Microsoft Surface Pro 11 review: The best Windows 2-in-1 around

You wouldn’t know from just picking it up, but the Microsoft Surface Pro 11 is representative of a watershed moment for Windows laptops. It looks just like the previous model, but inside it’s an entirely different species, powered by the ARM-based Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SoC.

It joins a small army of manufacturers also introducing Snapdragon laptops this year. So far, we’ve loved what we’ve seen, with the new ARM-based Windows machines delivering great performance married to long battery life, just like Apple’s MacBooks have been doing since moving to Apple silicon.

Microsoft Surface Pro 11 review: What you need to know?

Aside from the internals, which I’ll get to in more depth shortly, the Surface Pro is the same diligently excellent device as ever, with some key improvements. It’s a detachable 2-in-1 laptop, which means this is a laptop where you can remove the keyboard to turn it into a tablet, and it has all the same great design features of previous Surface Pro machines.

The tablet part is slim, lightweight and compact. It has a 13in touchscreen on the front with a resolution of 1,920 x 2,880 and a refresh rate of up to 120Hz – also compatible with the Surface Slim Pen 2. Also, for the first time on any Surface device you have the option of an OLED display, which comes with the upper tier Surface Pro models.

At the rear of the tablet is a built-in, blade-like kickstand that folds out of the rear of the tablet portion so it can be propped up at any angle you like. And the keyboard, which is still an optional extra at £140 or £180, attaches magnetically to the bottom long edge to turn the tablet into a fully functional laptop.

Microsoft Surface Pro 11: Prices and competition

Configuration tested: 1,920 x 2,880 120Hz OLED screen; 3.4GHz 12-core Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100 processor; 32GB of RAM; 1TB SSD; Price when reviewed: £2,149 inc VAT

As usual, there’s a range of configurations available when you buy a Surface Pro 11. The cheapest, most basic model comes with the 10-core Snapdragon X Plus chipset, 16GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD plus the standard IPS touchscreen. This costs £1,049 for the tablet on its own.

Add the basic Surface Pro Keyboard (without a stylus storage/charging slot) and you’re paying £1,189 inc VAT, and if you want the whole package – with the pen and keyboard included – that will be £1,329 in total.

If you want more storage, you can also have the basic tablet with a 512GB SSD, which adds an extra £100 to the price and opens up the option of buying the tablet in the blue, black and “Dune” colourways. The standard colour is silver, or “Platinum” as Microsoft calls it.

The higher tier Microsoft Surface Pro 11 models come with an OLED display and the 12-core Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. Prices for these models start at a pricey £1,549 for the tablet on its own. As with the basic model, you can add the basic keyboard to this for another £140, or the keyboard with a Surface Pen slot for £180, or the pen with keyboard for £280, for a total of up to £1,829.

I was sent the top-tier model for this review, which comes with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD (only available in ‘platinum’), and this tops out at £2,149 or a whopping £2,429 with keyboard and stylus.

As for alternatives, well those are numerous and a good deal cheaper, although we haven’t yet seen another detachable 2-in-1 with the new Snapdragon chips inside. On the laptop side you can pick up a 13in MacBook Air M3 for £949 from Amazon right now, although that comes with only 8GB of RAM and doesn’t have touchscreen or stylus capability.

If you can do without the detachable keyboard – and I recommend you do – the latest Snapdragon-powered 13.8in Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 is lovely and starts at a cheaper £1,049 with identical internal specifications to the basic Surface Pro 11. You don’t get the option of an OLED display with higher-tier specifications but you do get much better repairability.

However, if it’s a tablet you want with equivalent features and technology, you’re probably looking at a 13in M4 iPad Pro. This has a detachable keyboard, OLED display, ARM-based chip and brilliant battery life, but is much more expensive, starting at £1,300 (£1,777 for the tablet, keyboard and stylus package). iPadOS still has its drawbacks, too, including an infuriating file management system, so if it’s a regular laptop with premium, iPad-style trappings you want, the Microsoft Surface Pro 11 is a great option.

