Last year, Microsoft switched its entire Surface lineup to Snapdragon X Elite, bringing its entire lineup into the world of ARM chips and their superb battery life (not to mention their compatibility issues for professional applications). While these chips have many qualities, they are relatively expensive. A year later, it's time for the Redmond company to offer two more affordable machines around 1000 euros, this time with a Snapdragon X Plus chip.
These are the 13-inch Surface Laptop, a pure-play PC, and the 12-inch Surface Pro, a 2-in-1 tablet, both obviously running Windows 11. In addition to the price, both machines have the advantage of bringing the two machines to a much more compact format, since the previous Surface Laptops went up to 13.8 and 15 inches diagonally for example.
We were able to get our hands on these two devices, here are our first impressions.
Careful designs
Let's start with the Surface Pro, the famous 2-in-1 tablet. The first point that struck us was the comfort offered by the keyboard. It has two different coatings, one in Alcantara on the bottom, relatively textured, and the other keyboard side very smooth and soft. Typing is soft and quiet. The tablet integrates a 60Hz LCD screen which can inevitably seem a bit slow when opening or closing a window. The borders around the screen are rather conspicuous, but no more so than on an iPad. The kickstand at the back is still very practical, as it is very rigid and allows you to finely adjust the opening angle.
As for the 13-inch Surface Laptop, we were rather struck by its very controlled minimalist design. This small aluminum laptop, with its two USB-C ports on the right, its single USB-A port on the left accompanied by an HDMI port, light and elegant, frankly excited us. The kind of device that we can easily see ourselves slipping into a backpack without having to force to carry it. The keyboard also seemed very smooth to us to type. A machine that seems well suited to taking notes in a student context for example.
Price and availability
The 12-inch Surface Pro is available at 979 euros with a 16GB RAM + 256GB storage configuration. The 13-inch Surface Laptop is sold for 1099 euros.
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