You may have heard of Microsoft’s Surface lineup. There are quite a few devices to get familiar with, but the Pro is the company’s 2-in-1 offering aimed at professional creatives. In short, it’s a 12.3-inch laptop/tablet hybrid that’s among the best in its class. It has a touchscreen with a resolution of 2,736 x 1,824 pixels and supports Microsoft’s pressure-sensitive stylus – the Surface Pen – and is available in a handful of impressive configurations, all running Windows 10 Pro. Crucially, the Surface Pro is still extremely thin and light, but it doesn’t come cheap. The Microsoft Surface Pro feels very familiar. The large 12.3-inch touchscreen, again with a 3:2 aspect ratio, the angular shape, the magnetic keyboard connector on the bottom, the magnesium alloy construction, the huge, fully adjustable kickstand … it even has the same dimensions, has neither gotten bigger nor thinner, and the heaviest model at 768 g is only 2 g lighter than its 2015 counterpart. You have to look very closely to see any physical changes in this year’s Surface Pro. Fortunately, the tablet itself lands on the right side of the spectrum between luxury and rip-off. That’s mostly because of the performance, and that’s a good thing, since the minor design tweaks mean you’re largely paying for the addition of a seventh-generation Kaby Lake Intel chip. In our 4K application benchmarks, the Surface Pro with Intel Core i7-7660U achieved an excellent image test score of 102, which is on par with a good desktop system. It also did well in the video encoding test with 61 points, and it scored 46 points in the multitasking benchmark and 60 points overall. This is not bad at all for a mobile dual-core processor. Only the Core i7 Surface Pros are equipped with fans this time; the m3 and i5 editions manage with passive cooling, which means quiet operation. Microsoft says the fan is quieter than the Surface Pro 4’s, too. Even when pushed to the limits in our benchmarks. An even bigger improvement over the Surface Pro 4 is in battery life. This is remarkably long for a Windows 10 tablet, reaching 11 hours 33 minutes in our video playback test. That’s 5 hours 37 minutes longer than the Surface Pro 4 under the same conditions, and it means you should easily last a full workday. Still, it’s almost disappointing to discount the 2,736 x 1,824 display, because at full power it’s simply stunning. Oddly enough, our device shipped with the screen in Enhanced mode, which, according to my measurements, isn’t as pristine as the alternative sRGB mode. You can freely switch between the two modes in the Windows settings, by the way.
