Microsoft Surface Pro and Surface Laptop Review - Wow, Qualcomm Finally Has a Winner

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enmeet the new Microsoft Surface Pro and the new Surface laptop powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite or plus processors the first co-pilot plus PCS to land here at CNET I'm going to go into whether you should upgrade what I like and dislike and more importantly demo some of the new co-pilot AI features there's a lot to talk about so let's get to it the Surface Pro and laptop are similar but definitely not the same so while there's some overlap there different devices for different users I'm team Surface Pro because it really is the best example of a Windows detachable 2in one and the laptop while good is well a laptop and there are lots of them to choose from the Surface Pro is essentially the same device it's always been a Windows tablet PC with a built-in kickstand a detachable keyboard and a stylus this one is $1,500 with a Snapdragon X Elite processor 16 gigs of memory 512 gigs of storage and an OLED display the $1,000 base config comes with a Snapdragon X Plus chip and an LCD display instead of the Olay and that's just for the device the Surface Pro Flex keyboard and Pen are an extra $450 the flex part means you can use it attached or remove it and keep using it if that's not important to you you can get the regular version for $280 the the important thing is neither are automatically bundled and do add to the overall cost also I don't particularly like the pen the nib feels fine on the display but the slim design can get uncomfortable after a while and it the end rattles a bit having it charge at the top of the keyboard while handy leaves less room for the touchpad it's just that for the price it should all be better the OLED display is worth upgrading rating for though the default Vivid setting covers 99% P3 and its peak brightness measured 574 knits with HDR it went up to 891 nits colors do get warmer as you decrease the brightness so you'll want to turn off auto optimizations for Creative work multi-core processing performance is right up there with Intel Core Ultra 7 laptops we've tested and the M3 MacBook Air and all the m three comparisons do make sense because both are based on arm and to be clear we've only had these for about a week while this Qualcomm chip may be comparable to the M3 now when Apple moves the backbook air to an M4 it might slip behind we don't know right now though we're seeing great results from it and more importantly the performance and the battery life are great with roughly 13 hours in our tests on the Surface Pro this really is a nice compact package though the hardware itself uh is beautiful it feels great nice and solid in your hands having a 13-in tablet with a desktop operating system with this OLED display is a better option than a mobile OS for getting work done I do wish the keyboard and Pen were included for $1,500 but they've always been addon and at least you're getting top performance in battery life now if you do need better battery life go with the surface laptop the 13.8 in model we tested ran for just under 20 hours and with the same competitive performance as the Surface Pro the configuration we tested is $2,000 with the elite chip 32 gigs of memory and a 1 tbte SSD however and this goes for both the pro and the laptop these aren't for gaming or for demanding content creation the Qualcomm adrino GPU is roughly on par with Intel's integrated arc graphics so you could play some less demanding games and it'll also be okay for cloud gaming but that's where it should probably stop aside from performance you're getting a really well-built laptop the metal body is stiff and solid the keyboard and touchpad are comfortable and responsive there is no OLED display option but the LCD touchscreen is good and covers 96% of P3 at its default Vivid setting it doesn't support pen input though so stick with the pro if you need that and again the processing performance is strong now let's talk about the npu the neural Processing Unit which is there to help with AI tasks and what you can expect with a co-pilot plus PC co-pilot as an AI chatbot can do the thing other chat Bots can do and it's easy to launch from the taskbar or with the co-pilot key but there are other AI powered features that are baked in for you to use one of those called recall uh has been delayed over privacy concerns it's designed to keep track of what you do so you can use co-pilot to find things quickly but Microsoft decided to hold off on releasing it for now that leaves a few other AI tools like restyle which can take photos and recreate them so for example I've got this nice abstract here I'm just going to open it up in the photos app um go to edit it and then select Ai and it gives me a bunch of options to restyle the image that I have and what I'm going to do is click on fantasy here there's another option and it scrambles it up and makes it sort of fantasy but as more as you slide this creativity slider down it recreates that image giving you more and more in this case of fantasy I'll switch over this is surrealism and as you can see as I click them the npu kicks in to help with the processing so you can see I played around with it for a little bit um this is the impressionist uh selection in restyle and it does exactly