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日本Microsoft Surface Laptop 5 (13.5″) – Top 5 Pros and Cons
While a lot of companies tend to disagree with Apple’s practices and closed ecosystem, deep inside they want the same thing, as the tech giant is printing money left right, and center. Microsoft is one such company, which tries to emulate the Apple experience with its Surface lineup of products. However, they can’t get it to be as good, as fast, or as efficient, simply due to the fact that Windows as an OS is made to fit a variety of different hardware, while Apple’s macOS runs exclusively on Apple Silicon (unless you want to build a Hackintosh, which is a whole another ordeal). Today’s Microsoft Surface Laptop 5 doesn’t bring a lot of changes, except for the hardware, so let’s see what Microsoft has done right, or wrong.
Today we’re presenting you with LaptopMedia’s top 5 picks about the Microsoft Surface Laptop 5 (13.5″).
Microsoft Surface Laptop 5 (13.5″): Full Specs / In-depth Review
3 reasons to BUY the Microsoft Surface Laptop 5 (13.5″)
1. Display quality
The star of the show comes in at the front, as the 13.5-inch IPS panel with a resolution of 2256 x 1504p and excellent viewing angles, and a max brightness of 409 nits. The contrast ratio is also quite good, measuring at 1290:1. The panel shows 90% sRGB coverage.
The panel also has decent accuracy with our Design and Gaming profile, albeit the dE value still doesn’t drop down to less than 2. Here are the test results with the stock settings (left) and with our profile applied (right).
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Since our profiles are tailored for each individual display model, this article and its respective profile package are meant for Microsoft Surface Laptop 5 (13.5″) configurations with 13.5″ Sharp LQ135P1JX51 (SHP14B3) (FHD, 2256 × 1504) IPS panel.
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Office Work
Office Work should be used mostly by users who spend most of the time looking at pieces of text, tables or just surfing. This profile aims to deliver better distinctness and clarity by keeping a flat gamma curve (2.20), native color temperature and perceptually accurate colors.
Design and Gaming
This profile is aimed at designers who work with colors professionally, and for games and movies as well. Design and Gaming takes display panels to their limits, making them as accurate as possible in the sRGB IEC61966-2-1 standard for Web and HDTV, at white point D65.
Health-Guard
Health-Guard eliminates the harmful Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) and reduces the negative Blue Light which affects our eyes and body. Since it’s custom tailored for every panel, it manages to keep the colors perceptually accurate. Health-Guard simulates paper so the pressure on the eyes is greatly reduced.
Get all 3 profiles with 33% discount
2. Design and build quality
The Surface Laptop 5 comes in with a full-metal (heh) build. You can also get it with an Alcantara material that covers the base, providing extra softness and warmth, as well as minimizing fingerprints. Durability is decent, as the base shows a bit of flex, but the lid is ultimately more durable. In terms of dimensions, the laptop weighs only 1.27 kg and has a profile of 14.5 mm.
The lid opens easily with one hand, revealing the base, with a backlit keyboard and touchpad. The board has very short key travel, but the clicky feedback is a saving grace. The touchpad is quite responsive and accurate.
3. Battery life
With only a 47.5Wh battery, the Surface Laptop 5 lasts for 8 hours and 25 minutes of Web browsing, or 8 hours and 56 minutes of video playback. Now, we conduct the battery tests with the Windows Better performance setting turned on, screen brightness adjusted to 120 nits, and all other programs turned off except for the one we are testing the notebook with.
Time to Full Discharge: Lower is Better
In order to simulate real-life conditions, we used our own script for automatic web browsing through over 70 websites.
2 reasons NOT to buy the Microsoft Surface Laptop 5 (13.5″)
1. I/O
The port selection of the device includes one USB Type-A 3.2 (Gen. 1) port, one Thunderbolt 4 port, and a 3.5mm audio combo jack.
2. Upgradeability
Microsoft wanted to follow Apple in the worst way possible, by making the laptop so hard to open that even we didn’t dare to try, as we don’t like to break tech. The laptop arrives with a base configuration featuring 8GB or 16GB of soldered LPDDR5x memory and either 256GB or 512GB of removable storage, with one M.2 slot.
