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Surface Laptop 4 (15-Inch, AMD) Review: Battery Champion - WIRED

Surface Laptop 4 (15-Inch, AMD) Review: Battery Champion - WIRED

Surface Laptop 4 (15-Inch, AMD) Review: Battery Champion - WIRED
May 08, 2021 1 min, 54 secs

Microsoft's Surface Laptop 4 is everything I'd hoped the previous version would be, which is to say an excellent all-around, well-made machine with a speedy AMD chip.

It isn't the most powerful laptop around, nor is it the cheapest, but it's powerful enough for most people and wraps Windows in a package that competes well with Apple's hardware.

The Surface Laptop 4 looks like the Surface Laptop 3.

At least the USB-C port can be used to charge the thing, helpful if you carry an external battery capable of charging laptops.

If you prefer AMD, you'll get Ryzen 4000 series processors.

While chip updates are pretty standard for a new laptop release, Microsoft claims these changes, along with some other tweaks, deliver not only better performance but also improved battery life compared to the previous Surface Laptop.

I tested the 15-inch AMD Ryzen 7 4000 series configuration with 16 gigabytes of RAM and a 512-gigabyte SSD.

Surface Laptop 4.

Using the older Ryzen 4000 series chips is a strike against it now that the Ryzen 5000 series is out.

I've been testing several laptops with the latest Ryzen chips, and they are faster across the board and get better battery life.

The native resolution of 2,496 x 1,664 pixels isn't 4K-sharp like the Dell XPS 15, but it's considerably better than the "Full HD" 1080p screens found in many 15-inch laptops.

It might sound like a small thing, but after using the Surface Laptop 4 for a week, it was painful to go back to displays without it.

Another big win for the Surface Laptop 4 is battery life.

In our standard battery drain test (looping a locally stored 1080p video at 75 percent brightness), I managed 9.25 hours, which is one of the best results out there for a 15-inch machine.

(It's possible to map the little menu key to control using third-party software, so this isn't a deal breaker.) The trackpad, as with previous Surface Laptops, is the best non-Apple trackpad I've ever used.

If you want a 15-inch laptop for the extra screen real estate it affords, and don't have big plans—you're not editing video or gaming—the Surface Laptop 4 is a solid choice.

Surface Laptop 4.

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