Hands On With Microsoft's Surface Pro 9: New Components Amp Up a Familiar Design

pcmag.com:

Microsoft pulled the wraps off its next generation of Surface products today, unveiling the Surface Pro 9, the Surface Studio 2+, and the Surface Laptop 5.

You can read our news coverage for an overview of the announcements, but we were also able to go hands-on with the Surface Pro 9 at a press event in New York. There's a lot to unpack about the various configurations, including features exclusive to some models, such as 5G connectivity. Read on for details and impressions below, and hop over to our separate hands-on for the Surface Studio 2+ (coming up shortly).

At the top level, the headline for the Surface Pro 9 announcement is that Microsoft is offering both Intel- and Arm-based versions of this device for the first time. Previously, the Surface Pro X was the Arm solution in the family (which brings its own positives and negatives), but it seems to have been subsumed into the mainline Pro model as a configuration option.

There are core component differences, of course—we’ll get into the specs shortly—but Arm systems also change some of the features. The Arm model will be available with 5G wireless, most crucially, and Arm systems generally offer longer battery life (but diminished Windows performance). Microsoft also demonstrated some sweet camera and video-call tricks made possible by the Arm model's neural processing unit, or NPU, which can be offloaded with intensive tasks without straining the main CPU.

Apart from the camera features, none of this is really evident from a hands-on session. But the context comes from us having tested many Arm-based Windows systems in the past, and it is needed before running through the Surface Pro 9’s design and feature set.

This year's Surface Pro design is unchanged, focusing