It’s not something I used over just commenting in Word as I’ve always done, but it’s cool. In terms of tablet-mode, the Surface Pen is a great bit of tech that magnetically snaps to the side of the tablet and integrates very well with Microsoft’s office suite, allowing one to mark-up, draw, or otherwise doodle on documents in a way that adds the mark-up as an overlaid image for compatibility. The Ice Lake i5 and 8GB of RAM are perfectly suitable for such a workload. The Windows Hello IR Camera works great, and it didn’t have any issues running my standard office workload of Vivaldi, Slack, Discord, and Word. On the good side, the Surface Pro 7 has a beautiful QHD+ screen, it’s light, and typing on the keyboard folio is still excellent. This isn’t a full review, so I’ll try to get through the biggest pros and cons in an expedient fashion.

Unfortunately, they didn’t make nearly as much progress as I’d hoped. With these improvements, did Microsoft finally manage to make the perfect ultraportable computing device? But, on the inside, the Surface Pro 7 packs an Intel 10th generation “Ice Lake” 10nm i5-1035G4 CPU with an Iris Plus integration GPU, 8GB of DDR4 RAM, and a 256 GB SSD. While it did get a USB-C port (no, no Thunderbolt 3 still, because Microsoft) and a Windows Hello IR camera + fingerprint scanner (on the keyboard), the bezels are still the same chunky size, which gives the Pro 7 a rather “old-school” appearance compared to the ARM-powered Surface Pro X. Visually, it looks very much like all its predecessors. My first impression of the Surface Pro 7 was that not much had changed.

With so many generations of Surface 2-in-1s since then, I thought it was time to check back in on Microsoft’s Surface line and see how they’re doing. I eventually sold off the Surface 3 mostly due to its paltry 2GB of RAM making almost any task unnecessarily painful, but I loved the fact that it was so portable and light. It’s hard to believe a Surface shipped with only 2GB of RAM and an Atom CPU looking at today’s technical requirements, but back in 2015, it was almost enough to get you through most basic tasks with Windows 8.1. It just so happens that one of the first PCs I reviewed for UltrabookReview was the Surface 3. Update: In the meantime, Microsoft has updated the Surface lineups with the Surface Pro 8 model discussed here, as well as the Surface Pro 9. I’ve been using an i5/8GB/256GB Surface Pro 7 with keyboard and Surface Pen for the past few days, and in this article, I’ll share my thoughts on it.

Surface 1866 model