Microsoft Surface Pro Review: Four Years With the Pro 9

The Computer That Got Too Popular

Our Surface Pro has been the family computer since late 2022. Not a laptop that lives on a desk and belongs to one person, but the machine five people share, with five separate accounts, that does homework on a Tuesday and comes on holiday in July. Nearly four years in, the honest verdict is the one nobody expects from a long-term review: we would buy it again tomorrow, and the reason we finally bought a second computer had nothing to do with the Surface being worn out.

To be precise about what is being reviewed, because it turns out to matter more than usual: this is a Surface Pro 9 with an Intel Core i7, 16GB of memory and a 256GB SSD. If you have arrived here looking at the Surface Pro generally rather than that specific model, stay - almost everything below is about the format rather than the generation, and the last section is a straight recommendation on which one to buy today. But one thing is genuinely specific to ours, and it is the most useful thing in this review: we run the Intel version. We have not tested the ARM machines Microsoft now sells, and that difference has consequences.

It was simply always busy. Someone was learning on it.

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Microsoft Surface Pro for Business (2025), 13-inch 2-in-1, Intel Core Ultra 7 (Series 2), 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD, Windows 11 Pro (opens in a new tab)

The closest thing on sale to the machine in this review: a Surface Pro with an Intel x86 chip, so it installs anything. Microsoft sells it only through the business line.

That is a strange kind of praise, so let me be precise about it. Most tech gets replaced because it stops being good enough - the battery dies, the software outgrows it, the hinge goes. Four years is long enough for all three of those to happen and none of them did. What happened instead is that a device good enough to be the household default becomes the household bottleneck, and the fix is another device rather than a better one. For the Dadnology community this is a 5/5, with one caveat loud enough that it gets its own section: the part that makes this machine great is not in the box.

The specification that matters least here is the processor, and the one that matters most is the 3:2 display. A 13-inch screen in that shape holds a full page of a school text without scrolling, and that turns out to be the whole argument for the format.

What Four Years Actually Did To It

The short answer is: less than you would think, and the parts that did wear are the parts you can see.

The Graphite finish has picked up the shine that anodised aluminium always picks up where hands hold it, along the left edge where it gets grabbed off the table. There is a hairline scuff on the kickstand from four years of being opened onto whatever surface was available, including a lot of kitchen tables and at least one aeroplane tray. The screen is unmarked, which surprises me more than anything, given how much of its life has been spent being poked by people who had just eaten something.

Nothing has failed. Not the kickstand hinge, which is the part I expected to go first and which still holds any angle you put it at. Not the keyboard connection, not the ports, not the display.

The battery is the honest exception, and it is a smaller exception than the internet led me to expect. Microsoft’s claim was up to 15.5 hours, which was never true for the Intel version on any day of its life. It arrived doing something like seven hours of ordinary work and now does something closer to five and a half. That is real degradation and it is also four years of daily cycling, which is roughly what any lithium battery does. It still covers a homework evening. It does not cover a day out, and it never did.

One detail deserves more credit than it gets: the SSD in the Pro 9 is removable. Microsoft put a little door under the kickstand with a single screw behind it. On a device this thin that is a genuinely unusual decision, and four years later it means this machine has an upgrade path and a data-recovery story that most tablets simply do not have.

Five People, One Machine, Five Accounts

This is the part of the review that no spec sheet covers and the part that made the machine what it is in our house.

Every member of the family has their own Windows account. Their own desktop, their own browser with their own logins and history, their own files, their own settings. Switching takes about as long as it takes to sit down. That sounds like an ordinary operating-system feature, and it is - but it is the difference between a shared computer and a computer somebody owns and everyone else borrows.

What it means in practice is that the machine has no owner. Homework happens on it in the late afternoon in one account, research for a school presentation in another after dinner, and general web browsing in a third later. Nobody closes anybody else’s tabs. Nobody finds their document gone. There is no negotiation about whose Google account the browser is signed into, which is a fight I did not know families had until I watched one happen on a single-account laptop.

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Microsoft Surface Pro Signature Keyboard (opens in a new tab)

Not included with the tablet, and not optional either. This is the part that turns it into a real computer - budget for it as part of the price.

The second half of that is the Windows part, and I do not think it is nostalgia to say it matters. This is a tablet where you can install anything. Not anything from a store - anything. A piece of school software that only exists as a Windows installer, an old utility, a game, whatever the situation actually requires. That flexibility is the entire reason a Windows tablet is a different proposition from an iPad, and it is why the Surface stayed useful across four years of a family’s changing requirements rather than being outgrown.

