My last laptop was a sweet Thinkpad with an onboard GPU and sizable RAM. Yet I sold it already because it was a bit too big and heavy for me to lug around. For the replacement, I’ve thought of getting a MacBook but since my office already gave me one to use for work, I thought it would be redundant. Besides, my office changes our laptop (MacBook) every 5 years at least so I would be using one of the latest model. So I thought, why not get another Windows laptop?
So I researched high and low and compared many different models and specs. One thing for sure, this new laptop has to be lightweight and thin. That narrows it down to just a few mid range models but the ones that caught my eyes was the Surface laptop series. The Surface laptop Go was small and reasonably priced. However it was a tad underpowered and since I plan to play some games on it, it’s a no go. The next one in line is the Surface Laptop 3. It’s Microsoft’s flagship laptop at a pretty expensive price. The trick is of course to get a second hand unit.
There’s two sizes for the Surface Laptop 3, the 15” and the smaller 13.5” that I got. The second hand unit that I got comes in dark matte black colour. Powering the laptop is a Quad-core 10th Gen Core i5 processor with 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD. It might not feel heavy but the actual weight is 1.28kg. First impression - it’s a pretty sleek minimalist laptop. It’s casing is fully aluminum and the touchscreen display goes right to the edges. Apart using your finger, you can use a Surface pen to write on it. On the left side you get one USB-A port and one USB-C (no Thunderbolt) port which can be used for charging. On the right side is the proprietary Surface charging port.
The chiclet keyboard feels a little bit mushy or rubbery. Booting from this Surface laptop was fast, almost as fast as an M1 MacBook. As a flagship Microsoft laptop (during release), it’s a capable laptop. It runs my work software and games smoothly. Even the resource intensive Football Manager and Rise of Industry games works without any glitches. That said, the fan can get quite loud during heavy processing. The battery lasts reasonably long, 3-4 hours with regular use. 2 hours while playing Football Manager 2020.
Can I get a more powerful laptop at this 3.000 ringgit price point? Definitely. But if you know me, I value good design over power or specs. And the Surface Laptop 3 is one beautiful machine. I’d settle for any of these Microsoft line of laptops over any Dell, HP or Lenovo if I had to choose a Windows machine.
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