New Microsoft Surface Pro

Microsoft's New Surface Pro Has No Surprises—And That's Great

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

By Eric Limer

Today in Shanghai, Microsoft announced its new Surface Pro. It's the fifth model of the tablet PC with laptop brains, but pointedly not the Surface Pro 5. That may seem like a slight (and slightly annoying) naming detail, but it indicates something noteworthy: Microsoft is just about done tweaking the form and format of the Surface Pro line. The Surface Pro is all grown up.

From the outside, the new Surface Pro looks almost identical to its Pro 4 forebear. It's got the same display (12.3-inch, 2736 x 1824 pixels), the same thickness and weight (8.5mm and a little over a pound and a half).The one notable change is a new kickstand, which now extends to an extra deep 165 degrees, compared to the maximum 150 on the Pro 4. Other than that, you'd be forgiven for confusing the two at a glance.



And that's because the updates are on the inside. The latest Pro comes with a choice of Intel's latest 7th generation chips which, on top of additional computing horsepower, offer efficiency that helps give the new Pro an estimated 13.5 hours of battery life, up from 9 hours on the Pro 4. Real-life use tends to burn out any gadget faster than its stated battery life by a few hours, but it seems there's a good chance the latest Pro might actually get you through the working day on a single charge.

This sort of incremental, internal updating is a common endgame for a good gadget that has found its form-factor footing, and the Surface Pro took a rough road to get here. The first Pro, launched in 2012, was a 2-pound, half-inch thick monster of a slate, with a tiny 10-inch screen, miniature keyboard, and single-position kickstand that made it all but impossible to use like an actual laptop.

It wasn't until the Surface Pro 3 that the gadget widened (and thinned), got a much-improved kickstand, and started throwing its weight at replacing the Macbook Air instead of being a weird tiny-tablet PC. From there, it's mostly been a matter of refinement, with other variations of the Surface tablet line mostly dying out along the way, from the ill-fated Surface RT with its gimped version of Windows 8, to the Surface Mini tablet rumored to have been axed only shortly before its release. The result is a unique and useful bit of tech, enough like a laptop to take over for one, and with tablet tricks to sweeten the deal.

While the Surface Pro itself may mostly be set in stone, there's still room for upgrades for its optional accessories. The Type Cover—Microsoft's impressively thin-yet-still-comfortable keyboard—has been updated with some minor refinements as well as the soft, felt-like covering Microsoft is using on its new Surface Laptop. The new Pro also debuts with a new version of the Surface Pen, which can now detect and support degrees of tilt, an extra layer of control that can be used for shading and similar, subtle detailing in apps that support it. On top of that, the pen's sensitivity has quadrupled from 1024 levels of pressure detection to 4096.

But at its core, it seems the Surface Pro will be remaining mostly the same from here on out, and that's good news. Because after a patchy five years of finding its legs, the Surface Pro is finally fantastic.