Hold on to that point. It comes back later, and not in a comfortable way.

School Work Is the Job, and It Is Good at It

The daily work is unglamorous: reading, research, writing, printing. The Surface is good at all of it for reasons that are mostly about shape.

The 3:2 display is the first one. A 13-inch screen at 2880 x 1920 in a nearly square aspect ratio shows a document as a document, not as a letterbox with a page squeezed into the middle of it. Anyone who has tried to read a two-column PDF on a 16:9 laptop knows the difference. For schoolwork, which is overwhelmingly reading pages and writing onto pages, this is the correct screen shape and most laptops have the wrong one.

The second is that it detaches. Reading happens as a tablet, on the sofa, held. Writing happens on the table with the keyboard on. That transition takes one second and no thought, and the fact that both modes are genuinely good is rarer than the marketing for every convertible laptop would suggest.

The third is speed, and the specification here is deliberately boring. An i7-1255U with 16GB of RAM in 2026 is not a fast computer by any current benchmark. For a browser with thirty tabs, a word processor, a video call and a PDF open simultaneously it remains completely untroubled, and that is the workload. If you take one buying note from this review, take this one: the 16GB was the right call and the 8GB configuration would have aged into a frustrating machine. Buy the RAM.

If you want the study method that runs on top of all this, we wrote it up separately in our guide to studying with NotebookLM - the Surface is one of the machines it was worked out on.

The Suitcase Test, and Photo Culling on Holiday

The Surface goes on holiday, which is a sentence I would not write about most computers.

At 879 grams as a tablet and around 1.1 kg with the keyboard, in a footprint smaller than a sheet of A4, it disappears into hand luggage in a way a 14-inch laptop does not. It is the machine that answers the evening questions - where are we going tomorrow, is that place open, what is the weather doing - without anybody hunting for a socket first.

The unexpectedly good part is photographic. After a day out with a camera there are several hundred frames to get through, and culling them is a job that wants a big sharp screen and very little else. The Pro 9 does this well: the display is sharp enough to judge focus properly, it is a real Windows machine so it runs whatever photo software you already own rather than a cut-down tablet version of it, and quick edits are perfectly comfortable. On a rainy afternoon it will happily do the first pass on a whole trip.

The honest boundary is colour. This is a good screen, not a colour-critical one, and serious editing belongs on a desktop with a calibrated monitor - which for us is a Mac mini and a proper display. Culling and quick edits on the road, though, are exactly the job it turns out to be built for.

The Things That Still Annoy Us

Four years is long enough to know which irritations fade and which ones do not. These did not.

There is no headphone jack. Microsoft removed the 3.5mm socket on the Pro 9 and on a family machine this is worse than it sounds, because school-issued wired headphones are still a thing that exists and children still bring them home. It means a USB-C adapter, and adapters live approximately three weeks before disappearing. Four years on, I still occasionally hunt for the dongle. It has not stopped bothering me.

The keyboard is sold separately, and this is the caveat I flagged at the top. The Signature Keyboard is genuinely excellent - a real key travel, a good trackpad, a solid magnetic attachment that has not loosened in four years of being folded back and forth. It is also not in the box, it costs meaningful money, and the tablet without it is a much less useful object. Any price you see for a Surface Pro is not the price of the computer. Budget for both from the start, because the keyboard is not an accessory here. It is half the product.

The kickstand does not work on a lap. It works on any table, any desk, any kitchen counter, any aeroplane tray. On actual laps it wobbles, because the design puts the weight behind the hinge and a lap is not flat. If you want a machine for the sofa, that is a conventional laptop, and it always was.

And the i7 has a fan. Under a real load it is audible. In four years I have heard it perhaps a dozen times, always while something was genuinely working hard, and never during ordinary use - but a fanless machine it is not.

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Microsoft Surface Pro (2026), 13-inch 2-in-1, Snapdragon X2 Elite, OLED Touchscreen, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD (opens in a new tab)

The consumer Surface Pro, and the one most families should buy. Faster and longer-lasting than ours, on ARM rather than Intel.

What To Buy Now: Intel Is a Business Feature Now

If this review has convinced you, the obvious move is to go and buy a Surface Pro. Before you do, there is one thing worth knowing, and it is the single most useful paragraph in this article.

