Microsoft Surface Laptop Go 3 hands-on review: Style over substance

What matters more to you: portability or power? That was the question that flooded my mind constantly during my time with the new Microsoft Surface Laptop Go 3.

Measuring about 11 x 8 x 0.6 inches and weighing 2.5 pounds, there’s no question that the Surface Laptop Go 3 was designed to go anywhere and everywhere you do. And as it’s available in four subdued, Apple-evoking colors—Platinum, Sandstone, Ice Blue, and Sage (the color of my evaluation unit)—it’s also designed to look good, no matter where your travels may take you.

But whether it’s capable of doing everything you’ll need once you get wherever you’re going is a harder question to answer.

Microsoft Surface Laptop Go 3 design

Although the Surface Laptop Go 3 looks good closed, with a reflective Microsoft logo dead center, my strongest appreciation for it started when I opened the lid. It has a relatively spacious keyboard, with island-style keys providing sufficient travel for my notoriously finicky fingers. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that typing on it was a joy, but neither was it a (literal or figurative) pain, as it can often be on laptops that are intended first and foremost to be svelte.  The touchpad, which measures about 2.4 x 4 inches, is well positioned and roomy enough to not make my hand cramp during click-fest Web-browsing sessions.

I also liked its port selection, though I admit it’s limited. As with other Surface laptops, it draws power from a right-edge Surface Connect port (redolent of Apple’s MagSafe), which dislodges if you bump it or look at it the wrong way, to prevent you from damaging the port or the plug. Its only other ports are on the left: one USB 3.1 (Type A), one USB 3.2 (Type-C, with DisplayPort and charging functionality), and a 3.5mm headphone jack. It’s hardly a lot, but it covers all the bases for the ways you’re most likely to use the Surface Laptop Go 3.

Microsoft Surface Laptop Go 3 display

Beyond that, though, I struggled with the Surface Laptop Go 3—in more ways than one. The display is a 12.4-inch PixelSense touch screen with a resolution only a Microsoft mother could love: 1,536×1,024. That’s right, not even 1080p, which is the minimum you’ll find today on most any mainstream laptop. The screen gets acceptably bright—I measured its average brightness as 322 nits using a Klein K10-A colorimeter and Klein’s ChromaSurf software, and its color performance wasn’t too bad (95.1% sRGB color gamut volume and 67.3% DCI-P3, with its accuracy-measuring Delta-E a comfortable 0.25). But with a small, off-resolution display, how often are you going to care about those things anyway?

(Not often, I concluded after spending a few hours trying to find excuses to not watch things.)

Microsoft Surface Laptop Go 3 performance and battery life

In terms of its overall performance, things weren’t much better. It took just under 30 seconds to copy a 25GB folder full of music, video, document, and program files, with a transfer rate of 938MBps—not terrible, but below average. It managed an unimpressive score of about 6,900 on the latest version of Geekbench, the wide-ranging application benchmark. It took an average of 15 minutes, 28 seconds, to complete our HandBrake video encoding test. Its frame rate of 21.3fps on Civilization VI: Gathering Storm was passable, but we wouldn’t recommend playing much more demanding games on it. (It averaged 3,883 on the DirectX 11 3DMark Fire Strike benchmark and 1,407 on the newer DX12 Time Spy test—in neither case anything to e-mail home about.)

Nor was it anything special in terms of battery life. We measured it at just under 9 hours in our nonstop Web-surfing test, which falls short of both Microsoft’s claim of 15 hours of mixed use but is a notable improvement from the 7:42 we saw from the first-generation model three years ago. This may technically count as all-day battery life, but that day isn’t on Earth unless you’re not using the system continuously.

The performance stumbles maybe shouldn’t be that much of a surprise. Microsoft is only offering the Surface Laptop Go 3 with the Intel Core i5-1235U—an ultrabook-class CPU from the last generation, which is even more puzzling given the impending release of Intel’s 14th Gen chips. This processor is equipped with Intel Iris Xe Graphics, which is enough for basic, non-intensive use, but not much else. You’re also limited to a maximum of 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD in the consumer version (though the commercial version does offer up to 512GB). In other words, it’s enough to get by but probably not enough to get ahead.

Outlook

So once again, we’re back to the question: Does that matter? For business uses, maybe not. The Surface Laptop Go 3 is easy to carry, small enough to use in a cramped train or airline seat, and just attractive enough to convince your professional contacts that your company might have some clue what it’s doing. And if you don’t need to do much more than take a few notes, write up a report in Word or punch a few numbers into an Excel spreadsheet, or show someone else a website, then it can handle those simple tasks.

For everyone else, however, the Surface Laptop Go 3 isn’t like to be quite as eye-catching. For its basic benefits, the out-of-date hardware is understandable, but neither it nor the fairly high price (our configuration runs $999) is desirable. And if there’s an ironclad argument for buying this rather than a sexier, better-performing Apple MacBook Air or a better-specced Dell XPS 13, either of which will cost you about the same amount of money, I had trouble determining what it would be during my few days with the laptop. (Even though I sometimes fail to completely practice what I preach in this area in other aspects of my life, this is one case where I was firmly reminded that it’s what’s inside that counts.)

For all its outward gym-bro commitment to thinness and Fashion Week approach to style, it was never clear to me that the Microsoft Surface Go Laptop 3 was designed to be a good laptop for anyone other than someone who doesn’t care how good a laptop it is. Nonetheless, stay tuned for our full review of the laptop, to be published soon.