I say unfortunate, not because I disliked the i7 Pro’s performance, but because this spec is likely to represent a very small proportion of Surface Pro sales. Unfortunately, my review unit was the powerful i7, complete with a whopping 16GB of RAM and a massive, speedy 512GB SSD hard drive. You have a choice between three Intel chips: the base m3 (starting at £799 without the keyboard), the midrange i5 (at £979 for the 128GB / 4GB, and £1249 for the 256GB / 8GB), and the top-of-the-line i7 (topping out at a giddy £2699 for the 1TB / 16GB model).Īs part of the Pro revamp, Microsoft has said goodbye to Intel’s 6th generation Skylake processors in favour of the latest, 7th generation Kaby Lake chips, a move that brings a small-but-worthwhile power hike and much greater power efficiency. As with its predecessor, the ‘new’ Pro packs the punch of a full desktop machine, pretty much regardless of which of the processor options you go for. If you’re new to the whole Surface Pro concept, don’t let its compact tablet-hybrid form factor fool you. Performance: more than powerful enough for day-to-day use
If you decide on a Surface Pro tomorrow, you can be confident that while rivals may come along in the near future with higher-resolution screens or a myriad of other head-turning claims, they’ll struggle to better the Surface’s combination of quality, usability and battery life (now a claimed 13.5 hours). But that’s a niggle, and one you can fix yourself in seconds. Quite why Microsoft hasn’t smoothed this out by now is beyond me – I can only hope it’s put to rest with the big upcoming autumn update. The auto brightness in Windows 10 adjusts at quite brutal gradients that distract from the experience, so much so that I normally disable it. If I have one small niggle, it’s with the software more than it is the screen. As with the Surface Pro 4, I reset the scaling in Settings to 175%, creating more room on the display for content.
However, you’ll still have a decision to make in how you want to scale text and iconography, set by default to a recommended 200%. Happily, those days are long behind us: just about everything you install will look good by scaling correctly straight out of the box. The display resolution itself is a little unusual, a factor that at one time proved a problem for software vendors, who struggled to get their apps to render prettily. The touchscreen is incredibly responsive, too, and my review sample suffered none of the light bleed that I’d experienced in a Surface Pro 4 a year or so back. It’ll go bright enough for outdoor use on the sunniest of days, and dark enough to not wake the neighbourhood if you’re using it in bed at night. It’s calibrated beautifully colours pop without suffering from the glaring vibrancy that afflicts some rivals (hello, Samsung) you can look at the Surface Pro’s screen for hours without tiring your eyes and text is beautifully crisp, almost regardless of how much you enlarge it.
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