Surface Pro 9 Pick the Right
Hello you beautiful people. Today we’re taking a look at the Microsoft Surface Pro Nine. I still think this is one of the nicest looking two-in-ones you can buy on the market. Fun fact, when Microsoft created this two-in-one product, they actually gave the engineering schematics to other PC vendors. That’s why you see a lot of copycats on the market.
Copying Microsoft
It’s not because they’re copying Microsoft. Well, technically, basically they are. But they were given those engineering schematics so that they can create versions of their own. And it’s done very well for Microsoft because now we have a lot of beautiful two and ones to choose from. Now look, this is a lovely product, but it’s not much of an upgrade over the Surface Pro Eight.
Best Buy
Surface Pro 9 Pick the Right
This is why I want to start this video with Best Buy’s Top Deals because some of these deals are going to make a lot of sense by the end of the video. So thank you Best Buy for sponsoring this portion. The Microsoft Surface pro eight has 16GB of Ram and 7256GB of storage. It’s retailing for $200. This is $400 off if you don’t want the Pro.
There’s also the Surface Laptop for with the Ryzen 516 gigabytes of Ram retailing for $900. That usually is sold for $200. Probably the craziest deal of all, if you’re into gaming, is the Asus ROG Strix G 15 Advantage Edition. This is a rise in nine 5980 HX 16GB of Ram and an RX 6800 M GPU usually retails for $700. But right now you get it for $600 off at one 10.
Asus ZenBook 15
Also, the Asus ZenBook 15, which I showed in a previous video, is still on sale for 699, and that NetSuite MX 450 dedicated GPU. Links to all of these products will be in the description down below. So this cobalt blue is a very classy color. It’s vibrant, it pops, and it contrasts. I think a lot of people are going to like this.
The design and dimensions are fairly similar to the previous one. If I place the Surface Pro Eight on top of it, it feels the same, right? Like there’s not a lot of difference in terms of weight, maybe a gram difference, but you’re not going to feel the difference when you have both in your hand. It looks like they slip the motherboard though because the ports are now on the opposite side. So on the new version, instead of having the Type C ports on the right-hand side, it’s now on the left-hand side.
USB-type C
Surface Pro 9 Pick the Right
The benefit of the Pro Nine is you get two Thunderbolt Four ports which you didn’t get on the previous version. It was just a regular USB-type C. And of course, you have your Surface Connect port. There’s one thing you should notice is that the audio jack is no longer available on the Surface lineup. They completely got rid of it.
So if you want to connect, headphones to this, you either got to use wireless headphones or use some sort of dongle. There are some minor changes to the vents. It looks like they’re a bit wider on the Surface Pro Eight. It could just be the color in my eyes, but it looks like the gap between the front of the display and this back portion over here is wider than the Surface Pro Nine, which is kind of weird because this thing needs as much air as possible. This is such a thin form factor.
SSD
Another Tweak is the hard drive. If you want to get access to your Mvme SSD, you had to use a pin to pop this cover to replace it with a new version. You don’t need that. You just push this little circle, you get the satisfying binky noise, and then you can take off the COVID and access your SSD. As you can see here, they also flipped exactly where that SSD goes.
There’s no change in the hand. It feels nice and sturdy, and it goes back just as far as the previous model. Now, there is little variation between the intel model and the R model. They both come with ten DP cameras, but only the R model has Windows Studio Effects. Windows Studio Effects gives you cool utilities, like being able to auto-frame you and follow you around when you’re on a zoom call.
Surface Pro 9 Pick the Right
EP Webcam
You don’t get that with the intel version. The reason being is that the intel version doesn’t have an MPU, which is very specific to the Arm processor that’s inside of the other version of this. So you’re just going to get the regular ten EP Webcam, which looks good, but you’re not going to get any of those auto frame features now, because this is a Surface product, if you want the full experience, you have to spend another $280 to pick up the Surface keyboard. It does come with a slim Pen Two, which is a very awesome writing tool. I love using this pen for notes.
