Microsoft has revamped its Surface laptop and tablet lineup with a smaller version of the Surface Pro as well as a revised Surface Laptop 13in. It’s the Surface Pro 12in that pops the eyes though, with a smaller screen size at 12in and crucially, a lighter weight of 686g meaning it’s the lightest Surface device yet.
Indeed, it’s even lighter than 2019’s Surface Pro X. In other words, this Surface Pro is more tablet-like than it’s ever been before. The Surface Laptop 13in is also lighter than other Surface Laptops previously at 1.22kg).
The new devices are competitively priced and start from $799 for Surface Pro 12in and $899 for Surface Laptop 13in. Both will be available from 20 May.
Annoyingly you still need to buy the keyboard and stylus separately for the Surface Pro 12in , but that’s no different to Apple’s iPad of course. Because of the size, the Surface Slim Pen doesn’t fit into the keyboard for storage, but instead there is an indent on the back of the device instead. An encouragement to buy if ever there was one.
Both are Copilot+ PCs as you’d expect and both are running eight core Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus processors – Intel seems to be very much out of favour for mid-range thin-and-light PCs at this moment in time. I guess it’s possible that the Surface Laptop might get an Intel variant, but surely it would be here at launch if so.
The X Plus dates from early September last year and is clearly a choice to bring down the price of these new models. Last year’s Surface Pro and Surface Laptop utilised the Snapdragon X Elite chips which have the same AI capabilities as the X Plus but 12 core designs instead. 16GB of memory and 256GB of storage is also included as standard, though you can naturally increase this.
Microsoft says the Snapdragon X Plus offers a 30 percent performance uplift compared to 2022’s Intel Core i5-powered Surface Laptop. It has also compared the chip favourably to the MacBook Air M3, but of course that chip is no longer the most powerful inside the MacBook Air.
