Hands on: Microsoft’s Surface Pro thankfully gives up on ‘lapability’
For years, reviews of Microsoft’s Surface Pro came with a big caveat. They were light, they were lovely — and the Windows tablet also shipped with a thin kickstand that sliced into your thighs.
Microsoft’s latest Surface Pro 2024 (aka the Surface Pro 11th edition) solves that problem with the Flex Keyboard, a detachable, wireless keyboard that seems immensely obvious in retrospect.
Microsoft’s Surface Pro is a Copilot+ PC, and our eventual review will probably lean hard into how fast the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip is. To answer the immediate question: yes, the Surface Pro feels fast and snappy, evidence that Qualcomm is telling the truth about the speed of the Snapdragon X Elite. But we can’t truly know how fast it is until we try out a bunch of applications — and yes, those that we did try felt as fast as a Core Ultra. We did try to run benchmarks, and Microsoft shut that effort down.
(The full specs of the new Microsoft Surface Pro are listed in our original story.)
So when I did go hands-on with the Surface Pro, I focused on three things: what the hardware felt like, what the AI experiences felt like, and if the overall Windows on Arm OS felt slow, clunky, or different. I’ve written separate hands-ons of Windows Recall and Microsoft Paint’s Cocreator, two of the new highlight AI features of Copilot+ PCs. And as for the last question, nope — it felt like Windows.