Buy Surface Laptop 3 (Core i7, 256GB) at Amazon – $1,299

Buy Surface Laptop 3 (Core i7, 512GB) at Amazon – $1,690

The most affordable option is the 10th-gen Core i5 CPU, 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD for $800, or $200 off the regular $1,000 price tag. The sweet spot, however, might be the Core i7 model in “platinum,” “sandstone” and “cobalt blue” with 16GB of memory and a 256GB SSD for $1,299, or $300 off the regular price.

Jumping up to the 512GB model with 16GB of RAM and a Core i7 CPU will cost you $1,690 (in cobalt blue, or $10 more for the other colors), which is a hefty premium over the 256GB model, but it is a $310 discount over the regular price. The top version with a 1TB SSD runs $2,100 rather than $2,400.

The key benefits of the 13.5-inch Surface Laptop 3 are the lightweight 2.83 pound size and battery life that stretches up to 15 hours — even more than the Dell XPS 13. At the same time, it packs plenty of power for most chores. The main downsides are the lack of ports, thick bezels and price — but this sale takes care of that last issue.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

While those are very modest specs indeed, it’s fair to say they won’t give you the kind of realistic graphics and satellite-image-quality environments that Microsoft has showed off so far. To get the best results, you’ll probably want something close to Microsoft’s “Ideal Spec.” That requires much more recent Ryzen 7 Pro 2700X or Intel i7-9800X CPUs, along with high-end AMD Radeon VII and NVIDIA RTX 2080 GPUs with 8GB of VRAM at least. You’ll also need no less than 32GB of RAM, a 150GB SSD and a 50 Mbps connection, at least.

I’m on the alpha program and have played Flight Sim 2020 on both a laptop with a GTX 1070 GPU and desktop PC with an RTX 2080 Ti GPU. Suffice to say, there’s a pretty big difference in performance and graphics quality between the two machines, and the laptop is no slouch. If enjoying the incredibly detailed environment is more important than practicing your flying skills, I think it’s fair to say that you’ll have a better experience with a high-end PC and fast internet connection — just as you’d expect. .