 Oh, my disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined. Honestly speaking, I was afraid that Microsoft was just gonna let the Surface lineup quietly die. I mean, years ago, they made some nearly perfect devices and then just didn't fix small issues for years while all of the other Windows machines on the market leapfrogged them until today. This is the all new Surface Laptop Studio. And for a lot of people, this might very well be the best Windows laptop on the market. And today's video is brought to you by Antlion Audio. Their ModMic wireless microphone delivers best in class audio quality, 12 plus hours of battery life, and it can magnetically mount to almost any headphone. Get 15% off the ModMic wireless and other ModMic products at the link down below. But Linus, you might say, after your investment in framework, how can you possibly declare something else to be the best Windows laptop on the market? Well, it starts with the display. This is the new benchmark for how displays on Windows machines should work. It has a 120 Hertz refresh rate, so everything from dragging around a window to just interacting with the machine feels snappier while also making you a better gamer, of course. It has the classic Surface 3x2 aspect ratio and it can do this. Whoa, whoa, hold on a second. Okay, no, we're gonna talk about that a little bit more later. So cool. My only real complaint about the screen is the rounded corners. And I don't mean rounded in software. Like the display has rounded corners. It's got some pixels hacked off. This is something that can make sense on a phone where they have a super high screen to body ratio and they're meant to sit comfortably in the palm of your hand, which is round. Here though, I don't get it. Like the mouse even moves all the way into the corner. So I'm pretty sure Windows is just treating this display like there's some phantom pixels there. One problem that this gorgeous high refresh rate screen brings to light though is the polling rate of the trackpad. According to MouseRateChecker, this trackpad is polling at, it looks like probably 144 Hertz, which was totally fine with a 60 Hertz display. But now could result in nearly a frame between when you interact with your touchpad and when that gets turned into useful movement. Now, to be clear, I don't think that any laptop makers out there have dealt with this yet. And it is a lot less obvious on the surface than it is on the HP ZBook. Review coming soon, make sure you're subscribed by the way. But it seems like a really easy way for Microsoft to make this device truly feel way more responsive. Just like phone manufacturers are doing with their touch screens, where you'll see that the polling rate of the touchscreen is usually double or more compared to the refresh rate of the display. To demonstrate why this matters, we'll do a classic demo. Moving a mouse cursor back and forth across a dark background. You see those differences in the spacing of the pointer? That's because sometimes the frame gets refreshed immediately after the trackpad was pulled, and other times there's that gap. And you can see the difference when you plug in an external device, like this final mouse 1000 Hertz a Kajigger. I think that's what the model is called. By the way, thank you very much Dell for actually including this USB-C to A and HDMI adapter with your laptops. Microsoft didn't seem to feel that was necessary in spite of the fact that the surface has, I don't know what to call this IO other than surfacey. It's got a headphone microphone combo jack, their proprietary bull-s**t connector, and then two, at least thankfully, Thunderbolt 4 ports. So that's an improvement, but no USB type A as expected. Yeah, that's visible to the naked eye. I mean, it's not perfect. It's just that when you're pulling at 1000 Hertz, those differences are much smaller. Don't get me wrong though, this trackpad is really good, maybe even exceptional. The size is solid, the tracking is accurate, and now instead of a click, they're using haptic feedback. So you can actually tune the force to your liking. I do wish they gave us a bit more tuning options like we had in the Centrel software, but this is still an easy A plus trackpad. Also an easy A plus keyboard. Now surface devices have always had pretty solid keyboards, with the exceptions being the ones that you clipped onto them. Those were not always great. But this one feels good even compared to the good ones. The keys are snappier than on the Surface laptop and on the Surface Book, but there is still enough travel to prevent fatigue when you're typing all day. Add in the exceptional chassis rigidity, and you've got one of the best mobile keyboards on the market. What we haven't discussed just yet though is the performance. And the reason is that it is one of the low lights of the device. I mean, it's fine. It's fine for most people, a Core i7-11370H and an RTX 3050 Ti will be powerful enough for anything they would wanna do. But the problem is that it comes in at a very similar price to the XPS 15, which has an eight core Core i7-11800H. Just to demonstrate this point, we're gonna run Cinebench, but it shouldn't be surprising that when you have two processors using the same architecture, you could literally forget to start the one of them that has twice as many cores and it'll still win. So, if you plan to do a fair bit of... So if you plan to do a fair bit of gaming, this isn't gonna be the device for you. In fact, I'd recommend something like the Zephyrus G14. It's not only cheaper, but it has a much faster RTX 3060. Though, if you manage your expectations, it's not like the Surface Laptop Studio can't be used for gaming. This is hilarious, by the way. Totally off topic, but can we just take a moment to appreciate how nice the surface finish is? Like, is that why they call them Surface? Man, that soft touch though. Incredible. You know what else is incredible? 