I gave theSurface Laptop 4 a strong score in my review for Lifewire.
Its a great laptop by any measure.
Yet my praise is dulled by an unavoidable downside.
Lifewire / Matthew S Smith
For all its perks, I cant recommend the Surface Laptop 4 over Apples MacBook Air.
The Surface Laptop 4 Is Fast.
The MacBook Air Is Faster.
Lifewire / Matthew S. Smith
I tested the Surface Laptop 4 using the GeekBench 5 processor benchmark.
The entry-level model I reviewed, powered by a six-core AMD processor, hit a multi-core score of 5,448.
Thats competitive with the Ryzen 7 2700 processor in my gaming PC.
Lifewire / Jeremy Laukkonen
There’s just one problem: the MacBook Air is faster.
GeekBench 5 showsthe base MacBook Aircan defeat the upgraded Surface Laptop 4 in both single and multi-core tests.
In the past, there was an easy answer: battery life.
This trade-off remains common in Windows laptops.
Lifewire / Jeremy Laukkonen
Apples M1 doesnt ask for compromise.
The MacBook Air is fanless, too, so its always silent.
The only good answer is Windows.Around 75% of all PCs worldwide use Windows.
That, however, is a big decrease from Windows absolute dominance at the turn of the millennium.
And as Windows desktop market share has weakened, MacOS’s has surged.
Windows is still important, yes, but many shoppers are willing and able to ditch it.
Theyre doing exactly that.
Windows, itself, lacks direction.
Some features, like Cortana, are all but abandoned.
