Microsoft Surface Pro X review: beautiful design and good screen but expensive, slow for the price, and has an unimpressive battery and app compatibility issues
Better than expected isn't enough — The Surface Pro X is the computer Microsoft has tried to make for at least seven years.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two weeks after The Verge's Surface Pro 7 review praised full PC performance on Intel silicon, Microsoft shipped the machine it had chased for seven years: an ARM-based Surface built around a custom chip, thin bezels, and LTE. The bet was that Windows-on-ARM had finally matured enough to carry a flagship.
The verdict — beautiful hardware undercut by slow-for-the-price performance, battery, and app compatibility — set up a critique that never went away. Five years later, the Surface Pro 11 review is still flagging x86 apps that don't run well, and the Surface Pro 9 was dinged for slow apps too, making the Pro X less an outlier than the first data point in a persistent pattern.
First-order effects
- Launch buyers pay a premium for a device whose defining trade-off is software: apps not built for ARM run poorly or not at all, capping who the Pro X works for despite the design and screen wins.
- Microsoft's own lineup splits the market in the same month — the x86 Surface Pro 7 delivers 'great performance' while the Pro X sells a thinner, always-connected alternative that reviewers can't recommend on speed.
Second-order effects
- Every subsequent Surface Pro generation inherits the question: as long as reviews keep citing app gaps (Pro 9's slow apps, Pro 11's x86 misses), Microsoft must either fund developer porting or keep selling ARM hardware into a compatibility penalty.
- Intel-based rivals get a durable attack line — 'full PC performance' versus a device that needs per-app validation — which pressures Microsoft to justify the ARM premium through battery, connectivity, and design rather than raw speed.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds across the 2019–2024 review record, Windows-on-ARM stays a secondary track until app compatibility genuinely closes — meaning Microsoft's chip strategy advances only as fast as the developer ecosystem it doesn't directly control.
- The recurring 'expensive, accessories extra' critique across the whole Surface line points toward a structural ceiling: premium pricing without a differentiated software experience keeps the franchise dependent on buyers who accept the trade-offs.
The trend: Microsoft's long-running effort to move Windows onto ARM processors keeps shipping hardware ahead of its app ecosystem, leaving each generation judged by compatibility rather than capability.