Thanks to its innovative pull-forward reclining display and all-around premium design, the original Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio was a head turner, but the performance was disappointing. The new Surface Laptop Studio 2 (starts at $1,999.99; $3,299.99 as tested) remedies that, with powerful modern components plus a slight design refresh. A couple of added ports and a new aluminum exterior join 13th Gen Intel processing and Nvidia GeForce RTX 40-series graphics for not just improved performance over its predecessor, but genuine competitive power. A dedicated Intel Movidius neural processing unit (NPU) to handle local AI tasks such as video-call enhancements sweetens the pot. While the price is high (especially considering that the Surface Pen is not included), if you’re a creative professional seeking a powerful compact laptop that can double as a digital drafting tablet, the Surface Laptop Studio 2 is a uniquely excellent proposition, earning our Editors' Choice award among creator laptops.
The Design: An Unparalleled Folding Approach
We rated the Laptop Studio 2’s predecessor as excellent and unique when it debuted in 2021, but it slowly fell from our top recommendations. Its components have naturally become dated since its launch—it was increasingly difficult to recommend to shoppers as a brand-new system to buy here in late 2023—but we saw nothing wrong with its design. The Surface team clearly shares this view, as the layout, foldability, and overall core design are largely unchanged (though not identical) in the Studio 2, and the update is focused on components.
PCMag executive editor John Burek noted in his impressions of the new Laptop Studio 2 from the reveal event that manipulating the device is much the same as the original, and I’ve come to the same conclusion. This is largely positive, since we gave the original device high marks and had few complaints about the convertibility—it’s important that this remains intact to maintain the concept.
One thing you may only notice after handling the device, or upon closer investigation, is that different materials are used on the body—the Laptop Studio 2 features a new anodized aluminum chassis. The laptop feels high quality and, despite the convertibility, the touch screen, and the components, it weighs a reasonable 4.37 pounds. That’s not ultraportable, but it is plenty totable for a potent creator laptop that doubles as a drawing tablet. Competing 14-inch laptops (like the current M2-based 14-inch MacBook Pro) often weigh around a pound to half a pound less.
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If you open up the laptop from the closed position normally, it looks like any other laptop. The display measures 14.4 inches diagonally, with a 2,400-by-1,600-pixel native resolution, a touch-capable surface, and a 120Hz refresh rate. It’s a sharp-looking display—even if it lacks the visual impact of OLED laptops—while the size still keeps the machine portable enough. Touch technology is a must, given the convertible form factor and (still somehow optional) Surface Pen.
What gives the Laptop Studio its originality is the alternative layouts. Thanks to a special hinge design, you can pull the screen forward toward you, extending it out over the keyboard, by pushing in on the top half of the display from the back. This pops the lower half free of the lid, and you can bring its bottom edge to rest just before the touchpad. A magnetic strip will hold it in place, letting you lean against it, resulting in a sort of art-easel mode for creators that Microsoft calls “Stage mode.”
This leaves you free to use the Surface Pen, if you have one, on an upright (but angled) display for drafting or sketching. This mode also makes for a helpful presentation mode and an ideal setup for watching videos—it would even fit better on an airplane tray table this way.
The laptop does this while leaving the touchpad exposed for use—and good thing, too, as this is a noticeably upgraded haptic pad. This isn’t a physically tilting pad, but you could be easily fooled given the realistic haptic feedback when you click. It feels substantial, it scrolls smoothly, and it is responsive.
Microsoft's Surface Slim Pen 2, in particular, is the latest stylus meant for use with this device, which can magnetically hang on the underside of the front lip. This keeps the stylus out of the way and makes it less likely to get knocked free or fall loose in your bag than those that merely hang off the side. This position will also charge the pen, a convenient bonus.
