The new Surface Pro. Microsoft
Microsoft has announced the long-awaited refresh to its Surface Pro line of 2-in-1 tablets. The successor to the Surface Pro 4 is simply the Surface Pro—no numeric appellation to denote the hardware iteration—and it brings with it a Kaby Lake processor to replace the Skylake chip in the Pro 4. But that’s about all it does: those hoping for forward-looking features such as USB Type-C ports or Thunderbolt 3 connectivity will have to continue to look elsewhere.
With its new Kaby Lake chip, Microsoft is claiming up to 13.5 hours of battery life, a healthy boost to the estimated nine hours of the Pro 4. As before, there will be three processor options: at the low end, the ultra-low power Core m3-7Y30, with a base speed of 1GHz and a top speed of 2.6GHz. In the middle, the new Pro will use the medium power i5-7300U, with a 2.6GHz base and a 3.5GHz turbo.
At the top is the i7-7660U; the base speed is slightly lower, at 2.5GHz, but its turbo is higher, at 4GHz, and this part sports Iris Plus graphics. It has 64MB of on-chip memory, which should boost both CPU and GPU performance. In the Pro 4 generation, only the m3 unit was fanless; with Kaby Lake, the i5 part also omits the fan, making for silent operation.
On the inside, little else has changed. As before, there will still be versions with 4, 8, or 16GB RAM, and 128, 256, 512, or 1024GB of storage. There’s still a rear-facing 8MP camera for photography and a front-facing 5MP camera for video conferencing and Windows Hello facial recognition to log in. Wi-Fi is still 802.11a/b/g/n/ac, though Bluetooth has been bumped to 4.1 from 4.0.
While it won’t be available immediately, Microsoft is also planning to offer a Surface Pro version with integrated LTE connectivity. The company has dabbled with LTE tablets before, but in the past they were restricted to the (apparently now-defunct) Surface range of lower-priced, lower-specced tablets. This will be the first Pro-tier system to offer LTE.