Microsoft Surface Laptop Go 2

A high-quality, compact laptop that’s well suited to life on the move – for undemanding needs

- TIM DANTON

SCORE

If you’re spending around £700 on a laptop, you have no right to expect the quality that runs through the Surface Laptop Go 2. From the aluminium lid to the rigid polycarbonate shell, from the 720p webcam to the twin far-field mics, from the keyboard to the touchpad, it exudes class like a Savile Row suit.

Here, though, there’s no tailoring of choices. If you can live with 4GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD, it’s a bargain at £529. A stiff £100will double the RAM to 8GB. And if you want 256GB you must spend £729. Those prices are with windows 11 Home; if you need Pro you’ll need to pay an extra £80 for a “Surface Laptop Go 2 for Business”.

Microsoft sent us the version with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, and as with all models it’s based around a Core i5-1135G7 processor. That’s an 11th generation chip, which is much cheaper than the 12th gen Core i5-1235G7 in the Samsung Galaxy Book2 360 (see issue 335, p52).

Naturally, there’s a big hit when it comes to speed. The Go 2 scored 118 in the PC Pro benchmarks compared to 170 for the Book2. I saw a similar gulf in the multi core sections of Cinebench R23 and Geekbench 5: 4,121 versus 5,835, 4,388 versus 6,930. Only in PCMark 10was the gap more reasonable, with the Surface a mere 10% slower than the Book2.

Those results lead to one conclusion: the Go 2 is built for comfort not speed. And there’s just enough battery life for a full day’s work, with 7hrs 50mins in our video test and 8hrs 18mins in office tasks. The Samsung lasted for almost 12 hours in both tests.