Surface Pro 4

[Commander Llama]

 

Introduction

 

I wanted a Surface Pro the moment the device line was first announced in mid-2012. It felt like something innovative, something future-y. I grew up watching Captain Jean Luc Picard do Important Ship Stuff on tablets and rationality or productivity aside for a moment, it just seemed really damn cool. A flagship captain wouldn’t be caught dead with some weak namby-pamby mobile OS tablet, he would need performance! Serious software!

 

I have never taken to Android or iOS tablets. For a few years I’ve had smartphones with decent screens, and those tablets just seemed to me like larger screened smartphones that couldn’t make phone calls. Carrying around a tablet and a smartphone just seemed too redundant. On top of this, I once owned a Nexus 10, and maybe it was my device in particular, but it was shit.

 

Enter the Surface Pro! Tablet form factor, ultrabook tech specs, and nifty designs and accessories to try to create a new middle ground between the two. Did it succeed? Mileage will vary in the answer to that question, but I think most would agree that the Surface line is definitely improving over time, and here we are at the Surface Pro 4 and it’s only late-2015. Microsoft is taking planned obsolescence by the horns and iterating like crazy!

 

Onward to some actual review.

 

Overview

 

Tech Specs (of my configuration)

 

CPU: Intel Skylake i5-6300U (2 cores/4 threads, 2.4Ghz, 3.0Ghz Boost)

iGPU: Intel HD 520

RAM: 8GB

Storage: 256GB  PCIE SSD

Screen: 12.3” running the strange 2736x1824 resolution (3:2 aspect ratio)

Ports: 1 USB 3.0, 1 microSD slot, miniDisplayPort

Other Shit: Front and back facing cameras that aren’t worth writing home about but will let you Skype just fine

 

This review is not intended to go in depth about the Surface Pro 4 device line and its myriad specifications, or a detailed hardware review packed with synthetic benchmarks.

 

For my part, I decided the sweet spot for price/performance was the i5 model with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. Intel’s i7 processors might be awesome in many of our desktop builds, but their differences over i5 in the ultraportable family is truly laughable. 8GB of RAM seemed like the standard “it’ll be good for a while” amount. When I’m (hopefully) still using this little dude in 2017, I won’t be as fucked as if I had settled for 4GB. As far as the SSD size goes, the premium companies charge for their built in hard drives is fucking nuts. Good on them for having a 1TB model this time, but it makes far more sense to me just to add in microSD, keep external HDs at my desk/dock, or use the Cloud. I didn’t want to boot the thing up and be confined to ~100GB though, so once again, a middle road. After first booting up and installing updates, I had ~215GB of free space. After piling on tons of programs while typing up this review, I still had about 135GB left. More than enough.

 

Form Factor

 

Seeing is believing, and actually having the Pro 4 around makes me appreciate what Microsoft is trying to innovate. The 12.3” screen makes it a pretty decent sized tablet, and snug somewhere in the ultrabook class of screens. This thing is amazingly light and balanced. I have no issues using this in tablet mode with one hand, so my offhand remains free to use the pen. My significant other has an ultrabook, the HP Spectre 13, a relatively recent device that packs hardware similar to Pro 3. While the Spectre was light, I am very impressed that the Pro line packs in similar hardware and sheds so much weight without even much price difference.

 

Rumours of a large 14-inch Pro intrigued me quite a bit. If that had actually been a thing in this release cycle, I would have gone for that. As it is, the screen is more than enough for a mobile device. The bezels getting smaller and smaller. You can tell they wouldn’t be able to trim much more without cutting into the webcams, sensors, and ports. As it stands, there’s enough bezel left to anchor a finger or thumb comfortably in tablet mode.

 

Display

 

The 12.3” screen at 2736x1824 resolution provides a phenomenal PPI of 267. Although many phones can knock that out, including mine, this is one sharp as hell display. It’s still got a higher density than any of your desktop 4K monitors.

 

I’m not too picky when it comes to colours, and nothing seems wrong with the colours of the display. At full brightness, those LTT videos seem pretty vibrant. Windows 10 comes with 200% Scaling by default, and that seems to be a good setting for me. The taskbar and desktop icons are all pretty small but easily clickable/tappable, and it leaves quite a bit of working space.

