Microsoft also went with the simplest keyboard layout. Meanwhile, there’s a ton of empty space all around it. The trackpad is a fairly sizable one, at about 4.5 x 3 inches, but it’s only a little bigger than that found on the Dell XPS 13, a much smaller laptop, and even falls short of the touchpads on the Asus ZenBook 14 OLED and MacBook Pro 14-inch which are also smaller laptops. With the laptop opened up, the Surface Laptop 5 bares its blandness completely. The design ought to make it harder to accidentally suffocate the cooling systems in some common circumstances, such as setting the laptop on a pillow or couch, but it’s still a lot easier to do than it would be on a Zenbook 14 OLED or other comparable laptop that vents out the side or top. The speakers are hidden in the hinge area as well, going completely under the radar. There’s venting along the back edge of the base, just below the display hinge. The corners have a large radius and the base has a slightly taper toward the front edge, but that’s the extent of it.

It’s attempting nothing interesting with form. It’s a big, flat slab of gray-on-gray metal any way you look at it – from above, from below, and even looking at the keyboard deck you’re confronted with broad swatches of bare aluminum. There’s little in the way of style to the design, though. The Surface Laptop 5 feels well built, with a stiff aluminum construction that doesn’t have a lot of give to it. Let’s take a closer look and see what Microsoft has actually put on the table.

Dell’s XPS 15 line also bumps for U-series processors to higher-performance H-Series variants and can include dedicated graphics while staying below Microsoft’s prices. The 15-inch model comes exclusively with the higher-end Core i7 processor and ranges from $1,299 for an 8GB+256GB model to $2,399 for a 32GB+1TB model, once again playing far too close to the fire that is Dell’s XPS 15. That rises all the way up to $1,699 for a model with a Core i7-1255U, 32GB of RAM, and a 512GB storage drive ($200 more than the comparable Dell XPS 13 with a 1TB storage drive). The Surface Laptop 5 line starts at $999 for a model with a 13.5-inch display, 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and an Intel Core i5-1235U processor.

Microsoft surface laptop 5