Enlarge / The original Surface Laptop Go.
Jeff Dunn
Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Go was originally introduced in October 2020 as a smaller, lighter, and cheaper member of the Surface family, but hasn’t been updated since. That may change soon, according to a leaked retail ad discovered by The Verge, which said an improved version of the Surface Laptop Go could be available for pre-order as early as June 2nd.
Intel’s 12th generation processors have been available for a while, and in this context, the hardware of the new Laptop Go is not very exciting. The laptop came with a Core i5-1135G7, a quad-core CPU originally released in late 2020 that we’ve seen in tons of other laptops in the last two years. The new Laptop Go seems to use the same 12.4-inch touchscreen, the same backless keyboard and fingerprint sensor, and the same port plug-in (a USB-C, a USB-A, a socket). headphones and a Surface Connect port). ). The laptop will also ship with Windows 11: the current model is fully compatible with Windows 11, but still ships with Windows 10 in S mode out of the box.
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While almost as old as the original Surface Laptop Go, the i5-1135G7 would be an interesting upgrade to the current laptop i5-1035G1. It has the same number of CPU cores, but there are large increases in the base and it increases the clock speed. The integrated Iris Xe GPU would also be considerably faster, thanks to a newer GPU architecture, a higher GPU clock speed, and more than twice the number of runtime units (80 versus 32). It’s not a gaming laptop, but especially with the native 1536 × 1024 screen resolution, it should be fast enough to play older, less demanding games.
Our main complaints about the original Laptop Go were mainly about the base model, which included only 4GB of RAM and 64GB of slow eMMC storage, not enough even for an economical system. Versions with 8GB of RAM and a 128GB or 256GB NVMe SSD felt much better to use. We don’t know what the basic Laptop Go configuration will be, but the retail list suggests that it will still be surpassed with 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage (although the current Laptop Go SSD is user-replaceable, with a little effort).
We don’t know when the new Laptop Go will be available, if this leak is accurate, although a leaked retail listing suggests we might see the update sooner rather than later. However, using an older CPU and reusing most components of the older Laptop Go will help reduce costs and reduce supply chain issues.