Eight hundred euros is not a small starting price for a laptop, but Microsoft, with its new Laptop Go 3, looks to a generalist audience that needs a wide-ranging device. Lightweight, comfortable to carry around, and with good battery life, the Laptop Go 3 represents a first entry into the world of Redmond hardware, with the advantage of being able to immerse oneself in a complete ecosystem, which for some time now has also benefited from various artificial intelligence options, integrated into Windows 11.
As with previous generations, the Surface Laptop Go 3 is a sleek-looking laptop that is among the best-looking in its price range. It is a truly outstanding machine when compared with larger and heavier competitive examples, at least when you put it in the light of portability. A thickness of only 15.7 mm and a weight of about 1.13 kg make it one of the most comfortable laptops currently on sale. Of course, this comes somewhat at the expense of the width of the display, which cannot return the same angle as, say, a 16-inch, and this is one feature that any buyer will put before others. In terms of construction, the lid is made of anodized aluminium, while the bottom half is made of aluminium-polycarbonate composite resin, 30% of which is sourced from post-consumer recycling materials. The thin structure involves some sacrifices.
Regarding connection ports, there are one traditional USB and one USB-C, a headphone jack and a proprietary charging input. That’s it: no HDMI, no SD card reader or anything else.
Daily use – Microsoft Laptop Go 3
The display is 12.4 inches, perfect for basic tasks. The unit under test mounts a 12th generation Intel i5 processor, 16 GB of RAM and a 256 GB hard drive, of which about 180 is available to the user. Few, but one must consider cloud storage options, such as OneDrive, which, coupled with a Microsoft 365 subscription to the Office suite, allows as much as 1 TB of cloud storage per year. The keyboard is particularly comfortable to use, and the 65 per cent compact layout is perfectly usable for a laptop this size. One note for use in the dark: it is not backlit, so it will be tricky to type without light sources. The treat is the fingerprint-reading sensor built into the power button, so you can simply forget your PC password and login by placing your finger on the button.
Windows 11 and AI
Here, the real advantage lies in the Microsoft ecosystem. Windows 11 is up-to-date, clean, and easy to use. It is an operating system that has grown a lot in recent years, learning from its mistakes and benefiting from user feedback. It is now a complete platform further enriched by generative artificial intelligence. Just click on the search box at the bottom, including Bing Chat, to ask for anything, including creating graphics from textual directions. This is just the most fun use because, in fact, AI is beginning to concretely pervade the entire Windows system, from summarizing meetings in Teams to summarizing a Word document or drafting a few slides in PowerPoint as incipits and then continuing their own. The areas are indeed many and still to be discovered.
Pros and cons – Microsoft Laptop Go 3
Going back to the incipit: 800 euros is not a small amount at all for the Laptop Go 3 also because, for about the same price, you can buy products with more up-to-date hardware, a greater selection of ports and, ultimately, a longer life cycle. To whom would you recommend such a notebook? To those who put weight and size at the top of their list of needs, along with battery life and elegance of construction.
The Laptop can be carried around without any difficulty, in a backpack as well as in a handbag, promising several hours of battery life with an adequate level of brightness and small power-saving accoutrements. Multimedia is no less impressive either: with its built-in speakers, you can very well enjoy streaming music and movies. With the Laptop Go 3, we are in the presence of the utmost essence of the “laptop” concept, with a few compromises that do not affect its overall value all that much.
