Surface Pro Copilot+ review: Microsoft finally solved the Windows on Arm dilemma.

it's taken 12 years but Microsoft has finally made a Surface tablet powered by an arm chip that I don't want to throw out the window this new Surface Pro is powered by qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Elite chips and it's astoundingly fast it's very efficient and it just works it works in the way that you expect a typical modern Ultra portable PC to work and what's also really fascinating is that it can also run all your older apps and that's something Microsoft has had trouble with with its older arm systems those were things like the Surface Pro 9 5G and the Surface Pro X we did not like those computers very much because they just didn't work the way we wanted them [Music] to basically with the Surface Pro and the new Surface laptop these are Microsoft's first co-pilot plus PCS and they've managed to do something that Apple did several years ago honestly four years ago with its first Apple silicon Max it's developed laptops that are fast and capable and Battery efficient and work the way you expect them to to all running on mobile hardware and that is a pretty big feat for Microsoft what's funny though is Microsoft is really hyping up AI around copilot plus they're calling these AI PCS and there is something to that these new Qualcomm chips and the upcoming stuff from Intel and AMD are going to have mpus that are powerful and ready for AI tasks and more powerful than any of the MPS we've seen before those are neural processing units what's funny is that these features don't actually matter much the AI features as we see them so far they're nice to have but they're not as sense they're not nearly as compelling as a laptop with the onew punch of a lot of power and really efficient battery life and the one thing you won't see me talk about in this review is recall that's the kind of like Flagship feature that Microsoft showed off several weeks ago when it announced copilot plus PCS recall is not coming not anytime soon there's a lot of push back against it because of some very obvious security flaws which honestly it's very confusing how Microsoft didn't see a lot of those things but instead of being available at launch right now uh recall is going to be coming eventually sometime later this year what we have so far are a handful of AI features that are you know like I said just nice to have there's some image creation stuff the new paint app has both an image creation tool which didn't work in my testing at all and also image Co creation which lets you draw a little Doodle type a little text prompt and have it generate something an AI image based on all of those things coming together you can tweak the art style for this thing you can tell it how creative you want it to be the results are interesting but I don't think they're very good maybe kids will enjoy messing around with it but I don't find it really useful for adults and personally I'm still not sold on what the hell we do with these AI images at all do you put them in presentations do you just put them on your website or something and pretend they're your actual art I don't really know yet I think a more useful feature is live captions and that's the ability to just create automatic captions of any video that you're playing on your computer and from my testing it worked pretty well for English language stuff it can also translate some languages into English so I tested it with some anime clips translating Japanese into English it was fine it feels like you know when you were watching an old movie with bad subtitles it's not as direct or as well translated as official subtitles but it would be enough to help you understand something and it's also the sort of thing that could be applied to video chats down the line too so could help you understand somebody speaking a foreign language in a video chat so let's backtrack a little what is the Surface Pro if you you haven't been paying attention the surface lineup of laptops from Microsoft or tablets or kind of laptop tablet hybrids these are tablets that have kickstands that run full windows you can buy separate keyboard accessories and basically turn them into laptops but they've always been kind of unique devices and I think other companies once Microsoft announced these things in 2012 started to follow what Microsoft was doing but I still think they're the best at making a tablet laptop hybrid we've seen other two in ones but the surface is still very unique for what it is and the hardware still looks really good this Surface Pro is incredibly thin it feels really premium they've always been using a very good magnesium alloy metal so it just feels good to the touch uh there's an optional OLED screen on this model which also looks fantastic that's the one we're testing it has two USBC ports the surface power connection port on the side underneath the kickstand you can also pop out the SSD card and add more storage down the line pretty easily so that's nice you can't upgrade ram though because this is running in a Qualcomm chip with integrated memory and that's just something we're used to for Ultra portable machines overall as a tablet it's kind of what I expect from a 13-in device it has a pretty large screen it's easy to hold with one hand but you wouldn't want to do it for too long you know it doesn't feel like an iPad it feels more like an iPad Pro I just don't think you'd use this as an iPad youd use this more like a laptop that can occasionally have its keyboard detached so in that case I think this is still pretty useful for some people well it looks good overall though I'm still hoping Microsoft eventually tweaks the idea of how it's thinking of surfaces honestly I'm just tired of the kickstand it was an interesting idea 12 years ago but now it just makes it really hard to use this machine on your lap I would just like to see Microsoft kind of tweak this idea a little bit and I think there's room maybe another little extra bit of kickstand that comes down and maybe lays it flat against your lap or something I think that would make it more useful for a lot of people the best part about this Surface Pro is that honestly it's simply a great laptop once you add a keyboard to it it's fast it's really power efficient from my testing um with the PC Mark battery test it lasted about 12 hours running a full Benchmark depending on what you're doing could be less or more but I think that's the real world use case of battery life that's actually pretty helpful after suffering through so many arm powered surfaces over the years I was surprised that this one just ran pretty much everything I threw at it most