what it's supposed to it took my original abstract image and restyled it into an impressionist sort of painting um if you need help inspiration that's what this is going to be good for now let's move on to Studio Effects that can be used for things like video chats like Zoom or teams uh best way to demo that is to open up the camera app and immediately there's this little icon here gives you a whole list of Windows Studio Effects like automatic framing which you can see will zoom in on me and then if I move a little bit it should go out and reset and follow me around um and then you've got portrait light which will adjust the lighting on your face eye contact uh both standard and teleprompter which will um basically track your eyes so that it always looks like you're looking at the camera um we haven't gotten it to quite work right but um maybe in the future it'll iron itself out then you've also got background effects like blur you can see that's a it's a portrait blur or a standard blur which basically the difference between my room behind me looks okay um but uh the other one is my room behind me is a hot mess and I don't want anybody on the camera to see what is behind me also if you didn't notice I've got the uh task manager running here in the corner and you can see the npu is what's doing all of the processing here so that's the key thing with the mpu it's going to take over doing these things so that your uh CPU and GPU don't have to do it anyway you get the idea there are AI tools you can use and the mpu will take the load off the CPU and GPU speeding up overall performance and extending battery life so just to wrap up here's what I like and don't like about the Surface Pro and surface laptop for the pro you get an excellent Ola display very good battery life great mpu performance at the moment and competitive CPU performance what I don't like is paying up to $450 for a keyboard and Pen that's just kind of meh so for the surface laptop you get up to 20 hours of battery life which is great A nice keyboard and touchpad really good build quality and again strong npu and CPU performance no option for an OLED is disappointing but really the rest of the package is remarkably solid the Surface Pro and laptop are the first of many co-pilot plus PCS rolling out this year so you'll have a lot to choose from Beyond these two and if you're indifferent about the AI aspects right now at least you'll know you're getting a fast laptop with a long battery life regardless you can read more about these surface devices and other co-pilot plus laptops at cet.com and let me know in the comments what you think or if I missed anything you're curious about as always I appreciate you watching thanks and uh you'll see me when you see memeet the new Microsoft Surface Pro and the new Surface laptop powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite or plus processors the first co-pilot plus PCS to land here at CNET I'm going to go into whether you should upgrade what I like and dislike and more importantly demo some of the new co-pilot AI features there's a lot to talk about so let's get to it the Surface Pro and laptop are similar but definitely not the same so while there's some overlap there different devices for different users I'm team Surface Pro because it really is the best example of a Windows detachable 2in one and the laptop while good is well a laptop and there are lots of them to choose from the Surface Pro is essentially the same device it's always been a Windows tablet PC with a built-in kickstand a detachable keyboard and a stylus this one is $1,500 with a Snapdragon X Elite processor 16 gigs of memory 512 gigs of storage and an OLED display the $1,000 base config comes with a Snapdragon X Plus chip and an LCD display instead of the Olay and that's just for the device the Surface Pro Flex keyboard and Pen are an extra $450 the flex part means you can use it attached or remove it and keep using it if that's not important to you you can get the regular version for $280 the the important thing is neither are automatically bundled and do add to the overall cost also I don't particularly like the pen the nib feels fine on the display but the slim design can get uncomfortable after a while and it the end rattles a bit having it charge at the top of the keyboard while handy leaves less room for the touchpad it's just that for the price it should all be better the OLED display is worth upgrading rating for though the default Vivid setting covers 99% P3 and its peak brightness measured 574 knits with HDR it went up to 891 nits colors do get warmer as you decrease the brightness so you'll want to turn off auto optimizations for Creative work multi-core processing performance is right up there with Intel Core Ultra 7 laptops we've tested and the M3 MacBook Air and all the m three comparisons do make sense because both are based on arm and to be clear we've only had these for about a week while this Qualcomm chip may be comparable to the M3 now when Apple moves the backbook air to an M4 it might slip behind we don't know right now though we're seeing great results from it and more importantly the performance and the battery life are great with roughly 13 hours in our tests on the Surface Pro this really is a nice compact package though the hardware itself uh is beautiful it feels great nice and solid