And while it might not reach MacBook Air with M1 levels, this model is a solid upgrade over its predecessor, a laptop we had already praised for its fast performance. Surface Laptop 4 performanceĪrmed with an Intel Core i7-1185G7 CPU and 16GB of RAM, the Surface Laptop 4 is a speedy notebook capable of running all but the most intensive tasks. Blasting the track at 100% volume, the Surface Laptop 4 easily filled my apartment and never distorted - in fact, it sounded just as good as it did at lower volumes. When I played 'all the good girls go to hell,' a more aggressive up-tempo track, the bass had a head-bobbing thud even though it struggled to drop very low. The beautiful ballad had a concert-like airiness that let Billie Eilish's hushed, yet powerful vocals dominate the soundscape as the stripped-back instruments were properly separated so you could hear each guitar twang. The springy actuation made typing effortless and the key travel was more than I expected from such a thin laptop. I bounced from letter to letter while I typed this review on the Surface Laptop 4. Peaking at 349 nits, the Surface Laptop 4 was outshone by the XPS 13 (469 nits), MacBook Air (366 nits) and the Spectre (365 nits), and it couldn't hit the category average (392 nits). It landed toward the bottom of the pack in our brightness test, but not by a wide margin. When I wasn't using the touchpad, the touchscreen let me tap on icons and scroll down with my fingers as I read.Īccording to our colorimeter, the Surface Laptop 4's display covers 77% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, making it more vivid than the panels on the XPS 13 (69%) and Spectre x360 14 (75%) but not as saturated as those on the MacBook Air (81%) or the average premium laptop (85%).

The Surface Laptop 4 is not a 2-in-1 laptop - for that, see the Surface Pro 7 or Surface Book 3 - but it does have a touchscreen.

Laptop surface 4