If you're a coder and looking to get some heavy lifting done, you'll need a powerful laptop to match your ambitions. While we heartily recommend the Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 for all your coding needs — which has occupied a spot in our best laptops for coding and programming list for a while — its younger sibling, the obviously titled Microsoft Surface Laptop 5, has a brilliant price cut right now.
It's a slimline laptop that offers plenty of power, and thanks to Black Friday, you'll find a very steep discount at Best Buy. The retailer has cut $500 off of the MSRP of the latest model, bringing it down to $1,199.99 — it's still expensive, but it's not $1,699.99 expensive.
If you're wondering what all the fuss is about, discount aside, then this Microsoft laptop is impressively portable but very, very capable.
It's running Windows 11 right out of the box (you'd be surprised how many laptops aren't), and it's powered by a 12th Gen Intel Core i7 — ideal for multitasking with whatever you're doing, particularly when paired with 16GB of RAM and a fast 512GB SSD for storage.
Microsoft claims the Surface Laptop 5 can reach up to 18 hours of battery on a single charge, but naturally the harder you work, the less mileage you'll get from that. Still, that also makes it an ideal device to use on the sofa after a long day of, well, using the device at your desk.
The 13.5-inch display is just big enough for you to be productive without compromising portability, too, and it has a sharp resolution of 2256x1504. It's what Microsoft dubs a 'PixelSense' panel, and it's a looker, with plenty of brightness.
We will concede that creatives may want to look elsewhere, though — the integrated Iris Xe GPU from Intel isn't likely to pull up any trees when it comes to photo or video editing, particularly with complex projects. Still, it's a coder's dream.
