Microsoft Surface Pro (2025): Big upgrade in a small package

Finally, a compact Windows tablet with quality. Ultrabook fast, Al smart, versatile, and fanless.

- MATTIAS INGHE

Microsoft once pushed tablets as the future of Windows, but the world didn’t bite. Now the company mostly plays it safe with traditional laptops and mouse-friendly interfaces, and yet it keeps making Surface devices. The latest is the Microsoft Surface Pro (fave.co/4e1NFWN), more often called the Surface Pro 12 or Surface Pro 2025.

This compact tablet runs on a Snapdragon X Plus chip and is built for casual browsing and office work. It's not high-end, but it delivers a solid, fanless experience Windows tablets have long struggled to provide. And with Qualcomm's Hexagon NPU, it's got impressively snappy AI, too.

The Surface Pro delivers a solid, fanless experience Windows tablets have long struggled to provide.

QUIET AND COMFORTABLY COOL

So it's completely silent cooling, and I don't even think it ever gets annoyingly hot to hold the tablet—a little disturbingly lukewarm, but nothing unpleasant. It throttles with graphics performance when I run 3D graphics for long periods, but honestly, who buys a Surface to play games?

The price is $799 for a base model with 256GB of SSD storage or you can spend a little extra ($899) on the configuration with 512GB of SSD storage. You also get 16GB of RAM, just enough for all your regular office work, media streaming, basic photo editing, and communication.

Most of the multitasking I try goes smoothly. I'm in a Teams video meeting with the editorial team, Googling information in a browser (this is a Bing household—sorry!), I have articles in progress open in Word, and I'm syncing up a large video file for online sharing. All this happens at the same time, without one task interfering with another.