The Prestige 13 Evo is MSI’s new lightest laptop

MSI’s new Prestige 13 Evo trades the company’s typically hefty gaming laptop designs for an ultraportable profile that weighs just a little over two pounds. Just like the Prestige Evo devices before it, the laptop retains a similarly impressive selection of I/O ports despite its size, including a DC input, HDMI 2.0 port, headphone jack, microSD card reader, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, and even a USB-A port.

The Prestige 13 Evo has a pretty sleek chassis that comes in either gray or white, as well as a 13-inch full HD plus display (1920 x 1200) capable of running at 60Hz. But the laptop’s lightness doesn’t mean it’s super thin — it’s 0.67 inches thick, likely to fit all the ports on the sides of the device. That’s thicker than the 13-inch M2 MacBook Air, which has a paper-thin height of just 0.44 inches.

In terms of performance, you can expect up to the latest 13th Gen Intel Core i7-1360P processor and an Intel Iris Xe graphics chip, while storage options range from up to 32GB of LPDDR5 RAM and up to 2TB of storage on an M.2 2280 NVME SSD.

According to MSI, the Prestige 13 Evo has a 50 percent larger touchpad when compared to other 13-inch laptops. Other nice touches include a shutter-equipped full HD webcam, a backlit keyboard, and a fingerprint sensor on the power button. The Prestige 13 Evo starts at $1,199, making it slightly more expensive than the Prestige 14 Evo released last year.

As my colleague Monica Chin notes in her review of the Prestige Evo 14, the device has a number of drawbacks, including poor audio, a dim display, and awful battery life. It looks like the Prestige 13 Evo made some incremental improvements in these areas, as MSI claims it can get up to 15 hours of battery life and says the display can reach up to 400 nits of brightness.

MSI’s launching a larger 14-inch Prestige Evo and a regular 16-inch Prestige laptop as well, both of which come with up to a 13th Gen Intel Core i7-13700H processor. Only the 16-inch Prestige model sports up to 4060 Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics chip, while the 14-inch Prestige Evo has the same Intel Xe chip. These devices are a bit more expensive than the Prestige 13 Evo, starting at $1,899 and $1,299, respectively.

Both the Prestige Evo and Prestige laptops are set to become available in February.