Pros & Cons
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- More affordable than 13-inch models
- Extremely portable tablet design
- Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 connectivity
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- Accessories and charger sold separately
- No SSD storage (UFS only)
- Limited port selection
- Downgraded display and webcam
Microsoft Surface Pro (2025, 12-Inch) Specs
| Boot Drive Capacity (as Tested) | 512 |
| Boot Drive Type | UFS (Universal Flash Storage) |
| Class | Detachable 2-in-1 |
| Class | Ultraportable |
| Dimensions (HWD) | 0.30 by 10.8 by 7.5 inches |
| Graphics Processor | Qualcomm Adreno GPU |
| Native Display Resolution | 2,196 by 1,464 |
| Operating System | Windows 11 Home |
| Panel Technology | IPS |
| Processor | Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus (X1P-42-100) |
| RAM (as Tested) | 16 |
| Screen Refresh Rate | 90 |
| Screen Size | 12 |
| Tested Battery Life (Hours:Minutes) | 17:35 |
| Touch Screen | |
| Variable Refresh Support | Yes |
| Weight | 1.5 |
| Wireless Networking | Bluetooth 5.4 |
| Wireless Networking | Wi-Fi 7 |
The new 12-inch Microsoft Surface Pro (starts at $799.99; $1,049.98 as tested, with its Surface Keyboard cover) marks a clear shift for the flagship Windows tablet line, trading the premium Pro power of its predecessors for a more accessible sub-$1,000 price. To achieve that lower price, Microsoft has opted for a smaller, cheaper, and slightly less powerful design, featuring an eight-core Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus processor with a fanless cooling solution. The new pricing is tempting, but it comes at a cost. With fierce competition from other Arm-based 2-in-1s, the compromises Microsoft made hinder this midrange tablet from competing with top-notch contemporaries like the Editors' Choice-winning Asus ProArt PZ13.
Configurations: A Lower Price Comes at a Cost
The leaner, cheaper Surface Pro 12-inch starts at $799.99 for the base model, with an eight-core Snapdragon X Plus (X1P-42-100) processor, 16GB of memory, and a 256GB universal flash storage (UFS) drive. This storage option is a marked downgrade from last year's model, which used full-fat solid-state drives.
Our review unit was a step-up model ($899.99), which features the same Snapdragon processor but doubles the UFS capacity to 512GB.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)My review unit came with the keyboard cover ($149.99), which is normally sold separately. Microsoft also sells a Surface Slim Pen for $129.99. While everyone would rejoice if these were included in the purchase price, selling accessories separately is fairly normal, and numerous bundle deals offer the items together at a discount.
However, this model has one other glaring omission: It lacks a charger in the box. It comes with a USB-C cable, which is compatible with a USB-C charging block. However, the 45-watt Surface USB-C wall charger, sold by Microsoft for $69.99, is a separate purchase. That's steep for what, to many shoppers, will be an essential item.
You can also find a business version of the Surface Pro 12-inch that comes with a 1TB SSD, but you'll need to order it directly from Microsoft. It costs $1,249.99 with 16GB of RAM or $1,449.99 with 24GB.
Design: Still Sleek, Still Silent, Still Awkward on a Lap
The Surface Pro 12-Inch measures just 0.30 by 10.8 by 7.5 inches (HWD) and weighs a remarkably totable 1.5 pounds. That's about half the weight of a clamshell ultraportable laptop, which makes sense, given that this is roughly half the size of a laptop, thanks to its tablet design.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)The aluminum chassis is available in three colors: Platinum gray, Violet, and the blue-tinted Ocean. The slim design is comfortable to hold and use, with a comfortably rounded edge around the chassis and the classic Surface kickstand on the back. The kickstand utilizes a full-friction mechanism to remain open in any position up to 165 degrees, allowing you to tilt it at just the right angle on a desk or table. However, you still can’t prop it up on your lap without the edge digging into your thighs or knees.
The 12-inch tablet is also fanless, which makes it silent even under load, and gives it a slimmer profile, making it easy to hold and use one-handed. It can run a little warm at times, but the trade-off is that quiet running.