apps that I'm using like Evernote and Spotify and Slack are native so they have arm native apps they run just fine a few things are emulated and the emulation is much better than it used to be I did run into some cases uh fortnite doesn't launch at all because it detects an arm chip and also I've heard League of Legends has the same issue and that's because these things rely on really hardcore anti-che mechanisms so until those apps get updated you won't be able to play those games at all the other big new thing this year is the flex keyboard uh the Surface Pro Flex keyboard it looks like a typical Surface Pro keyboard but you can remove it from the screen and use it independently fully wirelessly so it's always connected to the surface via Bluetooth instead of a direct connection like before it's very expensive it's $350 on its own $450 bundled with the surface slim pen but it works and it does unlock new ways of using the Surface Pro that I would have loved to see over the last few years I really got used to uh just putting the Surface tablet on a table and just kind of lounging and typing with the tablet uh with the keyboard on my lap I could see this being useful in airplanes or cafes or just other areas where it's kind of cramped and where the surfaces design especially the kickstand makes using it kind of hard so that's cool I think that's an interesting way of rethinking this machine I just wish this keyboard wasn't so expensive as an AI PC as I mentioned you know the features are nice they're perfectly fine uh I would not buy this computer just for these AI features but maybe we'll see more down the line recall could end up being useful the real reason to buy this honestly is it's just very fast it's very efficient from what I'm seeing also J judging from the benchmarks we've run especially PC Mark 10 this machine is just inherently very fast uh it scored over 12,000 points in my testing that's faster than any machine we've tested this year and honestly any machine we've ever tested uh at least when it comes to laptops it's 50 to 100% faster than all the machines we've reviewed so far in 2024 so that's pretty impressive for a mobile chip PC Mark doesn't run on Max though so we don't have that direct comparison so I I would really like to see how those kind of hang together in geekbench 6 which does run on Max the Surface Pro chip ends up being faster in multi-threaded mode slower in single core processing mode but tells us that these systems are pretty neck and neck I don't think anybody's going to be buying this computer or the surface laptop expecting to do a lot of heavy duty work but just the fact that the benchmarks themselves are pretty fast that's just a good sign when it comes to 3D support the new qualcom processors also have pretty decent gpus in 3D Mark Wildlife extreme it scored better than any of the Arc systems we saw this year which is not saying much that's integrated Graphics so it's not as fast as AMD gpus or Nvidia gpus but it's perfectly fine for running really light 3D games like 1000x resist or something really simple like animal well that runs perfectly fine if you want to play games on this machine there's always Cloud streaming and from my testing Xbox Cloud streaming launches quickly runs really smoothly I was playing for of horizon 5 and it's practically indistinguishable from actually running on the local systems just don't plan to play any games locally on this thing pricing wise the Surface Pro starts out far better than any previous models for $11,000 you get the Snapdragon X Plus processor that's 10 cores 16 GB of RAM 256 GB of storage so a decent amount of ram normally you'd have to pay a little more to get that RAM and certainly it's more than you get in the base level MacBook Air M3 but of course that price just gets you the tablet then you have to add a keyboard the standard Surface Pro keyboard is $140 it's $10 if you want a slot for the slim pen if you want the slim pen bundled together that's $280 again the flex keyboard is 350 and 450 with the slim pen so it just really adds up I don't know how Microsoft can really think of this thing as a tablet you have to get a keyboard there's not even a tablet mode in Windows 11 anymore so using as a tablet is a little frustrating if you want the higher tier features like the OLED screen and the Snapdragon XLE processor which is 12 cores then you have to spend at least $1,500 our review system cost $1,950 so with tax that is an ultra portable system that is over $2,000 and I think that's just going to be tough for a lot of people to swallow if cost is a concern you just want to be in this ecosystem and play with some nice Microsoft Hardware you're better off looking at the surface laptop which starts at $9.99 actually has a keyboard because it's a laptop and it has the same basic specs too so you just save so much more by going for that that's also a really nice machine it's it just doesn't have an olet option I think I'd feel better about the Surface Pro of Microsoft was actually bundling the Surface Pro keyboard with it I'm sure that would eat into you know the actual money they'd be making from this thing but it may actually encourage more people to buy it too so maybe that would even out and the flex keyboard should be cheaper it's just insanely expensive for what it is it's $50 more than the new iPad pro magic keyboard sure it's wireless but it just feels like a tough sell for a lot of people so that's the Surface Pro I think it is the best surface I've reviewed so far are there are still things about the design of the surface that still annoy me like the kickstand but this is everything I want in a really light Ultra portable machine it is fast it has pretty decent battery life and it has a great screen if you go for the ol option it's just kind of ironic that once Microsoft has kind of mastered the whole windows on arm thing it's already introducing new features that are kind of half-baked and we're still waiting to see them be actually useful so rather than this being a successful tablet that really shows off everything Microsoft can do with surface it's sort of like an disappointment as an AI computer we're waiting for recall to happen the current AI features are just fine don't really change the world or anything don't buy this thing for AI you'd buy it because it is a very fast hybrid tablet it is super thin the hardware is great and it's really power efficient so I think that's really all I could ask for from a surface stay tuned to our channel for more laptop and tablet reviews and be sure to look out for our coverage for the surface laptop as well if you dug this video be sure to like And subscribe [Music]