Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 – 13.5" Touch-Screen – Intel Core i7 - 16GB Memory – 1TB Solid State Drive – Matte Black

If you don't want a MacBook Air/Pro because of macOS, or other Windows manufacturers such as Dell/HP/Lenovo have let you down in the past, the Surface Laptop 3 (i7 1065G7, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD, Matte Black) is quite the option. In my opinion it's the best premium Ultrabook on the market, especially impressive as Microsoft has only been at it for about 3 years.As performance between 85% of Ultrabooks is relatively similar, build and design is a big deciding factor to me, and the Surface won out against worthy competitors such as the Dell XPS 13 (9300), HP Spectre x360 13, and Razer Blade Stealth. A lot of Microsoft + Intel intangibles like Instant On, smart backlighting, and adaptive brightness help this feel like a polished machine that's been innovated for over 10+ years like the XPS lineup.The display on the Surface is excellent. The resolution is higher than standard full HD (not quite QHD because of the 3:2 aspect ratio), and doesn't sacrifice on either battery life (4K Ultrabooks make no sense) or picture quality. Apple and Microsoft seem to be the only ones who believe in making QHD+ displays for 13-14" instead of 4K. It just makes more sense for everyone.Performance is great for a 15W laptop, although I don't need much horsepower from my laptop as I have other desktops for heavy workloads. It's good in short bursts, and at lasting long. The quad core i7-1065G7 has the highest level graphics config for Intel's Ice Lake processors, so this is as good as it gets for this generation. I would recommend 95% of buyers to just buy the 8GB RAM models, as you'll find more use in just having 4 cores than 16GB RAM.Battery life is good, not amazing. I get about 6-7 hours of active use out of a full charge. It can top up pretty fast while in sleep mode with the included Surface Connect charger. Coming from a device that gave me 2 hours max off of battery, I'm not asking for much. There is some endurance left to be desired, but it's enough for what I need.The touchpad and keyboard are amazing. They're both among the best that Windows Ultrabooks have to offer (although that's not saying much..)Some minor gripes/annoyances:-Intel's Bluetooth and Wi-Fi drivers seem to mess with reception on this device. My range with my Bluetooth headphones is unexpectedly shorter than usual. When waking the device from sleep, Wi-Fi takes a long time to reconnect properly; I sometimes have to restart the machine to get online.- I knew that ordering a matte black metal device would be a challenge to keep clean, but yeah.. pretty hurts doesn't it?Overall, I think this should be the default recommendation for a Windows Ultrabook. at $1299 for the i5, 8GB RAM, and 256GB SSD, value isn't the best but you have what is the best looking Ultrabook on the market other than the new XPS 13.

I purchased this machine because I recently purchased several Native Instruments plugins for use with my application copy of Fruity Loops. My old computer was struggling to even eek out a full measure without crackling or stuttering, so it was time.This computer is simultaneously running FLStudio with multiple heavy Native Instrument channels without any stutter. I will say that it initially did have a little lag, but upping the buffer threshold has taken care of it. I have seen some complain that the I7 processor is insufficient for heavy music production, but if you are concerned about that, look up a tutorial about turning off the turbo boost since this should rectify the problem that many described.As for graphics, I have been using Flowscape to create ambient animated scenes, and the processor deals with this as well as most high end laptops would. I had a scene with thousands of animated 3d models (plants and particle effects included), and the framerate hovered around 8-10, which is fine for the initial setup of the scene. When I rendered it, it output about 1 frame per second at 4k quality, and the end result was as smooth as butter.Beyond that, it is a good quality, metal body, extremely high resolution machine with a lot of power for only weighing 2 pounds. If you are producing music with 30 different instruments or if you are a professional animator or heavy gamer, then you probably already know that you should spring for a tower with adequate cooling and hardware. If you enjoy moderate/heavy mixing and casual graphics work, this machine is absolutely perfect.The only warning I have is that this does not come with an SD slot. If you are worried about storage space, spring for the model with a bigger hard drive.

