Microsoft Surface Pro 6
With a superb screen and excellent battery life, the Surface Pro 6 shows what a convertible ought to be
SCORE PRICE £666 (£799 inc VAT), Type Cover £71 (£85 inc VAT), from pcpro.link/300pro
The Surface Pro 6 looks an awful lot like the Surface Go, and it broadly does the same job. In short, it’s a tablet with a snap-on keyboard that turns it into a laptop.
Here, though, we’re looking at a more formidable piece of hardware. The 12.3in screen feels far more spacious, and accommodates the Windows desktop more comfortably than the fun-sized Go. Despite that, the Surface Pro 6 is still one of the lightest machines here: with the Type Cover attached, it weighs an eminently portable 1.08kg.
The quality of the display is simply superb. I measured a dazzling maximum brightness of 410cd/m2, and a best-in-class contrast ratio of 1,341:1. It’s also this month’s sharpest screen, with a 2,736 x 1,824 resolution translating to 267ppi. As with all Surface products, those unusual dimensions represent a 3:2 aspect ratio that is – in my view – better suited to real work than the letterboxed shape of a Full HD screen.
There’s more good news inside. While the Surface Go has a low-rent Pentium processor, the Pro 6 I tested came with a bona fide Core i5-8250U, delivering quad-core power at clock speeds up to 3.4GHz. It’s not as fast as the Asus VivoBook S432F, but an overall benchmark score of 76 means it’ll handle typical laptop tasks with ease. If you fancy yourself a power user, Core i7 models are offered, though these start at a stiff £1,279.
As for gaming performance, you might be put off by average frame
rates of 29fps in the Manhattan test, and just 12fps in the Car Chase benchmark ( see the graphs on p90), but remember that the Surface Pro 6’s ultra-high-resolution screen means the integrated Intel GPU has to draw a lot more pixels than on other laptops. Step down to 1080p, as in the off-screen tests, and the Surface Pro performs as well as any other laptop.
One area where the Surface Pro 6 merely matches its little sibling is storage. This model comes with 128GB, which is tight for a do-it-all laptop, and if you want the 256GB model the price rockets up by an outrageous £230. Again, though, we can’t complain about performance: the Surface Pro 6’s SSD is one of the fastest here, with excellent read speeds of 1,296MB/sec and write speeds of 447MB/sec. And if you do run out of space, you can once again slot in a microSD card or turn to external storage. Happily, this larger chassis includes a full-sized USB 3 Type-A socket; shell out £129 on the proprietary Surface Dock and you can add four more ports, plus twin mini-DisplayPort connectors and Gigabit Ethernet. It’s just a shame that the more forward-looking USB-C isn’t represented at all.
On the subject of expensive upgrades, be warned that the price above doesn’t include the keyboard. If you’re on a tight budget, you can get a third-party snap-on Bluetooth keyboard for around £45, but the official Microsoft Type Cover in plain black will set you back around £85 –
“It’s not as fast as the Asus VivoBook S432F, but an overall benchmark score of 76 means it’ll handle typical laptop tasks with ease”
which takes you cheekily above our £800 price limit.
Still, there’s no denying that the Type Cover is a high-quality accessory. It slants towards you at a comfortable typing angle, the key spacing is generous and it feels much more solid than its thin synthetic construction would suggest. The backplate does have a little give in the middle, and I would prefer to feel more of a mechanical click when pressing each key down, but those are minor niggles in a fine typing experience. The touchpad also feels delightfully smooth and sensitive, although its oblong shape is a curious mismatch for the desktop workspace.
A final point of praise for the Surface Pro 6 is battery life. It has a much larger battery than the Surface Go, and while that miniature device languished near the bottom of our battery charts, the Pro 6 came out on top, delivering a very creditable 9hrs 36mins of video playback on a single charge.
If I have one complaint about the Surface Pro 6, it’s that it is slightly inelegant to set up and pack away. It’s not difficult to pull out the stand at the rear and flap down the keyboard at the front, but when you’re accustomed to simply flipping open the lid on a regular laptop, it feels like a faff.
Even so, the Surface Pro 6 is a terrifically impressive machine that combines the roles of tablet and laptop better than anyone could reasonably have hoped for. If you have no use for a handheld, touchfriendly device then you can buy a more powerful, expandable laptop elsewhere. However, if the Surface concept appeals even slightly, this exceptional hybrid computer demands serious consideration.