 

Given that the resolution is about halfway between 1440p and 2160p, it was a perfect test to watch some LTT videos in both resolutions on YouTube. At 1440p and over WiFi, the video ran smoothly and didn’t need to buffer. The fans kicked on within seconds, and I watched CPU usage shoot upwards and hover around 60-70%. Damn! At 4K, I found a performance throttle. The WiFi and the screen were perfectly capable of delivering, but after about ten seconds of playback, the Skylake CPU started throwing fits. Usage was 80-90% and the video started lagging and tearing. This is a bummer, since the screen is superior to 1440p in quality, but it’s a quality that I will rarely be able to access until 4K video files get tossed around more often. And with this device’s storage limits…

 

The display definitely kicks the battery in the face, as it is by far the biggest energy sap even in my hours-long session at 0% brightness. Even there, according to Windows Battery Saver, it was responsible for 50% of the drain. At higher brightnesses that would probably get worse, but my eyes have no issues using the screen at 0 or 25% brightness. I don’t go above that unless it’s plugged in, or for very brief use like a quick video.

 

Overall, the display gets a big seal of approval, but I am disappointed that I cannot harness its full potential. Given the existing throttle with 4K streaming, a 1440p screen that used a little less battery may have been better.

 

The Necessary Accessories

 

The Surface Pro 4 ships with the new Surface Pen, but come on, you also need a keyboard or you just bought a $1500 tablet. So toss in the Type Cover for an extra roll of cash.

 

I thought the Pro 3 Type Cover was good but not great. I’m sure with practice, I’d have become used to that keyboard, but it was a little cramped for my man hands. The Pro 4 Type Cover has spaced out the keys just enough. I had very little adaptation time at all coming from my full-size desktop keyboard. Previous generation keyboards also seemed to get a lot of flak for a shit trackpad. I can’t comment on the older ones, but the improved trackpad on the Pro 4 Type Cover feels as good as any of the other laptops or ultrabooks I’ve used. It tracks, it taps, it clicks. Yep.

 

The Surface Pen, in conjunction with OneNote and other drawing programs, is really awesome. The sensitivity and latency when writing in OneNote is nothing short of phenomenal. Unless you write very, very quickly, the latency is almost imperceptible. Palm rejection has been close to perfect. When you are jotting down or drawing notes with this thing, it feels like digital paper. In the first three days of owning the device, the cluttered piles of paper on my desk disappeared. At this rate, I imagine the paper notebooks clogging my bookshelves will be soon to follow.

 

It’s worth mentioning that although the digital writing experience is, say, 90-95% par with paper writing, you have at your immediate beck and call the extra digital tools. The Surface Pen works like a true digital pen, with the opposite end an eraser that instantly wipes away the objects you just made. Algorithmically, it seems to work like an Undo button. OneNote lets you crop anything with ease, and changing stroke thickness, colour, etc is all there.

 

Performance: Everyday Use & OS

 

As far as it goes for a Surface, it works very well with Windows 10. The OS performance is extremely fast. Boot up time from regular old Shut Down is 5-8 seconds. Sleep is 1-2 seconds. The Start menu is highly responsive, and apps and software load with lightning speed. For much of this, I think we can thank the SSD, with a passing nod to that Skylake ultrabook class processor.

 

It almost goes without saying that such a premium device will perform the simple tasks to perfection. So like many tech journalists before me, I spent time browsing the Internet on Chrome, watching some YouTube videos, and editing Word and OneNote documents both locally and on the Cloud. I already use Calibre as an ebook manager on my desktop. I setup Calibre as an “iPad-like device” and after configuring the settings to my liking, it’s a very capable e-book reader that works with touch controls and tablet mode. Confirmed, it does all of these things with great proficiency. It’s a pleasure to use. One thing I also wanted to try with the Surface’s excellent resolution and lightweight was graphic novels. ComicRack came highly recommended as a Windows comic reader program, but sadly it’s optimized almost exclusively for desktop controls. The UI of the program just wouldn’t scale, making it microscopic. As well, it was largely unresponsive to touch controls. Luckily, I tried out the Cover comic reader app on the Windows Store. It’s simple, and does all of the things I wanted comic reader software to do on a Surface.

