Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio 2 Review | Faster, but Better?
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio 2 is faster than the previous model new hardware brings higher performance and that’s exactly what Microsoft’s latest offers the bigger question and the one I want to focus on during the course of this review is if the laptop is truly better than the original Surface Laptop Studio that’s a surprisingly important question not only because Microsoft kept a lot of the elements of the laptop the same but also because it’s charging a much higher price the Surface Laptop Studio 2 is $400 more expensive than the
previous model for its base configuration clocking in at a clean 2 Grand and to get a model with a discrete graphics card which you get for 21,100 $100 previously you now need to spend $2400 on top of that you’ll pay upwards of $3,700 if you want the RTX 4060 in the machine the most powerful GPU Microsoft offers in the laptop I’ll go ahead and tell you up front that Microsoft has address the few pain points of the original Surface Laptop Studio but they don’t add up to a machine that is remarkably better than the original
model sure there are advancements in the display port selection and overall performance but they’re outweighed by the high pricing and some unfortunate regressions in battery life but hey
start at 16 GB of RAM but you can now reach up to 64 GB and although the surfice Laptop Studio 2 tops out at 2 TB of storage just like the previous model the base model delivers 512 GB up from the 256 GB seen previously the bump and RAM is a little problematic though more is better if you need it but it’s how Microsoft splits up its configurations that makes these 64 GB of RAM such a hassle in order to get a Surface Laptop Studio 2 with an RTX 4060 you need to buy configuration with
at least 1 TB of storage and 64 GB of RAM that means you’re paying at least $3,300 in as much as $3,700 even if you don’t need all of that Ram or storage frankly it doesn’t make any sense there’s a good argument you need an RTX 460 but don’t need 64 GB of RAM similarly 1 tab or 2 terabyt of storage is great out of the gate but you can replace the SSD in the Surface Laptop Studio 2 Microsoft doesn’t even offer the option to reduce the price if you want to upgrade the storage on
your own interestingly the sole configuration with nvidia’s RTX 2008 a workstation class GPU comes with only 32 GB of storage and a 1 TB SSD despite being $3600 something is seriously off with the pricing of these higher end configurations lower down the stack pricing is a little more sensible with $2,000 being the base price for that you’ll get 16 GB of RAM 512 GB of storage and integrated Graphics you’ll need to spend an extra $400 if you want an Nvidia RTX 4050 and another $400 on top of that if you want 32 GB of RAM
and a 1 terb SSD that’s still $200 cheaper however than upgrading the 14-in MacBook Pro M2 Pro with a 1 TB SSD and 32 GB of RAM so it’s not all bad pricing isn’t too out of sorts compared to the 14-in MacBook Pro with the Surface Laptop Studio 2 arriving slightly cheaper depending on your configuration however it’s much higher than competing Windows laptops like the Dell XPS15 for the same price as the cheapest RTX 460 configuration of the Surface Laptop Studio 2 you can get the xps15 with an Intel Core i9 13900 H RTX 470
64 GB of memory 2 TB of storage and a 3.5k OLED touch display just goes to show how expensive the Surface Laptop Studio 2 and the MacBook Pro for that matter really are but the Surface Laptop Studio and the MacBook Pro have something in common that other Windows laptops really can’t touch there’s a perfect marriage of hardware and software here that I like to call the Surface advantage that’s true of all Surface devices but it’s worth highlighting on the Laptop Studio 2 Windows Hello 2.0 signs you in before you can blink the touchpad never misreads
gestures Windows Studio Effects look fantastic with the ultra sharp webcam and the new adaptive touch feature which allows you to use basically any Surface as an input really does deliver on what Microsoft is calling the most inclusive trackpad ever there’s just this premium experience to using the Surface Laptop Studio 2 that others Windows machines just can’t match no matter how much more powerful or how much cheaper they are for instance the rounded corners of Windows 11 are match perfectly with the rounded corners of the pixel sense flow display it just feels like you’re using a
premium laptop no matter what you’re doing the Surface Laptop Studio 2 signature modularity stands out here too just like the previous model you have stage mode where you can pull the display towards you and Studio mode where the display lays flat on the keyboard like before the metal hinge and magnets that hold the system together feel robust but the Surface Laptop Studio 2 enjoys the enhanced tablet mode now in Windows 11 within a second of pulling the screen forward Windows 11 adapts to its tablet mode that enlarges icons and pulls the taskbar down to be
clear this is a software Improvement that’s available in other convertible laptops but it feels feels right on the Surface Laptop Studio 2 it’s that that Surface Advantage bringing together windows with hardware in a way other devices really can’t manage still there isn’t anything new here I love Stage mode for watching movies and playing games and using the Surface Slim Pen 2 in studio mode is great especially considering you can attach it magnetically under the front lip of the device however you can get that same functionality on the much cheaper original model the entire outer shell