The 12-inch PixelSense LCD features Microsoft's unique 3:2 aspect ratio and a 2,196-by-1,464-pixel resolution, complemented by glare-reducing glass coatings and calibrated color. Full 10-finger touch and stylus support come standard, even if the stylus doesn't. The LCD panel is sharp for its 12-inch size, but its colors and contrast can't match the vibrant, deep blacks of the OLED display on the 2024 Microsoft Surface Pro or key competitors. The display's 90Hz adjustable frame rate is impressive, looking smooth in any scenario, and its touch capabilities are superb. At this point, Microsoft has touch screens down to a science.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)You’ll find no fingerprint sensor here, even on the Surface Pro 12-inch keyboard, so you'll use the tablet's 1080p front-facing webcam for Windows Hello facial recognition logins. It's a step down from the 1440p camera on the 2024 model, but that's the sort of premium feature that's lost when you drop in price. For snapping photos on the go, you’ll find a 10-megapixel rear-facing camera, which is sufficient but sometimes struggles under challenging lighting conditions and has inconsistent autofocus performance.
Ports: A Little Light on Connectivity
The Surface Pro's port selection keeps things light—perhaps going too far—with just a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports. These ports support charging and DisplayPort output for up to three external monitors. (Note: You'll need to daisy-chain displays or use a dock to add that third screen, since you'll be out of ports after plugging in two.) You’ll also find a magnetic keyboard connector along one edge of the tablet.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)But that's all it has. The slim design sacrifices niceties like a microSD card slot or headphone jack, leaving it feeling somewhat under-equipped. The positive news is that the Surface Pro includes Wi-Fi 7 networking and Bluetooth 5.4 for audio and wireless peripherals, the latest versions of both.
Accessories: It's All BYOE (Bring Your Own Everything)
I've already grumbled over the fact that the Surface Pro comes without the keyboard cover that makes it a viable 2-in-1 laptop replacement, and I'll reiterate my concerns about the lack of a proper charger. If you buy the Surface Pro on its own, you'll be high and dry unless you bring your own charging block. Frankly, that's absurd.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)However, aside from the fact that the accessories are separate buys, they are good. The 12-inch Surface Keyboard Cover is a high-quality keyboard for the Surface Pro. The keys feel as pleasing to type on as any keyboard cover I've used; the travel is a bit shallow, like most tablet keyboards, but the keys are otherwise comfortable to use. The touchpad is suitably wide, though the 12-inch cover doesn't leave much room for vertical space, so it's just wide. That was already an issue on the 13-inch Surface Pro, but the 12-inch cover is even more compact. All that said, the new Surface Pro typing experience doesn’t feel cramped.
My biggest gripe with the keyboard situation isn't that it disappoints in any major way. Instead, it’s that the best version of the 13-inch Keyboard Pro (Microsoft's detachable, Bluetooth-connected Flex Cover) isn't available for this 12-inch tablet.
Performance Testing: Falling Behind the Arm Pack
When the first Surface Pro Copilot+ PC debuted with a Qualcomm processor, it was a new and distinct product, marking the first in a new class of Arm CPUs that ran full Windows and powered AI features with neural processing unit (NPU) hardware. A year later, it's one of many.
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For this review, we're comparing the 2025 Surface Pro with a handful of top 2-in-1s and laptops, many with similar Qualcomm chips inside: the latest 13-inch Microsoft Surface Laptop ($999.99 as tested) for starters, along with the HP OmniBook X 14 ($1,049.99 as tested), and the Editors' Choice-award-winning Asus ProArt PZ13 ($1,099.99 as tested). We also included the Framework Laptop 12 ($1,049 as tested) as a compact Intel-powered convertible laptop.
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
Our first group of tests represents workloads such as content creation, office productivity, and raw CPU speeds. Our go-to overall productivity and storage test, PCMark 10, is not yet Snapdragon-compatible, so we focused on core-stressing media tasks.
The three primary tests presented below are CPU-centric or processor-intensive. Maxon's Cinebench 2024 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs' Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the transcoding freeware HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.
Additionally, we have encountered issues with Puget Systems' PugetBench for Creators Adobe Photoshop 25 test on systems with Qualcomm Arm processors, so we’ve skipped it here until we resolve our problems with the test.
