Microsoft Surface Laptop 4: Neat little machine

Thin, light and sleek are becoming the buzzwords when it comes to business machines and the Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 is one of them. In fact, I find it amazing as to how much weight machines have shed these days. Carrying them around is a breeze now.

That said, the Surface has to be given full points for its sleek appearance. With the body made of metal, the look is clean with just the Microsoft logo on the top. Open up the lid and the backlit keys are neatly laid out. The gray keyboard surface is amazing on the silver version of the Surface 4. It almost has a velvety-fabric-like feel and is very comfortable. The function keys double up with the backlighting on/ off, volume up/ down, brightness up/ down and other keys. The top row has the power button as well.

The keyboard is so slim that someone like me who likes to rest my wrists next to the touchpad while typing does not feel an ugly bump next at the edge of the laptop. The keys are not very hard and there is hardly any hint of any clicking noise when struck.

Below the keyboard is the touchpad that is pretty generous in terms of real estate and there is a satisfying click to it.

The 13.5-inch touchscreen has a resolution of 2256 x 1504 and is actually quite nice. Watching 4K videos was a pleasant experience and the colours and skin tones were very natural. The blacks looked very deep. In fact, it was quite impressive. The bezel houses the HD camera and mics.

The audio is excellent with the mid and high frequencies dishing out very detailed sound. Obviously, laptops cannot be expected to pump out deep bass but the remaining frequencies were good to listen to. What I also observed was that the audio can go pretty loud for a laptop.

While closing the laptop, towards the very end, there is a magnetic closure. This ensures that it remains shut.

On the left side are the USB Type-A and Type-C ports along with the audio socket, while the right side has the proprietary charging Surface Connect port. One gripe of the Surface laptop is that there are not enough ports, but a simple solution could be the use of a USB hub.

The laptop we reviewed came with the 11th Generation Core i5 1145G7 processor that runs at 2.60 GHz along with Iris graphics. It came with 8 GB of RAM and a 256 GB solid state drive. Now, what can it do with this? A lot actually. It can be seamlessly used for business and the usual video calls and the like. In fact, it is good enough for a bit of Photoshop-like work.

The battery lasted the work day with the usual work and a bit of YouTube viewing. So, no complaints on that front.

Finally, If it is a sleek and light machine one requires with a substantial amount of processing power for on-the-go business use, we would definitely recommend the Microsoft Surface Laptop 4.

The Surface is priced from Rs 1.02 lakh to Rs 1.77 lakh depending on the configuration.

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