Microsoft recently unveiled a new segment of Surface laptops costing $999. The company says it's primarily aimed at students who mainly buy Apple Macbooks for educational purposes. Their latest product on offer is restricted from installing executable files, running applications only from the Windows store due to security and safety issues.
While the Surface Laptop from Microsoft is only one among the many competitors to Apple Macbooks in the market, other devices from the likes of Dell and HP are also sold fairly successfully, likely due to a similar pricing of their devices. With that said, a side by side comparison between the new Microsoft device with the Dell XPS 13, the primarily noticeable change is that Dell offers 8GB of RAM with the base model itself costing $999.
However, Microsoft is charging users an additional charge for those users upgrading to 8GB of RAM for their new Surface Laptop. If Microsoft really plans to attract the college students for their devices, a price bump of $300 for an addition of 4GB of memory is unjust, making no sense. The Apple Macbook Air by default comes with 8GB memory with no options for additional RAM sticks at all.
A similar comparison of the Surface Laptop with the HP Spectre 13-inch, reveals no changes in the graphics with both the devices offering only integrated HD620 graphics from Intel. However, the latter begins at a base price of $1169. But that said, it has an i5 7th generation Kaby Lake processor on board while Microsoft hasn't disclosed the actual processor variant for their new devices.
A bonus for new buyers looking to opt for Microsoft Surface laptop is that the device has a beautiful 3:2 display with a resolution of 2256 x 1504 pixels. It also supports the Surface Pen, 10 point multi-touch input. Microsoft has implemented a TPM enterprise-grade security chip on their new device. Students would've benefited greatly if Microsoft had an extended care program like the AppleCare from its competitor.
