Microsoft’s new 13-inch Surface Laptop is an odd one. It’s inarguably a step down in every respect from last year’s 13.8-inch Surface Laptop. But it’s also too good (and too expensive) to be considered a replacement for the Surface Laptop Go, the company’s perennially overpriced and underspecced entry-level laptop. It’s cheaper than last year’s Surfaces, but mostly because Microsoft gave those devices a de facto price hike by killing the entry-level configurations of those PCs.
We’re left with a laptop that’s perfectly fine or even great, depending on what you want. It’s relatively affordable for what is, a sort of MacBook Air-ish, just-the-basics portable computer. But it’s such a step down from the $999 laptop Microsoft released just last year that it’s hard not to see the entire laptop as one big series of compromises.
Where does the 13-inch Surface Laptop belong?
Despite just calling it the “Surface Laptop, 13-inch,” Microsoft clearly considers this to be an entirely different sub-class of laptop rather than a continuation of the flagship Surface Laptop or the lower-end Surface Go. The system identifies itself to Windows as “Surface Laptop 13in 1st Ed with Snapdragon,” where the 13.8- and 15-inch Surface Laptops are both labeled as 7th edition devices.