Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 – 13.5" Touch-Screen – Intel Core i7 – 16GB Memory – 512GB Solid State Drive (Latest Model) – Platinum with Alcantara (Renewed)

All day power on the go, with up to 11.5 hours of battery life, Plus standby time when you re away, Go from empty to a full battery with fast charging up to 80 percent in about 1 hour

• Clean, elegant design: Thin and light, starting at just 2.79 pounds, Surface Laptop 3 is easy to carry
• Choose from rich tone on tone color combinations: New Sandstone, plus Matte Black, Cobalt Blue, and Platinum
• Improved speed and performance to do what you want, with the latest processors: Surface Laptop 3 is up to 2 times faster than Surface Laptop 2
• More ways to connect, with USB C and USB A ports for connecting to displays, docking stations and more, as well as accessory charging
• All day power on the go, with up to 11.5 hours of battery life, Plus standby time when you’re away; Go from empty to a full battery with fast charging up to 80 percent in about 1 hour

It’s sometimes difficult to decipher the model numbers of computers, and even more so when you compare different laptops. It takes a good deal of effort to decode the finer points of different systems, and often, it feels like you need a degree in advanced mathematics just to understand what all those letters and numbers mean.

Fortunately, that’s not the case with the Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 13.5. This sleek, thin laptop hits almost all the right notes. It’s light and portable, has a fantastic trackpad and keyboard combo, and thanks to an Intel processor upgrade, it’s also got a decent boost in performance over last year’s Surface Laptop 2.

One of the few things that hold back the Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 from being the best laptop on the market is its display. The panel is bright and colorful, but it’s slightly reflective and has a lack of HDR support that limits its appeal. Hopefully, the next version will correct some of those issues and add support for wide-color gamut apps and games.

The keyboard and trackpad are great, and though they don’t quite measure up to Apple’s Force Touch technology, they feel very satisfying. In addition, Microsoft has made the click mechanism on both the keyboard and trackpad quieter, which is a welcome change. It still doesn’t come close to rivaling the loudness of Apple’s MacBook series, but it’s an admirable attempt at making the Surface Laptop 3 more user-friendly.

A pair of “omnisonic” speakers backed by Dolby Audio Premium are surprisingly powerful and provide excellent sound quality. That’s a welcome relief from the typical laptop speakers that tend to produce thin, tinny audio with shrill highs and unnaturally muddy bass.

On the software front, Microsoft has removed the more restrictive Windows 10 S install of its previous Surface Laptop models, which is a plus for productivity users who want full-fledged Photoshop or any other software with which they’re comfortable. The Surface Laptop 3 also includes a free 1-year subscription to Office 365.

The Surface Laptop 3’s most significant improvement is its processor upgrade from an old dual-core Intel Pentium Gold to a new 10th generation Intel Core i5 CPU. It’s not enough to make a difference in terms of everyday computing performance, but it does offer a notable boost in benchmarking and gaming performance. For example, we played the popular arcade game Guacamelee 2 on low settings on the 720p display at 60 to 70 frames per second (FPS). During major battles, that dropped down to about 54 FPS, but it was playable. In comparison, the Spectre x360 13 and the 2018 MacBook Air both struggled to hit 40 FPS when playing that same game. However, the Core i5 model isn’t meant to be a gaming laptop, so anyone looking to game on this laptop should consider a higher-end configuration with a faster CPU and more RAM.