 

Those who follow Surface more closely may have heard that the Chrome browser can be absolutely devastating to the battery. However, it’s my preferred browser so I wanted to give it a shot. Either I got lucky, or the issue doesn’t exist on the Pro 4 anymore. Cheers to that!

 

Battery usage during lighter tasks tells me that the battery overall leaves something to be desired. In our current age where some ultrabooks are blasting well past the 10 hour mark, the Pro 4 seems to average about 7-8 hours if all I’m doing is Chrome with a few tabs and a Word/OneNote document. It’s fair to say that the form factor provides certain limitations in this regard, and I knew that going in, but battery is king. Here, the Pro 4 is average at best.

 

Performance: Local Movie Playback

 

Once 4K Blu-Rays start coming out, I’ll have to see if it makes any difference playing them back locally versus online. As it stands, I transferred over my high quality Blu-Ray rip of Avengers: Age of Ultron to see how the Pro 4 handled local video playback. The 3:2 aspect ratio will take the regular black bars on movie rips and add even more black bars, but the screen would still be awesome for watching a movie, say, on a train or plane, or in bed. The Pro 4 fan didn’t even huff once playing back the entire 30GB movie. Kudos as well to Intel and its video playback efficiency. I watched the movie at 100% brightness and as the credits rolled two and a half hours later, the battery was still 65%. That makes media consumption with local files just as efficient as using an Internet browser. Crazy.

 

Also, Avengers Age of Ultron is a sweet movie.

 

Performance: Professional Use (Windows Programming)

 

I tried out Visual Studio 2015 and Unity 5 even though I don’t really code in C# much, but hey, what a great device to start on right? Both programs boot up very fast and remained extremely responsive the entire time I used them. I regret not having a medium or large-sized project to try compiling in VS, but as I just said, I don’t use it too much yet. As it is, compile times seemed on par with the desktop for the toy programs I wrote.

 

On Unity 5 at least I downloaded some drop-and-go projects including their Example Project. Unity 5 boots up like lightning, is just as responsive while tossing around 3D objects, and the little Skylake CPU had no issues compiling and testing the little 3D projects with zero framerate issues. As expected, with enough 3D objects or if testing for long enough, the fan would come on, but it was all well within acceptable bounds.

 

Performance: Professional Use (Linux Virtual Machines)

 

I installed VirtualBox and set myself up a little Ubuntu VM. Most of my programming work is in Linux, so I wanted a device that wouldn’t cough running it virtually. The Skylake CPU has the specs for it, but how did it run?

 

It went swimmingly. Installation and bootup of Ubuntu 15.10 went without a hitch. I had to look up the command to install the plugins needed to blow up the VM to the Pro 4’s massive resolution, but otherwise off I went. I set the VM up with a single core, 2GB RAM, and 20GB of space. The VM was responsive and quicker than my school desktop computers, though unsurprisingly slower and weaker than what I can conjure on the desktop. Now that I’m using it, I’m not so sure I’ll actually keep using Ubuntu, but it was a good test. While running the VM, Windows 10 remained responsive and I could flip back and forth comfortably. The VM seemed to chew up about 25-30% CPU usage throughout, but the fans came on and kept the heat low.

 

Performance: Heavy Use Gaming

Although I got this device with the complete knowledge it was not an AAA gaming device, who could resist leveraging the impressive touchscreen and decent specs? I installed Civilization V, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Shadowrun: Hong Kong, HOMM3, Caesar 3, and Minecraft.

I’m sure you can find more exacting benchmarks elsewhere, but I’ll give you my impressions as an avid 1440p high frame rate gamer. In every case of gaming, the fans would come on and the back of the device would grow warm, maybe even a little hot. At no point was it uncomfortable to rest on my hands or lap, though.

 

 

I also tried Steam In-Home Streaming in conjunction with my powerful desktop, LlamaBox (sig). This would allow me to stream games at high resolution without beating the shit out of my little Skylake iGPU. At maximum performance settings, I seemed to find a limit for the Pro 4’s WiFi. Civilization Beyond Earth ran beautifully with all settings maxed out on the desktop, and there was very little latency on the Pro 4. The Pro 4 fans still kicked on and the device slowly but surely warmed up, but CPU usage was only moderate. However, after about 15 minutes, the stream started buffering in small bursts. Since the CPU wasn’t maxing itself out (a sign of the iGPU reaching a limit, as per the 4K video earlier), I reasoned the WiFi was encountering its limit.