It’s one of my favorite pens to write with on the market. I like it better than the Apple Pencil for notes, not drawing. And this is a 120 Hz display. So the only thing I can suggest to you is, if you want the best pen experience, make sure that 120, because it’s the smoothest. When I took this out of the box, it was 60 Hz, and I could tell right away that there was a bit of latency when I was drawing on the screen.
Embedded
But if you put on 120, it just makes writing notes even better. The keyboard has a nice tactile feel on the keys. Obviously, it’s a very shallow travel distance because it has to be embedded into this cover. The touchpad is very accurate and easy to use, but it’s a tiny touchpad, so you don’t have a lot of space to move your fingers around. The display is absolutely gorgeous.
It’s the same pixel sense display you got on the previous Surface Pro Eight. It’s bright, it has good color accuracy, and it has a good color gamut. It’s a much better display than the one that’s on the Surface Laptop Five. Also, another hardware change is the placement of the power button and volume rocker. It’s now on the top of the Surface instead of the sides.
CPU
I like this better because let’s say you take your Surface out of the back, you open up the hinge, and you know right away that if you place your finger like this, you’re going to select the power button. And you know right away that if you place your finger here, you’re going to touch the volume controls. This is very similar to an iPad, but performance is where things start to get a little bit interesting. You would think with an I 712 gen CPU and faster DDR Five memory and slightly faster Mvme SSD, you would get, you know, a nice boost in performance compared to the previous model. But the fact of the matter is, I’m not seeing any difference at all.
Sure in synthetic benchmarks this new surface pro nine just completely destroys the surface pro eight. But when you start actually using it for specific applications, the Surface Pro Eight sometimes actually beats this out. In fact, when I was compiling Mozilla Firefox on this, it performed slower on the new Surface Pro Nine compared to last year’s model. Video editing was a little bit better on the previous model compared to this one, too. Now, this is where things also get interesting.
Surface Laptop
And that’s heat management. Microsoft is super conservative with this device. The thing gets a little bit warm a bit too quick, and if you’re really pushing this thing, it’s going to get hot. In fact, I couldn’t even run 864 on this to test stability because the application would just lock up and shut down. The same thing happened on my Surface laptop.
Five reviews. This is not meant for hardcore tasks. It’s really for the office user. The dude who’s sitting in there typing Excel notes all day wants to use the pen to take notes, and that’s about it. Don’t buy this to edit the video.
Battery life
Don’t buy this to handle large amounts of Photoshop files. It’s strictly a productivity device. One thing that I was shocked to see, though, was battery life. Battery life on the previous version was better than this. Don’t get me wrong, the battery life on both is good.
I got over 10 hours of use before it needed to charge, but I got over 12 hours with the Surface Pro Eight. So if that’s something you value first, the Surface Pro Eight becomes the better deal. Look, I love this thing, I really do. But it’s hard for me to recommend the surface pro nine over the surface pro Eight. While there’s still a lot of supply out there, you’re getting better battery life.
Surface Pro 9 Pick the Right
You’re saving $400 for the exact same SKU and you still get a headphone jack. You’re not really getting any benefit with the Surface Pro Nine except for Thunderbolt Four if that’s something you actually need. So while supplies last, if you’re looking at the Pro, I would personally go for the Pro Eight while you can. If time flies down the road and there’s no more Pro Eight left and you’re coming from an older product, obviously go for this. But it’s hard to not recommend $400 off for a very similar experience.
And look, I get it. You know, Microsoft wants to deliver a specific type of experience. They want to make sure the fan noise is low. They can’t really push this thing too hard because of how thin this chassis is. So they have to really be conservative with those thermals.
Processors
And until intel or AMD gets its more efficient processors, more performance per watt. This is what we have to kind of deal with in a chassis like this. I hope that answers all of your questions. If you want to check this out or the Surface Pro Eight, there will be links to descriptions down below, along with all the deals from Best Buy like them.
