Microsoft Surface Laptop Go is Microsoft's new low-cost PC

Microsoft has just introduced the surface laptop go and it might be the holy grail of cheap but good laptops finding a really good an inexpensive laptop is very difficult to do anything 500 or less. 

There are always a lot of compromises on the design on performance on features and even if you do find something halfway decent especially in 2020 it's hard to actually buy it because everybody's working from home or everyone is learning from home and people are buying a lot of extra less expensive laptops so when Microsoft took the surface laptop line which is a very good premium laptop line and said hey we're going to do a less expensive more stripped-down version called the surface laptop go, of course, I was very excited it starts at 550. 

It's got a 12.4-inch touchscreen which is something you don't usually see in budget-priced laptops and it's got a current-gen intel core i5 quad-core processor which again is pretty decent for something around 500. 

Now Microsoft is promising a bunch of interesting features in this. You can get 128 or 256 gigs of storage eight gigs of ram but in that entry-level 550 version you do only get 64 gigs of storage and four gigs of ram again for 500, that's reasonable.

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I wouldn't expect a lot more for that and I'm glad that you're getting the core i5 CPU at the same time and a design that looks pretty decent it weighs less than two and a half pounds uh the keyboard Microsoft claims has decent key travel obviously I have to try it out in person to find out but on paper, it looks impressive large touchpad I like that it has both USB a and USB c ports on it although for the power you're still using that Microsoft proprietary connector it's a little bit like the old mag safe it just kind of slots in on the side and then if you trip over it, it should pull right out which I do like but everyone is moving to these uh you know single USB-c ports on everything for power and connectivity.

I think eventually you'll see any kind of proprietary power connection like that go away now this is not the first time we've seen something like this earlier Microsoft took the surface pro and that's their big two in one tablet it's a windows tablet you snap on a keyboard so then it's like a two-in-one hybrid and they released the surface go which again is a less expensive version of that, the surface go. 

I think starts at 399 but like all the other surface tablet products you gotta buy it the keyboard separately at least with the laptop it comes with a keyboard built-in because that's what makes it a laptop frankly, a lot of super-budget laptops will do what you need them to do because you got to go online access google classroom maybe stream some stuff online do some email again online everything is cloud-based that's why Chromebooks frankly work for a lot of students and a lot of work for home people right now but if the keyboards and touchpads are terrible if the screens are terrible if the designs are plasticky and junky feeling you're not going to enjoy using it and you're going to feel that even for four or five hundred dollars you didn't really get your money's worth so having a nice looking design and a decent build quality in this would really go a long way especially with specs that are decent the one thing I would watch out for is the webcam it's only a 720 resolution webcam that's frankly not much worse than mainstream laptops will give you most of the time very few laptops even have 1080 webcams even expensive ones but now that we're all living entirely online mostly from our homes and everything is a web conference or web meeting or zoom meeting we should start demanding better quality cameras across the board in budget laptops and more expensive laptops really just everywhere and the other quirk about the surface laptop go.

You should watch out for is that it ships with windows 10 s that's the special version of windows that restricts the apps that you can install on it to just selected ones from the windows app store they say it's to make sure everything works great together but it's really because these are usually lower powered devices and they don't want you trying to install some big crazy software app in-game and then going oh it doesn't work on here this is terrible so they restrict that fortunately getting out of windows 10 s mode and getting into just regular old windows 10 mode  uh takes about 15 seconds and four clicks of the mouse so that is very easy to to update.

I suggest that everybody will do that the moment they take their surface laptop go out of the box you should be able to pre-order the surface laptop goes starting at 550 today and it will be hitting stores on October 13th.