Microsoft Surface Pro 11 review: Features and design

As I’ve already mentioned, there’s nothing remarkable about the external design of the Surface Pro 11 but that’s not a bad thing. The body of the tablet is extraordinarily well put together: it barely flexes when twisted and the hinge lets you position the screen at pretty much any angle you wish. It’s slim, too, at a mere 9.3mm, not as thin as the M4 iPad mind, which measures an astonishing 5.3mm from back to front. And it’s reasonably light at 895g, but again, the M4 13in iPad Pro beats it at a remarkable 579g.

The Surface Pro makes up for its physical limitations versus the iPad, however, with a slimmer, lighter keyboard. The total weight with the 280g keyboard attached (and no stylus) is a far more competitive 1.18kg versus the iPad’s 1.24kg. Plus, if you peek under the kickstand, you’ll see a small magnetic hatch, which can be removed to reveal the system’s 2,230 SSD, which can be removed and replaced with a higher-capacity part after purchase. You can grab a 1TB drive for around £80, and upgrading is a relatively painless process, so it’s definitely worth considering.

Around the edges, ports are limited in number, as you’d expect of such a slim machine but what you get is  quite capable. There are twin USB-C 4 ports on the left short edge capable of transfers up to 40Gbits/sec, plus support for video output and USB-PD charging. In addition, on the opposite edge is a magnetic Surface Connect port, used for charging with the supplied 65W mains adapter, so you can keep both USB-C ports free at all times.

Given this is a Snapdragon machine, it’s also fully up to date with the latest wireless technology, with full support for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.

READ NEXT: What is Wi-Fi 7?

Microsoft Surface Pro 11 review: Keyboard, webcam and speakers

Assuming you’ve opted for the official keyboard – and you should, because that’s the way the Surface Pro has been designed to be used – you’ll find it a dream to use. The keys have plenty of travel and a lovely tactile feel to them. Each key has plenty of space surrounding it, which keeps typos to a minimum and the layout is largely sensible, apart from the annoying half-height up and down cursor keys. It also has a three-stage backlight so you can keep using it in darkened rooms.

Inevitably, there is a bit of bounce when typing with the top edge of the keyboard folded up against the bottom of the screen to create a more comfortable angle, but this isn’t too distracting and if you prefer a more solid feel, you can always lay the keyboard flat on your desk. The haptic touchpad, too, works beautifully, despite being smaller than on your average 13in laptops. Its surface is silky smooth and the click action is lightweight, well-damped and much usable across the pad’s entire surface.

One of the bonuses of a detachable like this is that you can remove the keyboard and continue using it, opening up the possibility of hooking the tablet part to an external monitor via USB-C. Here you can move it to the side, then use the keyboard separately with the external monitor, just as if you were using a desktop PC setup with two monitors.

You’ll be just as impressed with the infrared, 1440p webcam, too. Not only does this support Windows Hello face recognition login (which works superbly), its image quality is among the best you’ll see on any laptop. It’s phenomenally sharp and refreshingly clear of mushy compression, and it handles low light conditions well, too. If you want to look your best on video calls, this is the laptop for you.

And, this being a CoPilot+ laptop, with a suitably powerful NPU, Microsoft’s Studio Effects are available, adding auto framing, eye contact and background blurring to your video calls, reducing the impact on your CPU. 

Audio quality is decent as well, although not as good as you get on a MacBook Air, which delivers audio with more depth and considerably more breadth than the Surface Pro. There’s a decent amount of volume and even a modicum of bass – it’s certainly good enough for listening to podcasts and work video calls – but for watching TV shows and movies or gaming, I’d still connect a pair of headphones.

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Microsoft Surface Pro 11 review: Display

The Surface Pro 11 marks the first time we’ve seen an OLED display on a Microsoft laptop of any stripe and it’s a pretty darned good one. It’s sharp, with a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 squeezed into a space measuring 13in across the diagonal and it’s colourful, too, delivering up to 105.2% of the DCI-P3 colour space in Vivid mode.

