The Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 15-Inch Review: Refreshing Ryzen
by Brett Howse on May 6, 2021 8:00 AM ESTBattery Life
On the Surface Laptop 3, the battery life disparity between the AMD Picasso and the Intel Ice Lake was a big enough factor on its own to make it difficult to recommend the AMD-powered Surface Laptop 3 over the Intel version. However, for this generation the tables have turned. Microsoft’s recommendation when choosing AMD versus Intel, is choose the Intel for single-threaded performance, but choose the AMD not only for multi-threaded performance, but for battery life as well. While the gulf between Tiger Lake and Renoir is not as dramatic as it was between Picasso and Ice Lake, that is still a very interesting change in marketing.
Microsoft has said that they worked very closely with AMD on increasing battery life on the Surface Laptop 4, and these improvements will only benefit all AMD buyers for any device, which is why it was such good news to see AMD get a design win in the Surface Laptop 3 in the first place. With the Surface Laptop 4, those improvements to the APU design, coupled with tweaks to the operating system, have really paid dividends.
Battery Life – Web
The battery life provided by the Surface Laptop 4 is really quite incredible when you factor in that this is a 15-inch notebook, and the display is always the source of most of the battery drain, and when you consider that Microsoft is only including a 46 Wh battery, which is very small for a 15-inch device. At over 11.5 hours, the Surface Laptop 4 offers very solid battery life in our web test, which is quite demanding.
Looking at the normalized results with the battery size removed from the equation, and it shows just how efficient the Surface Laptop 4 is. Despite having a larger display than the Dell XPS 13, it almost equals that device in terms of power draw. It is very impressive.
PCMark 10
UL’s PCMark 10 suite added a battery life test as well, and it works by looping some of the workloads from their performance tests in ten minute loops, but it takes into account performance as well by having a fixed workload per ten minutes, so if a device gets the task done quicker, it will have a larger percentage of the ten minutes that it can idle. The results are still excellent, with the Surface Laptop 4 offering one of the best results we have seen so far.
Movie Playback
Media playback is often one of the least demanding tasks on a modern processor, because all of the video decode functionality is handled by very power efficient fixed function hardware in the media engine, and as such, generally results in the longest runtimes of any test. Here, the Surface Laptop 4 delivers a very solid result, although the Tiger Lake MSI, and the Surface Book 3 with its massive battery, are both able to beat it in terms of overall runtime.
To get a feel for what these results mean, our Tesseract score divides the movie playback runtime by the length of The Avengers. You could watch The Avengers six times in a row, which is likely enough times for anyone but the biggest fan of the movie.
Charge Time
Microsoft ships the Surface Laptop 4 with a 65-Watt power adapter, which magnetically attaches to the right side of the device on the Surface Connect port. Microsoft continues to provide a 5-Watt USB Type-A port on the power adapter itself, which works great to charge an ancillary device such as a phone from the same charger, and is a great feature. This leaves 60 Watts for the laptop from the power adapter.
There is also a USB Type-C port on the left side which will allow you to charge from a USB Type-C cable if needed.
Charge time is about average, despite the small battery and fairly large charger. The previous generation completed this task a bit quicker when it was tested. The first 50% only took 41 minutes to complete.
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Cliff34 - Friday, May 7, 2021 - link
Bt mouse connection is not reliable.evilspoons - Friday, May 7, 2021 - link
I've been using a Bluetooth LE mouse (Microsoft 3600) with my Surface Pro 3 for years now. It's as reliable as any device that needs a separate receiver and I don't have to worry about breaking the damn thing off in a laptop bag.mrochester - Saturday, May 8, 2021 - link
Try a Logitech bluetooth mouse. MX Anywhere 3, MX Master 3 I'd highly recommend.s.yu - Sunday, May 9, 2021 - link
Same here, beware Logitech's battery scam but there's nothing wrong with the reception. It might suffer the BT power-save bug but AFAIK that's not mouse-specific but laptop-specific. The workaround is to turn BT power save off or if that doesn't work, one of those BT scanners that pings the mouse every few seconds.The Garden Variety - Thursday, May 6, 2021 - link
"no external optical drives"Are you for real?
TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, May 6, 2021 - link
not everyone is a silicon valley darling. Many people still have movies or photos or optical media. Sure you could make the argument that those people likely are not the primary surface market, but "most people" are not the surface market, and "most people" is what's being discussed, not people who gladly use no external devices with their $1500 computer.Would it have really killed them to have another type A port? Even $200 chromebooks can maanage that.
The Garden Variety - Thursday, May 6, 2021 - link
You're falling into the typical Anadtech commenter fallacy. If they had two USB-C ports, you'd ask for USB-A ports. If they have one USB-A port, you ask for two. If they had two USB-A ports, you'd find something else to bitch about. User-upgradable memory. A bigger battery. A brighter screen. A different screen ratio. Who knows; who cares! It's all fallacious, feature-itis by this tiny little very loud segment of the computer-using population that wants everything to still be floor-standing desktop towers and all sorts of other why-can't-things-just-stay-the-same-isms.It has one USB port. And I guarantee you not one person who buys one will care that it only has one, nor would it cause so much as a single additional sale if it had two. People don't make decisions that way, any more so than when people go buy a car do they look at torque curves. It's *fucking* mental how myopic you people can be and how what you find important doesn't represent even the tiniest sliver of importance to computer manufacturers anymore.
But not to worry. I'm sure there will be a smartphone review posted soon, that way you can get back to bitching about removable batteries.
Reflex - Thursday, May 6, 2021 - link
This right here. It's pretty easy to see what consumer demand looks like at a given price point. Go look at what the popular models are and recognize that whatever assumptions you have about your personal use case may not be what the market is requiring.All sorts of stuff I want on a given bit of hardware that isn't commonly there. It's okay, I adapt. The market does not exist exclusively for me.
alexvoda - Thursday, May 6, 2021 - link
Well, with regards to ports, if you are offering less to the user than the chipset offers you and you don't have a good reason for that, you are just cheaping out on the customers.This is part of the reason Surface devices suck from some POV. If the CPU gives you Thuderbolt for free (Intel versions), than as a user I expect you to give me Thunderbolt ports because it only costs you the traces on the board and the ports themselves. Microsoft has been very very late in adopting Thunderbolt for some reason (I know the latest versions do have Thunderbolt).
Rookierookie - Thursday, May 6, 2021 - link
Of course people who buy it won't care, the people who care won't buy it. I certainly won't buy a laptop with just one USB-A port.