Microsoft’s latest 2-in-1 Surface delivers good performance (if you don’t play any games) and excellent battery life, but it’s way too expensive.
Microsoft ’s converti-tablet is back, again, and the excitement is palpable. Microsoft ’s excitement, at least. This is the fastest, bestest, most AI-estbaked into its Windows operating system—Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X CPU, and a collective memory that has forgotten some of the misguided Pros of yesteryear., to highlight a few.
With the 2024 Surface Pro , Microsoft has returned to Qualcomm’s arms in full, having bought into the promises of the Snapdragon X, the “It Chip” that will bring AI into the mainstream via Windows. Plenty of other PC manufacturers are on board too—I’ve already reviewed theis out there, unpromoted. No one much cares, though, because you’ll need the Qualcomm version if you want to access Copilot+ PC features, since for the time being they aren’t supported on Intel.
Let’s talk performance. Qualcomm has been blowing the Snapdragon X Elite’s horn to a fault, touting that the “super-charged” chip would double performance over the competition at a third of the power. That’s proving to be wildly exaggerated: Head to head against recent-edition laptops with Intel Core Ultra 7 CPUs, the Pro was only marginally faster on mainstream tests like Geekbench, where I saw a 6 percent performance improvement on average.
Battery life is simply phenomenal. I got over 15 hours on a full-screen, full-brightness YouTube video playback test, which is far beyond Microsoft’s own specification, and more than double the battery life of the old Surface Pro X.Aside from incompatibility issues, I only encountered one problem with the device: The touchpad would frequently stop working after the laptop woke up from sleep.
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