Where Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Studio 2 beats the new MacBook Pro

(We’ve been watching the various monitoring tools you can call up in Windows 11 to check if there’s some rogue process or program killing the battery, but can’t find one. Our review laptop, which is the high-end model with the added Nvidia graphics chip, is consistently running at just 3 per cent CPU utilisation and 2 or 3 per cent GPU utilisation, yet it’s chewing through its battery. Something isn’t right ...)

The neutral reason the Surface Laptop Studio 2 wants docking is it’s a bit heavy. It weighs a shade under two kilograms, 100 grams less than the MacBook Pro but enough to tip the scale in favour of feeling like a desktop-oriented laptop rather than a travel-oriented machine such as the MacBook Air or Microsoft Surface Pro 9.

The good reason for docking the Surface Laptop Studio 2 is it makes for an absolutely magical work experience, especially (but not only) if you’re someone who likes or needs to draw with a pen.

It has a double-hinged, 14.4-inch screen that offers three official positions, plus a fourth unofficial one we’ve been using here in the Digital Life Labs to great effect.

The first position is the regular one that you would use on the road or kitchen table, but not when docked.

The second position, known as “tent” mode, is where you bring the screen forward on its middle hinge, covering the keyboard but not the trackpad. It’s brilliant for sitting up on a stand next to a bigger display. There’s no keyboard to distract you (other than the docked one of course) and the display is in easy reach if you want to use the touch-screen features.

Flatly the best

But the third (and fourth) positions are where this computer shines. You sit it on your desk in front of your other display, pull the screen all the way forward and rest it flat in front of you like a tablet. Better yet, you pull it most of the way forward, and wedge something like a glasses case under the rear of the screen, sitting it at the perfect angle for touch-screen interactivity, and for drawing and handwriting if you want to buy the $190 Slim Pen 2.

If you’re unlucky enough to work in an open-plan office, positions three and four will make your life so much better. With the screen flat on your desk, your co-workers would need to be standing right over you before they can stickybeak into your private affairs.

I’ve conducted all sorts of personal business in the few weeks we’ve had the Surface Laptop Studio 2 here in the Labs, and none of my colleagues has been any the wiser.

If you really hate your job, you could maybe even play games at work in position three. Our review model has an additional Nvidia GeForce ZRTX 4060 graphics processing unit that improves its graphics performance almost five-fold compared with the GPU built into its 13th-generation Intel Core i7 chip.

In benchmarks, that Nvidia GPU puts the graphics performance of the Surface Laptop Studio 2 on par with the powerful MacBook Pro we just reviewed (it is 95 per cent as fast at graphics as the Apple computer, which is essentially a tie), though for non-graphics tasks, there’s still a gap for Intel-based machines to bridge.

In our tests, the latest MacBook Pro was 48 per cent faster for single-threaded applications, and 77 per cent faster for multi-threaded ones.

But performance isn’t everything. Indeed, for most of us, it barely matters at all, given how fast even the slowest computers are nowadays.

What matters is productivity, and what could be more productive than getting all your personal tasks done while you’re still chained to your desk at work?

Likes: Flexible design opens up new ways to work, and not work.
Dislikes: Battery life is short (but may be fixable).
Price: Surface Laptop Studio 2: $3519 to $5729 depending on memory, storage and GPU. Slim Pen 2: $189.95