

The trackpad is responsive and accurate but I would have liked the click to require a bit more force as often I would mistakenly double click due to its sensitivity. It’s well spaced and has a nice spongy feel to it. Annoyingly the stylus doesn’t come in the box and has a standalone cost of $180, which is a significant amount when you’re already paying premium prices for this laptop. I had worries that the pen would fall off but it’s well-secured, unobtrusive and you’ll forget it’s there. The Slim Pen 2 magnetically secures itself underneath the front hinge of the device and charges. It’s responsive, seamless and I especially liked the charging area for it. I’m sure there are some creatives that will love Studio Mode as a canvas for painting and drawing, however I’m not convinced there’s a massive market for this.įor creative works, the Laptop Studio is at its best when paired with Microsoft’s stylus, the Slim Pen 2. It’s simply too big to use comfortably in tablet form.

While I do think there’s a market for a 2-in-1 device that acts as both a laptop and a tablet, the Surface Laptop Studio is thick and heavy weighing 1.8kg. When watching a movie, or playing a game on a laptop, I’ve never found the keyboard so distracting that I wished I could bring the screen forward to cover it. For me, Stage Mode was completely pointless. While the ability to do this is unique and interesting, throughout my time with the device, I only ever used Laptop Mode. And Studio Mode in which the display lies flat, more like a canvas or tablet. There’s standard Laptop Mode, Stage Mode, in which the screen comes towards the user covering the keyboard but leaving the trackpad available. What makes the design unique, is the ability to maneuver the screen into 3 different modes. From the outside it doesn’t have a very distinctive look but overall it looks nice. The Laptop Studio is a sleek-looking device. The only thing you’re paying for is the adjustable screen. WIth it’s mid-range RTX 3050 Ti graphics card and Core i7 CPU it’s overpriced. Taking these comparisons into consideration, the Surface Laptop Studio is an expensive device. Microsoft’s main competitor in this space, Apple’s MacBook Pro, costs $4,649 for the midrange option boasting 16GB Unified Memory, a 10-Core CPU, 16-Core GPU and 1TB of SSD storage. To put this table into perspective, the Razer Blade 15, a more powerful gaming laptop with a higher resolution 2560×1440 display, 16GB RAM, Intel Core i7 and an Nvidia RTX 3060 costs $4,552. Our review device had an Intel Core i5 CPU, Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti GPU, 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD storage. Below are the “Home,” configurations but there’s a whole range of others for businesses and students. The Surface Laptop Studio comes in a variety of configurations. Not as good as other similarly priced competitors.
