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The 4980U in particular has eight cores, and AMD’s excellent Radeon integrated graphics.

Ryzen 4000 chips outperform Intel’s 10th Gen Comet Lake processors across the board. Of course, that doesn’t make the Ryzen 7 4980U a bad chip. It’s disappointing to see that the Surface is still using older Ryzen chips But that may not matter to Surface Laptop 4 buyers - at least, not yet. For the most part, it’s still not quite as good. So my big question when looking at AMD’s new Ryzen 7 Surface Edition (also known as the AMD Ryzen 7 4980U Microsoft Surface Edition because of course it is) is: Does it beat Apple’s M1?

MAC OF ALL TRADES BATTERY LIFE UPGRADE

But more importantly, there’s another company out there that recently made a huge chip upgrade to its flagship models, which has left most other 2020 chip upgrades in the dust: Apple, with its Arm-based M1. For one, the Laptop 3 set a low performance bar - it had mediocre battery life, and couldn’t even play a 4K 60FPS video without stuttering, so even a competent budget laptop would blow that out of the water. But my priority wasn’t to compare the 15-inch Surface Laptop 4 that we received to its predecessor. So this review will largely focus on the new system’s performance. Microsoft promised that these improvements would deliver significantly better performance and battery life than the previous Surface generation. You can configure both the 13.5-inch and 15-inch Surface Laptop models with either Intel’s 11th-Gen processors or AMD’s Ryzen 4000 processors. But you get the same 3:2 touchscreen, the same port selection, and the same design. Sure, there are differences here and there: the Laptop 4 is ever-so-slightly thinner, and there’s a new “Ice Blue” color option.

In look and feel, very little has changed from the last generation. On paper, the Surface Laptop 4 is a Surface Laptop 3 with better chips.

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