You cannot buy a consumer Surface Pro with an Intel chip any more. The current Surface Pro that Microsoft sells to ordinary people runs on Snapdragon X2, which is ARM. It is a genuinely faster and more efficient machine by most measures, with better battery life and a quieter, cooler body. What it is not is the machine reviewed above. The property I spent a whole section praising - that this thing installs literally anything, including software nobody has updated since 2015 - is exactly the property that changes on ARM. Mainstream applications are fine. Older programs, niche utilities and some specialist school software either run emulated or not at all.

Intel Surfaces do still exist. Microsoft simply moved them behind a different door: the Surface Pro for Business comes with an Intel Core Ultra 7, which is x86, runs everything natively, and is the direct descendant of the machine in this review. It also costs meaningfully more - the reporting at launch put the Intel premium at around $400 over the ARM equivalent.

Sit with that for a second, because it is the honest summary of where Windows tablets are in 2026: running any Windows program you like is now a feature Microsoft charges business customers extra for. That is not a conspiracy, it is a supply decision, and it is still a strange thing to type about the operating system whose entire historical advantage was compatibility.

So the recommendation is short. Most families should buy the consumer machine: browser, Office, school portals, a photo app - none of that cares which chip is underneath, and the ARM version is the better tablet. Buy the Business model only if you can name the specific program that forces it, because otherwise you are paying a few hundred for compatibility you will never draw on. And if you can name it, do not compromise: that program is the reason you are buying a Windows machine at all.

There is a larger consequence hiding in this, and it changed our own thinking. The strongest argument for Windows over macOS was never the interface. It was that a Windows PC runs anything. If the affordable Windows tablet no longer quite does, and the one that does carries a business-tier price, then that argument has a price tag on it for the first time - which makes the question of whether to stay on Windows genuinely open rather than settled. That is not a criticism of the current Surface, which is a very good tablet. It is the reason a Windows household ended up with a Mac on the same table - our MacBook Neo review covers exactly how that went.

Family Fit: Why We Bought a Second Computer

Here is how the Surface’s story ends, and it is the best thing I can say about it.

By early this year the machine was booked. Homework in the afternoon, a presentation to prepare in the evening, someone wanting to look something up in between. A single computer that everyone can use properly is a computer everyone wants to use, and there is no configuration of one device that solves that. We did not replace it. We added to it — a MacBook Neo bought specifically as our daughter’s school laptop — and the Surface carried on doing exactly what it had been doing.

That is also the honest limit of the recommendation. One Surface Pro is a superb one-computer household solution right up to the point where your household needs more than one computer, and no amount of user accounts fixes a scheduling problem. If you already know two people will need a machine at the same time on a Tuesday evening, buy two things, and make one of them cheap.

Is the Surface Pro 9 still worth buying in 2026?

As a used or clearance machine, yes, and it is the one we would still choose for a shared family computer. Buy the Intel version with 16GB of RAM, budget for the keyboard on top, and do not buy the 8GB model. Buying one new at its original price makes no sense in 2026 - the current Surface Pro is the new machine, and it costs about twice as much.

How is the real battery life of the Surface Pro 9?

Microsoft claims up to 15.5 hours. In four years of real use we have never seen anything close to that. A realistic figure for the Intel i7 with a browser, a video call and a dozen tabs is six to seven hours when it was new, and around five and a half now. It comfortably covers a homework evening or a flight, and it does not cover a whole day away from a socket.

Can a whole family share one Surface Pro 9?

Yes, and it is the single best thing about it. Windows lets you give every family member their own account with their own desktop, browser profile, files and settings, and switching between them takes seconds. That is what made one machine work for a household - right up until it did not, because too many people wanted it at the same time.

Does the Surface Pro 9 have a headphone jack?

No, and it is the design decision that still irritates us most. Microsoft removed the 3.5mm jack on the Pro 9. On a family machine that means a school-issued pair of wired headphones simply does not work without a USB-C adapter, and adapters get lost. Plan for Bluetooth headphones or a permanent dongle.

Is the Surface Pro 9 good for photo editing?

For culling and quick edits on the road, genuinely good. The 13-inch 2880 x 1920 display is sharp enough to judge focus, and a real Windows machine runs whatever photo software you already own. It is not a colour-critical editing machine and it is no substitute for a desktop and a calibrated monitor - but for triaging a holiday card of photos in the evening it works very well.

Should I buy the Intel or the ARM Surface Pro?

It comes down to one question: do you need to install older or unusual Windows software? Ours is Intel, so it runs everything without asking. The consumer Surface Pro sold today is ARM, where mainstream apps are fine but some older or niche software runs emulated or not at all. Intel Surfaces still exist, but only in the business line and at roughly $400 more - so buy the ordinary consumer machine unless you can name the program that forces the upgrade.