Review: Microsoft Surface Pro X (2020)

I have to confess that I was wrong in my original review of the Microsoft Surface Pro X. Not about my 3/10 rating of the product. I stand by that. What I was wrong about was my brazen prediction that the product would be discontinued in a year. I guess that’s a testament to what you can do with a $1.6 trillion market cap.

For those who don’t remember the original Surface Pro X—and I don’t blame you—the big news about this device, the “X” factor if you will, is that it did not run on an Intel chip but rather on Microsoft’s own silicon, an ARM CPU designed with Qualcomm called the SQ1. As I noted in my recent review of the new Mac Mini, Microsoft isn’t alone in pushing out its own microchips. It’s become downright fashionable these days for tech companies to dabble in chip design.

The problem with the original Surface Pro X—one of the big problems, anyway—wasn’t the CPU itself. It’s that the software wasn’t even close to being in place to support it. Yes, Windows and Office had been updated for the new chip, but not much else. The “Pro X,” as it’s known in Redmond, was really at its best when running a web browser. And for that, Microsoft wanted you to pay up to $1,500.

Well, the second generation of the Surface Pro X is here, and for all intents and purposes it is really the same computer as before. Microsoft has made some cosmetic upgrades, including a new platinum color option and an updated keyboard/stylus combo (though the bundle still costs an extra $205). And the signature 3-GHz SQ1 CPU has been upgraded to the 3.15-GHz SQ2.

Base pricing hasn’t changed, though the top-end model (with 16 GB RAM and a 512-GB SSD) now tops out at a heady $1,800. Key specs, including weight (1.7 pounds), thickness (8 millimeters), a dazzling 13-inch touchscreen (2880 x 1920 pixels), an integrated gigabit LTE modem, and a pair of USB-C ports used for connectivity, haven’t changed either. Curiously, Microsoft now boasts “all-day battery life” on the Pro X, though after testing it three times on my video rundown test, my review unit only eked out seven hours and 15 minutes of life, a mere 45 minutes more than the 2019 model. You’d have to kill the brightness to nearly nothing to approach the promised 15-hour life span.

Just as I was completing this review, Microsoft finally delivered a beta version of its x64 emulator, available for Windows Insiders members. This is a huge step that’s been (too) long in the making, finally arriving a full year after the launch of the SQ1 chip.

After experimenting with the emulator, I found that it’s decidedly still a work in progress. Many x64 apps still refused to run, and those that did run were extremely slow. Also, if you download an app like Chrome, you’re still pushed to install the 32-bit version; it took some hunting to find a 64-bit version—and I found that it unfortunately was considerably slower than the 32-bit option, running web tests at roughly half the 32-bit browser’s speed. All told, a majority of applications that I was unable to run last year still wouldn’t run this year, though I was able to eke out a few new benchmark scores, none of which were remotely impressive.

The good news is that I did not experience the massive stability problems I ran into in 2019, and this year I didn’t encounter a single crash during well over a week of testing. Baby steps.

Meanwhile, the even better news (if you’re a Pro X owner, that is) is that the industry is—slowly, oh so slowly—coming to terms with having to develop for yet another microprocessor platform. Adobe Lightroom now runs natively on the SQ1, and a beta of Adobe Photoshop is also available, with a shipping version slated for 2021. Also, Microsoft’s revamped version of its Edge browser offers solid web-app performance, besting 32-bit Chrome-on-emulator performance by a factor of nearly three to one. Microsoft says that it’s put a lot of recent effort into the Edge experience, and it shows.

But that really begs the same question I posed last year: Are you ready to shell out $1,500 for a web browser and a few Microsoft apps, like Teams, which is now native on Microsoft silicon? The implicit contract between PC buyers and manufacturers has always been that we bought PC hardware so we could install and run whatever apps we wanted, because the underlying platform was always the same. We traded the bugs, the viruses, and the various headaches of Windows in exchange for compatibility and the flexibility to run anything and everything without having to go through a corporate gatekeeper. Microsoft’s ARM chip has broken that contract, though at least now if you visit the Microsoft Store on the Pro X, you won’t be taunted by a bunch of apps that you can’t install. On the Pro X, the Store is now curated to only show you those programs that are compatible with the device (though they do show up if you search for apps by name).

To be sure, the compatibility and stability situation is better than it was a year ago, but plunking down $1,500 for the Pro X remains a really tough sell. The system still looks great, and Edge performance is impressive, but I still wouldn’t consider it until every app I used was running natively, or until the x64 emulator is working a lot better than it is today. The Surface Pro X and Microsoft SQ chip look like they’re here to stay, but if you buy one now, you’re still paying a significant premium for potential—and an uncertain potential at that.