The Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio is in ninth place in our ranking of the best laptops of 2022. It’s a uniquely designed laptop that can be used in three different ways, including as a regular laptop, a tablet and tilted for presentations. It has a long battery life and a bright image, but the performance is a bit lacking considering the price. The Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio is a convertible laptop that can be used as a standard laptop, a tilted laptop in studio mode, or as a tablet.
The Studio laptop measures 12.72 x 8.98 x 0.74 inches. The Intel Core i5 model weighs 3.83 pounds and the i7 model weighs 4 pounds. What makes this 2-in-1 laptop unique is the way it works. It converts to “scene mode” as well as studio or tablet mode. When the laptop is open, you can pull the screen down to cover the keyboard – this is the stage mode. It allows you to watch videos more comfortably with the screen tilted and without a keyboard to distract you. You can continue to pull the screen forward to lay flat against the keyboard to have a tablet, which is studio mode. It’s also compatible with the Surface Slim Pen 2, which can be purchased separately.
The Wi-Fi 6-enabled laptop is platinum silver inside and out, and has thin bezels to make the image as big as possible. The webcam is built into the top bezel to avoid a notch, meaning you barely know it’s there. Professional reviewers largely appreciate this laptop’s unique design, as well as its convertibility, though some found the process of moving the screen tedious. They also note that while the fact that the computer folds into a tablet is cool, it makes for a very heavy tablet to carry around, unlike computers whose screen detaches to become a tablet.
You have two different processor options with the Laptop Studio: an 11th-generation quad-core Intel Core H35 i5-11300H or an 11th-generation quad-core Intel Core H35 i7-11370H. You can also customize your machine with 16 or 32 GB of RAM and a 256, 512, 1 or 2 TB SSD. Models with the i5 core come with an Intel Iris Xe graphics card, while i7 models come with NVIDIA GeForce RTX3050 Ti and 4GB of GDDR6 GPU memory.
The entry-level model is equipped with the Intel Core i5 processor. But even with the upgraded Intel Core i7 processor, professional reviewers are disappointed with the performance of this laptop, especially for the price you pay. While you’ll have no trouble performing everyday tasks like browsing the Internet, streaming video, playing light games or editing photos, the machine will struggle to keep up beyond that. While this laptop’s screen offers excellent brightness and beautiful colors, the available processors and graphics cards aren’t equipped to do heavy photo or video editing or gaming. Other computers, such as the Razer Blade 14, have always performed better than the Surface Laptop Studio.
