New Surface Pro reviews are coming in from a variety of sources, and one of the biggest questions about the 2017 tablet is its battery life. When the product was first revealed in May, Microsoft said it had 13.5 hours of battery life. Just how true is that claim? Here’s what we know.
Much like the Surface Pro 4, the battery life you get from the machine is going to strongly depend on the model you buy. In general, the most efficient SKUs have an i5 processor. Bumping up to the i7 offers more power and a higher price, but it also negatively impacts performance.
Just take a look at this quote from Mike Lowe of Pocket-Lint , who reviewed the New Pro’s i7 variant.
“We streamed YouTube videos for two hours and the battery drained by 48 percent. Yikes. In normal operation things have performed fairer that that, but over the two full days of initial use we've not been getting anything more than we did from the previous Surface Pro.”
As disappointing as that perspective may be, however, others weren’t quite as negative. During its own testing, Expert Reviews was able to achieve 11 hours and 33 mins of productivity with its machine. On a fairly intensive WiFi and web surfing metric, Laptop Mag was able to get about 90 minutes more juice than it did on the same test with the Pro 4. CNET’s professional methods stretched endurance all the way to eight hours and 15 minutes on a single charge, a three-hour increase over its predecessor under the same conditions.
So, the general consensus appears to be that Microsoft was at least half truthful in espousing the advantages of its latest hardware refresh. While managing a single charge for 13.5 hours is quite the stretch under normal conditions, the vast majority of units seem to offer a sizeable boost over 2015’s option. All that voodoo about Kaby Lake CPUs and special modifications to maximize endurance appears to have worked, just not quite as well as the hardware maker advertises.
This sentiment also seems to be a running trend in public use as well. Just days after the Pro 4 arrived on market, the official Surface subreddit was full of battery drain complaints to the point where Microsoft was forced to release several software patches to mitigate the shortcoming to bearable levels. While there are a few of those about 2017’s build if you look hard enough, it’s clear the Pro 4’s former achilles heel has mostly been resolved in the New Pro, with a slight margin for error.
Because the New Surface Pro is only a modest hardware refresh over the Pro 4, its benefits and drawbacks remain mostly the same. While reviewers praised the device for its design and adeptness at running Windows 10, the added expense of Type Covers and accessories continue to drive up the price of this premium experience.
The New Surface Pro is available now starting at $799.
What do you think of these reviews? Is the battery life of the New Surface Pro good enough for you to buy one? Tell us in the comments section!
