Surface Pro 4 review: best workhorse productivity tablet with its build quality, performance, and accessories, but expensive
The Microsoft Surface Pro 4 Review: Raising The Bar — It is almost hard to believe that only a few short years ago, Microsoft had no hand in the PC systems or tablet markets.
Context & Ripple Effects
In October 2015, AnandTech crowned the line that would carry Microsoft's tablet ambitions at its strongest point yet: the Surface Pro 4 pairs workhorse performance with the best build quality and accessories Microsoft had shipped to date, cementing the formula introduced when a company with no PC history entered the market just a few years earlier.
The review also fixes the pattern the next decade of coverage would keep confirming. The Verge's Surface Pro 8 review six years later repeats nearly word-for-word the same caveats — expensive, accessories sold separately, limited ports — while the Surface Pro X showed what happens when the design leads the silicon: beautiful hardware undermined by price-to-performance mismatch.
First-order effects
- Buyers who want the full productivity experience pay twice: the tablet itself is priced at a premium before adding the keyboard and stylus that make it a laptop replacement.
- Microsoft's positioning wins on capability but cedes the value argument — every reviewer in this corpus praises the hardware and then flags cost as the caveat.
Second-order effects
- Unbundled accessories become a structural revenue stream for Microsoft: each generation ships the 'magic' input devices separately, so the effective price of the workhorse configuration rises beyond the sticker.
- Rivals competing in the 2-in-1 space inherit a fixed comparison frame — reviewers judge them against Surface-class keyboards and build quality, raising the bar any challenger must clear.
Third-order effects
- If the decade-long review record holds, the Surface line's identity is locked in: premium-priced hardware with paid add-ons and constrained port selection persists through the Pro 8 and the OLED-equipped Pro 11, suggesting the trade-offs are deliberate product strategy rather than engineering limits.
The trend: Microsoft's Surface line has sustained a premium-price-plus-paid-accessories model across a decade of generations, with reviewers repeating the same cost and portability caveats from the Pro 4 through the Copilot+ era.