I prefer the more traditional cylindrical shape of past Surface Pens; this two-sided flat pen is kind of awkward and unlike most real pens and pencils, even if you get used to it over time. (And yes, I know the flat sides help the stylus cling to the laptop chassis.) At this price, and given how integral it is to the Laptop Studio 2’s different modes, it really should be included, but it’s sold separately for $129.99.
If you're a heavy pen user, you can continue to pull the screen past the midway stopping point and lay it down entirely. This transforms the device into a tablet, albeit a thick one. While you could (and might, depending on your office environment) carry the tablet around in this mode, it’s much better suited to staying put on your desk while you draw, sketch, and tap away with the pen.
Because it’s resting back on the hinge and lid, the screen isn’t completely flat in this mode, but slightly angled. It’s not the steepest angle, granted—I can imagine some creative pros might prefer an even greater incline—but it is more comfortable than being totally flat.
This and the Stage mode feel a little unnatural at first (as does learning how to fold and unfold the device), but it becomes second nature pretty quickly. I'm not sure if Stage mode is the ideal angle for a lot of artists (your mileage may vary depending on preference and workflow), but it is absolutely usable and is already something most alternatives are not.
We've seen hundreds of laptops that transform into tablets over more than a decade, so that’s not a unique proposition. But, coupled with the easel-like Stage mode, the angled tablet screen, the superior build quality, the ease of conversion, and the attached keyboard, this design is better than most. The components are obviously a major factor in making this suitable to demanding creative work, too, but nailing the design is key to the concept, and it is, again, well executed.
As for the keyboard, when it isn’t covered by the display in Stage or tablet mode, I have no complaints. The keys aren’t big on tactile feedback, but they do have a healthy bounce to them, and a decent amount of travel. The chassis has enough room to leave space between the keys, which are neither too small nor too cramped.
I did mention that the build wasn’t identical to the one before: In addition to the haptic touchpad improvements, you'll find some differences in the port arrangement. The most notable is that, in a rare move, Microsoft added (rather than removed) a USB Type-A port to the device, which the original did not have.
While we’d like to live in a world where everyone, everywhere, and everything uses USB-C connections only, we’re simply not there yet, and you’ll often run into a peripheral, a charging port, or a cable that is only USB-A. Considering this isn’t a device that’s attempting to maximize thinness, this is deeply welcome.
That’s not the only new port either—Microsoft also added a microSD card slot to the right flank, which is a must-have for some content creators like photographers and videographers. The previous Laptop Studio model had just two Thunderbolt 4-enabled USB Type-C ports and a headphone jack, which have been maintained here too. (Even the latter isn’t guaranteed, these days.)
Meet Movidius: A Local AI Advantage
Machine learning and AI have been at the forefront of nearly every tech company’s plans this year, and Microsoft is no different. Despite announcing this new Surface hardware, Microsoft Copilot was the star of the show at Microsoft's most recent event, and even the new laptop announcements were not left short of their own AI either.
While Intel’s upcoming 14th Gen “Meteor Lake” processors have built-in AI support via an integrated neural processing unit (NPU) in the CPU, Microsoft chose to release the Surface Laptop Studio 2 now, with current 13th Gen “Raptor Lake” processors. The company decided it’s more important to get an updated device out the door than wait for the 14th Gen launch—and since the original Laptop Studio components had gotten long in the tooth, we can’t blame them. Rather than leave the device bereft of hardware AI support without this upcoming integrated NPU, though, the Laptop Studio 2 is running a discrete Intel Movidius neural processor, designed to power local AI tasks.
This Movidius 3700VC unit works in tandem with the laptop’s Core i7-13700H processor—a high-end laptop chip in its own right for serious workloads or demanding gaming—to take AI workloads off the Intel Core chip. This allows the laptop to continue to run your applications at its normal pace without sharing resources.
While you'll find many web-based use cases for AI, you may not be able to think of as many local examples. The main way (and really right now, the only way) AI processing is utilized on the Laptop Studio 2 is with Windows Studio Effects, a suite of features that's designed to enhance video calls. The machine records with a sharp 1080p webcam to make optimal use of all these features, as well.