The two most interesting points of comparison for the Surface Pro would be the Framework Laptop 12, a budget 12-inch 2-in-1 powered by an Intel Core i5 processor, and the Surface Laptop, a 13-inch clamshell that utilizes the same Snapdragon X Plus processor as the Surface Pro, and matches it in terms of memory and storage.
In Cinebench 2024, the Surface Pro rocketed past the Framework Laptop 12, nearly doubling the multi-core rendering score. But it still fell behind all other competitors, including the Surface Laptop. This was a consistent pattern across several tests and is likely due to the fanless Surface tablet’s constricted thermal capabilities. The Surface Laptop, on the other hand, routinely outperformed it, thanks to a roomier chassis and internal cooling fan.
We observed a similar distribution of performance in the HandBrake and Geekbench Pro tests, where the Surface Pro outperformed the Intel-based Framework Laptop 12 but fell behind other Qualcomm-powered competitors.
Graphics Tests
We challenge laptops' and tablets' graphics with a quintet of animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K) use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. Steel Nomad's regular and Light subtests focus on APIs more commonly used for game development, like Metal and DirectX 12, to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. A fifth test, Solar Bay, emphasizes ray-tracing performance. (Several of these systems could not complete this last test, so they’re missing from that chart.)
The Microsoft Surface Pro held its own in graphics tests, scoring remarkably similar numbers to the Asus ProArt PZ13 and the Microsoft Surface Laptop, all of which utilized similar Snapdragon X Plus CPUs and Qualcomm Adreno graphics processing. Overall, I was quite pleased with how the Surface Pro performed in our graphics benchmark tests. It's obviously not ready for AAA gaming, but for day-to-day productivity, web browsing, and media streaming, the Surface Pro performs quite well.
Graphics scores followed a pattern similar to the general productivity tests, with one major exception. The HP OmniBook X 14 features a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processor, one tier above the Snapdragon X Plus processors used in other Qualcomm-powered systems. In general performance, those differences were not extreme. However, the Snapdragon X Elite sprinted ahead in these tests, posting the best graphics scores of all competitors.
The other point of differentiation was in the Solar Bay ray-tracing test. In most of our graphics tests, the Microsoft Surface Pro and the Surface Laptop achieved similar scores, as they utilize similar hardware. However, in Solar Bay, a test we have not run on all the competing systems, the Surface Pro dropped precipitously to nearly half the score of the Surface Laptop. Given that they use the same model of processor with the same integrated graphics solution, the only real conclusion I can draw is that differences in thermal management had a significant impact on ray tracing, giving the Surface Laptop a substantial edge over the Surface Pro tablet.
Battery Life and Display Tests
We test each laptop's and tablet’s battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
Battery life is another area in which the tighter confines of the tablet design are most strongly felt. The Surface Pro lasted 17 hours and 35 minutes in our continuous video playback test. In the same test, we observed more than 30 hours of battery life from both the HP OmniBook X 14 and the Microsoft Surface Laptop. Notably, the Asus ProArt PZ13, which is also a detachable tablet rather than a convertible laptop, achieved a similar 17-hour result.
Given that these constraints are due to the tablet design, it hardly seems fair to hold it against the Surface Pro compared with full-size laptops. Seventeen hours of battery life is ample for getting through a day of work or school, but short enough that I wouldn't leave home without the charger.
The display quality on the 12-inch Surface Pro tablet is satisfactory, but test results clearly indicate that it falls short of the OLED display found on the 13-inch Surface Pro tablet from 2024. Additionally, the OLED-equipped Asus ProArt PZ13 produces significantly better color coverage.
This tablet’s overall display quality is right in line with the Microsoft Surface Laptop, but that speaks more to the corners Microsoft cut to achieve more affordable prices on both 2025 Surface models than anything else.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Microsoft Surface Pro (2025, 12-Inch)
Microsoft’s newest, smaller Surface Pro tablet delivers the ultraportable design that Surfaces are known for, but middling performance, storage and display compromises, and the puzzling decision not to bundle a charger make it a poor value.