110 FPS in Forza Horizon 4 on a productivity laptop. To be clear, it's not cranked. This is medium and we had to turn the resolution down a little bit, but from a reasonable distance, laptop resolutions have gotten so high these days that you can turn them down a little bit and it's not just immediately interpolation city. This thing is fricking quiet. Like, anyone else notice that or rather not notice it? Oh yeah. Super quiet. Hello? Hello? Anybody in there? I should note, by the way, even though I complained there's no Type-A ports on the Surface Laptop Studio, there is one on the Power Brick, but that's just for charging. That's not for actually plugging in a USB device and using it. So it's not like the ethernet jack on the iMac M1. The point of all this though is that quiet is worth nothing unless it's also cool. And the Surface Laptop Studio is not particularly cool. You can see that the palm rests are up in the low 30s, mid 30s on this side, meaning they're not uncomfortable, but if you were gaming on a winter day, you'd have yourself a nice little hand warmer here. Of course, you're not buying this thing for gaming anyway, are you? Gaming's a bonus. You get it for this guy. Oh yeah. Man, those are strong magnets, aren't they? I mean, it's one thing to have a stylus that clips onto your device, but that's really, really incredible. And I love the way that they've got it tucked away so that if you're sliding the laptop into your bag or something like that, it's not gonna get caught on something and fall off. Now, obviously, if you guys have ever seen my art, you'll know I'm not qualified to evaluate the stylus. So I handed it over to the one and only Sarah Butt to try it out for a bit. She felt that the feel was a bit cheap compared to the Apple Pencil, but the responsiveness is great with the Surface Laptop Studio being able to handle larger projects without slowing down, something that can't be said for the iPad Pro. It wasn't all sunshine and roses though. While the pen itself is great, the problems she ran into had more to do with Windows, having to regularly switch between laptop and folded mode depending on the task and whether a real keyboard was required. I mean, this won't be a problem for your student who's just taking notes in OneDrive or Whiteboard, but if you're a professional using Photoshop daily, their touch only support in Windows leaves much to be desired and you're gonna want an external set of peripherals. And the same could probably be said about the looks. It's got this kind of chunky two-tiered vibe from the outside and from the inside, it suffers a little bit from 2015 MacBook Pro clone syndrome with the only distinctive feature being its gray keyboard rather than having a black one. That is until you do this. Now, this is far from the first two-in-one device on the market. In fact, they've been making these things for like 10 years now. But what makes this one unique is not just the fact that it can be operated in laptop mode. I would call this something akin to easel mode and then tablet mode. Studio mode. That's what they call it. Studio mode. Yeah, studio mode. This? This is a tablet. Not just that, but the fact that it can switch between them so easily. One of the big problems with a device like this one from HP is that when you wanna switch from tablet mode because you just need to type something for a second, you gotta unfold the whole thing, typeity type type type, and then wait around for Windows register. Okay, you're back in tablet mode. With this, okay, hey, touch screen, I need you out of the way for a sec. Boom. And you're back. It's really quick. It's pretty cool. What's less cool is Microsoft also sent us the Surface Ocean Plastic for our consideration. It paired flawlessly with our laptop. And that's all I can really say about it. It looks stupid. It has a low polling rate. The ergonomics are terrible. And really the only question I have about it is why didn't you buy a real mouse? What you might not wish you bought, at least if Microsoft is to be believed, however, is additional speakers. They apparently have a total of four downward firing drivers on this machine that are supposed to give it really impressive sound. And it takes a lot to impress us these days in a world where Apple's latest MacBooks exist. And honorable mention for Dell, honorable mention for Dell. We're gonna compare it to that right now. Okay, let's hear a Dell. That's not a Dell, that's Crab Raid. Get it? Cause it's a Dell. Thanks, Brandon. Not bad. Okay. Way fuller sounding. Yeah. It's not close. Yeah, wow. Wow. That is damn impressive. And what's also apparently impressive, though I haven't tried it yet, is the webcam. Now I've gone ahead and I've gotten some little smudgies on there. Here we go. Windows Hello, ready, set, hello. Hi, how