Microsoft's Surface Pro X Is an Expensive Mess. Don't Buy One

Microsoft says the Surface Pro X—the latest version of its vaunted 2-in-1 tablet-puter—is the thinnest, fastest, lightest, longest-battery-lived, and fastest-charging Surface to date. Most of these superlatives are made possible by the inclusion of a brand-new CPU called the SQ1, which was designed not with Intel or AMD but rather with Qualcomm.

The catch is that, like the smartphone CPUs Qualcomm makes, it’s designed to be a small, cool, power miser … and not something to give you the full-blown Windows experience. Nonetheless, Microsoft’s stated goal with this machine was “to take a mobile architecture and push the technology to make it a fully functioning powerful PC.” Whether the Surface Pro X is actually “fully functioning” is open for debate.

The new SQ1 chip runs at 3 GHz, and the review system Microsoft sent to me came with 16 GB of RAM and a 256-GB SSD. The 13-inch screen runs at 2880 x 1920 pixels. Connectivity comes via two USB-C ports (and that’s it).

There’s no question that the Surface Pro X will be a decidedly divisive device, an exercise in compromises that may be OK for many but which will be a nonstarter for power users. Let’s start with the biggie: The SQ1 can run Windows 10 and the Microsoft Office suite, but there’s also a lot that it can’t run. Namely, it can’t run any 64-bit Windows programs designed for Intel chips (which, today, is almost everything), and it can only run older 32-bit programs via a behind-the-scenes emulator.

I tried downloading a number of the most popular apps from the Microsoft Store and found that several wouldn’t install—nor would the vast majority of the standard benchmarks I run. Even apps that did install didn’t always work right. An old 32-bit version of PCMark 8 (originally released in 2013) crashed midway through its run, for example. Apps that do run, like the 32-bit version of Chrome, are noticeably slow. Running browser-based tests like Speedometer and JetStream on Chrome put performance on par with your typical $300 Chromebook. In other words, I hope you like Microsoft Edge. (It’s also worth noting: The system takes three times as long to boot up as the Surface Pro 7.)

Want to run Photoshop? Fortnite? You can’t—at least, not in any meaningful way. Critically, Microsoft says that Adobe’s Creative Cloud is being ported to run on the SQ1, but no one is offering a timeline, which may as well mean never. I did manage to get one gaming benchmark to run on the Surface Pro X: Monster Hunter. For the sake of comparison, I managed a score of 3,304 on the Surface Pro 7 and a mere 1,954 on the Surface Pro X.

But hey, you might be saying, I’m on board with Microsoft’s vision and really do just want to use my tablet for web browsing and writing the occasional poem in Word. I don’t need to run AutoCAD and never will. Is the Surface Pro X right for me?