Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio 2 Review: The thicker, bigger flagship

Starting at $1,799.99

Microsoft has refreshed its most powerful Surface device with the Studio Laptop 2, and this year, customers are greeted with Intel’s latest 13th Gen core processor, beefier GPUs, aluminum instead of magnesium materials, a heavier chassis, and an even heavier price tag.

The original Surface Laptop Studio started at what appeared to be a reasonable $1,599.99 but what that actually got customers was a visually modified and overpriced Surface Laptop. With an outdated Intel Core i5, 16GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD and Intel’s Iris Xe GPU. Entry-level Laptop Studio customers were only grabbing the device for its new odd design, because the specs that turned it from “gimmicky” laptop to portable workstation could pry open a wallet to the tune of $3,099.99.

In 2023, Microsoft is forgoing the pricing two-step-shuffle, for better or worse, and eliminating the entry level configuration of the Laptop Studio and instead offering power users the specs that allow the device to really shine, and tasking the marketing team with the unenviable job of explaining the price increase.

SPECS

DESIGN

4/5

Microsoft is back with the weird two-tiered platinum colored workstation Surface Laptop Studio, but this time the company replaced its customary magnesium casing with anodized aluminum and thicker chassis for better air flow. The Surface Laptop Studio 2 feels every bit as premium as the original Studio laptop and that is thanks in large part to its identical design.

The Laptop Studio 2 maintains the compound hinge lid that forces a clear line break across the top surface of the laptop and allows for different use cases that include traditional laptop mode, keyboard less stage mode, and designer-centric studio mode. Once again the patented heat sink bottom box that creates a table like stand for the rest of the laptop is present.

Instead of a four quadrant rubber stopper layout, the bottom of the laptop holds it position across slick surfaces with dual laptop-length rubber strips that are slightly brighter than the chassis color.

The articulating display uses the same hinge design as the original Surface Laptop Studio that is a make up of thin wires, strategically placed magnets and dark grey fabric to conceal it all.

Microsoft has increased the chassis size of the Laptop Studio 2 to aid in heat dissipation due to the new power hungry 13th Gen Intel core processors combined with NVIDIA’s 40-series GPUs. While the overall width of the laptop remains roughly the same, it’s height has increased a tad and combined with the new anodized treatment the Laptop Studio 2 is noticeably heavier than its predecessor.

The Laptop Studio originated as a heavier alternative to ultra books due the promised experience of combining NVIDIA GPUs in Microsoft’s first ‘performative’ laptop to-date. The Surface Laptop Studio 2 doubles down on both aspects in 2023 with a chunkier feeling laptop that makes use of a heavier anodized aluminum as a replacement for the lighter magnesium material of the original Laptop Studio. Combined with a millimeter increase in material used to bump up the size of the vent section of the laptop, the anodized aluminum can be felt throughout the whole casing.

The Surface Laptop Studio 2 is cooler to the touch and less prone to micro abrasions when compared to its magnesium predecessor as well as coming in with a lighter platinum color due to the material switch.

While the screen, keyboard, under-the-deck keypad speakers, and 14-inch articulating display remain untouched from the original Surface Laptop, the Laptop Studio 2 comes equipped with two additional ports that include a new USB-A and micro SD slot. The same single-sided dual USB-C and opposite facing proprietary Surface charging port design remains in tack but the additional ports are now split across both sides with the USB-A joining the USB-C ports on the right side of the laptop and a micro SD slot placed on the left side alongside the charging port.

Another addition to the Laptop Studio 2 this years is an upgraded haptic track pad experience designed with accessibility in mind. While the three basic haptic components are present in the Laptop Studio 2’s trackpad like the touch-sensing, force-sensing and haptic actuator, Microsoft has tweaked the way all three respond to less refined touch points typically associated with fingers.

Users who need to access a broader touch point for click and drag functions that aren’t centered around 10-fingers can now go into software settings to turn off the out-of-the-box configured 10-finger recognition of the trackpad and enable an accessibility version that allows for the use of other limbs to access the same sort of granular controls as fingers.

The two-tier chassis continues to serve as an innovative solution to lap-laden heat exhaustion by venting air through the sides of the device as well as also creating a nice storage and charging nook for the Surface Slim Pen 2 accessory.