Bought this as my previous laptop decided to die before my last semester of nursing school. When I was looking into buying laptops, I did a lot of research and was leaning towards a MacBook Pro but couldn’t justify the cost for what the hardware would be offering. Plus limited gaming ability and while I’m familiar with how a Mac operates, I’m most comfortable with windows.This laptop has been awesome, mostly. The look of it is sleek, it handles all my programs for school with ease (which is impressive because the software for taking my exams should be considered a virus at best). The laptop has a great speed, touch pad is sensitive and responsive, and the battery life gets me through the entire day.What’s not so great about it? A couple times I’ll have left the laptop open and go to wake the computer up and it doesn’t respond. Annoying but if I closed the screen and reopen it, it would be fine. One time the laptop was off and wouldn’t turn on, simple google on the phone and already had a fix for it. Also had to turn off the auto adjust for the screen brightness as it was overly sensitive and would constantly fluctuate.All in all, I’m happy with my purchase. There are some things I’d like to be fixed, but I wasn’t willing to spend the money for an even more expensive laptop so I feel like while it is on the costly side, it’s a huge upgrade from what I had and it’s held up great for the past 3 months.

I bought this laptop in November around Black Friday and absolutely loved it, build quality is incredible. Wanted to buy it through Microsoft but their website is broken half the time and literally did not let me purchase the product, the cart wasn't working. After trying for a few days I gave up and bought it through Amazon, luckily. A few weeks ago I opened the laptop to a blue screen. I tried automatic repair, recovery, restore points, format/reset to factory, nothing would work. Always kept getting the error that the there is a drive (ssd) issue. I called Microsoft for help, they tried to brush me off because I didn't buy it directly through them, I explained I physically couldn't since their website was broken. They arranged for me to go pick up a replacement laptop 100km away, thanks? I called Amazon and they were amazing, helped me return the device. I had high hopes for this device but was let down. I noticed a lot of reviews online with stories very similar to mine, hopefully they sort out their issues. PS: SSD is "up-gradable" M.2, but its an odd size, 2230, which isn't sold anywhere, when standard is 2242.

The media could not be loaded.  Best laptop in market , this is the third one in my family.Way better than Apple Mac book as I was Mac book user for past 3 year and upgraded to two Mac books but nothing beats surface 3 it’s crisp fast and so smooth with 16 gig ram enough to run heavy applications as I need to run cloud and virtual machines and databases on this one.

I bought this mainly to be my dedicated personal/music recording laptop (I use another equipment for company work). It's really powerful considering the price, size and weight (enough to play Divinity 2 over Steam, for example). Camera is impressively good and can compensate very well for poor lighting with very little noise. Sound is fair for overall use (I use an external Focusrite interface for music recording/editing). Now the cons:1. Because I usually run it on power, only after a few months I realized this odd behavior of completely shutting down randomly when running on battery, even with battery full. Tried to fix it via software several times (Windows and Firmware updates, Factory Reset and Recovery from USB). Nothing worked. Seems like a hardware defect by the behavior and result of some online research so I returned it for replacement. Hope the new unit works.2. The keyboard looks fragile. You can see its surface bending while you type. I wonder how long until I need to repair/replace it.3. It would be nice if the touch screen could be flipped all the way back to work like a tablet.4. The face recognition log in mechanism (I don't recall how Microsoft calls it) is a little bit odd and I'm thinking about disabling it completely. Did some research and it appears it uses an infrared dedicated camera instead of the main "normal" camera so this would explain why it was recognizing me even with the regular camera covered. I never got to confirm this a 100% but then I decided to test in a way where I wasn't even in front of the screen and the thing would unlock sometimes! Since I use it only at home in these quarantine times, not a big deal, but I would NEVER leave this thing enabled if taking it outside.Overall, assuming the replacement will solve the battery problem, I would see this laptop has a nice value for money on its tier.

I was hoping to switch from a Mac to the Surface laptop expecting Microsoft and PCs, in general, to have caught up to the technology and speed of a Mac. I was very disappointed. The keyboard was not comfortable to the touch, and the keys felt slight too far apart. The speed of downloading and installing a relative basic program was very slow. The trackpad was not nearly as convenient or responsive as that of my Mac despite having changed the sensitivity. I choose not to keep the Surface and have instead opted to stay with an updated Mac.

Had this matte black version for less than a month. Well taken care of, but the corner paint is already starting to chip off. Super disappointing for a machine this pricey. I would not recommend getting a colored version of the Surface and instead stick with the regular grey.