The contrast ratio is effectively perfect, as you’d expect of any OLED screen with its self-emissive pixels. Peak brightness reaches 602cd/m2 in SDR and 943cd/m2 during HDR playback and colour accuracy is superb. You get two SDR modes to choose from – sRGB and vivid – and the former delivered an average delta E colour variance score of 0.44, while the latter hit 0.51. Both numbers are about as good as it gets; it would have been nice to have a few more profiles to select from though, such as AdobeRGB.

Anecdotally, it’s a great screen, too. I fired up The HDR Channel on YouTube to give it a thorough workout and all the clips looked wonderful – full of super bright specular highlights and vivid colours. I prefer the look of the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge’s screen but you’ll not be disappointed with this.

READ NEXT: Best PC monitors

Microsoft Surface Pro 11 review: Performance

We’ve already seen that the Snapdragon X Elite is a capable performer in our reviews of the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7, the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge and the Asus Vivobook S15 (S5507), but it’s worth being aware that there are multiple variants of the X Elite chip on the market, each with slightly different capabilities.

The one inside the top tier Surface Pro 11 is the X1E-80-100, with a base frequency of 3.4GHz and a Dual Core Boost frequency of up to 4GHz. This is the same chip as in the Surface Laptop 7, which is a slightly quicker chip than the X1E-78-100 inside the Asus and slightly slower than the X1E-84-100 in the Samsung. All are highly capable, however, and run the same 45 TOPS NPU (neural processing unit), which is designed for accelerating on-device AI processes such as the Windows Studio Effects mentioned above.

You can see that pecking order reflected in the charts below, with the Surface Pro 11 sitting in between the Galaxy Book4 Edge and the Vivobook, beating the M3 MacBook Air for CPU performance and lagging behind it for GPU speed.

In day to day use, this is a speedy feeling laptop that you’ll struggle to find the limits of. It’s no gaming machine but you can play older or less-demanding titles on it without causing undue slowdown.

The more important question, as ever with ARM-based Windows laptops, is whether it will run the software you need. Most major apps, it seems, now have ARM-native versions, which means they should run perfectly. That includes apps such as Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, most of the major browsers, DaVinci Resolve and Microsoft Office 365. Most other apps, should run on emulation via the Prism emulator, and those that do run, aren’t as snappy as they are on native code, but are still perfectly usable.

Where you might have an issue is with hardware peripherals that require third-party drivers (my old Canon iP4950 still doesn’t work), and some older software that requires deep hooks into Windows 11’s native code. At the time of writing, for instance, NordVPN won’t run on a Snapdragon laptop, however the company says a native version of the software is coming soon. The lesson here is to check if all your essential software will run or not before buying.

If it will, then happy days because laptops such as the Surface Pro 11 are not only powerful, they’re also highly efficient. This laptop, in particular, lasted 17hrs 17mins in our video playback test (with the screen set to 170cd/m2 brightness and flight mode engaged), which is the most impressive result we’ve seen from a Snapdragon laptop to date. Bear in mind, though, that the battery life results may be different from the lower tier Surface Pro as that has an IPS display.

Moreover, the Surface Pro barely ever seemed to overheat or overwork its fans. It got a little toasty when I was gaming but during everyday use it was silent – and it manages standby elegantly, too, never seeming to haemorrhage battery capacity when in hibernation.

Microsoft Surface Pro 11 review: Verdict

If you’re wavering, my advice would be to consider a regular laptop before buying the Surface Pro 11. All the alternatives I’ve mentioned in this review are cheaper – including the M3 MacBook Air – and you won’t have to purchase an extra keyboard to make them usable.

However, that’s not to denigrate Microsoft’s achievement here; the Surface Pro 11 is unequivocally a fantastic laptop. As with all the recent Snapdragon machines we’ve looked at, its battery life is stunning. General performance is snappy, it will run most software without issue and it’s even a little upgradeable. It’s a fantastic alternative to the iPad Pro and it’s cheaper, too.

The move to Snapdragon chips has been consolidated, nay strengthened, by the move to Snapdragon chips and this remains the best 2-in-1 detachable Windows laptop you can currently buy. If that’s what you want, go buy one.