What exactly do Studio Effects entail? You'll find three main features: background blur, eye-contact correction, and a dynamic reframing and field-of-view feature. Some of these exist in other software or different forms already, but the idea is (beyond, well, being useful) that the local AI processing can deliver superior results without slowing down your PC.
With background blur, the NPU handles the realtime blur workload so that your processor can, say, keep a presentation running smoothly while you have many applications open or are working on another demanding task. In my time trying out this feature, the camera did a decent job of quickly detecting my face and effectively blurring out the background; it wasn’t easily tricked by someone walking through the background, either, or by people who weren’t directly facing the camera.
The idea behind the eye contact correction is similar—the NPU will “correct” the video for the person or people on the other end of the call so that it looks like you’re staring into the camera lens while speaking. The habit of looking at the screen, where other people’s faces are on a video call, rather than looking into the webcam while speaking, is natural, since you want to see their reactions and expressions while talking, but all eye contact is lost. While you may have mixed feelings on AI “faking” the fact that you are making eye contact, it does indeed work, maybe even unsettlingly well. In some professional environments, it may win you some plaudits or subconscious approval.
Finally, the reframing feature will “follow” you around if you shift or move while on camera, widening, reframing, and/or refocusing the camera (to an extent) if you’re leaning, moving, or shifting while on video. It can even automatically widen the frame if another person pops up next to you and joins the call, or vice versa if your presentation partner steps off screen. All of this happening automatically is pretty cool, and again, it happens quickly without burdening your processing load further.
Despite all of the talk of AI and the NPU, these Windows Studio Effects features are about the limit of Windows’ local AI use cases for now. That’s not to say these aren’t important—in this era of remote work and video conferencing, you will likely make plenty of use of these enhancements—but it’s not exactly far-reaching in scope for the time being. I understand the focus on this area given the industry buzz around AI right now, but the airtime perhaps outweighs the real-world uses for the time being, as helpful as they may be.
Configurations and Components: A Needed Intel 13th Gen Update
I mentioned the potent Intel Core processor powering this laptop, and it’s not the only impressive core component packed into this 14-inch machine. Our review unit is a massive jump up from the $1,999.99 base model, with the Core i7-13700H CPU, 64GB of RAM, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 GPU, and a 1TB SSD for a whopping $3,299.99. The Laptop Studio 2 is already a premium device for professional creatives, and even more so with our pricey review model, we can’t stress enough that most users don’t need to follow in its configuration footsteps.
Taking a step back to that $1,999.99 base model, it nets you the same processor, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics. If this was a standard laptop, that would be a pretty expensive way to acquire this set of components. Indeed, on a pure performance basis, your dollar could go much further or get a similar set of parts for way less money. The engineering behind the folding design and fancy touch display inherently add to the cost.
Outside of the base model and our review unit, you'll find a handful of other configurations. You can bump the base model to an RTX 4050 while keeping the other components the same (maybe the best combination for users who need just a bit of graphics oomph), add the RTX 4050 while doubling up on the base RAM and storage, or upgrade on our test unit with either an RTX 2000 Ada professional GPU or twice the storage. The top configuration will run you $3,699.99.
Testing the Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio 2: Finding Substance to the Style
To gauge the performance of our model, and get a sense of what the Core i7 chip can do in this system across all configurations, we put it through our usual suite of benchmark tests. We compared the Laptop Studio 2’s results with those of the following systems…
The Laptop Studio 2 is a unique system in that, while it converts, it’s aimed at a much more demanding user and higher power tier than the many ultralight convertibles we see out there. Its competition is really other high-performance touch-capable laptops and professional creator machines at the same or slightly larger size; this is what the creative user has to decide among.
