Microsoft says you can go from 0 to 80% in an hour: I got 74%, which I'll call close enough. One last note on battery is a new fast-charge capability. Using the laptop in my daily life, I got between 5 and 6 hours of use out of it before it needed a recharge. Disappointingly, the Laptop 3's battery life was shorter than the Surface 2's and is slightly shorter than the Dell XPS 13's. Once again, given the Air's ultralow-power Y series processor, that's unsurprising. In my looped video-stream test, I got far more battery life out of the MacBook Air: 13 hours and 27 minutes for the Air versus just over 8 hours for the Laptop 3.

As noted, the Surface Laptop 3 is significantly more powerful than the identically-priced MacBook Air and a good deal more so than last year's model. For a thin-and-light laptop, the power on offer here is above average. But there's no dedicated graphics card on either model, so creatives looking for a machine on which to do the bulk of their video editing are best opting for something with more power. You might be able to get away with Photoshop on the base-level 13.5-inch Laptop 3, and light video editing on the i7 version.

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