Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 (2021) review: A missed opportunity

Note: This review was first published on 25 June 2021.

Spec bump Surface Laptop

Don’t fix what ain’t broken. Last year’s Surface Laptop 3 was one of the most portable and aesthetically pleasing Windows notebooks you could buy. So for 2021, Microsoft has wisely decided to leave its design untouched and instead upgrade only the internals.

The latest generation Surface Laptop 4 still comes in two sizes: 13.5 and 15 inches. The model we are looking at today is the 15-inch one. The design is, as I mentioned, unchanged. The footprint and thickness (14.7mm) is the same, and so is the weight (1.54kg). It’s one of the most portable 15-inch notebooks available now. Build quality remains faultless. The edges are immaculately finished and the aluminium body feels immovable.

The 15-inch touchscreen PixelSense display has a 3:2 aspect ratio. Unusual it may be but newcomers will soon find that the extra vertical space offered by this aspect ratio is beneficial for viewing documents and spreadsheets. The downside, however, is that there are unsightly thick black bars when watching videos in full-screen. 

The display itself is quite excellent. It’s mighty sharp. A resolution of 2496 x 1664 pixels gives us a pixel density count of around 200 pixels per inch. Colours look great too – vibrant, punchy, and natural-looking. Viewing angles are also good, but because of its glossy finish, glare and reflections could be a problem. My only complaint is that the display doesn’t get quite bright enough for my taste.

Ports are unchanged and that’s a massive disappointment. The only ports on offer are the same single USB-A and USB-C ports, and they both only support the old USB 3.2 Gen 1 standard. That means transfer speeds of just 5Gbps. Opposite the USB ports is a Surface Connect port, but it’s practically useless unless you have a Surface Dock. Really what Microsoft should have done is update the USB-C port to include Thunderbolt support. 

Fortunately, there are big changes inside. The Surface Laptop 4 comes with a choice of either Intel’s latest 11th generation Tiger Lake processors or AMD’s Ryzen 4000 series mobile processors.

The finish and amount of memory and storage varies but broadly speaking, customers of the 15-inch Surface Laptop 4 will be able to choose configurations that feature either the Intel Core i7-1185G7 or Ryzen 7 Microsoft Surface Edition (Ryzen 7 4980U). The Intel processor comes with Intel's new Iris Xe integrated graphics while the AMD processor comes with AMD's Radeon RX Vega 8 integrated graphics.

Here are the configurations available:

The unit I'm testing is the top-of-the-line Ryzen 7 version with 16GB of memory and a 512GB SSD. It costs S$2,399.

The keyboard and trackpad are also unaltered and that’s no bad thing. The decision to forego a numpad should be applauded because that gives us larger and better positioned keys. In my opinion, there’s no point on insisting on a numpad if it compromises the rest of the typing experience. Key feel is decent. There’s a distinct point at which it actuates and it doesn’t feel mushy, but there isn’t much in the way of actual travel. The trackpad is quite large but it looks like it could have been larger. Just look at the amount of space around it. But it is super responsive and accurate – easily a step up on other Windows notebooks.

Performance analysis

Let’s see how the Surface Laptop 4 with the AMD Ryzen 7 processor performs against contemporary ultraportable notebooks with Intel’s Tiger Lake processors. I have also included results from the Huawei MateBook 14 which is powered by a Ryzen 5 4600H processor.

Here's a table showing how they stack up:

Performance is generally alright but nothing to shout about, which is to be expected given that this notebook features AMD’s last-generation mobile processors – the company announced new Ryzen 5000 series processors at CES earlier this year. On PCMark 10, the 
Surface Laptop 4 mostly held its own. On compute-intensive workloads like Cinebench and Geekbench, its single-core performance was not quite as good but its multi-core performance was leaps and bounds ahead of the Intel-powered notebooks. However, it struggled on WebXPRT 3, a browser benchmark that AMD processors have traditionally had difficulty with that’s heavy on HTML5 and Javascript.

The Ryzen 7 Surface Edition processor has a Radeon RX Vega 8 integrated GPU and it’s clearly not quite as powerful as Intel’s new Iris Xe integrated graphics that come with its Tiger Lake processors. On 3DMark, its scores were around 20% to 30% lower. On Tomb Raider, though it managed playable frame rates, it’s noticeably slower than the Intel-powered notebooks. If it’s any consolation, it maintains its performance well and doesn’t seem to suffer from much throttling, unlike some other notebooks. Given that the Surface Laptop 4 was announced after AMD's Ryzen 5000 series processors, one has to wonder why Microsoft chose to outfit their laptop with last year's processors instead of the newest ones.

Battery life

Note: Battery tests were conducted using PCMark 10's battery benchmark with the display set to 100% brightness.

The Surface Laptop 4’s battery life was impressive. Despite having the smallest capacity battery (47.4Wh) it managed to last nearly 12 hours in our general workload battery test – and bear in mind that it has a larger 15-inch display that has its brightness set to 100%. Even on the more intensive gaming workload, it lasted nearly 3 hours. Looking at the power consumption figures show that it was the most efficient notebook. All this means is that despite being a large 15-inch notebook, its Portability Index score easily rivals that of more compact 13 to 14-inch ultraportable notebooks.

Final thoughts

Ultimately, the Surface Laptop 4 feels like a missed opportunity. I have no qualms with Microsoft leaving most of the notebook unchanged but their decision to use last year’s AMD processors is puzzling. And even if you take into account the model that uses Intel’s latest Tiger Lake processor, Microsoft’s refusal to update the USB-C port with Thunderbolt support makes it the only S$2,000 ultraportable notebook that I know of that only comes with a standard USB-C port. It might not matter to some people but a Thunderbolt port is infinitely more versatile and lets you connect high-performance docks and accessories that can add a lot of utility to a notebook.

Maybe they could have got away with it last year, but it's 2021 and the competition is different now. And I know the Surface Laptop looks fantastic and that it has a great display and outstanding battery life, but I fear that's not going to be enough.

Consequently, it’s hard to recommend the Surface Laptop 4 over any number of its rivals. There’s no shortage of smaller more compact notebooks that are just as, if not faster. And if you really need a notebook with a larger display, LG’s gram 16 looks like the better option. It weighs a lot less, has a slightly larger display, better ports (with Thunderbolt support), and it even costs less. Back to the drawing board, Microsoft.

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