Microsoft Surface Pro 6 (Intel Core i5, 8GB RAM, 128GB)review

Verdict

The Microsoft Surface Pro has long been our favorite detachable 2-in-1 laptop, but one thing has held it back from hanging with the best full-fledged laptops: short battery life. It's not easy to squeeze a lot of juice out of such a thin design. Well, we have some good news.

The new Surface Pro 6 lasted nearly 2 hours longer on our battery test than its predecessor while delivering a lot more speed via its 8th-generation quad-core Core i5 processor. The lack of USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 ports continues to be a bummer, but overall, this is easily one of the best tablets for work and play.

Update Aug 27: Microsoft has sent out invites for an Oct. 2 event. The company is expected to announce a new Surface Pro 7. We still recommend the Surface Pro 6, especially if you can find it at a discount.

Surface Pro 6 Quick Summary
The Surface Pro 6 lasted a strong 9 hours and 20 minutes on our web surfing battery test, nearly 2 hours longer than the Surface Pro 5's 7:30.
Expect blazing speed from this 2-in-1, with performance scores about 47 percent higher than the last model.
The new matte black color looks sleek, but you still don't get a USB-C port. That likely won't come until the Surface Pro 7.
Don't be fooled by the starting price. The cost with keyboard and pen is for 128GB of storage. The 256GB version costs a steep with all the accessories.

Surface Pro 6 price and configuration options

The Surface Pro 6 starts for a Core i5 processor, 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, but that's misleading. The vast majority of people will want to add the keyboard, which brings .Microsoft’s Surface Pro 6 is a light and portable 2-in-1 with a decent display that’s ideal for office work and streaming. I’m impressed by the lightness and nippiness of the Surface Pro 6.

Pros
Great screen
Good battery life
Solid performance
Light and portable hybrid design

ConsDated processor
Keyboard dock may be too small for some

What is the Microsoft Surface Pro 6?

Key Specifications
12.3-inch touchscreen
8th Gen Intel laptop CPUs
Flexible hybrid format
Surface Pen stylus support
Front-facing camera

Design

The Surface Pro 6 returns with pretty much the same formula as previous models with a slight tweak. You still get three primary modes -- tablet, laptop and studio with the kickstand extended 165 degrees.

But there's now a matte-black finish option, which we received for this review. The dark hue makes this 0.33-inch thin magnesium beauty look even slimmer than before. The black exterior also did a nice job resisting fingerprints, and it has a slightly gritty texture that makes the casing easy to grip.

The metal kickstand on the Surface Pro 6 remains easy to maneuver. This 2-in-1 bounced around a bit in my lap as I typed, but it felt sturdy and stable enough. My only real complaint with the design is the somewhat thick bezels around the display. It feels a bit less modern next to the Dell XPS 13.

The Surface Pro 6 weighs just 1.7 pounds as a tablet and a still very light 2.4 pounds with the keyboard attached. By comparison, the 12.9-inch iPad Pro weighs 1.4 pounds as a slate and 2.28 pounds with its keyboard.

Surface Pro 6 Specs

CPU: 8th-gen Intel Core i5, Core i7
RAM: 8GB or 16GB
SSD: 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, 1TB
Display: 12.3 inches (2736 x 1824 pixels)
Battery: 9 hours and 20 minutes
Ports: 1 USB 3.0, DisplayPort, Surface Connect, microSD, headphone
Cameras: Rear: 8 MP; Front: 5 MP
Size: 11.5 x 7.9 x 0.33 inches
Weight: 1.7 pounds (tablet), 2.4 pounds (with keyboard)

Ports

Call it stubbornness or simply a desire to stick with its proprietary docking connector, but for whatever reason Microsoft refused to embrace USB-C on the Surface Pro 6. That means you can't use USB-C for charging or plug in a growing array of USB-C peripherals and Thunderbolt 3 docks.

You'll have to use Microsoft's own Surface Connect port to plug into the company's Surface Connect dock if you want to output to a couple of monitors at the same time. I do like how Microsoft's connector lights up when attached.

In addition to the Surface Connect port, the right side houses a USB 3.0 port and a mini DisplayPort. The left side is home to the headphone jack. If you want to expand the storage, the microSD card slot is located underneath the kickstand.

Display

The 12.3-inch PixelSense display on the Surface Pro 6 is one of the better ones you'll find on a 2-in-1. This panel is not just sharp at 2736 x 1824 pixels, it's also remarkably bright and colorful. When I watched the Aquaman trailer on the Surface Pro 6's screen, Jason Momoa's scaly gold superhero uniform gleamed, and the red laser beams coming from Black Manta popped off the screen.

The Surface Pro 6 is a 2-in-1 Microsoft device that can be turned into a makeshift laptop when paired with the sold separately Type Cover.

The Surface Pro 6 is longer the flagship device of the series though, with the newer Surface Pro 7 recently launched with a more powerful processor and improved connectivity options such as USB-C and WiFi 6. Microsoft have given the Pro 6 a huge price cut though, so it’s still very much a worthwhile

But what are you missing out on by going for the Surface Pro 6 instead of the more pricey Surface Pro 7?

Like all of Microsoft’s 2-in-1 range laptop-tablet hybrids, the Surface Pro 6 comprises a Windows 10 tablet with a kickstand and a six-pin port, which lets you attach a TypeCover keyboard dock.

Even without the (separately sold) keyboard cover attached, the Surface Pro 6’s kickstand is wide and stable enough to ensure that if you have the tablet stood up on your desk and you’re using another Bluetooth keyboard, it’s not going to get knocked over easily, no matter how hard either of your pet cats try it.

The keyboard dock features magnetic strips that enable it to snap and lock into place snugly. The angle of the dock makes the whole thing rise up on your desktop, so that you’re not tied down to a flat surface, as you would with lesser keyboard docks.