looks identical despite being a little thicker overall the Surface Laptop Studio 2 adds a tenth of an inch to the thickness of the previous model as well as nearly half a pound it ends up just shy of a full pound heavier than the MacBook Pro 14 as well as 0.2 in thicker now one of the big talking points for the service Laptop Studio 2 has been the improved pixel sense flow display it’s less of an improvement than Microsoft is making it out to be though you’re getting the same specs as the original Laptop Studio overall
it’s a 14.4 in display with a 3×2 aspect ratio and a resolution of 2400 x600 that comes out to 200 pixels per inch Which is less than the 254 offered by the 14-inch MacBook Pro and the 262 available on the Dell xps1 15’s 3.5k OLED display still the screen looks very sharp given the size it’s not the best based on pure pixel density but that hardly matters at this size and resolution as before you get access to a 120Hz refresh rate which is a fair trade-off given the lower pixel density I’d take a smooth desktop
and gaming experience any day which isn’t offered on the 60hz OLED display available on the XPS 15 the MacBook Pro claims 120Hz but that’s only available through Apple’s Pro motion smoothing the service Laptop Studio 2 definitely has the edge here as did the previous model those specs are all the same but Microsoft made improvements to the brightness in HDR the screen is now certified with vesa’s display HDR 400 mostly due to higher Peak brightness I measured 531 nits of peak brightness and a contrast ratio of 650 to1 which is great still it falls short of
the Lenovo slim Pro 9i with its mini LED display and of course Ola displays available on machines from Asus and Dell regardless the display looks stunning duing no small part to its glossy finish that seems well equipped to keep fingerprints at Bay my main issue is color coverage my testing produced only 77% of the dcip 3 extended color space Which is less than the original Surface laptop studi 82% the screen still covers 100% of srgb and was very color accurate with less than one color error on average but I don’t like seeing a regression in
color coverage along with bumping the brightness Microsoft has added two new ports on the service Laptop Studio 2 a USB-A 3.1 port and a Micro SD card slot I know I know hold your applause they join the two USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 4 along with the 3.5 mm headphone jack it’s been very interesting to see these supposed MacBook killers double back on USB-A after a little time in the sun but that’s a different conversation I’m happy with the addition though the ports feel very stiff I external hard drive gets stuck in a usba port several
times before it finally smoothed out it wasn’t just kind of stuck either I was worried I was going to break the port trying to get it unplugged similarly the stiff microSD card slot made me wonder if I was inserting the card the right way I mean these problems went away after using the ports of dozen times or more but the ports still feel oddly stiff on top of the machine you’re getting the same keyboard but an updated trackpad as mentioned Microsoft says the service Laptop Studio 2 has the most inclusive trackpad ever and that’s largely
due to the Adaptive touch feature it disables gestures but it’s a huge step for accessibility on laptops not much has changed otherwise though the keyboard is still excellent with its 1.3 mm of key travel and the haptic touchpad is responsive with four different levels of haptic feedback not much has changed here but Microsoft really didn’t need to change anything the keyboard and trackpad are great and I’m glad Microsoft didn’t mess with them in addition the Surface Laptop Studio 2 packs the same 1080p webcam as the previous model but it’s bolstered This Time by Windows Studio
Effects the webcam looks fantastic offering great color in brightly lit areas and avoiding grin in low light conditions really though Windows Studio Effects are what’s important here for the first time the Surface Laptop Studio 2 comes with Intel’s gen 3 midus 3700 VC AI accelerator currently that’s used in Windows Studio Effects to offer autof framing eye contact and background blur features all of which look excellent when accelerated by AI That’s just about the only purpose for this chip right now though we could see and probably will see more in the future but the AI accelerator
really isn’t a reason to buy the service Laptop Studio 2 right now after all the machine includes an Nvidia GPU that has access to Nvidia broadcast which offers similar effects that are accelerated by AI all right on to the big difference with the Surface Laptop Studio 2 performance starting with the default recommended power mode the Surface Laptop Studio 2 gets destroyed by similarly configured machines the Del XPS 15 is clearly ahead with the same processor and cine bench both for single core and multi-core performance and the M2 Max MacBook Pro 14 is even faster that
