Several days into my testing Microsoft rolled out a hardware update designed to improve stability and battery life. That didn’t turn out to be the problem, but if that’s an actual issue, it’s an even bigger deal-breaker than any of the above complaints.Īdditionally, my system crashed more than once, giving me an honest-to-God blue screen, even during minimal workloads. One potential diagnosis was that I was charging the system via one of its two USB-C ports instead of via the magnetic charger. I eventually discovered that phantom screen taps were being registered when the system was otherwise not in use, and after some back and forth, Microsoft sent me a whole new unit to test. Out of nowhere, the system began behaving as if possessed, scrolling through web pages, opening new tabs, selecting and clicking on text, and even repositioning the task bar from the bottom of the screen to the left. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention the bizarre behavior I experienced after my first day of using the Surface Pro X. Also check out our Microsoft Surface Buying Guide. We recently recommended the Surface Pro 7 and the Surface Laptop 3. Microsoft does make some Surface machines we really like. I don’t need to run AutoCAD and never will. 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.īut 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 did manage to get one gaming benchmark to run on the Surface Pro X: Monster Hunter. 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. Want to run Photoshop? Fortnite? You can’t-at least, not in any meaningful way. (It’s also worth noting: The system takes three times as long to boot up as the Surface Pro 7.) In other words, I hope you like Microsoft Edge. Running browser-based tests like Speedometer and JetStream on Chrome put performance on par with your typical $300 Chromebook. Apps that do run, like the 32-bit version of Chrome, are noticeably slow. An old 32-bit version of PCMark 8 (originally released in 2013) crashed midway through its run, for example. Even apps that did install didn’t always work right. 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. After several days of working with the Surface Pro X, I remained confused as to why the product exists.

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