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00:00The Surface Pro X is a product that was clearly designed to compete with what iPads offer.
00:11This is a thin, elegant looking, magnetically attached tablet that has an ergonomic design
00:19that looks good, with a good battery life, and still runs Windows 10 for the functionality
00:23and usability that a lot of people are looking for in a computing device.
00:28So I'm going to dive into the Surface Pro X, I'm going to talk about the hardware first,
00:32and then talk about the user experience.
00:34So I'm going to go into weight first.
00:36This is not a super light machine.
00:39It's slightly lighter than like a regular Surface Pro.
00:42It's got a bigger screen, it's got thinner bezels, but it's similar in weight to a Surface
00:46Pro and still heavier than an iPad Pro.
00:50Now the finish of this device is this black anodized aluminum.
00:53It's not magnesium like the regular Surface Pro devices are, and on my unit I found that
00:58some of the edges were sharper than I expected.
01:01Not that you can cut your finger on it or anything, but you can definitely scrape things
01:04on it that you normally wouldn't be able to on kind of a premium Surface product.
01:09It's just, it's a little bit weird.
01:11I don't know if this is just my unit, but you know, it's just something that you should
01:14look out for if you end up buying one.
01:17Like always though, black anodized metal protect the stuff.
01:20I put a skin on, like this is my Surface Pro 6.
01:24This is over a year old at this point, but like this stuff scratches easily, so I highly
01:28recommend getting a skin when it comes to black Surface devices.
01:31Okay, 13 inch screen on the Surface Pro X.
01:34This is a bigger screen than what the Surface Pro 6 and 7 offer.
01:39Let me face unlock this guy.
01:41Okay, 13 inch screen, looks really nice.
01:44It's bright, it's sharp, it's got a 3 by 2 aspect ratio.
01:47It's basically the screen that you would expect on a high-end Surface device, and on
01:51either side of that screen are some speakers.
01:53The media consumption experience on the Surface Pro X is definitely enjoyable.
01:57It also has good connectivity, or at least better than what the iPads offer, so it's
02:02got two USB-C ports.
02:04They don't support Thunderbolt 3, but it also has a Surface Connect.
02:08I don't love the existence of the Surface Connect.
02:10I mean, if you don't know what it is, it's Microsoft's proprietary connection port.
02:15The AC adapter that comes in the box uses this port, but you can also use USB-C ports
02:19to charge the device.
02:20I really wish they just stuck another USB-C on the other side, or even a USB-A, but that's
02:25what you have.
02:26On the backside, you have access to the removable SSD, as well as your SIM card slot, so you
02:31have access to LTE wherever you go, which is nice.
02:34You don't have access to any other hardware, at least not user-friendly access.
02:39The Wi-Fi card in here is Wi-Fi 5, not Wi-Fi 6, and the battery is, well, they claim a
02:4413-hour battery life, but I got 9 1⁄2 hours with my regular test, so they get 13 hours
02:49by running their screen at 150 nits, which is really dim, like that's not a real-world
02:53test to me.
02:549 1⁄2, which is respectable.
02:57It's very similar to what the iPads offer in terms of battery life.
03:00The keyboard attaches magnetically, like any other Surface Pro device.
03:04It doesn't work with other Surface devices, like the Surface Pro X keyboard has to work
03:09with the Surface Pro X, but it's got the same kind of like touch and feel and just
03:14mechanics to a regular Surface Pro keyboard.
03:17The one thing that is different and super cool is the presence of this pen that's kind
03:21of hidden in the keyboard case.
03:23It sits in there magnetically and it charges in there, but it also, they've designed it
03:27in a way so that if you put it upside down, it'll automatically flip itself over to charge
03:31properly.
03:32It's pretty cool.
03:33The kickstand is like your standard Surface kickstand, gives you a whole bunch of different
03:37kind of viewing angles and stuff like that for ergonomics.
03:40It's a nice design.
03:42You also have your webcam up front that supports Windows Hello, as well as rear-facing cameras
03:46that shoot 4K video, if that's your jam for whatever reason.
03:50So I used this thing for about five, maybe six days before I shot this, yeah, six days,
03:57and I tried to use this thing as my regular and only computer.