single core result in cinebench isn’t a typo either I reran that test four times and got the same result the same was true in handbreak with the xps15 completed the TR code more than 20 seconds faster than the Surface Laptop Studio 2 as did the M2 Max strangely the Surface Laptop Studio 2 managed to beat the XPS 15 Premiere Pro despite sporting a weaker GPU though it still fell much short of the MacBook Pro 14 with the M2 Max little strange but the power modes of the service Laptop Studio 2 have a massive impact act
on performance switching to the best performance mode you can see the service Laptop Studio 2 match the single core and multi-core performance of the XPS 15 and cinebench similarly it falls short of the MacBook Pro’s massive core array and the multi-core test but it takes a clear lead in The Single core test beating everything but the MSI Prestige 16 handbrake was much better too with the XPS 15 and service Laptop Studio 2 evenly matched in the MacBook Pro 14 actually taking a slight back seat the Lenovo slim Pro 7 with the ryzen 7 7735 HS
is behind here as well unfortunately the same isn’t true in Premiere Pro where I actually saw a slight regression in the best performance mode in this app the MacBook Pro 14 still wins the day by a significant margin regardless of the Windows laptop you compare it to it’s clear that any serious work should be done with the best performance power profile the machine runs hotter and gets louder but never to the point of being uncomfortable I’m just shocked Microsoft dial back the performance so much with with the recommended profile even with this performance the core
i7 13700 H is in an awkward spot in the Surface Laptop Studio 2o it’s arriving a couple of months before Intel will start shipping its 14th gen meteor L processors which come with an AI accelerator built in I’m not sure why Microsoft didn’t just wait a couple of months the Core i7 13700 H inside the service Laptop Studio 2 performs well but it will almost certainly be outclassed by newer Windows laptops in just a handful of weeks not a promising sign for a machine that you could easily spend over three grand on moving on to
graphics performance though I ran 3D Mark times spy and Fir strike to get a general sense of gaming performance this isn’t a gaming laptop but it certainly can run games thanks to a discreete Nvidia GPU and access to features like deep learning super sampling 3 in the recommended profile the service Laptop Studio 2 beats everything except the Alienware x14 R2 which is the only dedicated gaming laptop here it’s even being the the XPS 15 which has a faster GPU on paper what’s really interesting is when you look at the performance in the best performance power
mode where the Surface Laptop Studio 2 even bests the Alienware x14 R2 both in time spy and fire strike all of this performance comes with a cost though battery life frankly Microsoft’s claims of up to 18 hours of battery life with a Surface Laptop Studio 2 are egregious it doesn’t get anywhere close in our web browsing test the laptop lasted just under 7 1/2 hours and in our 1080p local video playback test it fell just short of 10 hours Microsoft says you can get up to 18 hours with typical device usage but if bring the
internet and playing videos isn’t typical I’m really not sure what is it’s almost identical to the Alienware x14 R2 which has a similar configuration that’s a gaming laptop though for a more fair battle the xps15 lasted almost 2 hours longer in our web browsing test and almost 3 hours longer in video playback it’s an absolute bloodbath when you bring in the 14-in MacBook Pro which lasted nearly 20 hours with the M2 Max I didn’t expect 18 hours of battery life out of the surfice Laptop Studio 2 I know what the components inside are capable of
what’s really disappointing here is that the original Surface Laptop Studio lasted longer it offered 10 and 1/2 hours in our web browsing test and as much as 12 hours with local video playback Microsoft majorly dropped the ball here it’s very hard judging the service Laptop Studio 2 because so much of it has stayed the same and for everything Microsoft has improved there are areas where the Laptop Studio 2 is oddly worse there are some improvements over the original mile but for those who don’t need Peak power and just want a topshelf laptop are better off
buying the previous version it’s cheaper at list price and Microsoft is offering upwards of $500 off on configurations that are still available obviously performance is a big reason to upgrade for some people for similar Windows laptops like the XPS 15 you’re getting similar performance with the service Laptop Studio 2 for a significantly higher price for the same price you can get the MacBook Pro 14 with the M2 Max all getting similar and sometimes better performance and much better battery life there is a particular audience that will love the service laptop Studio too those that demand
Peak Performance and want the unique forward Factor the machine offers most people are fine saving some money with a simil premium Windows machine or jumping to the MacBook Pro though and both situations show clear advantages over the Surface Laptop Studio too but what do you think are you willing to overlook the problems of the Surface Laptop Studio 2 for its unique form factor let me know in the comments below while you’re down there make sure to leave a like on this video and get subscribed all right everyone thanks for watching I will see you in
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