The pen is slightly different to the older Surface Pen seen on past Pro tablets. But the flat sides did take some getting used to. The upgrades are very welcome and make the Surface Pro 8 feel like a much more competent laptop replacement than most competing convertibles, including the iPad Pro.
One of the biggest updates Microsoft has made to the Surface Pro 8 relates to its screen. This increases the maximum number of images per second the screen can display from 60 to A higher refresh rate brings with it a number of benefits. It can also help gamers for the same reason, reducing the gap between a command being input and it playing out on screen. Elsewhere, the screen feels very similar to past Surfaces. This means the screen is great for productivity and basic things like Netflix binging, but not appropriate for hardcore creative work.
To the naked eye the screen looks vibrant. Netflix movies have nice deep blacks, despite the screen being LCD, and max brightness levels let content and text remain legible in everything but direct, bright sunlight. Content on Netflix looks great, despite the lack of formal HDR support and all in all I had no issues using the screen day-to-day during testing. Cracking out a colorimeter, our test results backed up my real world findings. The device recorded a 0.
The end result gives the screen a reliable contrast ratio. As a rule of thumb anything over on a laptop is good. The only issues occurred after I started checking colour gamut coverage. Gamuts are ranges that inform how many colours a screen can accurately render.
The higher the coverage the more accurate the colours are. The Surface Pro 8 covers But it only covers The Surface Pro 8 is more than powerful enough for everyday use. Using it as my work laptop, I never had any issues, even when running a quite frankly ridiculous number of tabs in Chrome and doing some basic image retouch work in GIMP. True AAA gaming is beyond it, but during testing I was able to get popular games including Minecraft and Apex Legends to run at playable frame rates, albeit with their graphical settings lowered.
It also ran creative workloads okay. Though more hardcore workloads like large scale vector projects and video editing will give it pause. I was also impressed how cool the tablet ran. The fan system works well and ensured the device ran cool and quietly in most instances. Putting the Surface Pro 8 through our standard suite of synthetic benchmarks, the figures matched my real world findings.
You can see a breakdown of its scores and how they compare to competing devices in the table below. The only real performance issues I suffered occurred when I tried to use the device as a tablet.
Windows 11 is a great step forward for Microsoft, featuring a number of UI changes that make it feel significantly more user friendly than Windows 10, plus some awesome backend security, stability and performance improvements.
You can navigate through Windows 11 using the on-screen keyboard and touchscreen, but compared to iPad OS the experience feels very cumbersome. The desktop view is also fiddly to navigate with even basic things, like changing display settings not feeling as quick and easy to do in a few clicks as it is on Android and iPad OS. Microsoft quotes the Surface Pro 8 as offering 16 hours battery life, and during testing I found that it is possible to get that much use out of the device under certain conditions.
Logging on at 8. Playing graphically-intensive tasks, like 3D modelling in Blender, I managed to drain the battery in less than 3 hours. This is a benchmark that simulates every day office workloads, like video calling, web browsing and document editing, on a loop until the battery is completely drained.
It has a bigger inch display with thinner borders around the screen than the While it's slightly heavier, I think it looks and feels more refined and less clunky than earlier versions of the Surface Pro. The screen gets plenty bright and I appreciated the built-in kickstand — a staple on Microsoft's Surface Pro — to help prop up the device while I watched "Squid Game" on the couch over the weekend. You can easily add two 4K monitors, which makes it a great option if you're moving from work and home, or from your office desk to the couch.
There are lots of other noticeable upgrades. It has the latest Intel Core processors. The new Windows 11 operating system felt plenty fast, even with lots of tabs open in Chrome and an Amazon Workspaces session going in a separate window for work. Also, I was surprised that it was able to run Amazon's New World game on the lowest settings.
I'd rather play the game on high settings, but I didn't expect it to run at all on a tablet. Windows 11 is a big new update to Windows 10, which is about 6 years old at this point. I'm not going to fully review the software here, but it's a nice looking refresh. I like that the task menu and Start bar are centered now and that there's more transparency to windows.
It looks a bit Apple-y. Still, it feels a little clunky using Windows 11 as a tablet -- it's still mainly a keyboard-and-mouse operating system, compared with an iPad which is built primarily with touch screens in mind and does not work as well with a keyboard and mouse. The SSD storage is removable, but Microsoft states it should only be done by technicians.
Unlike many Windows PCs, the they do not come with various free trials for anti-virus programs and other unwanted software that can often cause problems, relying instead on the robust security systems built into Windows. The only exception is a trial offer for Microsoft Office. Otherwise, Windows 10 Home ran smoothly and trouble-free on the Surface Laptop 4 throughout the test period. The Surface Laptop 4 is another top-quality, premium Windows 10 notebook from Microsoft. It feels great, still stands out in a crowd and — most importantly — works really well: fast, quiet and without the hassle of the rubbish software trials except Office that often riddle Windows competitors.
If all you need from this kind of device is general everyday usage, then chances are you might fall in love with the benefits that ARM already has. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said if you were hoping to use it as a dedicated portable creative workstation. This combined with the lack of native support for most creative applications results in a disappointing and expensive piece of kit for anyone hoping to replace a bulky laptop with something easier to transport around.
If you reign in your expectations a little though, you can appreciate that the Surface Pro X is a fantastic secondary device for creative professionals who have access to other hardware. If you have the cash to spend on a Surface Pro X, but your main priority for a device is to run graphically demanding applications then you can get much better results with a laptop that has a dedicated GPU within the same price range.
Battery life was touted as a prominent benefit using an ARM-based device, and Microsoft promises on its website that the Surface Pro X can run for up to 15 hours. This is sadly far from the case in our own tests, with the tablet running a continuing looped video for 9 hours and 10 minutes while managing around 8 hours and 12 minutes while running Adobe Photoshop.
The design is pretty standard stuff for a Surface Pro tablet. Luckily, there are plenty of BlueTooth options available that would help keep your workspace free of cables and free up the few ports you have available.
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