I dropped the stream quality to Balanced, gave the stream maximum bandwidth and network prioritization and ran the test again. This time I maintained a solid 1080p@60fps for almost the entire playthrough. There were only a few little blips of slow network causing momentary lag or buffer. Even better, I was hard pressed to notice a drop in quality between Balanced and Best.

The fan ran pretty loud during In-Home Streaming, at least as loud as actually playing the other games locally, which surprised me. Overall, my experience with this particular Steam feature was decent, but I’m not sure if I’ll actually use it. The Pro 4 seems capable of playing the older or easy to run touch-enabled strategy games I’d be most interested in anyway. For 99% of my other gaming time, I would just wait until I was home using the desktop, which renders In-Home Streaming slightly redundant.

Windows Hello

The much toted and gimmicky biometric login option offered by Microsoft needed a whirl, at least. I usually don’t have a login screen at all because I prefer to just use my device immediately after startup or wake. But okay, I’m also dumb, and should try to be a little more secure.

Windows Hello is okay, but it needs improvement. In general, the biometric stuff works. The camera recognizes my face quickly with or without glasses, and with or without headphones. Most of the time. I’ve had a few instances where Windows was “looking for me” and couldn’t find me. I also had a few instances where the webcam took about 30 seconds to get off its ass. Windows Hello also didn’t let my significant other or friends login.

Therefore, for Windows Hello, the tech is early. In theory it’s very cool. In practice, when it works it’s effective, but it has hiccups. Standard old password protection is still the go-to 100% no hiccups experience. For something as simple as password protection, I personally expect 100% marks.

“Lapability”

Opinions seem mixed on the retarded term known as Lapability in regards to the Surface line. Notebooks and ultrabooks with a firm hinge are better to use in the lap, and hey, it’s a laptop, I’ll be using it in my lap!

My take on it is, thus far, the Surface is great in every location I’ve used it at. Like pretty much any notebook, it excels on a desk, table, or flat surface. As a tablet, it’s super light and comfortable with both hands. I typed most of this review out while curled up like a cat in my Papasian chair, and not once did the Pro 4 and its flexible hinge seem unstable. I’ve also used the Pro 4 in bed, and in what I call “drawing mode” with the hinge at maximum extent on a flat surface.

In all of these cases, the thing is freakin’ great, so I don’t know why this was ever an issue. I’ll blame Twitter I guess.

Miscellaneous Problems I Encountered, And My Solutions/Workarounds

You’d think the 4th iteration of a first party device to ship with almost no problems. In truth, I had three. You average Reddit user would have raged for hours and returned the device, I expect. I decided to power on through.

First, and most severe, when I first got the device and installed updates, the CPU usage sat at a solid 30-40% with no programs or apps running. Uh oh. At that rate, the battery would last 3 hours at most. This seemed catastrophic to me.

My solution to this was simply patience. I tracked the problem to the svchost process, but Windows isn’t too informative about which subprocess is actually using up all the resources. All I could really deduce was something in Windows was eating up 35% of the CPU power all the time. I plugged the device in, disabled sleep, and let it chug. I’d heard stories of new Surfaces needing to “do stuff” after first boot.

Despite having checked Windows Update first and finding no updates, after about 4 hours, the Surface suddenly found a big update. After it installed the problem disappeared entirely. Weird. But if you get a Surface, or you know someone having this problem, tell them to try patience!

