I gave the Surface Laptop 4 a strong score in my review for Lifewire. Its battery life, performance, and build quality are excellent, especially for a laptop with a 13.5-inch display. The Laptop 4 is great for travel, but powerful enough to handle photo editing, AI upscaling, and programming. It’s a great laptop by any measure. Yet my praise is dulled by an unavoidable downside. For all its perks, I can’t recommend the Surface Laptop 4 over Apple’s MacBook Air.
The Surface Laptop 4 Is Fast. The MacBook Air Is Faster.
I tested the Surface Laptop 4 using the GeekBench 5 processor benchmark. The entry-level model I reviewed, powered by a six-core AMD processor, hit a multi-core score of 5,448. That’s excellent! The new entry-level Surface Laptop 4 is roughly four and a half times quicker in this benchmark than the original entry-level Surface Laptop with an Intel Core m3-7Y30 dual-core processor, released in 2017. Notebookcheck, which reviewed a Laptop 4 15-inch with the optional eight-core Ryzen 7 processor, saw a GeekBench 5 multi-core score of 7,156. That’s competitive with the Ryzen 7 2700 processor in my gaming PC. There’s just one problem: the MacBook Air is faster. GeekBench 5 shows the base MacBook Air can defeat the upgraded Surface Laptop 4 in both single and multi-core tests. The $999 MacBook Air trounces the $999 Surface Laptop 4 I reviewed, exceeding its multi-core performance by over 35%. It’s a similar story in graphics, where Apple’s M1 chip is ranked above Radeon RX Vega 11, the best version of Radeon graphics found on AMD’s Ryzen chips.
Apple’s M1 Delivers The Best of Both Worlds
If the MacBook Air is faster than the Surface Laptop 4 in all workloads, even at the base $999 price point, why buy the Laptop 4? In the past, there was an easy answer: battery life. AMD and Intel processors with more cores and faster clock speeds would use more power. When I reviewed Dell’s 2018 XPS 13, for example, I noted the Core i5 model lasted three hours longer than the top-tier Core i7 variant. This trade-off remains common in Windows laptops. The slowest models typically last longest on a charge, while gaming laptops can consume massive batteries in under three hours. Apple’s M1 doesn’t ask for compromise. In my testing, the Surface Laptop 4 lasted no longer than nine hours on a charge, and seven or eight was typical. Jeremy Laukkonen, reviewing the MacBook Air (M1, 2020) for Lifewire, saw 12 hours of endurance. To make matters worse for Surface, Max Tech’s comparison of the Laptop 4 and MacBook Air found the Air has a larger lead in performance when on battery power. The MacBook Air is fanless, too, so it’s always silent. The Surface Laptop 4 isn’t loud for a Windows laptop, but it can make a racket when pushed hard.
Windows Is The Only Reason To Buy A Windows Laptop
So, why buy the Surface Laptop 4? The only good answer is Windows. Around 75% of all PCs worldwide use Windows. That, however, is a big decrease from Windows’ absolute dominance at the turn of the millennium. And as Windows’ desktop market share has weakened, MacOS’s has surged. Windows is still important, yes, but many shoppers are willing and able to ditch it. Windows, itself, lacks direction. Microsoft continues to release updates, but its attempts to add new features, like Continuum and Windows Mixed Reality, have failed to take off. Some features, like Cortana, are all but abandoned. And Apple is just getting started; newer, faster chips are expected to power a redesigned MacBook Pro in late 2021. This will doom high-end Windows laptops to fight over shoppers who, for whatever reason, have no choice but to stick with Windows.