you doing? Boom, signed in. Love it. So this is Linus Central Station here. Very respectable. Yeah. Without that unfair backlight behind it, that looks pretty good. I could do my morning makeup in there. It's 1080p, more than almost every other webcam can say. Yeah. Like dang. Not bad. What's a little more bad is the price. The Surface Laptop Studio technically starts at $1,600, but that one does not come with a dedicated graphics card. So the first Laptop Studio that you actually want is $2,100. Far from cheap. And that's even before you pay for a memory upgrade. So if you bought this version and realized, you know what, I actually need 32 gigs of RAM. Are you screwed? Or is there any way to upgrade it after the fact? Let's open it up and find out. We haven't actually looked inside this yet because although it's only four screws on the corners of the chassis, they're hidden by the rubber feet, making disassembly annoying and the potential of the device looking kind of weird after pretty high. So what Microsoft says is this device does not contain any user serviceable parts. Hard drive is only removable by an authorized technician following Microsoft provided instructions. Here's an idea, Microsoft. If the provided instructions are so important, why don't you provide them to everyone? This is, have you removed this rubber foot yet? No, I'm afraid I'm gonna screw it up. It's a pain in the butt. That's not going back on right. No, big bummer. This does not want to come apart. That is not its plan. All right, you are sure it's four or should I keep peeling this back? They told me four. I asked in the meeting. They told you a big fat lie. My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined. All they had to do was have four exposed screws to make it so that this wouldn't have been necessary. I think this is glued down. Oh, I hate this so much. So it looks like if I pry here, we get a bit of, oh, that just broke some stuff. I legit just don't get it. What are we missing here? Can't get a pick in there. Can't get a pry tool in there. Sorry, Microsoft. I'm sorry, viewers. I'm sorry, Alex. I'm sorry, Brandon, that you have to witness this. Not sorry, Microsoft. It's their fault. Sorry, everyone. Okay. What was it? It was a screw. It was a screw. Okay, well now we know. There's a fascia piece, like a plastic sticker. See this? There's a plastic sticker that covers up a couple of more screw holes here. Also the battery came with that. Yeah. This is a really unusual battery configurations. So it's actually a good Lord. What is this? Six piece soft pack battery, 56.3 watt hours. How did they get 11 hours of battery life out of that? Well, hold on. I can't, well, no, it can't be just this one. I was thinking maybe it's just this one and there's more capacity here, but no, that's really impressive. That would have to be the whole thing for sure. Unfortunately, we won't get a good look at the motherboard without fully popping it off. But I think there's a fair bit we can see here. We've got a one terabyte, looks like customized SSD of some sort. They've at least done a fancy little Microsoft heat spreader on it. Oh boy. Yep, standard M.2, just got a nice little Microsoft theme shield on it. We really wanted to know the spec of this thing. We could use a software to look at that. This is cool. Super flat heat pipe here going from the CPU over to an exhaust over here. So the intake is all along the side here and then the exhaust is here. And then you see the same thing on the other side where there is, where the hell's the heat pipe for this one? At any rate, there's another heat pipe that goes over to the GPU, which is right here. And then this is our dedicated fan for that. So it looks like the two coolers do not share CPU and GPU cooling duty in any way. Yeah, I like it. I like it, it's cool. You know what, Brandon, we could go deeper, but I think we know everything we need to know. If you don't order the right amount of RAM when you order, you are plum out of luck. I think this is salvageable, Alex. If we just order, if we can get replacement parts, if we just order a new base slash battery thing and plunk it on here, there is the issue of the smile to sort out. You can see it's a bit of a happy laptop right now. Or sad, depending on how you look at it. It's, I think we could probably mostly buff that out. If you know what I mean, just kind of give it a little, you know what? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I think I fixed it already. Yeah, it's pretty straight. Hold on, hold on. Just got it. I mean, that's the thing about these aluminum alloy chassis, right? You can just kind of give it a little, oh yeah. Bottom line, great battery life, great track pad, amazing display, utterly unique form factor, very usable, probably one of the best integrations of a stylus in a device that I've ever seen with those nice strong magnets. And all it costs you is that you will never, ever, ever open it up and hope to put it back together with upgraded components. And you will never, ever hope to see a Linus Tech Tips video without this message from our sponsor. Do you think making a website is hard? Well, it doesn't have to be. Use Squarespace and you'll have your website up and running in a matter of hours, maybe even less, if your standards are as low as ours. 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