The Surface Pro 7 is now $599, but should you buy it? (fanless i5 model, mini-review)

Microsoft has been slashing prices on its Surface line in recent months, with the cheapest Surface Pro 7 tablet + keyboard bundle now available for just $599 (which also means prices are falling elsewhere).

Even with the Surface Pro 8 available now, this Surface Pro 7 is still a competitive offering, and with over seven iterations of the Surface line of 2-in-1 PCs, it should be a highly polished piece of kit worthy of the price premium . So is it worth it at this lower price?

I've been using an i5/8GB/256GB Surface Pro 7 with keyboard and Surface Pen for the past few days and in this article I'll share my thoughts on it.

Update: Microsoft has since updated the Surface lineups with the Surface Pro 8 model reviewed here.

Coincidentally, one of the first PCs I reviewed for UltrabookReview was the Surface 3. It's hard to believe a Surface would ship with just 2GB of RAM and an Atom CPU given today's specs, but it was back then in 2015 it was like that nearly enough to walk you through most basic Windows 8.1 tasks. I ended up selling the Surface 3 mainly because of its meager 2GB of RAM which made almost any task unnecessarily painful, but I loved the fact that it was so portable and lightweight. With so many generations of Surface 2-in-1s since then, I thought it was time to revisit Microsoft's Surface line and see how they fare.

Surface Pro 7 first impressions

My first impression of the Surface Pro 7 was that not much has changed. Visually, it looks very similar to all of its predecessors. It may have gotten a USB-C port (no, no Thunderbolt 3 yet, because Microsoft) and a Windows Hello IR camera + fingerprint scanner (on the keyboard), but the bezels are still the same chunky size huh Pro 7 has a more "old-school" look compared to the ARM-powered Surface Pro X. But inside the Surface Pro 7 is a 10th Gen Intel "Ice Lake" 10nm i5-1035G4 CPU with an Iris Plus integration GPU, 8 GB DDR4 RAM and a 256 GB SSD. With these improvements, has Microsoft finally managed to create the perfect ultraportable computing device?

Unfortunately, they didn't make nearly as much progress as I had hoped. This isn't a complete review, so I'll try to go through the biggest pros and cons in a purposeful way.

On the bright side, the Surface Pro 7 has a nice QHD+ screen, it's lightweight, and typing on the keyboard folio is still excellent. The Windows Hello IR camera works great and had no issues with my standard office workload of Vivaldi, Slack, Discord and Word.

The Ice Lake i5 and 8GB of RAM are perfect for such a workload. In terms of tablet mode, the Surface Pen is great technology that snaps magnetically to the side of the tablet and integrates very well with Microsoft's Office suite, allowing you to markup, draw or otherwise do documents all at once scribble manner which adds the markup as an overlaid image for compatibility reasons.

It's not something I've used to just annotate in Word like I've always done, but it's cool. Finally, you can now "swipe" your finger across the onscreen keyboard keys in Windows, so it's now almost as functional as swiping your thumb on your phone. All in all, the Surface Pro 7 is easier to use than ever in tablet mode (but it still lags far behind PC mode).

So now we can talk about what is not cool. For starters, the Surface Pro 7 shines in the sunlight:

So much for "ice lake". This happened after about 30 minutes of outdoor use at 15°C / 59°F.

After using the Surface Pro 7 outdoors for about 30 minutes, it began to stutter and become unresponsive. I tried closing my browser but it just didn't respond to input, although it continued to stream music and let me type. About 4 minutes later it shut off and gave me the temperature warning above. I felt the pill and it was actually quite hot - but why? The tablet is silver, but the large bezels are black. Could that be the reason? I've never had a problem with my black carbon fiber XPS 15 outdoors. Then it occurred to me that the Surface Pro 7 is fanless in this i5 version... yes, that's enough. So, well, don't use your tablet outside in the sun I guess.

But there's a much bigger issue with the Surface Pro 7: battery life, or lack thereof. Despite asking for advice on Reddit and tweaking everything I could, running Firefox, Word, Slack, and Teams barely got me more than 4 hours of usage. Less than half a working day. Still, Microsoft has the balls to claim it 8-10.5 hours on your website. But, if you take a closer look at their claims...:

[1] battery life; Surface Pro 7: Up to 10.5 hours of battery life with typical Surface device usage. Testing conducted by Microsoft in September 2019 using pre-production software and a pre-production Intel® Core™ i5, 256GB, 8GB RAM device. The test consisted of a full battery discharge with a mixture of active use and modern standby.

Up to 10.5 hours”with a mix of active use and modern standby”. So, maybe Microsoft let it idle for 5.5 hours and then left it on active standby for another 5 hours? Very cheeky guys. The unfortunate fact is that this isn't a new problem for the Surface Pro range either. A web search for "Surface Pro 7 battery life" reveals that poor battery life has been an ongoing issue with the Pro line, and the Pro 7 seems to offer worse battery life than its predecessors (anecdotally, anyway). I shudder to think how poorly the i7 would fare.

I tried to optimize everything I could by baring Windows, running at a slightly lower resolution so the iGPU didn't have to work as hard, switching from Vivaldi to Firefox for mobile, and killing apps that weren't mission-critical, like discord I also tried undervolting, but unfortunately Intel/Microsoft took that away from us with Ice Lake in SP7. Starting with Windows Update 2004, you cannot disable Modern Standby or tweak other power options. If I leave it completely idle I could get 10 hours of SoT, but the moment I start actually using it, that number goes down and down. I've come to terms with the fact that I'm just not going to do more than half a day's work on this thing.

Yes, I could bring the Power Brick or a smaller USB-C charger, but what's the point of having a 2-in-1 if you're tied down? The honest marketing copy for the Surface Pro 7 should have looked like this:

Introducing the new Surface Pro 7. Get work done anywhere.***
*As long as it is not in the sun
** And can be done within 4 hours

Battery life and outdoor overheating are by far my biggest issues, but there are a few other annoyances that I think should be mentioned for anyone thinking of trying a 2-in-1 like the Surface for the first time. Using the Surface Pro on your lap in laptop mode has always been very uncomfortable, and that still hasn't changed over time. The fact that the 2-in-1 form factor takes up so much space speaks strongly against it for the "street fighter" target group. However, folding the keyboard under the surface and thus propping it up with an onscreen keyboard/touch is better than it used to be, as we can now "swipe" from one key to the next instead of picking.

Speaking of the keyboard, the fingerprint sensor is pretty slow and painful to use, and while it's better than nothing, it reminds me of the old "strip" fingerprint sensors from 2010 in terms of functionality.

Ice Lake's performance is adequate for basic workloads, but on the few occasions when you need sustained performance (such as many installs when you first get it), it slows down noticeably.

Finally, I think 12.3″ is a bit small these days, to be honest. I'd love to see a more "professional" Surface Pro one day, bringing back active cooling, giving us a 14-inch screen and beyond, and actually hitting 8+ hours of battery life. If that happens, maybe I'll give the SP line-up another chance. It's going up on eBay at the moment.

If you're interested, these articles cover a few other small-screen mini laptops, while this one covers a selection of the best budget ultrabooks and laptops you can find on the market today.

What do you think of the Surface Pro as a series? Do you have a Surface Pro 7 and swear by it, or have you had similar complaints as me? Let us know in the comments.

By: The Surface Pro 7 is now $599, but should you buy it? (fanless i5 model, mini-review)