SURFACE LAPTOP 4 by Microsoft (Full Review 2021)

hey guys welcome back to the channel right here we have the brand new microsoft surface laptop 4 which as you can see has a really slim and really premium looking design so in this video we're going to dive into this laptop and talk about the physical aspects of it what's different about it the internal components and it'll also get into a webcam microphone video speaker test to really figure out how good this laptop actually is now with that being said guys there's actually two different models there's a 15 inch model and then this is the 13 and a half inch model and there's a couple different colors and the colors all look really nice with an aluminum body this one is the ice blue which as you can see in most lighting looks more silver doesn't really look that blue but i guess in the studio lighting you can kind of see it looks a little bit blue there i guess ice is really not that blue anyway so it makes sense but you can see on the top we have a really nice clean aesthetic so not only is it a thin laptop we have a nice flat aluminum body on the top so just a really flat piece of aluminum and then on the bottom very similar just a flat piece of aluminum we don't have a fan down here we don't have a speaker down here so it's kind of nice i'm not worried about it really getting anything in there i'm not worried about breaking the bottom just a nice clean aesthetic now the fan is actually backed by the hinge as you can see right there which personally i mean i've seen a lot of different orientations for where fans go on a laptop but i think the back tends to be my favorite one when it's on my lap just blowing out in front of me just makes the most sense so it's not like blowing on me or out of the side or something like that i think that that's a good style right there now of course that does limit how far the hinge can go back but we'll talk about that in a second looking at the right side we'll see we have just a little slot there and at first glance you might think that's an sd card slot unfortunately it is not an sd card slot this doesn't have an sd card slot anywhere on here instead that is actually the charging port so microsoft has their little proprietary charging cable and it's just a really slim profile it magnetically snaps on there so really easy to put in place and like i said has a low profile so when you're working it really doesn't stick out much and it's not going to be like it's easy to take out put on pretty convenient but i mean considering the size of this laptop i would probably rather have just another usb type c port there and i'd be fine charging by usbc but regardless that's what microsoft chose to do and and so that's what we have over there on the left side we have just three ports we have a usb type a which i'm glad they still have that we have usb type c and this actually you can charge through this as well and then we have a headphone jack now i'm sure a lot of people will be using that usb type-c port for a dongle so you can have hdmi or micro sd or sd card or a lot of other things that you might want to have because i mean it's pretty typical a 13 inch laptop usually doesn't have a lot of ports so that's just what it is you're going to have to kind of get used to that if you want the 13 inch model and so looking at the rest of this laptop if we open it up i mean the first thing you might notice is that it looks a little bit larger than a lot of 13-inch laptops and that's because in a lot in a way it kind of is so even though it's a 13-inch screen the aspect ratio is slightly different than a lot of other ones so for example the dell xps 13 is i believe 16 by nine so it's a little bit wider and a lot of laptops are wider like that this one is actually three by two so it's going to be a lot taller than a lot of other laptops out there giving you more of a square shape as opposed to a long rectangle and because you're measuring the diagonal for 13 and a half inches this technically has more screen real estate personally i'm a big fan of that it gives you a little bit more working space while still keeping the laptop very compact very travel friendly and i think it's a really nicely sized laptop now i'll get it more into what the screen is all about in a second but i want to talk a little bit more about the aesthetic here we do have a bezel around there so typically i mean a lot of laptops don't have ultra thin bezels yet they're not anywhere near where phones are or tablets are but i mean it's thin enough that it's not going to be a massive eyesore i mean it's probably i mean i hope in a couple years that laptops have really thin bezels and this might look antiquated but for now it looks pretty standard now on the bottom right below the keyboard and all around the touch pad and everything you'll see that it has kind of an interesting texture interesting aesthetic there where it almost feels like if you made velvet out of rubber that's that's pretty much what it feels like i think it's kind of nice so if it's like really cold out these this will not be cold so it's nice in the winter now i'll get a little bit more into the keyboard in a second but you'll see on the laptop on the screen we actually have on the top a couple sensors so we have our microphones we have our camera and of course we have our face id so it is using infrared you open it up blink some little red lights read some face id and that's the only biometrics you have this one does not have a fingerprint sensor which i don't think is really a problem face id is so fast and you already have that bezel anyway so the only catch though is that this webcam is only 720p now we'll get into a test in a second but 720p in a laptop made in 2021 feels a little bit low to me i feel like you should at least have 1080p i know a lot of people are on zoom calls all the time and different types of like teams and and skype and whatever else you're using having a high resolution camera i think would be a good benefit it can't be that hard to add that onto an expensive laptop like this so i'm not really sure why they chose to do that now you'll also notice that this laptop doesn't have any visible speakers so they're kind of hidden along the top and underneath the keyboard so we'll actually get into a test to see how well that performs in a second okay so next let's take a closer look at the keyboard obviously a very important aspect of any productive laptop and the first thing i want to point out is that this does have backlighting on the keys it actually has three levels of backlighting so one two three and off so maybe that's four levels however you look at that and the keys themselves are made of plastic i found that they don't have a ton of travel but that makes them pretty quiet and pretty subtle which i mean it's kind of a mixed bag on this one some people really like the subtle slow travel low profile keys because they can type really fast other people prefer the more mechanical keys and would like something larger more metal maybe similar to like the hp spectre for example honestly i'm a little bit used to the more mechanical keys but i'm i could get used to this one very quickly and i feel like i would have no problem typing fast with that being said it does have a little bit of a slightly lower quality feel when they're all plastic keys and there's a little bit of flex in the middle of the keyboard especially if you're a harder typer you might notice that but i mean ultimately i feel like the keyboard i could definitely get used to and i don't have any major complaints about this the trackpad similarly is made of plastic and it feels like a relatively premium plastic with some pretty tight tolerances but of course it is still a plastic trackpad now