The Ryzen 7 4980U processor in the 15-inch system is dubbed the Ryzen 7 Microsoft Surface Edition. It's also par for the course: the Surface Laptop 3's AMD CPU was also an older-than-current generation. Given the rote upgrades, it's a bit annoying that Microsoft chose to use the last generation (Zen 2) of the AMD CPUs rather than the current and faster 5000 series (Zen 3), though that's probably due to the timing of the laptop's release. It's been bumped to the 4000-series of the AMD Ryzen 7 mobile processor and 11th-gen Intel Core i7-11875G7, plus storage and memory increases and newer Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Very little has changed for this generation. But it's also still reasonably portable, sufficiently fast, pleasantly sleek looking, durable, somewhat upgradeable, and backward-compatible with previous power supplies and Surface Connect accessories sold by Microsoft. It's faster and has better battery life than the older model, but so does every other laptop updated for 2021. It's not inexpensive or full of cutting-edge tech and it doesn't have an especially long battery life. It's still not particularly light, or fast or feature-packed.

Just like last year's Microsoft Surface Laptop 3, the 2021 Surface Laptop 4 indistinguishes itself by its utter averageness.

Surface laptop 4