The Surface Laptop 5 retains the sleek, wedge-shaped design of the previous version, and the one before that, and while there’s a lot to praise about Microsoft’s knack for nailing clean lines and a minimalist aesthetic, the fifth edition is beginning to look a a little tired in 2023.
We’re still impressed by the attention to detail: the display is uniformly thin from top to bottom and can be opened with a single fingertip. The anodised aluminum chassis features bold, industrial corners, and the absence of visible screws and joins makes the package feel ultra-refined.
While most other Windows laptops are branded by the parts-manufacturers who helped make them, you won’t find anything as garish as a holographic Intel Evo sticker here. (Although the laptop is Intel Evo-certified, meaning it meets a set standard for wake-up times and battery life.)
What’s dated are those chunky bezels around the display, that black border surrounding the screen. It looked outdated on the Surface Laptop 4, boxing in the screen in a way that felt almost claustrophobic, like you were looking at your Excel spreadsheets through a neighbor’s letterbox, but now it’s starting to look positively retro.
Display
The display on the Surface Laptop 5 is crisp, natural-looking and clear, and comes in the taller 3:2 aspect ratio, which is closer to A4-shaped, making it ideal for document editing and web browsing.
The 2,256 x 1,504px resolution looks great on a 13.5in screen. While more expensive laptops might offer headline-grabbing (and battery-draining) 3.5K and 4K displays, they’re really not needed on laptops of this size. Microsoft made the right decision by sticking with the screen they’ve got.
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That said, we’d have liked a brighter display this year. The Surface Laptop 5 reaches 400 nits of brightness (the MacBook Air M2 reaches 500 nits, for comparison), which is brighter than your average laptop but not quite enough to be reliably glare-free in daylight.
The 60Hz refresh rate is also fine, but other laptops in this price range now offer 90Hz refresh rates for buttery-smooth scrolling and animation. It’s a compromise to keep costs down and battery life up, but another area in which the competition seems to be getting away from Microsoft.
Connections
New to the Surface Laptop 5 this year is Thunderbolt 4 support, which gives you high-speed data transfer, charging, and video output in a single USB-C port. And that’s literally the case here: the Surface Laptop 5 only has a single USB-C port, alongside a classic USB-A port, a headphone jack, and Microsoft’s proprietary Surface Connect port.
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That Surface Connect port is used for charging and attaching accessories, such as docks with additional USB ports, SD card ports and HDMI connections, which are all less important now that the USB-C port can connect directly to an external monitor, or to a generic dongle with extra connections.
We suspect Microsoft’s kept the proprietary port to avoid rendering old accessories obsolete, but it’s an increasingly non-essential connection to keep including in the Surface Laptop range. We’d prefer a few more USB-C ports, so we can charge the laptop and plug stuff in at the same time.
Performance
The 13.5in configuration we tested features the 12th generation of power-efficient Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB of memory and 512GB of storage (£1,699, Microsoft.com). That gives it decent performance for an all-rounder laptop. The Surface Laptop 5 is more than capable of handling everyday tasks, juggling loads of open browser tabs and handily tackling some light photo-, audio- and video-editing jobs. It’s also whisper-quiet, the fans only making themselves known if you really stress the device with CPU-intensive tasks, such as media rendering.
Face unlock with Windows Hello happens almost instantly, noticeably faster than most premium laptops we’ve tested, and because Windows wakes up as you open the display, the device is ready to go by the time your fingertips have reached the keys. It’s a small detail, but it makes the Surface Laptop 5 feel incredibly premium.
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The cheapest configuration is an Intel Core i5 version with 8GB of RAM and a smaller hard drive (£999, Microsoft.com). That will still give you good mid-range performance and a longer-lasting battery, but it’s a fiercely competitive price point. The MacBook Air M1 (£999, Apple.com), the Surface Laptop’s closest rival, simply offers better performance.
Battery life
Microsoft’s engineered the Surface Laptop 5 to be a truly portable device, and battery life is where this laptop really excels.
By being conservative with a power-efficient CPU and a battery-friendly display, the Surface Laptop 5 keeps enough juice in the tank for at least 15 hours of continuous work. That’s more than enough to get you through a long working day and commute, or a trans-Atlantic flight.
Using the laptop for everyday office tasks – writing and emailing, web browsing, video conferencing, some light Photoshop work, watching the odd YouTube video – the device ended each working day with somewhere near half a charge remaining. That’s a refreshing change from ultrabooks with tiny batteries designed to last as long as it takes you to get from one plug socket to the next.