Hands-on: The Surface Pro 4 is a design that’s settled down

Microsoft's Surface tablet has always had the same basic idea—take an Ultrabook, put it inside a tablet's body, and then attach a keyboard cover and prop it up with a kickstand to make it approximate a laptop. But the Surface Pro 2 and 3 made substantial tweaks to the way the kickstand and keyboard worked. It was only in the Surface Pro 3 that Microsoft hit upon a kickstand that could be opened as much or little as you wanted, combined with a keyboard cover that was stable enough to use on your lap.

Microsoft apparently realizes that it's hit upon a compromise between tablet and laptop that works well enough for people who want to use the Surface Pro as a laptop, and it has wisely decided not to fix what wasn't broken. The Surface Pro 4 makes many changes, but the keyboard and kickstand work the same way as they did last year, which makes the Surface Pro 4 feel like the most iterative version of the tablet yet (that's not a bad thing).

The first refinement is the slightly larger, slightly higher-resolution screen. It retains the Surface Pro 3's 3:2 aspect ratio but bumps it up to 12.3 inches with a 2736×1824 resolution. The port layout and wireless capabilities are identical—you still get one full-size USB 3.0 port, an SD card slot, a Mini DisplayPort, and the port for the Type Cover, as well as Bluetooth 4.0 and 866Mbps 802.11ac. The one difference you'll spot easily is that the capacitive Windows button is totally gone—you'll need to rely on the onscreen button.

The new Type Cover's keyboard is an improvement over the old one—there's space between the keys now, and the key travel is firmer and more like a standard chiclet keyboard than the slightly larger, wobblier keys in the Surface Pro 3 Type Cover. The layout is the same, it just feels even more like a "regular" keyboard than it did before. The larger multitouch trackpad is also a subtle but welcome improvement given Windows 10's improved trackpad gestures.

For better or worse, the Type Cover still costs an extra $130 on top of what the Surface normally costs. There are two versions: the standard, which includes no fingerprint reader and comes in multiple colors, and a $160 version that includes the fingerprint reader but only comes in black. As Microsoft said, these covers are also compatible with the Surface Pro 3.

We didn't have enough hands-on time with the new Surface Pro 4 pen to appreciate the differences between it and the Surface Pro 3 pen, but we can say that the magnet that docks it to the top of the tablet is a bit mixed. As a place to attach the pen briefly while you pause to touch the screen with your fingers or type, it's perfectly acceptable. But it can be a bit difficult to find the anchor points, and it's easy enough to detach that it will quickly come off if you sling the tablet in a bag.

Internals, performance, and pricing

There are some interesting wrinkles among the different Surface configurations. The base $899 model, for example, uses a Skylake Core m3 processor rather than a full-on 15W Core i5 or or i7, something that will make it marginally lighter (1.69 pounds rather than 1.73) and fanless. Core m3 chips use the same architecture as the Core i5 and Core i7 chips but a lower TDP, which could substantially impact CPU and GPU performance.

The second wrinkle is that the Core i7 versions of the Skylake chips all include Intel's Iris graphics this time around, and in Skylake those chips have gotten much more interesting because they include 64MB of dedicated eDRAM. The difference in GPU performance between i5 and i7 processors used to be a few MHz of clock speed, but eDRAM gives the i7 the potential for significantly improved graphics performance.

The preconfigured Surface Pro 4 models run thusly: a Core m3 model with 128GB of storage and 4GB of RAM will run you $899, including a pen but not a Type Cover. The version with the Core i5, 128GB of storage, and 4GB of RAM costs $999. For $1,299, you step into what we suspect will be the sweet spot for most people: a Core i5 with 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM. And for $1,499, you can get the same device with 16GB of RAM instead.

To get the Core i7 or the 1TB SSD, you'll need to fire up the custom configurator. To limit the number of motherboards it needs to build, though, you don't have infinite CPU, GPU, and storage configurations. The Core m3 machine, for instance, can't be configured with more RAM or larger SSDs. A Core i7 machine with 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM will run you $1,599, but you can't upgrade to 512GB or 1TB of storage. To get those larger SSDs, you'll need to bump it up to 16GB of RAM.

Overall the Surface Pro 4 looks like the best possible version of the Surface Pro 3 design—better screen, better internals, better Type Cover, but same idea. If you weren't into the Surface, this won't change your mind. If you were tempted by a Surface Pro 3, this is a very strong shove that might just push you over the fence. We'll publish our full review of the device in the coming weeks.

Listing image by Andrew Cunningham