Alcantara is softer in texture and easier to make available in different colors than anodized magnesium or aluminum alloy. When Microsoft introduced the first Surface Laptop three years ago, they vaunted the Alcantara surface as a unique selling point over traditional metal Ultrabooks. The Surface Laptop 3 13.5 competes directly with other high-end subnotebooks including the Dell XPS 13, Asus ZenBook S13, or Lenovo Yoga S940 and some 3:2 alternatives like the Huawei MateBook X Pro or Acer Swift 3 SF313. While the native resolution has not changed from the Surface Laptop 2, there are still display differences that we will note below. The unique selling point of the Surface Laptop continues to be its uncommon 3:2 2256 x 1504 display in contrast to the typical 16:9 Ultrabook or 16:10 MacBook.

AMD Ryzen options are only available for the 15-inch Surface Laptop 3 15 as of this writing. Our unit here is the black metal Surface Laptop 3 13.5 equipped with the Core i5-1035G7 CPU, 8 GB of LPDDR4x RAM, and 256 GB SSD for a retail price of $1000 USD. This time, however, users get to choose between the classic Alcantara finish or a new metal finish for a more 'MacBook-like' feel.

The Surface Laptop 3 launched a year later with 10 nm Ice Lake CPUs and an identical chassis design to the original model yet again.

The Surface Laptop 2 launched on October 2018 with 14 nm Intel Kaby Lake-R CPUs and an identical chassis design to the original 2017 Surface Laptop.

Microsoft model 1867