Next, I had one hell of a bitch of a time getting my Surface to connect to shared media files on my local network, and things still aren’t perfect. I imagine this is a Windows 10 issue, not Surface specifically, but it took hours of troubleshooting. My Windows 8.1 machine is already setup to share a media folder and it works perfectly with the other three Windows machines in the household, two Windows 7 and one Windows 8.1. In theory, it should just work right off the bat with the Surface, but not so. I configured the Pro 4’s sharing settings to see other devices on private networks, and it could see the other computers, but it would not connect. When it could try to connect, it would demand network credentials that it either wouldn’t accept if they were correct, or demand anyway if I didn’t have network credentials! I toggled more or less every setting on both host and client in the Network and Sharing center. None of the computers are on a homegroup making anything exclusive. I spent a while in the command prompt verifying the shared folders were visible, though they obviously were. I made sure Windows Firewall wasn’t blocking anything. Joining or creating a Homegroup in the older style menus did nothing…

Thus came the unique Windows 10 solution. I had to use the “new” Homegroup menus made in their “app” style, which are somehow separate (but not?) from the older menus. I created a new homegroup on the 8.1 machine and joined it on the Windows 10 machine using this menu. Magically, everything worked at once. Okayyyy Windows 10. As it stands, I can connect about 95% of the time, but I still get a network path error for the other 5%. No solution that I can see, but connecting to the host media server, exiting, and then trying to connect to the shared folder seems to be an annoying workaround. On top of this, the access speed is terrible. This isn’t a problem for small things like books, documents, and comics, but it took 2 hours to copy over the Age of Ultron rip. Unacceptable.

Third, the Windows 10 Battery Saver seems glitched right now. I updated my battery firmware through the Control Panel, but both before and after I did that, the Battery Saver only seems to negatively impact battery. If Windows estimates I have 4 hours left, for example, I’ll turn on Battery Saver and see the estimate drop to 3 hours. Okayyy… No solution to this so far. As a side note, the battery estimate metric they use seems to be wonky too. At times it has said my battery will last another 13 and a half hours, which’ll uh… never happen, especially while sitting at 60% battery already. Surface Pro 9 packing some future lithium-oxygen battery might do this, but not the Pro 4. Ever. Hopefully this is a firmware issue they can fix up. This issue isn’t too big of a deal, but considering the middling at best battery life of the Pro 4, I am interested in options to squeeze out every last bit of it.

Conclusion

After owning the Surface Pro 4 for about two weeks, I am extremely happy with the device thus far. Now, two weeks is still a honeymoon phase, clearly, and I'm sure there will be bumps ahead. But I was nervous about actually using a Surface as opposed to staring at it with child-like wonder, and now I'm no longer nervous. In quite a few ways, I've found more productive, more comfortable, and more interesting ways to enjoy computing.

 

The initial clumsiness I had using the hinge, and interacting with the Type Cover and Pen have disappeared. I use each to their strengths. Performance-wise, the Pro 4 is capable of everything I could need it for and more, though I was never in need of a true mobile workstation. It’s ridiculously portable, thinner than the paper notebooks I used to carry around, and lighter too. It handles light and mediumweight activities like a champ, it’s good for light gaming a passable client device for game streaming once your settings are optimized. For the heavy stuff, I just transfer my work to desktop.

In the future, I’m hoping Microsoft fixes the few issues I’ve had and perhaps even improves the battery life a tiny bit. At the very least, I hope they don’t break anything! It would be nice if my access to other devices on the network was absolutely 100% perfect (and fast), because with so little device storage, I need reliable access to files remotely.

If anyone has any questions about the Surface Pro 4 that I didn’t address, fire away, and I’ll be over here uninstalling those games to get my hard drive space back.

 

 

[TechGod]

What a nice and thorough review! Thanks!

[MonkeyFace]

Great review!

 

I just got mine this week (12/1/2015) and I certainly love the SP4.

 

The biggest grime I have with the SP4 is the standby battery drain. I'm seeing anywhere from 10-20% drain in 2 hours of standby. It's about the same as 2-3 hours of using OneNote or Word.

 

But then again it doesn't surprise me since MS was using battery drivers from 2006 until recently.

 

Still some minor annoyance like microSD has to be reformatted to NTFS from exFAT before it can be recognized (Win 10 issue).

[elkenrod]

Fix the colour of the text please.

[Commander Llama]

Fix the colour of the text please.

 

Which text? Everything was written with the defaults of the LTT forum.

[elkenrod]

Which text? Everything was written with the defaults of the LTT forum.

 

I'm using night theme and the text from the article is just about unreadable. It's fine, I just highlighted what I needed to read.

[Hoppa]

Which text? Everything was written with the defaults of the LTT forum.

