I do wish there were a headphone jack, but at least Microsoft includes two USB-C ports (compared to, say, the iPad Pro’s single one). LTE support is available, the webcam is among the best on a laptop or tablet, and the removable SSD is a nice touch should I ever want to opt for a bigger drive. The speakers are the best of any of Microsoft’s tablets (including the Surface Book 3, which has speakers in the tablet portion). The screen is excellent, with vibrant, accurate colors and good contrast.

The conical pen nib also feels more natural when tilting the pen for shading or bold strokes, but not constantly losing the pen is definitely the best part.Įverything else feels polished too. It’s not as fancy-looking as the standard Surface Pen, which is available in multiple colors, but frankly, I think it feels a little better. The pen itself is pretty nice to use too, with a soft-touch finish and great pressure and tilt sensitivity. It fits a larger screen into a footprint similar to the Pro 7, while allowing enough purchase to avoid most accidental touches in tablet mode. The X model slims the bezels, makes the chassis thinner, and is lighter than comparably sized predecessors. Unlike the Surface Pro 7, the Surface Pro X finally refreshed the design of Microsoft’s OG form factor. The best-designed Surface, especially as a tablet After using the Surface Pro X full-time for a couple of months, here are some of my favorite things about it - and some of the growing pains of using Windows 10 on ARM.

Ironically, but perhaps not surprisingly, it was Apple’s success with its own transition to ARM-powered devices that convinced me to really try out the Surface Pro X as my primary PC for a while.Īnd you know what? It’s actually been pretty neat. So I’d play with the Pro X - the marginally updated SQ2 version - every once in a while, but my heart was never fully in it.Īnd then Apple released its M1-powered MacBooks. I’ve been using a Surface Book since the original, and I’ve always considered myself a power user, so the idea of adopting an ARM-powered PC that couldn’t run all of the apps I might need seemed unconscionable. I put off writing my Surface Pro X review for a while.

Surface pro x sq2