Surface Pro 8 review: The best Surface for people who love Surface

Microsoft needed three tries to get the correct Surface Pro. The 2nd and 3rd gen models both improved aggressively on the first model’s small screen and poor battery life, coming up with something that was portable enough to be replaced by a laptop but tablet enough. to be unique.

And then things sort of … stopped. Some of the ports have changed over the years – the late 2019 Surface Pro 7 finally got USB-C – but the basic design and accessory compatibility has been exactly the same in every Surface Pro mainline between 2014 and now.

Five-generation accessory interoperability is commendable and useful in some cases, especially if you use multiple generations of Surface Pro tablets in a business and need to be able to swap parts quickly. But some Surface Pro 3 design cues have shown their age over the past two generations: Thunderbolt and / or USB-C ports do almost everything the proprietary Surface Connect port tries to do, and other laptops do. , tablets and convertibles have been reducing their display bezels in recent years to increase screen size.

Which brings us to the Surface Pro 8. The model here remains the same as since Microsoft first got the right Surface: a decent-sized screen, the innards of a decent Ultrabook, and a kickstand and cover. detachable keyboard with sturdy pen holder. But Microsoft did ultimately fine-tune the device in significant ways, including some we’ve seen first in other Surface devices. If you own an older Surface and want to upgrade, or want to buy a Surface to replace the laptop you currently own, this is the place to start.

What’s new?

A renewed design

Microsoft modeled the Surface Pro 8 after the ARM-based Surface Pro X design – the two tablets can even share keyboard covers. The Pro 8 is 0.1 inch (or 2 millimeters) thicker than the Pro X to make room for the additional cooling hardware that an Intel processor needs. But you would need to have the two devices next to each other to really see the difference.

Compared to the Surface Pro 7 and the previous Surface design, the Pro 8 is almost identical in dimensions, but it replaces the 12.3-inch, 2736 × 1824 screen for a 13-inch, 2880 × 1920 panel with the same 267 PPI pixel density and the 3: 2 aspect ratio characteristic of the Surface range. The bezels all around the screen are thinner to allow for a larger screen without increasing the size – the same design trick we’ve seen in just about every phone, tablet, and laptop in recent years.

The Pro 8’s bezels are comparable to the iPad Pro’s on the left and right of the screen, but they’re also thicker at the top and bottom (let’s say I’m still talking about the Pro 8 in landscape mode unless I’m saying the opposite). This presumably leaves room for the webcam and Windows Hello infrared camera above the screen, while still leaving space for the keyboard to rest against the screen without blocking the display.

Another new feature of the Pro 8 is a refresh rate of 120Hz, but the tablet still uses the more typical 60Hz refresh rate. This is likely a decision made to preserve the tablet’s battery life. which is still decent but not great compared to laptops with similar performance. Microsoft also supports an Apple-esque adaptive coloring feature called Adaptive Color, which, like Apple’s True Tone, adapts the color temperature of the surface to the ambient light you are in.

The only bad thing I can say about the display is that unlike Apple’s iPad Pros or MacBook Pros, the Surface Pro 8 still doesn’t support the DCI-P3 color gamut. The display covers 99.4% of the sRGB color gamut and has a respectable contrast ratio of 1211: 1 and peak brightness of 433 nits, but its DCI-P3 coverage averages 82.9%, according to our i1 Display Studio colorimeter.

New ports and accessories

The Surface Pro 7 finally added a USB-C port in 2019, which didn’t completely replace the proprietary Surface Connect port but at least allowed the tablet to be used with USB-C chargers and monitors supporting charges USB power. Surface Pro 8 replaces Surface’s USB-C port and old USB-A port with a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports, which provide faster data transfer speeds for Thunderbolt accessories and enable GPU support external while maintaining compatibility with USB-C things. The Surface Connect port remains on, with all the same capabilities as before.

Losing the USB-A port can still be a bit frustrating for people with an abundance of legacy accessories. On the other hand, I think it’s a trade-off to be able to connect a pair of monitors to the Surface without needing to rely on an expensive docking station or some sort of DisplayPort daisy-chaining. Regardless, Dell’s MacBook line, XPS 13 and 15, and other laptops have already set the all-USB-C precedent. More irritating is the loss of the microSD card reader – you’ll have to rely on an external dongle or, if you’re using a camera, your camera’s USB port to retrieve data from SD cards.

The Pro 8 uses the same keyboard cover as the Surface Pro X – it’s pretty much the same as the old Type Cover, but with room for the Surface Slim Pen or Slim Pen 2. The trackpad is definitely smaller than in laptops like the XPS 13 9310, but it’s as big as it needs to be, and it still looks accurate. The backlit chiclet keyboard is also pleasant to the touch. But as with all types of covers from Microsoft, there is a certain flexibility in the keyboard that you don’t get on a regular laptop with a sturdier base (Lenovo’s detachable ThinkPad X12 still has the keyboard cover the most. more stable than I used with a surface type PC).

The Surface Slim Pen 2 is only a slight improvement over the first generation Slim Pen. It moves the button from the narrow edge of the stylus to the wider, flatter edge. And when used with newer Surface devices, including the Pro 8, Laptop Studio, and Laptop 4, it has a nifty haptic feedback feature that makes it vibrate subtly, like a real pencil or pen does. would if you dragged it out on paper.

I’m not an artist, but for an artist on these devices, I still check Brad Colbow’s YouTube channel. He’s got years of videos on Surface Pro, iPad, and other pencil-enabled devices, and I trust what he has to say about the usefulness of each tablet for people who draw and ink a lot with their tablets. Colbow’s problem with the Surface line – and one the Pro 8 and the new stylus don’t fix – is its use of the Microsoft Pen protocol.

Compared to iPads and tablets equipped with Wacom scanners, Colbow says MPP pens are excellent for palm rejection, making them good writing tools. But they tend to draw somewhat wobbly lines, which can make them more difficult to use for fine line jobs. I can certainly recreate this wavy line effect on the Surface Pro 8 with the new stylus if I don’t draw quickly, although you don’t notice it if you’re writing or doing work involving faster strokes. If you’re already using a Surface and you’re fine with pen performance, the Pro 8 will continue to work great for you. But newer devices don’t respond to complaints people have had about older versions.