in your hands having a 13-in tablet with a desktop operating system with this OLED display is a better option than a mobile OS for getting work done I do wish the keyboard and Pen were included for $1,500 but they've always been addon and at least you're getting top performance in battery life now if you do need better battery life go with the surface laptop the 13.8 in model we tested ran for just under 20 hours and with the same competitive performance as the Surface Pro the configuration we tested is $2,000 with the elite chip 32 gigs of memory and a 1 tbte SSD however and this goes for both the pro and the laptop these aren't for gaming or for demanding content creation the Qualcomm adrino GPU is roughly on par with Intel's integrated arc graphics so you could play some less demanding games and it'll also be okay for cloud gaming but that's where it should probably stop aside from performance you're getting a really well-built laptop the metal body is stiff and solid the keyboard and touchpad are comfortable and responsive there is no OLED display option but the LCD touchscreen is good and covers 96% of P3 at its default Vivid setting it doesn't support pen input though so stick with the pro if you need that and again the processing performance is strong now let's talk about the npu the neural Processing Unit which is there to help with AI tasks and what you can expect with a co-pilot plus PC co-pilot as an AI chatbot can do the thing other chat Bots can do and it's easy to launch from the taskbar or with the co-pilot key but there are other AI powered features that are baked in for you to use one of those called recall uh has been delayed over privacy concerns it's designed to keep track of what you do so you can use co-pilot to find things quickly but Microsoft decided to hold off on releasing it for now that leaves a few other AI tools like restyle which can take photos and recreate them so for example I've got this nice abstract here I'm just going to open it up in the photos app um go to edit it and then select Ai and it gives me a bunch of options to restyle the image that I have and what I'm going to do is click on fantasy here there's another option and it scrambles it up and makes it sort of fantasy but as more as you slide this creativity slider down it recreates that image giving you more and more in this case of fantasy I'll switch over this is surrealism and as you can see as I click them the npu kicks in to help with the processing so you can see I played around with it for a little bit um this is the impressionist uh selection in restyle and it does exactly what it's supposed to it took my original abstract image and restyled it into an impressionist sort of painting um if you need help inspiration that's what this is going to be good for now let's move on to Studio Effects that can be used for things like video chats like Zoom or teams uh best way to demo that is to open up the camera app and immediately there's this little icon here gives you a whole list of Windows Studio Effects like automatic framing which you can see will zoom in on me and then if I move a little bit it should go out and reset and follow me around um and then you've got portrait light which will adjust the lighting on your face eye contact uh both standard and teleprompter which will um basically track your eyes so that it always looks like you're looking at the camera um we haven't gotten it to quite work right but um maybe in the future it'll iron itself out then you've also got background effects like blur you can see that's a it's a portrait blur or a standard blur which basically the difference between my room behind me looks okay um but uh the other one is my room behind me is a hot mess and I don't want anybody on the camera to see what is behind me also if you didn't notice I've got the uh task manager running here in the corner and you can see the npu is what's doing all of the processing here so that's the key thing with the mpu it's going to take over doing these things so that your uh CPU and GPU don't have to do it anyway you get the idea there are AI tools you can use and the mpu will take the load off the CPU and GPU speeding up overall performance and extending battery life so just to wrap up here's what I like and don't like about the Surface Pro and surface laptop for the pro you get an excellent Ola display very good battery life great mpu performance at the moment and competitive CPU performance what I don't like is paying up to $450 for a keyboard and Pen that's just kind of meh so for the surface laptop you get up to 20 hours of battery life which is great A nice keyboard and touchpad really good build quality and again strong npu and CPU performance no option for an OLED is disappointing but really the rest of the package is remarkably solid the Surface Pro and laptop are the first of many co-pilot plus PCS rolling out this year so you'll have a lot to choose from Beyond these two and if you're indifferent about the AI aspects right now at least you'll know you're getting a fast laptop with a long battery life regardless you can read more about these surface devices and other co-pilot plus laptops at cet.com and let me know in the comments what you think or if I missed anything you're curious about as always I appreciate you watching thanks and uh you'll see me when you see me\n"