As such, this list of competitors includes the Dell XPS 15 (9530) ($2,499 as tested) as the best desktop replacement laptop, the Gigabyte Aero 16 OLED ($2,199 as tested) as a symbol of what a larger pro laptop can get you, the M1 Pro-based Apple MacBook Pro 14-Inch ($2,899 as tested), and of course the original Surface Laptop Studio ($2,699 as tested).
The MacBook Pro pick is not the ideal comparison, but we don’t have test numbers for the latest 14-inch M2 Pro system: The 13-inch M2 model we reviewed is under-priced and under-powered for the purpose of this, while the 16-inch M2 Max model we reviewed is in another tier entirely. This is a close point of comparison despite being from the M1 generation, which itself is telling regarding Apple's silicon work.
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
We run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive.
Our other three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
Finally, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Systems, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
Professional creative users eyeing this system for its fancy folding need not worry: It has the speed to back it up. You may expect more concessions given the form factor, but its Core i7 H-series chip is the real deal, using its 14 cores and 20 threads to great effect on these strenuous multimedia tests. It was the fastest system in a couple of cases, hanging near the top of the pack on every one of these benchmarks.
The Aero 16 flexed its muscle most on Cinebench where it could run free, so you'll notice an upper ceiling not quite attained here, but the Laptop Studio 2 was still a strong performer. The bottom rear block of the system, which somewhat raises the chassis off the desk while keeping the vents clear for cooling, went a long way in helping this more compact system play with the big dogs. You can also see the massive performance improvement over the original Laptop Studio.
Graphics Tests
We test the graphics inside all laptops and desktops with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).
To further measure GPUs, we also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.
The GeForce RTX 4060 chip really gives this system some meaningful graphics power, not just passable entry-level chops. You'll always find more powerful options—if you mainly work in 3D or need the best GPU possible, look at a workstation or larger media editing machine—but at this size and class, this is more than acceptable. The Aero 16’s RTX 4070 was superior, but not by leaps and bounds, again a testament to the engineering here in a smaller body (which is also part of what you’re paying extra for). Combining this level of CPU and GPU power with a flexible pen-ready display could be a real treat for creative users.
Battery and Display Tests
We test each laptop and tablet's battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, and that Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting are turned off.
To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
The Laptop Studio 2 is in the clear: All of this head-turning design and high-end power didn’t result in pitiful battery life. In fact, the runtime was quite long, lasting for more than 15 hours on our video playback test. This will naturally shorten significantly if you’re going to edit video or animate (and, to a lesser extent, draw and sketch) while off the charger, but it provides a strong baseline to make this system’s portable size worthwhile.
Microsoft's display color coverage is only okay, lacking somewhat compared with the others, particularly in the Adobe RGB and DCI-P3 color spaces. That's likely concerning for some designers and artists out there, particularly if color matching is important. Brightness, on the other hand, is not an issue; this is a particularly bright display when set to maximum.
Verdict: A One-of-a-Kind Creative Solution Made Better
Microsoft's Surface Laptop Studio 2 already starts with a leg up given its unique value proposition and form factor. It’s portable and converts to a touch-friendly form like smaller systems, but it also packs the power of a larger professional creator laptop. When all of those are executed especially well, it’s an appealing combination, with the high cost the only real roadblock. (Though, some creators might scoff at the screen's color coverage.)
For plenty of shoppers, that is enough of a barrier to entry, but those seeking a high-performance professional system already know the machines they need are expensive. None of the alternatives could be called cheap either, and even if some of them cost less for similar or more power, none combines the speed with a three-mode, touch-first design. You may miss having an OLED panel, and maybe one that's larger, but if you look to marry the drawing and design convenience of a tablet and stylus with the performance of a professional laptop, the Surface Laptop Studio 2 is unmatched, earning this effective reboot our Editors' Choice award.
Microsoft's Surface Laptop Studio 2 significantly ramps up the performance with modern parts and dedicated AI processing—all while maintaining the unique pull-forward touch-screen design.
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