Budget Surface Laptop Go could see its first hardware upgrade soon

The Microsoft Surface Laptop Go was originally introduced in October 2020 as a smaller, lighter and more economical member of the Surface family, but it hasn’t been updated since. That could change soon, according to a leaked retail ad spotted by The Verge that said an updated version of the Surface Laptop Go could be available for pre-order as early as June 2nd.

12th generation Intel processors have been available for some time now, and in that context, the new Go laptop’s hardware isn’t very impressive. The laptop was listed with a Core i5-1135G7 quad-core processor, originally released in late 2020, which we’ve seen in a variety of other laptops over the past two years. The new Laptop Go uses the same 12.4-inch touchscreen, same non-illuminated keyboard and fingerprint sensor, and the same set of ports (one USB-C, one USB-A, headphone jack and Surface Connect port).). The laptop will also ship with Windows 11 – the current model fully supports Windows 11 but still ships with Windows 10 in S mode out of the box.

While it’s almost as old as the original Surface Laptop Go, the i5-1135G7 would be an interesting upgrade to the current laptop’s i5-1035G1. It has the same number of CPU cores but has a large increase in base and boost clock speeds. The integrated Iris Xe GPU will also be significantly faster thanks to the new GPU architecture, higher GPU clock speed, and more than double the number of execution units (80 instead of 32). It’s not a gaming laptop, but especially at its native 1536×1024 screen resolution, it should be fast enough to play older and less demanding games.

Our main gripes with the original Go laptop were mostly about the base model, which included just 4GB of RAM and 64GB of slow eMMC storage – not enough even for a budget system. The 8GB RAM and 128GB or 256GB NVMe SSD versions felt much better to use. We don’t know what the base configuration of the updated Laptop Go will look like, but the retail listing suggests it will still have 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage (although the Go laptop’s current SSD can be replaced by the user, with little effort ).

We don’t know when the new Go laptop will be available if this leak is correct, although a leaked retail listing suggests we might see an update sooner rather than later. We hope that using an older processor and reusing most of the components from the old Go laptop will help reduce costs and supply chain issues.