DISPLAY

3/5

Microsoft has stuck with the same screen tech as the original Laptop Studio, down to the resolution, sRGB, and color gamut specs. The 14-inch PixelSense display sports the same 3:2 aspect ratio with 2400 x 1600 (200 PPI) resolution and 1500:1 contrast ratio as the two year old Laptop Studio. The Laptop Studio display was great for what it offered in 2021, but even at that time it still wasn’t as color accurate as some competitors of the day, and now two years later it can feel a bit outdated to pixel peepers.

While other manufacturers are moving to OLED, AMOLED and mini LED, Microsoft is sticking with a 10-point touch enabled glossy IPS panel with relatively thicker 1cm bezels and a brightness rating of 500 nits for SDR content and 650 nits for HDR modes. Again, the real-world experience of the display is just a nice as the original Laptop Studio, but after two years it fees a bit disappointing that Microsoft couldn’t be bothered to apply an anti-reflective and anti-smudge layer of coating if it wasn’t going to tweak its color accuracy or widen the viewable display by reducing bezels.

Similar to the original, the Laptop Studio 2 also supports 120Hz Adaptive Response refresh rate and response times are decent but could irk some hardcore gamers relaying who live at the razors edge of latency.

PERFORMANCE

4/5

Similar to an Apple keynote, Microsoft made sure to compare its Laptop Studio 2 with its predecessor to show a more than double jump in multi-core performance, and above a 30% increase in singe core performance.

The original Surface Laptop Studio promised performance and offered a decent experience that was often throttled by off-power wattage consumption and heat dissipation linked partly to its odd design but mostly because of the 11th Gen Intel chip powering the device.

Two years later, Microsoft made a few tweaks to address the heat and airflow in the design but it’s ultimately still powered by Intel. Fortunately this time around, it’s the latest available Intle chip the fab company could produce powering the Surface Laptop Studio 2.

With that being said, while the Surface Laptop Studio 2 does deliver once again on its performant promises, it also continues to throttle the upper limits of what Intel’s 4 process Raptor Lake CPUs could be capable of.

The model Microsoft sent for review was equipped with an Intel Core i7-13700H paired with and NVIDIA RTX4060, 64 GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. While not the most expensive variant of the Laptop Studio 2, the model I tested does rank as the second most costly of the buying options at $3,239.99.

For that amount of money, the Laptop Studio 2 does perform well by comparison.

The 13700H processor can reach 80Ws during peak load but sits in the lower 50W range for mostly everything else, which equals a roughly 150 percent jump in performance over a similarly spec’d Surface Laptop Studio when it comes to multi-core performance.

Benchmarks

When measuring single-core performance, the Surface Laptop Studio 2 seems designed to reach and address short spikes in loading intensive workloads but cannot maintain its output and drops levels of performance across a sustained period of time.

The drop in single-core related tasks can be enough to worry some users, especially those looking to take the Laptop Studio 2 off power and rely solely on battery.

Surface engineers have decided, for this iteration of the Laptop Studio it would cap battery consumption to 55/40W, perhaps in an attempt to hit a sweet spot of per-wattage use on portable laptops.

On the plus side, the Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio 2 performed well with synthetic benchmarks, and lived up several times to its announcement claims of meeting or besting Apple’s M2 powered MacBooks.

In a Cinebench R23 Multi Core benchmarks, the Laptop Studio 2 outperformed the M2 MacBook Pro 14 by four percent and by eight percent in single core testing.

Unfortunately, that only puts the Laptop Studio in middle of the pack for equivalent PCs alternatives such as the Asus Zenbook Pro 14 OLED, Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, Lenovo Yoga Pro 9, and Lenovo Legion Slim 5.

Real Tasks

When comparing the coveted Geekbench 5.2 marks, the MacBook runs away with the crow by a wider margin of 16 percent more performance in multi-core testing as well as seven percent more in single core results.

Putting numbers aside, the real world performance of the Surface Laptop Studio 2 is as performant as the money invested in it. The base model of the SLS2 will be more than enough for most laptop users, albeit a more luxury buy than value.

However, for users who sit outside of the video and graphics editing crowd who measure a laptops success in ‘seconds-to-export-files’, the SLS2 does a decent job of being a portable workstation for IoT engineers, AI devs, stock trend analysis, processing large amounts of data in real time, streaming and exporting live events, and more.

