Microsoft Surface Laptop 2 price, release date, specs, features

Microsoft

• Microsoft announced the Surface Laptop 2 on Tuesday.
• It sports almost twice the power as last year’s Surface
  Laptop, but comes at the same $1,000 price tag.
• A sleek new matte black color option is also available for
  the Surface Laptop 2. 
• The Surface Laptop 2 will be available to pre-order starting
  Tuesday October 2, and will be available to buy on October
  16. 

Microsoft announced its brand-new Surface Laptop 2 during its
event in New York City on Tuesday with almost twice the power as
last year’s model — for the same starting price of $1,000. 

The latest iteration of Microsoft’s very own line of laptops
looks nearly identical to the original Surface Laptop, save for a
sleek new matte black color option that will be offered alongside
the existing blue, burgundy, and silver options. The gold option
from the original Surface Laptop hasn’t made the jump to its
successor. 

The Surface Laptop 2 with a Core i5 processor, 8GB of RAM,
and 126GB of storage will start at $1,000 with pre-orders
starting on Tuesday October 2. It’ll be available to buy on
October 16.

The real changes are mostly under the hood. Microsoft is making
the the Surface Laptop 2 significantly more powerful —
up to 85% more so, the company says — than the
original Surface Laptop.

The original Surface
Laptop, pictured on the left, should give you an idea of how the
new Surface Laptop 2 looks and feels. The main changes are under
the hood. That’s Microsoft’s Surface Pro on the
right.
Melia Robinson/Business
Insider

That performance boost comes from
Intel’s 8th-generation Core i5 and Core i7 chips,
sporting four cores — newer and faster compared to last year’s
7th-generation Intel chips that had only two cores. It
essentially means that the Surface Laptop 2 can run more apps at
a faster speed than last year’s model. 

It also means that Microsoft finally caught the Surface
Laptop up to many of its closest competitors, including the Apple
MacBook Pro, which have been running Intel’s latest 8th
generation of quad-core chips for months.

Otherwise, the Surface Laptop 2 keeps the majority of the
features from the original Surface Laptop, including a sharp
13.5-inch touchscreen display, a lightweight design, a 14.5-hour
video playback battery life, and a felt-leather-like
Alcantara fabric on the palm rests.