04:01So let's talk about performance.
04:03If you're doing regular, light computer tasks, like regular stuff like, I don't know, browsing
04:07the web, emails, YouTube, Netflix, any kind of light stuff performs quite smoothly on
04:13this machine.
04:14And the whole experience is nice, right?
04:15It's got Windows 10, it's got multiple ports, it's got native mouse support, native trackpad
04:20support.
04:21It's a whole Windows 10 laptop slash computer.
04:25However, if you want to run more specialized applications, like let's say you're a creative
04:30and you want to run Photoshop, this machine cannot run native 64-bit Intel-based Photoshop.
04:37You can't run 64-bit Intel-based anything.
04:40You have to run a 32-bit version of those programs.
04:44And Photoshop has one.
04:45You can run it on this system, but it just runs quite poorly.
04:48It's being emulated.
04:49It's not natively running on that ARM processor.
04:52It's taking that 32-bit instruction set and then converting it to run on this system in
04:58real time.
04:59It's cool that it does it, but performance is not good because the chip in here is the
05:03SQ1.
05:04It's an ARM chip that's designed to run ARM-based applications.
05:08So to get good performance, this thing needs to run applications that developers have made
05:13specifically for this type of processor.
05:15And right now, there's not a lot of them.
05:17And when it comes to gaming, I tried CSGO.
05:19It's not a particularly demanding game, but it's pretty choppy.
05:22Asphalt, I don't think this game is particularly well optimized for this system right now,
05:27but it runs.
05:28Now, if you're looking at the Surface Pro X and you're thinking, this looks like it
05:31could play games because it's got teraflops and other flops, like the commercial said,
05:35don't.
05:36Like this is maybe graphically capable, but don't buy this thing for games.
05:41Okay, if you look at the benchmarks and you compare it to the most recent iPad Pro, the
05:46Surface Pro X is not as strong of a performer.
05:49And same if you compare it to the current Surface Pro lineup.
05:52The value of a product like this is very dependent on the ecosystem, like all the applications
05:57that run on the Surface Pro X.
05:59And right now, there's very few.
06:01If you compare it to something like an iPad Pro, this is a product that has a very rich
06:05ecosystem.
06:06Like any of the iPads running iPadOS have access to, I don't know, hundreds of thousands
06:11of really good, high quality apps from like A-tier developers to like C-tier developers.
06:16It doesn't matter what you're looking for, there's probably an application that's on
06:19Apple's App Store.
06:20Now, 10 years ago, that wasn't the case.
06:23If you look at what iPads were like when they first launched, they had no apps and there
06:26were very few people that looked at this thing with utility.
06:29It was like this gigantic iPod Touch with a big screen.
06:33No one really wanted to use it, but as these things became more popular, developers found
06:37it worth their time and effort to make apps for them.
06:40I feel like that's where we are today with the Surface Pro X.
06:43This is a device that requires developers to make apps to really flex what this hardware
06:47can do, to make it useful.
06:50And in its current state, because this is a $1,000 device, I don't know whether we'll
06:55get to that stage.
06:56Whether or not developers will ever look at this platform, these ARM-based devices for
07:00Windows and think, hey, this is worth our time.
07:02This is worth the effort and energy and resources it takes to make these apps run at an optimized
07:08state on an ARM-based tablet.
07:11So the way it sits right now, as cool as this is, as much as I like the technology and love
07:17the idea of this ARM-based tablet that's thin and ergonomic and very good on battery life
07:22and just energy efficient, it's hard for me to recommend this thing openly.
07:28If I had to choose something today, like, hey, Person X needs a tablet of some sort
07:33and you have a $1,000 budget, I would get them an iPad every day.
07:37It's only for the niche user that really wants a productivity-focused device and they want
07:42to have connectivity for their USB devices.
07:46Then this makes sense, but right now we got to wait.
07:50We got to wait for the applications to show off what this thing can do.
07:54Okay.
07:55Hope you guys enjoyed this video.
07:56Thumbs if you liked it.
07:57Subs if you loved it.
07:58See you guys next time.