Buy NOW? Or Wait for Surface Pro 5?? - Surface Pro 4 Review
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
1,464 words · ~7 min read
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a lot has changed in the last year Beyonce stunned the world with the
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release of her Visual Album lemonade Donald Trump stunned the World by
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packing his bags and moving into the house on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and
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perhaps most importantly Microsoft slashed the price of the Surface Pro 4
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earning it after a year and a half to reach full maturity a spot in our review
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lineup so while the Surface Pro 4 looks
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very similar to the three which is good it's possible nay probable that the
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changes lurking under the hood are enough to make it very different from
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its predecessor which received a pretty tepid review from yours
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truly but are they enough to elicit a
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recommendation at the new lower price
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let's have a look
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Zotac GTX 1080 mini is extremely Compact
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and Powerful measuring just 8.3 in in
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length check it out at the link in the video
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description the Surface Pro 4 feels really good in the hand it is reasonably
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light and as we've come to expect the overall build quality is fantastic the
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magnetic mount for the stylus is on the left now so you can have it clipped on
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while you charge the device and more importantly it is much stronger than the
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Surface Pro 3 under the hood there are more upgrades over the older model and
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while Skylake CPUs have been on the market for 18 months now they still hold
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up surprisingly well given that Intel
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hasn't done much performance-wise in that time so you should be able to find
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something that's right for you depending on how much you want to spend I think
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The Sweet Spot sit somewhere in the I5 with 8 gigs of RAM range an i7 costs a
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lot more for a pretty small performance boost but you might find the core M3
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equipped Model A little sluggish in even day-to-day tasks like web browsing and
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PowerPoint creation and it doesn't include a surface pen one thing to watch
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out for make sure you buy the amount of RAM you need since it cannot be upgraded
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after which brings us back to the exterior the front camera is 1080 p and
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is equipped with an IR emitter for Windows hello which is still amazing and
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there's also a 1080p rear-facing camera which is probably worse than whatever's
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on your phone at this point and one of my life rules is to never use a rear
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tablet camera anyway so we didn't spend much time on that on the right it has a
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mini DisplayPort Port this is a huge Plus for something that is at least on
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the surface a tablet so that can be
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easily adapted to HDMI DVI or even DGA
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for boardroom presentations but it's 2017 and while it kind of kills me to
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say this a single usb3 type a port does
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feel a little dated and I hope that the refresh features Thunderbolt 3 or at
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least USB type-c with the option to use it as a power input not that I'm asking
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for the magnetic power connector to go away another upgrade I'd love to see on
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the rumored upcoming Surface Pro would be a full-size SD card reader instead of
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a micro I mean there's got to be enough space down there and those new 300 megab
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per second cards from Sony would make a great extra storage Drive the screen on
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the Surface Pro 4 maintains the 2x3 aspect ratio of previous versions which
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sacrifices some real estate for widescreen aspect media consumption but
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with the average sounding speakers that clearly wasn't the primary focus for
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Microsoft and this this aspect ratio is great for productivity and reading
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articles and its full coverage of the srgb color space and excellent viewing
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angles as well as outof the boox calibration means that it has stood up
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very well to the test of time just like the CPU Microsoft went for a suede feel
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on the keyboard cover that in spite of its binder likee Edge Construction
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managed to really impress me the touchpad is understandably a little
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small but feels good with a satis ifying audible click and the keyboard wow if
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I'd known it was this good I'd have reviewed this when it was released the keystrokes felt good there's a fairly
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long travel and there's a satisfying click that I didn't expect from my
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experience with previous surface products I was able to quickly get up to
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speed and this entire review was typed on the Surface Pro 4 the backlight is
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also a nice touch on that subject as one
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of those weirdos who genuinely likes touchscreen devices it shouldn't surpr
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Uris you that even in kickstand laptop
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mode that was one of the highlights for me of using the Surface Pro 4 in word
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you can easily highlight misspelled words and navigating in the browser is
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cake I mean other than that I was using Edge to kind of have the full Microsoft
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experience I know many people still think that laptops don't need touch
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screens but I suspect many of them have just never used one regularly the
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included Stylus is also one of the areas that Microsoft really stepped up on the
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Surface Pro 4 compared to the three writing notes in one note was easy and
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felt much closer to actually putting a pen to paper and I could see this being
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extremely useful as a university student and it even inspired me to learn a bit
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about thermodynamics from one of our new writers a bit not much this is
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definitely a huge improvement over the previous versions with the only downside
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being that it occasionally picked up a palm uh while using the stylus opening
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up the notifications panel another area that the Surface Pro 4
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impressed me with was The Thermals of this little guy despite its super thin
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size it was able to keep the i7 in its guts nice and cool during our ID to 64
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stress test stabilizing it at around 75°
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while still turbo boosting to 3 GHz and as a bonus it actually stayed reasonably
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quiet too so who is this thing for then
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the tablet with a keyboard concept still
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won't be perfect for everyone and if you never plan to use the pen or
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fold back the keyboard a normal laptop
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like the LG gam or HP Spectre X 360
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might make more sense but I will say
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this I genuinely regret not bothering to
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review this thing when it first came out because the fourth version of the
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surface is where the concept finally lives up to Microsoft's vision and if
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you can compromise on a somewhat dated IO and you want something now today
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that's great for productivity tasks such as taking notes using word and surfing
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the internet at the new lower prices it's pretty killer I'm just excited to
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see how they follow it up maybe with a more timely piece of content this
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LT so thanks for watching guys if the video sucked you know what to do but if
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it was awesome hit that like button get subscribe to our Channel maybe check out
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where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also
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down there is our merch store where you can buy cool shirts like this one and
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our community Forum which you should totally join