Microsoft has just introduced the surface laptop go and it might be the holy grail of cheap but good laptops.
[MUSIC]
Finding a really good inexpensive laptop, very difficult to do anything $500 or less.
There are always a lot of compromises on design on performance on features.
And even if you do find something halfway decent, especially in 2020 it’s hard to actually buy it because everybody’s working from home or everyone is Learning from home and people are buying a lot of extra less expensive laptops.
So when Microsoft took the surface laptop line, which is a very good premium laptop line and said, hey, we’re gonna do a less expensive, more stripped down version called the surface laptop go.
Of course, I was very excited.
It starts at $550, it’s got a 12.4 inch touchscreen, which is something you don’t usually see in budget price laptops.
And it’s got a current gen Intel Core ifI quad core processor, which again, is pretty decent for something around $500.
Now Microsoft is promising a bunch of interesting features in this.
You can get 128 or 256 gigs of storage, eight gigs of RAM, but in that entry level $550 version, you do only get 64 gigs of storage and four gigs of RAM.
Again for $500 that’s reasonable I wouldn’t expect a lot more for that and I’m glad that you’re getting the tour I5 CPU at the same time and a design that looks pretty decent It weighs less than two and a half pounds.
The keyboard Microsoft claims has decent key travel obviously I have to try it out in person to find out but on paper it looks impressive, large touchpad I’d like that it has both USB A and USB C ports on it.
Although for power you’re still using that Microsoft proprietary connector.
It’s a little bit like the old magsafe but just kind of slots in on the side and that if you trip over it.
To pull right out, which I do like, but everyone is moving to these single USBC ports on everything for power and connectivity.
I think eventually you’ll see any kind of proprietary power connection like that go away.
Now this is not the first time we’ve seen something like this.
Earlier Microsoft took the Surface Pro and that’s their big two in one tablet.
It’s a Windows tablet, you snap on a keyboard.
So then it’s like a two in one hybrid and they released the surface go, which again is a less expensive version of that surface go I think starts at 399.
But like all the other Surface tablet products, they gotta buy the keyboard separately, at least with the laptop.
It comes with a keyboard built in because that’s what makes it a laptop.
Frankly, a lot of super budget laptops will do what’s in these them to do because you got to go online access Google Classroom, maybe stream some stuff online, do some email again, online.
Everything is cloud based.
That’s why Chrome books frankly.
Work for a lot of students and a lot of work for home people right now, but if the keyboards and touchpads are terrible, if the screens are terrible, if the designs are plasticky and junky feeling, you’re not going to enjoy using it and you’re gonna feel that even for four or $500.
You didn’t really get your money’s worth.
So having a nice looking design and a decent build quality and this would really go a long way, especially with specs that are decent.
The one thing I would watch out for is the webcam.
It’s only a 720 resolution webcam.
That’s frankly not much worse than mainstream laptops will give you most of the time very few laptops, even if 1080 webcams even expensive ones, but Now that we’re all living entirely online mostly from our homes, and everything is a web conference or web meeting or zoom meeting, we should start demanding better quality cameras across the board and budget laptops and more expensive laptops really just everywhere.
And the other quirk about the surface laptop go You should watch out for is that it ships with Windows 10 s. That’s a special version of Windows that restricts the apps that you can install on it to just select one from the Windows app store.
They say it’s to make sure everything works great together.
But it’s really because these are usually lower powered devices.
And they don’t want you trying to install some big crazy software app in game and then going, It doesn’t work out here.
This is terrible.
So they restrict that Fortunately getting out of Windows 10 s mode, and getting into just regular old windows 10 mode, takes about 15 seconds and four clicks of the mouse.
So that is very easy to update and I suggest that everybody will do that the moment they take their surface laptop go out of the box.
Should be able to pre order the surface laptop ghost or to get $550 today, and it will be hitting stores on October 13.
