Microsoft Surface Laptop 2 review: A faster Surface Laptop 2 is back, now in black

Last year's Surface Laptop from Microsoft broke the mold for Surface devices. Microsoft had spent a good part of the past half-decade pushing the idea of Windows-powered slates and two-in-one hybrids, eventually becoming the standard bearer for the category with the best-in-class Surface Pro line. But the Surface Laptop was something different. It was a slim, premium laptop designed to compete with the Dell XPS, HP Spectre and Apple MacBook Air laptops of the world.

8.2

Microsoft Surface Laptop 2

$569 at Walmart

$281 at Amazon

The Good

The Surface Laptop 2 ups the default RAM and upgrades to much faster processors. The new matte black color option looks great.

The Bad

Other than a CPU/RAM bump, there's very little new about this. The black color option is only available on more expensive configurations. No USB-C, a rarity for premium laptops.

The Bottom Line

Microsoft's Surface Laptop 2 gets a big speed boost and a new color option, but is otherwise a minimal update to the first version.

The Surface Laptop borrowed more than it invented, but it did an excellent job of synthesizing a greatest-hits high-end laptop, with a slim, modern design, great 12.3-inch touchscreen, good keyboard and touchpad combo and even a decent set of ports. It wasn't necessarily better than those other laptops, but it was at least in the running, and provided a real alternative to the same familiar shapes seen in every coffee shop and classroom. 

The Surface Laptop's one big innovation was a fabric-covered interior, using an artificial material called alcontera, perhaps best known for its role in the boat upholstery industry. The fabric surfaces ended up being much sturdier and more stain-resistant than I expected, and I've become a fan.

You can read a deeper dive into the use of fabric in the Surface Laptop design in our review of the 2017 version. 

In the year-plus since the original Surface Laptop, it's remained near the top of my premium slim laptop list, in part because the official Microsoft Store and other retailers often had steep discounts on the base model.

Now that there's a new version, unimaginatively named Surface Laptop 2 , and that means the starting price is bouncing back to $999. As I liked the Surface Laptop, it should come as no surprise that I like the Surface Laptop 2, but that's because they're nearly identical. The outer form is unchanged, with the exception of a new matte black color option. There's still a USB-A port and mini-DisplayPort, but no USB-C or HDMI. 

Inside, the processors get a big upgrade, from dual-core seventh-generation Intel CPUs to quad-core eighth-gen. The actual boost in performance is impressive in our benchmark testing, even though the first-gen version felt speedy enough for mainstream or student use. In another upgrade, the base RAM is now 8GB instead of 4GB, which is also welcome. Battery life is also better by a bit, adding around 40 minutes over the first-gen Surface Laptop, and just passing 11 hours on our streaming video playback test. But note these are preliminary battery life scores, and we're conducting additional testing.  

The $999 version has a Core i5 and 8GB of RAM, while our review unit ups the SSD storage from 128GB to 256GB, which drives the price up to $1,299, which feels like a hefty premium for an additional 128GB of storage. In the UK, it starts at £979 and in Australia, AU$1,499. 

Aside from the big boost in performance and a handful of small internal tweaks, it's fair to say one could expect more from second-generation Surface Laptop. Other premium laptops, such as the Acer Swift 7 or the 2018 redesign of the Dell XPS 13 move the design ball further down the road, while this is a product that's largely the same as the original. 

No more Windows 10 S

If you've been looking at the Surface Laptop and holding out for an update, then go ahead and grab the new version. The faster performance is a nice bonus for your patience. If you have the original, I shouldn't even need to say that there's no need to upgrade.

Microsoft did undo one of the few missteps of the first Surface Laptop. That model shipped with the limited Windows 10 S operating system -- a stripped-down version of Windows that only allows installs from the built-in app store -- but nearly everyone took advantage of a free upgrade offer to full Windows 10, which allowed for "real" apps such as the Chrome web browser or Steam PC gaming platform to be installed. The Surface Laptop 2 comes with Windows 10 Home as the default, a much more practical choice.

While I'm enjoying my initial days with the Surface Laptop 2, I am disappointed in one thing. The new matte black color, much hyped by Microsoft, looks amazing. But, it's only available in a step-up model that doubles the internal storage from 128GB to 256GB, at the cost of an extra $300. The $999 base model is only available in gray, which is also very nice, but not the "new" color.