Mid-range Microsoft Surface laptop with 12.5in display in the works

We love Microsoft Surface products, but they are prohibitively expensive for some people. That’s why the news that the company is working on a mid-range Surface laptop with a 12.5in display is music to our ears.

According to a report from Windows Central, the laptop is codenamed Sparti and is designed to appeal to a student audience. This often is as representative of a laptop’s price as its features, so we can hopefully look forward to a more affordable Surface laptop.

We aren’t capitalising ‘laptop’ here, but the Microsoft Surface Laptop (capitalised) is a product, and the report says the new laptop “is being positioned as a more affordable Surface Laptop”, likening its price and features to how the cheaper and smaller Surface Go sits alongside the Surface Pro in Microsoft’s range.

The 12.5in laptop is said to be smaller than the Surface Laptop, which has a 13.5 or 15.5in screen, and will have a 10^th-gen Intel Core i5 CPU (not the newer 11^th-gen), 4GB RAM, and 64GB storage at the base model. That low RAM and storage is particularly small for a modern laptop, but that is how Microsoft achieves its starting prices for most of its Surface line, and then upsells customers from there.

Reportedly the laptop will ship with Windows 10 S mode and cost between $500-$600. This is significantly lower than the Surface Laptop, which starts at $999/£879. This would allow the new PC to slot neatly between the pricing of the low-end Surface Go 2 and the cheapest Surface Pro.

The laptop is thought to be being readied for announcement in October alongside some other Surface products.

We have high hopes for this new Surface laptop given the build quality on the low-end Surface Go 2 was just as good as anything else Microsoft makes.