Microsoft Surface Laptop 5 Review

Vemuda Techno - This is the new Surface Laptop 5 that just recently started shipping. It's a laptop designed by Microsoft, my previous employer.

I guess we parted on good terms because they were willing to send this free loaner unit to me. We're going to look at is this laptop any good and should you consider getting it? Let's find out.

Source: Microsoft

Within the box itself, you get the laptop, a power supply, and there's also a quick start guide along with safety and warranty information. You wouldn't want to go without that.

If you've never looked at the Surface line of laptops before, these are premium laptops. It has an all-aluminum case, which reminds me a little bit of the MacBook. If you've ever used a cheap plastic laptop before, you'll really appreciate the difference.

The laptop itself is very small and lightweight. It comes in right under three pounds. This is really perfect for on-the-go productivity, so say you're an office worker going off to a meeting or maybe you're a student going to work on a class project.

It fits very nicely within just your standard backpack. The one downside of having such a small size is especially if you're working for long periods in front of your laptop, you can start to feel some strain, but you can also dock it and connect it to a larger monitor.

On the left-hand side of the laptop, we have all of our ports. First you have a USB-A 3.1 port, and this is a slightly older technology, but I think all of us have devices that use this, so it's nice to see it included.

Next to that we have a USB-C or Thunderbolt port, and you can use this to charge your laptop, you can use it to transfer data, or you could even use it to connect to an external monitor.

Next to that, there's a 3.5-millimeter headphone jack just in case you don't have Bluetooth headphones.

On the other side of the laptop, there's the Surface Connect port and you can use this to charge your laptop, or you could also use it to connect to the Surface docking station, and this is a proprietary port.  

In the future it'd be nice to see this move to  USB-C since that would give you another USB port. Now overall, there aren't that many ports for this laptop, so especially when you're on the go, you're somewhat limited.

But as long as you have mostly Bluetooth devices and you're not bringing that many accessories along with you, that should be more than sufficient, and when you're back at your desk, you can dock it which gives you far more ports.

The screen on this laptop is 13 and a half inches, but there is also a 15-inch version, and overall, I think the screen looks fantastic. You can't detect any of the pixels.

The one thing to call out though is the screen size uses a non-standard aspect ratio of three-by-two.

The advantage of this is you get additional vertical space and that tends to work well when say you're composing a Word document or maybe you're working on a spreadsheet, but let's say you're watching a video on YouTube, you'll get those black lines on the top and on the bottom.

One thing I also like about this screen is it's a touch screen, and I frequently find myself  reaching to the screen to move around. 

Surrounding the laptop screen, you have a fairly large bezel, but you do have your camera, two microphones, and other sensors integrated into it.

Now looking at the microphones, you have two of them, so you would expect them to be pretty good, but when I tested them, they didn't sound that great.  

Here's what they sounded like. This is what the microphone sounds like on the Microsoft Surface Laptop 5.

To use a microphone, let's say you're joining a meeting, you'll probably want to use a headset with an integrated microphone instead.

Along with the microphones, there's also another sensor called the Dolby Vision IQ, and this adjusts the colors on the screen based on the ambient lighting, and this is similar technology to what you find on many cell phones.

So it's nice to see this make it to a laptop. There's also the Windows Hello sensor, which helps you log into your computer very quickly, and you really start to appreciate this one when you think back to the days where you had to type in a password manually.

It also has a built-in webcam, but unfortunately, it's only 720p and here's what that looks like in my studio with very nice lighting. Especially with working from home, it would have been nice to see a better and higher resolution webcam.

The keyboard felt good to type on. It provided good feedback. At the very top, you have a power button, you could adjust the volume, you could adjust the brightness

You could also set the backlighting on the keys and there are three different brightness levels that you could set it to.

Under the keyboard, you have the trackpad and I felt like it was a good size. It was big, but not too big to get in the way when you're typing.

Next, we're going to look at inside the machine. The laptop comes with a 12th generation Intel Core i5 or i7 EVO processor, so what does EVO mean?

Well, EVO balances battery life with performance, so it's really good for on-the-go productivity. It'll handle productivity software like Microsoft Office, or web browsing, or writing emails.

It'll handle all of those without a problem. It can also take care of some very light gaming or video editing, but the moment you want to say play triple A titles with high frame rates or if you want to do some heavy video editing or maybe even fluid simulations,

This processor is probably not the best match for that, so it really depends on what your needs are.  

The graphics card is in the same boat. It uses an Intel Iris Xe graphics and that's integrated it into the CPU. It handles things like productivity software, web browsing, or watching videos well. 

But here again, if you're planning on doing  heavy gaming or video editing, this graphics card is not the best for that, so here too, it depends on your needs.

For the memory, you can get anywhere between 8 gigabytes all the way up to 32 gigabytes of RAM, and for the storage space, you can get anywhere between 256 gigabytes all the way up to one terabyte, and for both of these, the more you can get the better, of course that will cost you.

The laptop also includes integrated speakers, and at least when I played some videos and I listened to the audio, it sounded like it had some good volume and the quality was  decent for speakers in a laptop.

Of course, if you want the best possible audio quality, you'll probably want to use some headphones.

The laptop also comes with Windows 11, which overall is a pretty decent and solid operating system.  

Now that we've looked at the laptop, you might  be wondering well is this laptop right for you, and I think it really depends on what type of user you are.

If you're an office worker or a student and you want to be productive while on-the-go, this is a really high quality laptop and also a solid choice, but on the other hand, let's say you're a gamer or you're a creator, there are probably other laptops that better meet your needs.  

The price of this laptop ranges between $900 up to $2,160 depending on how you customize the machine, and for what you get and what else is in the marketplace, that's pretty competitive.  

Let me know down below in the comments, what  do you like or dislike about this laptop? And I'll see you in the next post. Thank you for reading. 

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