My perfect laptop doesn’t exi—


My eyes may or may not have welled up when I first laid my hands on the Surface Laptop Studio. I was only able to spend about 20 minutes with Microsoft’s most powerful laptop, but it is as if the company had combed through my brain and made the PC of my dreams — or something very close to it.

Rather than creating a Surface Book 4 with a detachable tablet, the new laptop takes a cue from the desktop Surface Studio. Not only can you move its main hinge like any other laptop, you can also pull the display forward via a secondary hinge.

This allows you to either bring the screen closer to your eyes for movies and photos, or you can lay the screen almost flat to use as a tablet or for stylus input, and it makes for a more seamlessly flexible design than ever before.

It’s not the first time we’ve seen a laptop like this — Acer’s Ezel series comes to mind — but it’s the most exciting implementation of this design I’ve seen. And there’s so much more to this laptop than just the new flip-floppy design.

Yes, I know that there’s no such thing as a ‘perfect’ laptop, keyboard warriors. But if you ask little old me — barring any dealbreakers once I get my review unit — the Surface Laptop Studio is as close to that as I’ve ever seen.

It starts at $1,600 and is up to pre-order today. Units will be available starting October 5, but I need one right now. Here’s why.

The Surface Book couldn’t handle the heat

The Surface Book has been my primary PC since the original launched way back in 2015. Its versatility was unmatched. It was nearly unheard of to have a laptop with a powerful dedicated GPU that also had a fantastic screen, allowed for convenient stylus input, was reasonably useful as a tablet, and offered strong battery life. That combo is still exceedingly rare.

But the Surface Book was always limited by its thermals. Cramming the processor, memory, SSD, and part of the battery right behind the display meant Microsoft could never put too powerful a processor in there.

Surface Laptop Studio internals