JANUARY 2020 PCWorld 71use Intel’s 10th-gen Ice Lake chips. (Full
disclosure: Intel sent us this Surface Laptop 3
for review, not Microsoft.)
There are other, somewhat substantive
differences between the consumer and
Business models: the operating system
(Windows 10 Pro, versus Windows 10 Home),
as well as the wireless. Intel’s chip is paired
with an 802.11ax radio, while the AMD chips
come with 802.11ac. The first standard offers
up more potential bandwidth (9.6Gbps vs
6.9Gbps) as well as broader wireless
coverage. The Surface Laptop 3 for Business
models also cost about $100 more than a
similarly-spec’d consumer model at retail,
though recent discounts have pushed the
disparity to about $210.(14.69 mm)
Weight: 13-inch: 2.89 pounds; 15-inch:
3.36 pounds (tested), with charger: 4 pounds
Color: Sandstone (metal, as tested), Matte
Black (metal), Cobalt Blue (Alcantara) and
Platinum (Alcantara, metal)
Price: Orders start at at $1,099 at Microsoft.
com (go.pcworld.com/s199); $1,599 as tested
Pay close attention to the Surface Laptop
3 prices: There’s a massive $400 bump
between the SL3’s 256GB and 512GB SSD
configurations. One of the new features of the
Surface Laptop 3 is its ability to swap out the
SSD, though it’s not exactly user-serviceable
(go.pcworld.com/svcb).
We’ve previously reviewed the 15-inch
Surface Laptop 3 (Ryzen 5; go.pcworld.com/
ryz5) as well as the
Surface Laptop 3 (Ryzen
7; go.pcworld.
com/7ryz), both of
which are the
“consumer” versions of
the Surface Laptop 3 for
Business. The 15-inch
Surface Laptop 3
consumer models use a
semi-custom “Surface
Edition” of the AMD’s
older Zen+ Ryzen 5 and
Ryzen 7 chips, while the
13-inch consumer and
13-inch/15-inch Surface
Laptop 3 for Business The Surface Laptop 3 is fairly light for its size.