Ah, Surface Pro, How I had completely forgotten about your epic journey to get to this point.
Microsoft’s tablet converter is back once again and the excitement is palpable. At least Microsoft’s enthusiasm. We’re told this is the fastest, best, and most AI-intelligent Surface Pro computer ever, all thanks to Copilot+, the company’s suite of AI features built into its Windows operating system, the Snapdragon of Qualcomm and a collective memory that has been forgotten by some of the misguided professionals of yesteryear.
This is my sixth round of Surface Pro review, which includes editions from 2015, 2019, and 2020, to highlight a few. If you don’t want to delve into memories, I’ll give you the highlights: Everything was fine until Microsoft decided to abandon Intel and the x86 architecture for an ARM Qualcomm chip in 2019, and then abandoned Qualcomm in 2020 for its own. ARM silicon (which was developed with Qualcomm as a partner).
The TL;DR about the switch to Qualcomm in 2019 is pretty simple: thanks to the ARM silicon, the computer couldn’t run anything, at least not very well. Windows has supported the x86 architecture for decades, but almost no applications at the time supported ARM-based Windows machines. None of the Adobe Creative Cloud applications would run on it. Users who did not want to work with the Edge browser had to use a very slow, emulated 32-bit version of Chrome. Oh, and it was twice the price of Microsoft’s other Surface product at the time. In my review I predicted that the Pro
With the Surface Pro 2024 (aka 11th Edition), Microsoft has fully returned to the arms of Qualcomm, having embraced the promises of the Snapdragon X, the “It Chip” that will bring AI to the mainstream through Windows. Many other PC makers are also on board: I’ve already reviewed the Asus Vivobook S 15 Copilot+ PC and will be testing more of these Snapdragon-powered machines soon. Everyone wants their piece of the AI pie.
However, please note that although we return to Qualcomm first, an Intel option “for businesses” It’s out there, unpromoted. No one really cares, though, because you’ll need the Qualcomm version if you want to access Copilot+’s PC features, as they don’t support Intel at the moment. So get one for Qualcomm – this is the first time the company’s CPU can run something in Windows that Intel and AMD can’t.
Photography: Christopher Null