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I have two complaints with the Surface Laptop 3's screen. First, the display is way too reflective. My second criticism doesn't have to do with the panel itself, but with the thick bezels surrounding it. At this point, nearly every premium laptop has reduced its footprint and improved its viewing experience with an edge-to-edge screen. Reducing the Laptop 3's bezels is at the top of my wish list for 2020.
According to our colorimeter, the Surface Laptop 3's display covers 121% of the sRGB color gamut, making this display about as vivid as the premium laptop average (122%). The Surface's screen is more colorful than the panels on the XPS 13 (111%, 4K) and Spectre x360 13 (109%, 1080p) but not as vivid as the MacBook Pro's screen (163%).
Reaching 348 nits of brightness, the Surface Laptop 3's display outshined the Spectre x360's screen (287 nits) and again came close to matching the category average (354 nits). The 13-inch displays on the XPS 13 (382 nits) and MacBook Pro (441 nits) are brighter than the Surface Laptop 3's panel.
Apple, Dell and others have moved to low-profile key switches in order to cut tenths of an inch off their laptops' chassis. Microsoft hasn't — and I hope it never does. My fingers effortlessly jumped from one key to the next thanks to the Surface Laptop 3's bouncy keys, which have surprisingly decent travel.
With a cushy, soft-touch surface and quiet, satisfying click, the Surface Laptop 3's keyboard will be a reprieve to anyone suffering from Apple's stiff, loud butterfly keys. Then again, comparing this keyboard to Apple's keyboards, butterfly or scissor, would be doing it a disservice. Rather, the Surface Laptop 3's keyboard offers a typing experience closer to that of the brilliant ThinkPad keyboard.I typed at 108 words per minute with a 95% accuracy rate on the 10FastFingers.com typing test. That is right around my 109-wpm average and matches my typical accuracy.
The 4.5 x 3-inch touchpad's soft-touch coating felt plush against my fingers as I easily executed Windows 10 gestures, like pinch-to-zoom and three-finger swipe up to switch windows, on the Surface Laptop 3. I was worried about the Surface Laptop 3's speakers' placement, hidden beneath the keyboard, but my doubts disappeared the moment Billie Eilish's smooth, clear voice filled our lab. The slow, rhythmic drums in the Grammy Award-winning artist's song "Idontwannaobeyouanymore" hit with surprising depth, and the electric guitar was well defined, even at maximum volume. Switching tracks, the strange pops, claps and arcade noises in Glass Animals' "Season 2 Episode 3" were nicely separated and Dave Bayley's voice was crisp and forward.
I loaded 27 Microsoft Edge (the new Chromium version) tabs on the Surface Laptop 3 and was never slowed by lag or throttling. Armed with an Intel Core i7-1065G7 CPU and 16GB of RAM, the Surface Laptop 3 quickly loaded three 1080p YouTube videos, and I even watched Reverse2k win a round of Fortnite on Ninja's Mixer stream with all those tabs running in the background. There was a slight delay loading the last few tabs in another batch of 10, but it didn't bother me much.
We saw mixed results from the Surface Laptop 3 in our benchmark tests. The notebook scored a 19,078 on the Geekbench 4.3 overall performance test, losing out to the XPS 13 (Core i7-10710U). The 10th Gen Ice Lake processor in the Surface Laptop 3 helped it defeat the MacBook Pro (17,366, 8th Gen Core i5), the Spectre x360 13 (18,404, Core i7-1065G7) and the premium laptop average (16,559).
Qualcomm will be a major player in this space as the company recently unveiled its Snapdragon 7c and 8c chips. Targeting entry- and mid-level laptops, Qualcomm is looking to bring always-connected systems to mainstream consumers in a big way. However, we should also be on the lookout for Qualcomm's 8cx processor. A 7-nanometer chip, the 8cx chip is featured in the company's Project Limitless concept and is supposed to deliver better performance and longer battery life along with LTE connectivity. Samsung is also rumored to be working on a 5G tablet, the Galaxy Tab S6.
But don't think 5G is going to be a Qualcomm-only affair. Intel is reportedly teaming up with MediaTek to make their own 5G laptops. Now that foldable phones are sort of a thing, it's only natural that tablet makers are going to want a piece of the action. While we don't think we're going to see many (if any) consumer-ready models at CES 2020, we're pretty confident that we'll be seeing quite a few concepts as companies try to figure out this new medium.
In our HandBrake transcoding test, we push laptops to convert a 4K video to 1080p resolution. The Surface Laptop 3 completed that task in 24 minutes and 55 seconds, which is much slower than the times from the XPS 13 (14:25), MacBook Pro (14:42) and Spectre x360 (21:13). Even the premium laptop average (20:04) was faster.

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