When live streamed a San Francsico 49ers game I was able to both produce a broadcast with several transitions, animated graphics, import and process replays, while also delivering real-time stats and injury reports from an NFL-wire feed without a hiccup.

The SLS2 was able to crunch HPCs with only the faintest of audible fan noise involved.

Another real world example of the SLS2 prowess was when I lent the device to a friend in the research field to test a new Genomic Sequencing application based on the DRAGEN research from Rady Children’s Institute.

Leveraging end-to-end HPC applications on the SLS2, sequence testing took 20 minutes, a process that used to take an hour on her previous device, all while she was able to load several web pages and examine large PDFs simultaneously.

Lastly, paired with PowerBI and Azure NetApps the SLS2 can do some pretty amazing things in the realm of machine learning, visualizations, engineering rendering, data lake analytics, all while still being used for some web browsing, note taking or other productivity tasks in Office 365.

The point is, the SLS2 can be a neat portable package for heavy workloads but it also suffers from some of the expectations of broader laptop normalcy that other devices are achieving such as lengthy battery life and per wattage usage.

For anyone interested in gaming on the SLS2, yes it can game, but not really comparable to a dedicated gaming setup or a console.

The SLS2 managed to nab 160FPS for GTA V, 181FPS for The Witcher, 104FPS for Far Cry 5, and 88FPS for Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 2022, at 1080 settings.

More dedicated gamers may want to look into the Asus ROG, Zenbook Pro 14, or Legion Slim 5.

Battery

3/4

Despite being a beefier device this time around the battery on the SLS2 remains relatively small and its degree of useful portability depends on the projects its tasked with.

On a purely Wi-Fi browsing run, the laptop could last a little over nine straight hours, when tasked with heavier computing tasks such as creating 3D visualizations for applications, it would drop out after three hours. Rendering building models the SLS2 could last as much as three hours as well, when streaming movies or TV shows in 4K it would last a little over four hours, and 5 hours for HDR content.

Running ML clusters the SLS2 would top out at around two hours and for simple Office 365 productivity that includes creating PowerPoint docs, collaborating on Word and Excel docs with VBA scripts the SLS2 could last as long as 6 hours.

Overall, the battery life on the SLS2 is only decent and can fall behind competing laptops such as Apple’s M-Series MacBooks or the Asus Zenbook Pro 14.

The Marketing Promise

2/5

Unfortunately, for Microsoft, this year’s marketing promise for the SLS2 is muddled, confusing and anchored by an increase in price. When the first Laptop Studio was introduced, it was pitched as the creators laptop, more specifically the graphics creators all-in-one workstation. Microsoft leaned heavily on the articulating display, touch, and pen support to actualize the Laptop Studio’s place amongst a sea of competing devices.

The 11th Gen chip in the Laptop Studio was derided for its age and performance against many metrics, but few included the marketed graphics editing Microsoft had intended to measure the device against.

However, this time around, Microsoft beefed up the performance but weighed down its marketing efforts by combing the SLS2’s announcement with cloud and AI initiatives, few examples of graphics editing, and even fewer examples of how AI and data clusters could excel on the device. Ultimately, the SLS2 now feels like a device a drift with a steeper barrier of entry.

Without pivoting the message of what the SLS2 can do well while increasing the price, Microsoft simply tossed out a spec update to ageing marketing effort and is more accurately than not, being judge less than anticipated by the Surface team.

Summary

The Surface Laptop Studio 2 is a solidly crafted laptop for fans of branded devices. The SLS2 is relatively expensive for what it offers and eagers customers will need to concede their attraction to the Microsoft Surface brand over rational purchasing behaviors.

On the positive side, the Surface engineers made the SLS2 more performant and it’s able to match creative high performance computing tasks fairly well if being connected to a power source isn’t an inconvenience. The best way to describe the SLS2 is as a sleek looking desktop station that can be useful to a certain degree on the go.

No, you won’t be crushing 4K video editing with ludicrous export times or gaming at 120FPS consistently for first person shooters, but if you’re researcher, broadcaster, med student, architectural engineer, a dev starting work with ML or AI and have the money to invest in a five year device with almost no bloatware,and a modicum of repairability and expansion, then the Surface Laptop Studio 2 might be for you.