Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 13in i5 16GB 256GB Win 10 Pro Black (58Z-00023)

This is my second Surface laptop, the first one lasted over 5 years with hard use every day, including a lot of travel. This one doesn't disappoint. It is super fast, has a large screen for my old eyes, and is light enough for travel. Well worth the money.

PROS+ Bright, beautiful, and functional 3:2 screen+ Fantastic keyboard+ Sleek & thin design+ All-day battery life+ Ryzen CPU performs great+ Speedy SSD+ Big trackpad to match longer screen+ Speakers surprisingly punchy+ Windows Hello features integrate very well+ TouchscreenCONS- Minimal port selection- 8GB of RAM pretty low for being paired with a Ryzen 7 CPU for power-focused users- Pretty thick bezels by modern laptop standards- Black color shows fingerprints/grease pretty easyTHE LONG & SHORT OF ITSince working from home over the course of the past year, I have truly learned to appreciate the smaller conveniences that make a good laptop great. Things like a long battery life, clear screen, speedy performance, and much more. The ... MorePROS+ Bright, beautiful, and functional 3:2 screen+ Fantastic keyboard+ Sleek & thin design+ All-day battery life+ Ryzen CPU performs great+ Speedy SSD+ Big trackpad to match longer screen+ Speakers surprisingly punchy+ Windows Hello features integrate very well+ TouchscreenCONS- Minimal port selection- 8GB of RAM pretty low for being paired with a Ryzen 7 CPU for power-focused users- Pretty thick bezels by modern laptop standards- Black color shows fingerprints/grease pretty easyTHE LONG & SHORT OF ITSince working from home over the course of the past year, I have truly learned to appreciate the smaller conveniences that make a good laptop great. Things like a long battery life, clear screen, speedy performance, and much more. The Surface Laptop 4 is in many ways the best laptop I have ever used. It is amazingly well constructed from what appears to be one solid piece of metal, which also helps make the laptop very thin and light. The keyboard (one of the most underrated pieces of any laptop) is possibly the best I have ever used, with a solid key travel that feels just right, and a crisp bottom that easily allows me to generate some of my best words per minute typing scores.It is the screen that is maybe my favorite feature of this laptop. With a 3:2 aspect ratio, it has more height than a typical computer screen. For things like media consumption, means you will likely end up with much larger black bars on the top and bottom than something like a more standard 16:9 screen. However, what you gain with this aspect ratio is more height when viewing documents/pages, which helps make work production so much smoother. I’ve actually gotten pretty spoiled on the 3:2 aspect ratio, and often find I miss it when going back to my standard desktop. On the brightness, sharpness, and color aspects, this laptop also excels. The screen gets plenty bright, punchy, with a 2256x1504 resolution that allows text to appear crisp and clean across the board. I don’t have the equipment to officially measure color accuracy, but have owned many screens, including several calibrated ones, I can say this laptop looks great to the eye.As for performance, the AMD Ryzen 7 CPU in here performs amazingly well. I write code for a living, and I found this processor to be fantastic at powering through most computational tasks I threw at it. It’s super speedy, and even for day-to-day work, it blows through everything I threw it at without skipping much of a beat. The one area of performance I am less than thrilled with is in terms of RAM. With only 8GB, the package feels a little lackluster, and I would often run out of memory in more computationally expensive tasks before I hit any CPU bottlenecks. At this size and price point, 16GB of memory standard would have been much preferred to pair with this kind of CPU. All this being said, for the average consumer or daily worker, I still think 8GB is plenty of memory for most scenarios, but just be aware you may see slowdown when running lots of memory-hungry programs at once, like Microsoft Teams with several Chrome browsers open, or for serious gaming.On the note of performance, the internal SSD is plenty fast with very quick file transfer speeds and no read/write issues to note. For battery life, I didn’t run a formal clock on how long it took to go from 100% -> 15% (when I typically charge it), but it easily lasted me a full day without issue, and I have no doubt that you can easily get 12-14 hours out of this machine on a single charge if needed. It is simply a workhorse when it comes to longevity.In general, there is so much to love with this machine, and apart from some thicker bezels (which seems a bit out-of-date in 2021 where many laptops are boasting near bezeless displays), there is very little to complain about. The only other area where I think this machine is lacking is in the port department. Specifically, you only get one USB-A and one USB-C port, which means you will almost certainly need a USB dock if you plan to use any more than one or two USB devices at the same time. I am not a fan of needing to carry a dock with me wherever I go when I want to use multiple USB ports at once, and so the lack of reports is a shame here. Not a deal breaker by any means, but certainty lacking if you use things like HDMI or many connected devices at once. Outside of the USB ports there is a headphone jack and propriety power jack with the included magnetic laptop charger.All-in-all, I love this device. Like other Microsoft hardware I have owned in the past, the machine exudes quality and excellent performance. Unfortunately, it trades some function for these things, and may not be perfect for anyone. This being said, if you need a blazing fast CPU, amazing screen, and long battery life, look no further. I have no issues recommending the Surface Laptop 4 for others, and fully plan to use it as my daily productivity driver from now on. It simply feels like a quality device through-and-through.

This is my 4th laptop and certainly wont be my last. Super easy to setup and performs flawlessly! I have recommended this to so many of my colleagues. Great for working from home and going into the office.