Microsoft’s Surface inventor Panos Panay has just unveiled the new Surface Laptop 3, which as expected will be available in 13” and 15” variants. This isn’t quite the iterative update we expected, as theyre are some pretty significant changes under the hood.
iFixit used to call the original Surface Laptop a “glued-filled monstrosity,” and the Surface team apparently took this criticism to heart. Indeed, the Surface Laptop 3 will have a modular design, allowing consumers to upgrade the hard drive and probably other components. The new laptop also features a new machined aluminum finish for those of you who don’t want the Laptop’s trademark Alcantara keyboard, and Panos Panay also highlighted that the 3:2 PixelSense display has no rubber around the screen unlike other laptops.
We're pleased to bring you the new Surface Laptop 3 from #MicrosoftEvent pic.twitter.com/Y7lH94NbQK
— Microsoft Surface (@surface) October 2, 2019
Other improvements include an improved keyboard with 1.3mm key travel, a 20% larger Precision trackpad, as well as Fast Charging through the Surface Connect port. Microsoft has worked closely with Intel and AMD to make the Surface Laptop 3 charger get the battery to 80% in under an hour, which is similar to what we see on premium smartphones these days.
As for internal specs, , the 13” Surface Laptop 3 will use Intel’s Quad core 10th Gen Core processors, which according to the company are 2x faster than the processors on the Surface Laptop 2. The 15” Surface Laptop 3 will come with AMD Ryzen Surface edition CPUs, which according to Microsoft provides faster graphics performance than any other laptop in its class.
The 13” and 15” Surface Laptop 3 are available to pre-order day with prices starting at $999 for the 13” model, and $1.199 for the 15” models. Both devices will start shipping on October 22, and we’ll add a link to the pre-order page as soon as it’s live.
