Read more: Meet Microsoft's new Modern family of work-from-home audio accessories
#Video edit magic 4.15 720p
It retains the same old sufficient 720p webcam and the limited ports - one each USB-A and USB-C plus an analog headphone jack. There are two color profiles which come with it, a standard sRGB and an "Enhanced" mode, the latter seems to be the native screen profile and looks like it just increases the contrast. It's fine for work, but somewhat washed out for Netflix. The 3:2 aspect ratio, 201 pixel-per-inch display is the same as before nothing to get excited about unless you're upgrading from an old laptop with a dim screen. Note that this year's AMD model of the Surface Laptop will certainly outperform its predecessor simply because the older model used a lower-end Ryzen 5, not a Ryzen 7, and the new AMD model will likely outperform the new Intel model, at least on multicore-intensive tasks, simply because it has 8 cores compared to the Intel's 4. But this year's CPU is effectively identical to the Ryzen 7 4800U, albeit with clock speeds a mere 200MHz faster, and in fact its Vega 8 integrated GPU has one CU less than the chip in the Surface Laptop 3. That made sense last year when the processor differed from the rest of its siblings by the addition of an extra graphics core (compute unit) its Vega 9 integrated graphics. The Ryzen 7 4980U processor in the 15-inch system is dubbed the Ryzen 7 Microsoft Surface Edition. It's also par for the course: the Surface Laptop 3's AMD CPU was also an older-than-current generation.
Given the modest upgrades, it's a bit annoying that Microsoft chose to use the last generation (Zen 2) of the AMD CPUs rather than the current and faster 5000 seriesĀ (Zen 3), though that's probably due to the timing of the laptop's release. It's been bumped to the 4000-series of the AMD Ryzen 7 mobile processor and 11th-gen Intel Core i7-11875G7, plus storage and memory increases and newer Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Very little has changed for this generation.
But it's also still reasonably portable, sufficiently powerful, pleasantly sleek looking, durable, somewhat upgradeable, and backward-compatible with previous power supplies and Surface Connect accessories sold by Microsoft. Yes, it's faster and has better battery life than the older model, but so does every other laptop updated for 2021.
#Video edit magic 4.15 full
It's not inexpensive or full of cutting-edge tech. It's still not particularly light, or fast or feature-packed. Just like the previous Microsoft Surface Laptop 3, the 2021 Surface Laptop 4 indistinguishes itself by its averageness.