Microsoft is well known for poking fun at Apple in almost all of the ads it makes for its Surface products, and now the Surface Laptop 4 has been featured in one as well. The company chose to pit the newly-launched laptop against the MacBook Air, and of course, the Surface Laptop 4 is painted in a much better light.
There"s not a lot that"s new to this comparison, though. Microsoft first touts the touch screen on the Surface Laptop 4, which Apple doesn"t offer on any of its Macs. The only way you can use a touchscreen on an Apple device is by getting an iPad Pro, but then you"d be limited to using iPadOS, which is getting closer to a desktop-like experience, but not quite there yet.
The next point of comparison is the ports, and again, Apple has infamously moved exclusively to USB Type-C on its laptops, so if you have legacy USB Type-A devices or want to connect to an external display, you"ll probably need a dongle. The Surface Laptop 4 has a USB Type-A port, in addition to USB Type-C, which gives you a bit more flexibility, though it"s not like you get a ton of connectivity options without a Surface Dock, either. You do get a headphone jack, though.
Finally, of course, there"s app compatibility, with Windows 10 supporting almost every app and game you might want to use today, while the selection of apps for macOS is a bit more limited. Microsoft specifically refers to games, which are particularly hard to find on desktop operating systems other than Windows. Plus, the latest MacBook Air is powered by the Apple M1 chipset, so compatibility with x86-based apps is all the more complicated. Meanwhile, the Surface Laptop 4 still runs either Intel or AMD processors and they have fairly capable integrated GPUs, so they are capable of running some modern titles.
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