something to note physically with this laptop is the hinge on here i think microsoft did a really good job balancing this so first of all if you open it there's really no hinge wobble it stays very steady anywhere you want it to and second of all when it's closed you can very easily just open it with one finger and it doesn't lift up the other side of the laptop i think they did a great job balancing it perfect stiffness perfect feel on there and it gives you a really nice premium experience pretty similar to what we're seeing with a lot of the macbooks okay so next let's talk a little bit more about the display like i said this is a 13 and a half inch 3x2 display so it's going to give you approximately the size of a piece of paper so it's 8.8 inches by 12.2 inches and that gives you 2256 by 1504 pixels so it's a little bit more than 1080p but a little bit less than 4k i found that the resolution on here is pretty good ultimately the screen looks really good vibrant colors very bright very clean and i mean i like the display it's also a touch screen of course even though it doesn't fold all the way back so you can see that that's about as far as it goes right there it is a 10-point multi-touch screen so it's nice for poking on the screen or whatever you want and similarly this does accept the windows surface pen but with that being said i don't really know why i would be using the the pen if it doesn't fold back all the way and of course you can't fold back any farther than this as i mentioned before because we do have that little fan right on the bottom and you don't want it blowing onto the screen of course so i think that's a little bit of a drawback of having the fan back there i find that this bends back far enough for most situations but every now and then i would like to bend it back just a little bit farther something else to note about the display is while it does get really dim and really bright if you're outside it's definitely prone to a lot of glare so something to be aware of if you're going to plan on working outside a lot but that's pretty much everything i want to talk about with the display and the keyboard and pretty much everything physically so let's actually now get into a test of the speakers as well as the webcam and the microphone all right guys this is the webcam and the onboard microphones if i was in a video call it would probably look and sound something like this of course i am in my studio right now so there's no echo and it's really the best lighting that this thing is ever really going to get so you guys can leave a comment it's limited to 720p but do you think this is acceptable for video call or would you like to see something better so let's get into a quick speaker test this is maximum volume by the way so honestly good clean audio pretty good volume especially considering this is such a small laptop and you see no speakers on there also a surprising delivery of bass okay so let's talk a little bit more about the internals of this laptop of course there's a lot of different variations you can get you can get amd or intel the most typical configuration you'll see at best buy is the intel i5 with eight gigs of ram which i think is a little bit underpowered for my purposes with editing videos and stuff so i drove like 50 miles to buy the i7 which is the 11th gen intel i7 processor and this has 16 gigs of ram now according to microsoft's website they also configure this up to 32 gigs of ram but i don't believe it goes any higher than that and finding that in a store i think is going to be almost impossible now with that being said they promised 17 hours of battery life with the intel i7 on this laptop of course it depends on what you're doing but they promised 19 hours on the amd so a subtle difference there if you're looking for battery life the amd might be a better choice for you and i mean ultimately when i'm doing basically everything i'm doing editing videos browsing the web i find that 17 hours is a reasonably accurate estimate it's really hard to say exactly how long i use it because i don't always use it for 17 hours straight and of course i do all kinds of different stuff on here if editing a video versus browsing the web have very different demands on your battery but i mean the battery life ultimately i think did a pretty good job here all right guys editor mike here i was trying to edit this video on this laptop just to really test it out and put it through its paces with premiere pro and premiere crashed and now we're looking at it looks like it's running on low memory is what it's a little error message said and things are just really frozen i can't close windows i'm going to have to reboot this but it's definitely disappointing to see a brand new laptop run into issues like this now getting some pros and cons with this laptop starting off with the pros i think they did a great job with the aesthetic i really like how slim this laptop is i like the feel of it and i think they did a great job with the hinge as well a really nice smooth well-balanced hinge to really give you that premium feel and you just know it's a well-built laptop similarly the screen i really like how they have the aspect ratio of three to two i think it gives you a lot more working space that makes it more bearable to use a small 13-inch laptop and so i don't feel really like i'm using a 13-inch laptop because it has that big aspect ratio it also has the really nice keyboard backing that little soft touch kind of rubbery feel i think it's interesting over time i hope it doesn't wear down too much but i mean it's kind of a cool thing right there now getting into some drawbacks there's a couple that i had in mind the first one is that it's a 720p webcam i just really wish we'd push that forward make it 1080 but i mean regardless it's 720 for some reason the second one is a subtle one and that's anytime i glance at the keyboard i think the caps lock is on because the little circle that is translucent is actually pretty white and it looks very similar when it's on or when it's off another one is that you don't have a lot of ports on here obviously three on the left side is great to have but i wish we had at least one more usb type-c port on here so i don't always need it to angle for anything i ever use but i mean again it is what it is but ultimately guys this laptop is is pretty simple i really like how it's built it looks nice it feels nice and it's just going to be kind of a no-frills laptop there's other laptops for the price if you're looking for more features maybe you want a touch bar on the top maybe you want an s pen you want to wirelessly charge your phone on the track pad there's other laptops that do all of that but i think a lot of people interested in the surface laptop won't really care a lot about those extra features and they're really looking for something maybe for work maybe for personal but you want something that just works it works well it's easy to travel with and it's a slim sleek fast laptop and i think that's exactly what this one is so ultimately i'm a fan of the surface laptop 4. you guys can leave a comment below and let me know what you think of this laptop if it's something that you will be buying or not and if there's anything you liked or didn't like about it as always guys if you enjoyed this video consider liking and subscribing i will be reviewing a couple more laptops just like this one coming up so definitely subscribe so you don't miss those i'm michael bryan guys thanks for watching and i'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Mike O'Brien

Views: 298,531

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Id: NAHTY1JaO3w

Length: 13min 36sec (816 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 17 2021