Review: Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio

Microsoft's Surface Laptop Studio is a laptop that's also a media center and tablet, all rolled into one. It's designed to be your workstation, video gaming center, Netflix screen, and sketching slate. That's a tall order, and tackling too many use cases is often a recipe for succeeding at none of them. 

But the Surface Laptop Studio surprises. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good at all of those tasks. It's a shame the operating system it runs keeps it from excelling.

Apple gets all the design credit, but Surface devices really cemented the hybrid laptop-tablet concept, which is now a billion-dollar business for Microsoft and has been picked up by Dell, Lenovo, and others.

The Surface line remains the leader, though, and the new Surface Laptop Studio continues the tradition of successful Surface experimentation. Exactly where Microsoft is headed with this device isn't entirely clear, but the Studio is at the very least the best-performing Surface available, and the unusual design mostly works. Unlike the Surface Pro 8 and Surface Go 3, the screen doesn't detach from the keyboard.

Photograph: Microsoft

The first thing you notice about the Laptop Studio is that the keyboard hangs about a quarter inch over a recessed base. The extended upper surface—the same level as the keyboard—is where all the Studio's ports live. Two grills sit on either side of the recessed base. It looks somewhat bizarre when you first pull it out of the box, but it's not all that noticeable when the Studio is sitting on a flat table. 

Carrying it around does feel very different than any laptop I've ever used, but despite the odd design, this is a very good-looking machine. The silver magnesium/aluminum shell reminds me of the Macbook Pro, but the Surface has a slightly chunkier feel to it. The rounded corners also feel fitting with the more rounded interface in Windows 11.

The comparison to the MacBook Pro is also apt in the sense that this is not a svelte, lightweight Surface that doubles as a tablet. This is a powerhouse laptop that happens to fold down to a completely flat, tablet-like screen. At 4 pounds, you aren't going to use this the way you'd use an iPad or a Surface Go, but that might be OK, because you have significantly more processing power at your disposal.

If you've ever tried to, for example, create or work with a complex, multilayer document in an Adobe app on the iPad and found it wanting, you're one of the people most likely to enjoy the Surface Laptop Studio.

Opened up as a laptop, the Surface Laptop Studio looks just like, well, a laptop. To move the Surface into Stage Mode, you pull the bottom half of the lid forward so that it covers the keyboard until you feel it lock in place with a satisfying magnetic click. The hinge is a complicated affair from an engineering viewpoint, but it's surprisingly easy to use once you get the hang of it. It does require two hands to move, though.

Laptop mode is on the left, Stage Mode is in the middle, and Studio Mode is on the right. 

Photograph: Microsoft

It's similar to “tent mode” in other 2-in-1 devices, but the trackpad is uniquely accessible. Too bad I rarely felt the need for it and usually browsed the web by touch. Microsoft's promotional videos show Stage Mode as the place you use the Surface Pen to turn out pro-level illustrations. I did manage a couple of stick figures, but I am not an artist by any means. Where I found it most handy was consuming media, not creating it.

I almost never use the touchscreen of touchscreen laptops. I own a Dell XPS 13, and I am pretty sure I have never once touched its screen on purpose. I don't know why exactly, but Stage Mode's tilt is just enough to make using the touch screen more appealing for things like browsing the web. I still found this an awkward way to, for example, edit photos or video, but it's a great way to browse and watch videos.

Where things get far more interesting is when you lay the screen completely flat in what Microsoft calls Studio Mode. The design makes it too heavy to use as an iPad, but if you lay it flat on a table and pick up the included Surface Pen, it's a great way to edit images, video, and audio. If you have better drawing chops than me, this would also be the mode to use them in.

Fully flattened in Studio Mode and Surface Pen in hand, the Surface Laptop Studio is one of the nicest pen-based image-editing devices I've tested. A part of what makes it so good is that it doesn't lag on files with 30-plus layers.

Many Surface devices are compromises between svelte form factor and processing power. Not so with the Surface Laptop Studio. This is hands down the most powerful Surface you can buy. There are several configurations available, starting with the $1,600 model featuring an 11th-generation Intel Core i5 processor, 16 gigabytes of RAM, and a 256-gigabyte SSD.

Photograph: Microsoft

Where the Surface Laptop Studio gets interesting is when you step up to the Core i7 models, which get Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics cards. The cheapest of these is $2,100, and you can keep adding RAM and SSD space until you get to the top-end model with 32 gigabytes of RAM and a 2-terabyte SSD for $3,100.

The model I tested featured a Core i7 chip with 32 gigabytes of RAM and a 1-terabyte SSD, which retails for $2,700. That's a lot of money, but it's in the same ballpark as a similarly specced Macbook Pro and the Dell XPS 15.

No matter which model you opt for, you get one of the best-looking screens I've seen in a long time. It's large at 14 inches, with a 2,400 x 1,600-pixel resolution, which works out to 197 pixels per inch. That's not quite as sharp as the 4K Dell XPS 15, but side by side I barely noticed the difference. Like the rest of the Surface devices, the Laptop Studio screen has a 3:2 aspect ratio.

Where the Laptop Studio's screen stands out from nearly everything else in the consumer market (except the new Surface Pro 8) is the 120-Hz refresh rate. You can read our guide to screen refresh rates for the nitty-gritty on what this means and why you want it, but the short story is that super-smooth animations and interactions, once the province of high-end gaming machines, are now available on mainstream laptops. The result is noticeable. Windows 11 on the Laptop Studio is a visually delightful experience. I am less sold on Windows 11 functionally, though. More on that in a minute.

What's almost as impressive as the performance and screen is the battery life. The Studio always lasted a full workday and managed almost 12 hours in our looped-video battery drain test. That's not the 18 hours Microsoft is claiming, but it does beat the XPS 15.

Sound is also a standout feature on this Surface. It's got four speakers, including subwoofers, and it sounds fantastic. The trackpad is also the best I've ever used, bar none. It's large, has excellent gesture support, and has a haptic feedback system that makes it feel like you're pressing a button even when you're not.

Windows 11 takes several steps forward, and nearly the same amount back. You can read our Windows 11 overview to see the new features and some of the problems. The biggest problem from the Laptop Studio's point of view is that almost no desktop apps are optimized for Studio Mode. It's not that you can't use apps like Adobe Illustrator or Lightroom, but they lack the tablet-friendly aspects of their iOS counterparts.

What's great about the iPad is that apps are forced to deal with the idiosyncrasies of a tablet experience. What's great about the Laptop Studio is that apps don't have to deal with the power limitations of the iPad. Somewhere in the blending of these two different poles lies the ideal, but neither system is quite there yet.

It's tempting to think that running Android apps in Windows 11 might solve this, but if you've ever used Android on a tablet, you know you'll have to hold your breath. A laptop with a detachable screen that starts running Android when you remove it and seamlessly reverts back to Windows when reattached, all without closing your apps or otherwise interrupting your work, feels a long way off. So does tablet optimization on Windows 11.

The world is a series of compromises, and the Surface Laptop Studio straddles these device lines better than anything else I've ever used. It's not perfect, but for a certain type of user, it's as close as you can get right now.