Microsoft has been dropping prices on its Surface lineup over the last few months, with the cheapest Surface Pro 7 tablet + keyboard bundle now available for just $599 (which also means prices are dropping elsewhere).
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Even with the Surface Pro 8 now available, this Surface Pro 7 is still a competitive offer, and with over seven iterations to the Surface line of 2-in-1 PCs, that means it should be a highly polished piece of kit well worth the price premium. So is it worth it at this lower price point?
I’ve been using an i5/8GB/256GB Surface Pro 7 with keyboard và Surface Pen for the past few days, và in this article, I’ll giới thiệu my thoughts on it.
Update: In the meantime, Microsoft has updated the Surface lineups with the Surface Pro 8 mã sản phẩm discussed here.
It just so happens that one of the first PCs I reviewed for heckorea.com was the Surface 3. It’s hard to lớn believe a Surface shipped with only 2GB of RAM và an Atom CPU looking at today’s technical requirements, but back in 2015, it was almost enough khổng lồ get you through most basic tasks with Windows 8.1. I eventually sold off the Surface 3 mostly due to lớn its paltry 2GB of RAM making almost any task unnecessarily painful, but I loved the fact that it was so portable & light. With so many generations of Surface 2-in-1s since then, I thought it was time to kiểm tra back in on Microsoft’s Surface line và see how they’re doing.
Surface Pro 7 – first impression
My first impression of the Surface Pro 7 was that not much had changed. Visually, it looks very much like all its predecessors. While it did get a USB-C port (no, no Thunderbolt 3 still, because Microsoft) & a Windows Hello IR camera + fingerprint scanner (on the keyboard), the bezels are still the same chunky size, which gives the Pro 7 a rather “old-school” appearance compared to lớn the ARM-powered Surface Pro X. But, on the inside, the Surface Pro 7 packs an hãng intel 10th generation “Ice Lake” 10nm i5-1035G4 CPU with an Iris Plus integration GPU, 8GB of DDR4 RAM, & a 256 GB SSD. With these improvements, did Microsoft finally manage to lớn make the perfect ultraportable computing device?
Unfortunately, they didn’t make nearly as much progress as I’d hoped. This isn’t a full review, so I’ll try khổng lồ get through the biggest pros and cons in an expedient fashion.
On the good side, the Surface Pro 7 has a beautiful QHD+ screen, it’s light, và typing on the keyboard folio is still excellent. The Windows Hello IR Camera works great, và it didn’t have any issues running my standard office workload of Vivaldi, Slack, Discord, and Word.
The Ice Lake i5 & 8GB of RAM are perfectly suitable for such a workload. In terms of tablet-mode, the Surface Pen is a great bit of tech that magnetically snaps khổng lồ the side of the tablet & integrates very well with Microsoft’s office suite, allowing one to lớn mark-up, draw, or otherwise doodle on documents in a way that adds the mark-up as an overlaid image for compatibility.
It’s not something I used over just commenting in Word as I’ve always done, but it’s cool. Finally, you can now “Swype” with your finger across the keys of the onscreen keyboard in Windows, so it’s now almost as functional as Swyping with your thumb on your phone. All in all, the Surface Pro 7 is more usable than ever in tablet mode (but it’s still far behind PC mode).
So now we can talk about what’s not cool. For starters, the Surface Pro 7 in sunlight, apparently:
Introducing the new Surface Pro 7. Get your work done anywhere.* ** *As long as it’s not in the sun ** and can be done within 4 hours
Battery life và overheating outside are by far my biggest gripes, but there’s a few more annoyances that I feel should be mentioned for anyone thinking of trying a 2-in-1 lượt thích the Surface for the first time. It’s always been very uncomfortable to lớn use the surface pro on your lap in laptop mode, & that still hasn’t changed with time. The fact that the 2-in-1 form factor requires so much depth of space counts against it in a major way for its target demographic of “road warriors”. However, folding the keyboard underneath the surface & propping it up that way with an onscreen keyboard/touch is better than it used to be now that we can “Swype” from one key to lớn the next rather than pecking.
While we’re talking about the keyboard, the fingerprint sensor is quite slow and painful lớn use, and while it’s better than nothing, it reminds me of the old “strip” fingerprint sensors from 2010 in terms of its functionality.
Performance of ice lake is adequate for basic workloads one might use, but on the few occasions you need sustained performance (doing lots of installs when you first get it, for example), it slows down noticeably.
Lastly, I think 12.3″ is a bit small these days, honestly. I would lượt thích to see a more “professional” Surface Pro one day that brings back active cooling, gives us a 14″+ screen, and actually hits 8+ hours of battery life. When that happens, maybe I’ll give the SP lineup another go. For now, this one is going up on eBay.
If interested, these articles go over a couple of other small-screen mini laptops, while this one goes over a selection of the best budget ultrabooks & laptops that you can find in stores these days.
What vì chưng you think about the Surface Pro as a series? vì you have a Surface Pro 7 and swear by it, or did you have similar gripes to lớn me? Let us know in the comments. Xem thêm: Cách Cắt Giấy Hình Chiếc Lá Phong Origami, Cắt Giấy Kirigami Hình Chiếc Lá
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