 

Highlight the text and set it to automatic

All of it*

[VAkena]

Better than the iVerge? I think so.

[Commander Llama]

Highlight the text and set it to automatic

All of it*

 

All right, did that. Hopefully that makes it better for the night moders.

[elfensky]

Do you have access to Photoshop? Can you try drawing in it on the Surface? How well does it work for that? How (well, or not) does Photoshop recognize the pressure sensitivity (and/or/not) angle of the pen?

 

You say you ran into problems using the stock wifi antenna... If you have any, can you try using some USB WiFi dongles? Do they work better/worse than the inbuilt wifi?

 

I'm of the same mind about android tablets, in my opinion if I'm gonna spend money on a tablet, I might as well get something that's actually useful beyond streaming movies in my bed from my NAS.

 

I plan on using it as a "cheaper" CintiQ replacement as well, which is why I'm asking.

 

Thanks for the awesome review.

[AMDisTheBEST]

What versions of window is that? Normal ones or the the slim, trimmed down version you find on windows phones and tablets?

[Commander Llama]

Do you have access to Photoshop? Can you try drawing in it on the Surface? How well does it work for that? How (well, or not) does Photoshop recognize the pressure sensitivity (and/or/not) angle of the pen?

 

You say you ran into problems using the stock wifi antenna... If you have any, can you try using some USB WiFi dongles? Do they work better/worse than the inbuilt wifi?

 

I won't feel right giving you a balanced answer with regards to Photoshop drawing, as I'm very much a non-artist and my drawing abilities stop at stick figures and basic tracing. My girlfriend has Creative Cloud and is a bit more of an artist, I'll ask if she feels like giving it a whirl and weighing in. It will take me a bit of time to do this.

 

As far as the WiFi goes, I don't own any USB WiFi dongles, so sorry, I won't be able to test this one either. I will reiterate that I wouldn't call the WiFi antenna a "problem" so much as one of the weaknesses or bottlenecks in the "Surface experience." I haven't had any true technical problems so far with it (random disconnects, hardware failures, etc).

 

What versions of window is that? Normal ones or the the slim, trimmed down version you find on windows phones and tablets?

 

The Pro 4 ships with full Windows 10 Professional. I'm liking it, though the inability to micromanage system updates bugs me about as much as it bugs most of us techies.

[elfensky]

I won't feel right giving you a balanced answer with regards to Photoshop drawing, as I'm very much a non-artist and my drawing abilities stop at stick figures and basic tracing. My girlfriend has Creative Cloud and is a bit more of an artist, I'll ask if she feels like giving it a whirl and weighing in. It will take me a bit of time to do this.

 

As far as the WiFi goes, I don't own any USB WiFi dongles, so sorry, I won't be able to test this one either. I will reiterate that I wouldn't call the WiFi antenna a "problem" so much as one of the weaknesses or bottlenecks in the "Surface experience." I haven't had any true technical problems so far with it (random disconnects, hardware failures, etc).

 

 

The Pro 4 ships with full Windows 10 Professional. I'm liking it, though the inability to micromanage system updates bugs me about as much as it bugs most of us techies.

 

About Photoshop: I see, thanks. Lets hope your gf doesn't mind helping out then .

 

About Wifi: Ah so. Okay...

 

About Windows Updates: You can actually. It requires a bit of effort, but MS released a tool with which you can hide updates from the actual windows update, so it won't see it and thus won't apply them. It's how I got around it updating me to an unstable Intel HD Graphics driver after I downgraded to a stable release.

[Commander Llama]

About Windows Updates: You can actually. It requires a bit of effort, but MS released a tool with which you can hide updates from the actual windows update, so it won't see it and thus won't apply them. It's how I got around it updating me to an unstable Intel HD Graphics driver after I downgraded to a stable release.

 

Oh cool! I hadn't heard of that, going to go look into it. Truthfully there haven't been updates that were bad yet, and I don't expect their will be for a while. Pro 4 was no doubt made with Windows 10 in mind. But for the farther future, it's an important thing for sure!

[GodSpoon]

 

 

One of the most well thought out and written reviews I think I have ever read! Nice job man  

[lizhijian]

I like it very much, however, it's somehow expensive