meet the new Microsoft Surface Pro and the new Surface laptop powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite or plus processors. The first co-pilot plus PCS to land here at CNET. I'm going to go into whether you should upgrade, what I like and dislike, and more importantly demo some of the new co-pilot AI features. There's a lot to talk about so let's get to it. The Surface Pro and laptop are similar but definitely not the same, so while there's some overlap, they're different devices for different users. I'm team Surface Pro because it really is the best example of a Windows detachable 2-in-1, and the laptop, while good, is well, a laptop, and there are lots of them to choose from. The Surface Pro is essentially the same device it's always been: a Windows tablet PC with a built-in kickstand, a detachable keyboard, and a stylus. This one is $1,500 with a Snapdragon X Elite processor, 16 gigs of memory, 512 gigs of storage, and an OLED display. The $1,000

base config comes with a Snapdragon X Plus chip and an LCD display instead of the Olay. And that's just for the device. The Surface Pro Flex keyboard and Pen are an extra $450. The flex part means you can use it attached or remove it and keep using it. If that's not important to you, you can get the regular version for $280. The important thing is neither are automatically bundled and do add to the overall cost. Also, I don't particularly like the pen. The nib feels fine on the display, but the slim design can get uncomfortable after a while and it the end rattles a bit. Having it charge at the top of the keyboard, while handy, leaves less room for the touchpad. It's just that for the price, it should all be better. The OLED display is worth upgrading rating for, though. The default Vivid setting covers 99% P3, and its peak brightness measured 574 nits. With HDR, it went up to 891 nits. Colors do get warmer as you decrease the brightness.

you'll want to turn off auto optimizations for Creative work. Multi-core processing performance is right up there with Intel Core Ultra 7 laptops we've tested, and the M3 MacBook Air, and all the M3 comparisons do make sense because both are based on ARM. To be clear, we've only had these for about a week. While this Qualcomm chip may be comparable to the M3 now, when Apple moves the MacBook Air to an M4, it might slip behind. We don't know right now, though we're seeing great results from it, and more importantly, the performance and the battery life are great, with roughly 13 hours in our tests on the Surface Pro. This really is a nice compact package. Though the hardware itself is beautiful, it feels great, nice, and solid in your hands. Having a 13-inch tablet with a desktop operating system with this OLED display is a better option than a mobile OS for getting work done. I do wish the keyboard and pen were included for $1,500, but they've always been add-ons.

at least you're getting top performance in battery life. Now, if you do need better battery life, go with the Surface Laptop. The 13.8-inch model we tested ran for just under 20 hours, and with the same competitive performance as the Surface Pro. The configuration we tested is $2,000 with the elite chip, 32 gigs of memory, and a 1TB SSD. However, and this goes for both the Pro and the Laptop, these aren't for gaming or for demanding content creation. The Qualcomm Adreno GPU is roughly on par with Intel's integrated Iris graphics, so you could play some less demanding games, and it'll also be okay for cloud gaming, but that's where it should probably stop. Aside from performance, you're getting a really well-built laptop. The metal body is stiff and solid, the keyboard and touchpad are comfortable and responsive. There is no OLED display option, but the LCD touchscreen is good and covers 96% of P3 at its default Vivid setting. It doesn't support pen input, though.

stick with the pro if you need that. And again, the processing performance is strong. Now let's talk about the NPU, the Neural Processing Unit, which is there to help with AI tasks and what you can expect with a Co-Pilot Plus PC. Co-Pilot, as an AI chatbot, can do the thing other chatbots can do, and it's easy to launch from the taskbar or with the Co-Pilot key. But there are other AI-powered features that are baked in for you to use. One of those, called Recall, has been delayed over privacy concerns. It's designed to keep track of what you do so you can use Co-Pilot to find things quickly. But Microsoft decided to hold off on releasing it for now. That leaves a few other AI tools like Restyle, which can take photos and recreate them. So for example, I've got this nice abstract here. I'm just going to open it up in the Photos app, go to edit it, and then select AI. And it gives me a bunch of options to restyle the image.

have, and what I'm going to do is click on fantasy. Here, there's another option, and it scrambles it up and makes it sort of fantasy, but as more as you slide this creativity slider down, it recreates that image, giving you more and more in this case of fantasy. I'll switch over this is surrealism, and as you can see as I click them, the npu kicks in to help with the processing so you can see I played around with it for a little bit. Um, this is the impressionist selection in restyle, and it does exactly what it's supposed to. It took my original abstract image and restyled it into an impressionist sort of painting. Um, if you need help inspiration, that's what this is going to be good for. Now let's move on to Studio Effects that can be used for things like video chats like Zoom or teams. Uh, the best way to demo that is to open up the camera app, and immediately there's this little icon here gives you a whole list of Windows Studio Effects.

like automatic framing, which you can see, will zoom in on me. And then, if I move a little bit, it should go out and reset and follow me around. Um, and then you've got portrait light, which will adjust the lighting on your face, eye contact, uh, both standard and teleprompter, which will, um, basically track your eyes so that it always looks like you're looking at the camera. Um, we haven't gotten it to quite work right, but, um, maybe in the future it'll iron itself out. Then you've also got background effects like blur. You can see that's a, it's a portrait blur or a standard blur, which basically, the difference between my room behind me looks okay, um, but, uh, the other one is my room behind me is a hot mess, and I don't want anybody on the camera to see what is behind me. Also, if you didn't notice, I've got the, uh, task manager running here in the corner, and you can see the npu is what's doing all of the processing here, so that's the key thing.

with the mpu, it's going to take over doing these things so that your uh CPU and GPU don't have to do it. Anyway, you get the idea. There are AI tools you can use, and the mpu will take the load off the CPU and GPU, speeding up overall performance and extending battery life. So just to wrap up, here's what I like and don't like about the Surface Pro and Surface Laptop. For the Pro, you get an excellent Ola display, very good battery life, great mpu performance at the moment, and competitive CPU performance. What I don't like is paying up to $450 for a keyboard and Pen. That's just kind of meh. So for the Surface Laptop, you get up to 20 hours of battery life, which is great. A nice keyboard and touchpad, really good build quality, and again, strong npu and CPU performance. No option for an OLED is disappointing, but really the rest of the package is remarkably solid. The Surface Pro and Laptop are the first of many co-pilot plus PCS rolling out this year.

so you'll have a lot to choose from. Beyond these two, and if you're indifferent about the AI aspects right now, at least you'll know you're getting a fast laptop with a long battery life. Regardless, you can read more about these surface devices and other co-pilot plus laptops at cet.com, and let me know in the comments what you think, or if I missed anything you're curious about. As always, I appreciate you watching. Thanks, and uh, you'll see me when you see me.

Microsoft Surface Pro and Surface Laptop Review: Wow, Qualcomm Finally Has a Winner

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