Surface Pro review: Incremental improvement isn’t enough

Enlarge / Surface Pro with a Cobalt Blue Type Cover.

Every new Surface Pro has been the best Surface Pro yet. The new fifth-generation Surface Pro-unnumbered, Microsoft having dropped numeric suffixes-continues that trend. It is as good as or better than its predecessor, the Surface Pro 4, in every way.

And yet, the new machine strikes me as unambitious in a way that older models weren't.

The 2017 Surface Pro is an extremely incremental update. What was once a Skylake processor is now a Kaby Lake chip, which brings a healthy improvement in battery life and additional GPU features such as accelerated 4K HEVC video decoding. Overall, the new Surface Pro runs a bit faster and lasts longer away from the wall socket. The screen size and resolution remain the same (a beautiful 12.3" display with a strange 2736i-1824 resolution), pen latency is lower, and parallax error seems improved. The pen itself is better.

Read 38 remaining paragraphs | Comments