Hands-on with the Surface Laptop Go 3

Microsoft just announced the Surface Laptop Go 3 at its Surface event on Thursday, and we’ve gotten to briefly try it out as part of a demo session after the main presentation.

As we expected after watching Microsoft’s presentation, the laptop looks just like last year’s Surface Laptop Go 2 in person. It’s very light, but it has a solid build. That lightness is the real draw of this device — but the low-resolution 12.4-inch screen, at 1536 x 1024, feels like a bit of a disappointment when the rest of the hardware is built with such high quality. The nice chassis makes the screen look all the more grainy, and with Copilot taking up a good chunk of the right side of the screen, the interface has a cramped feel. We’ll have to conduct more extensive testing to see how much the resolution ultimately impacts the user experience.

Keys are satisfyingly clicky with a good amount of resistance. But that’s to be expected; Surface keyboards are some of the best, and this one is very comfortable. The touchpad is still a bit small, though it has a nice click.

The laptop we saw on the demo floor had a 12th Gen Intel Core i5-1235U, and you can buy it with as much as 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. That processor is somewhat old news at this point, since Intel just announced its 14th Gen lineup, though we would expect its performance to be adequate for general use cases.

Microsoft says it also offers up to 15 hours of battery, which hopefully will pan out in the real world; one of Dan Seifert’s biggest knocks on the Surface Laptop Go 2 was that it had lousy battery life.

The Surface Laptop Go 3 will be available on October 3rd. It starts at $799. If you want to learn more about what Microsoft revealed, check out our post about the biggest announcements from the show.