Surface Pro 8 review: the best of both worlds

Key Takeaways

microsoft has been selling surface pro models with basically the same design since 2015. if you put the last four generations of surface pro devices next to each other they look basically identical but other laptops have gotten significantly nicer looking during that period of time and we've been begging microsoft for years to make the surface pro look like a modern flagship computer and what do you know microsoft finally did it this is the surface pro 8. so take a look at the surface pro 8 and you're not going to see a lot of the surface pro 7. what it does look like is the surface pro x the super thin super light and just gorgeous device that microsoft released in 2019 the pro 8 has the same powerful specs as the pro 7 but it borrows a number of physical features from the pro x the result is one heck of a nice computer and one that i'm glad microsoft has finally made so the biggest thing is borrowed is the screen the new service pro 8 has a 2880 by 1920 13 inch display which means it's almost an inch bigger than the pro 7. microsoft also made the side bezels much thinner now the pro 8 is also meant to function as a tablet and you still need something to hold on to when you're using it as a tablet so the top and bottom bezels are still somewhat chunky but the clever thing about this design is that the keyboard cover actually hides the bottom bezel entirely when you're using the pro 8 as a laptop so it's really the best of both worlds the other new thing about this screen is that it has a 120 hertz refresh rate meaning the screen can show you up to 120 frames per second so this is more common on gaming rigs so most productivity and business laptops have 60 hertz displays but even if you're just doing work in office and chrome it totally makes a difference and once you've used 120hz you won't want to go back the cursor is nicer to look as you drag it around the screen there's less lag when you're writing with the pen and the scrolling is so much smoother whether you're blazing through a google doc or a very long verge article it just makes the whole windows experience slightly nicer to look at especially if you're using the touch screen now the downside of 120 hertz refresh rate is that it negatively impacts battery life so if you want to save power you can also use the pro 8 at the regular 60 hertz rate so when i was using the pro 8 for my standard office workload with the screen at 60hz i was seeing close to eight and a half hours to a charge well i was only getting around seven with the screen at 120 hertz windows 11 is supposed to have a feature called dynamic refresh rate which will automatically swap a device between 120hz and 60hz depending on the app you're using but that's not a feature that the pro 8 currently supports and microsoft hasn't given us a timeline for if or when we'll see it here so for the foreseeable future you need to dig into advanced display settings to change the screen's refresh rate and that's kind of a pain and unless you want to be doing that multiple times a day you're going to be choosing between smooth scrolling and an extra hour of battery so please microsoft please give us dynamic refresh rate soon but the screen isn't the only thing that's new so in addition to the dual farfield studio microphones the pro 8 has a 10 megapixel rear camera that can also shoot 4k video for zoom calls there's also a 5 megapixel front-facing camera which shoots in up to 1080p speaking of zoom calls the two watt speakers sound pretty reasonable you can actually hear the bass the keyboard cover is made of carbon fiber which makes it stiffer and sturdier than surface pro type covers we've seen in the past it's not quite the typing experience you'll get from a full-size laptop but it's certainly the best detachable keyboard that i've ever used the pro 8 borrows a couple other things from the pro x so there's a removable ssd which you can pop out under the kickstand there's also a handy place to put microsoft's surface slim pen too you just pull out the keyboard deck and it lives and charges in a little slot against the screen and there are finally two usbc thunderbolt 4 ports on the surface pro in addition to a headphone jack now this slim pen 2 comes with a built-in haptic motor which you uses to make you feel like you're actually writing on physical paper while you draw or take notes even with the intensity cranked all the way up the vibrations were pretty subtle i could only feel them if i was paying close attention also only a few apps currently support this haptic feedback so i'd look forward to seeing microsoft expand it so our test model has the intel core i7 1185 g7 which is one of the most powerful chips that intel makes for thin and light laptops this chip is in some of the best laptops on the market from companies like dell and lenovo and it's probably more power than the typical surface pro user actually needs my model also has 16 gigabytes of ram and it's fast i was regularly running video calls over 15 to 16 chrome tabs a couple different apps and even some streaming it could handle whatever i threw it without the tiniest amount of slow down or heat now that's about the bare minimum for this processor it's a chip meant for powerful portable devices so it would be very concerning if things were like freezing all over the place but what's impressive here isn't just the pro 8 speed it's the fact that it's able to maintain that speed for long periods of time so part of the reason microsoft put an arm chip in the pro x rather than a big and fancy chip like this is that the x was so thin and light that microsoft couldn't fit a fan inside now when computers can't cool their processors with fans they throttle them that is they bump down the chip's performance so it doesn't fry itself which translates to your apps slowing down but the reason that surface pro 8 has such a powerful chip is that it does have a fan and that fan did a good job here the chassis never got hot even when i was pushing it through pretty intense loads and i was able to do that for hours at a time in the past few years i can't tell you how many people i've talked to who weren't sure whether to buy the pro 7 or the pro x they wanted the pro 7's powerful processor but they hated the way it looked and they loved the pro x's design but it wasn't powerful enough for the things they wanted to do and it was hard for me to recommend either device to those people because they both came with serious compromises the pro 8 is the computer that those people have been waiting for it combines the pro x's flagship design with the pro 7's flagship hardware and for the first time i think the surface proline has a real mainstream flagship on its hands it's finally service pro that's well pro with all that said none of this comes cheap so surface pro 8 models start at 10.99 but that's without the keyboard cover which of course you're going to buy so the keyboard adds 179 to the price meaning you're going to pay at least 12.79 for the base model and then if you want the slim pen 2 that's another 100 bringing that total to 13.79 and that base model has a core i5 just 128 gigabytes of storage and 8 gigabytes of ram but then you know many people probably want a bigger ssd and more memory for the work that they're doing so if you want my specked up test model alongside the keyboard and stylus you'll be paying 18.79 that's a lot of money for these specs guys and well i don't have major problems with surface pro 8 that price tag does limit who's gonna be able to buy this sure it's got one of the most powerful processors you can find in an ultra portable device and it crams it into a beautiful chassis that's unbelievably thin and light but most people will be able to find just as much power and better battery life for several hundred dollars cheaper in a macbook pro or a dell xps 13. again that doesn't make a pro 8 a bad device but the people it's going to be the best device for are going to be the people who are willing to pay a premium specifically for the surface pro form factor that is something as thin and light as a tablet but with the power of a full-size computer so in the past that kind of device hasn't really existed using a windows tablet this portable meant compromising on performance but this year you're not sacrificing that performance you're just sacrificing some extra cash hey guys if you enjoyed this review make sure you go to theverge.com where we also have reviews of the surface laptop studio and the surface go 3 and also make sure you like and subscribe