There’s a single USB-A 3.0 port, a mini DisplayPort port, and a microSD card reader along with the 3.5mm headphone jack and power supply connection. That’s more than what you get with most tablets (and some laptops, come to think of it), but anyone looking for a ‘pro’ device might expect to see an HDMI port or a USB-C port here. The Surface Pro 7 solves this issue by featuring a USB-C port, but it does cost a little bit more.

The Surface range is also generally synonymous with bright colours, or smooth, spaceship grey plastic. But, for the first time, Microsoft’s launching a new Surface in matte black. The Surface Pro 6 is available in either black or platinum, which is bad news if you’ve enjoyed Microsoft’s colourful styles on other devices.
Microsoft Surface Pro 6 – Keyboard

The Type Cover dock of the Surface Pro 6 measures 295 x 217 x 5mm and features a full QWERTY layout including function keys and a trackpad.

Generally the typing experience is pretty good, despite the cramped dimensions. Sensibly, Microsoft has given more acreage to the letter keys, making the function keys smaller. Downsides include the four arrow keys, which are bunched up at the bottom right corner, and the left-hand shift key, which is so small, I found myself ACCIDENTALLY HITTING CAPS LOCK ON MORE THAN ONE OCCASION.

The trackpad is very precise and responsive, allowing you to scroll through long articles with ease and get a quick overview of running processes with a three-fingered drag. There are no buttons next to the trackpad, but it supports both left and right clicks.
Microsoft Surface Pro 6 – Display

The display of the Surface Pro 6 measures 12.3 inches across and boasts a resolution of 2736 x 1824, which gives you 267 pixels per inch (ppi). The display conforms to an aspect ratio of 3:2, which is common for the Surface range, as well as Apple’s iPad Pro.

It’s a very good display. Streamed video and web pages look crisp and clear, with no colours looking overly washed out. Contrast is decent too, with dark areas of pictures not looking flat or grey – like they would on laptops with lesser screens.

The tempered glass cover has a tendency to reflect sunlight and harsh striplights, which hampers visibility. But that’s something you’ll encounter on any device with a glass display cover.

The figures backed up our real-life observations, too. In colorimeter tests, I recorded a maximum brightness of 422.74, which is very good, and a decent minimum of 0.3132 nits, resulting in a superb contrast ratio of 1350:1. We recorded a colour temperature of 6265K, slightly warm, but close enough to the 6500K ideal for reds to not look overly saturated.

In terms of colour gamut coverage, the Surface Pro 6 gave me 90.2% of the sRGB gamut, which will be good enough for digital art and cartooning.

Photographers will be disappointed by the paltry Adobe RGB and DCI P3 scores of 62.4% and 64.2%. But, frankly, you wouldn’t want to be using a device like the Surface Pro 6 for such work anyway. All this means in realistic terms is that any holiday snaps you take and then load on to the Surface Pro 6 won’t look as good as they would on other devices.
Microsoft Surface Pro 6 – Specifications

Specs for the Surface Pro 6 range differ slightly, depending on which of the two processor options you go for. Here’s how everything stacks up:

Microsoft Surface Pro 6 (Intel Core i5, 8GB RAM, 128GB)review

Microsoft Surface Pro 6

Dimensions

292 x 201 x 8.5mm

Weight

775g (i5) / 792g (i7)

Processor

Intel 8th Gen Core i5-8250U / i7-8650U

Memory

8GB / 16GB RAM

Graphics

Intel UHD Graphics 620

Storage

128GB, 256GB, 512GB, 1TB

Display

12.3-inch, 2736 x 1824 (267 ppi): 3:2 aspect ratio PixelSense with 10-point multitouch

Connectivity

Wi-Fi ac, Bluetooth 4.1

Ports

USB 3.0, Mini DisplayPort, Surface Connect port, Surface Type Cover port, 3.5mm headphone jack, microSDXC card reader

Cameras and mics

5.0-megapixel front camera with 1080p Skype HD video, Windows Hello, 8.0-megapixel rear camera with 1080p full HD video and autofocus, dual microphones, 1.6W stereo speakers with Dolby Audio Premium Microsoft Surface Pro 6 – Performance

The Surface Pro 6 Microsoft sent in for review is one of the entry-level models, with an Intel Core i5-8250U (1.6GHz, boosting to 1.8GHz), 8GB or RAM and Intel UHD Graphics 620.

The Surface Pro 6 review model performed well in benchmarks, in line with mid-range laptops like the Acer Swift 5 (SF514-52T-531B) and Acer Aspire 5 (A515-51G).

Given that those laptops are powered by the exact same processor, the quad-core Intel Core i5-8250U, it’s not that surprising that both the Geekbench 4 single and multi-core results are pretty similar.

For more context, the scores the Surface Pro 6 recorded aren’t that far away from bigger and more powerful devices, such as the Lenovo Yoga 730 and the Dell XPS 15 2-in-1. So, on paper, the Surface Pro 6 punches above its weight.

The Surface Pro 6 is really geared towards work and streaming media between writing essays/reports/articles. And to that end, the bulk of my benchmarking focused on that.

If you’re after a hybrid laptop tablet that will let you hammer our essays and satisfy your Netflix/iPlayer/Amazon Prime binges on the sly, then the Surface Pro 6 does all of that with aplomb.

The Surface Pro 6 is well equipped to handle light gaming (such as Minecraft) as well, but isn’t really capable of playing the likes of Overwatch and PUBG.

To give you an idea of how the Surface Pro 6 might handle games, I ran the standard 3DMark Ice Storm test, which we use when testing laptops and 2-in-1s that don’t have a dedicated GPU. This gave us a fairly middling score of 50,847. I also ran the Ice Storm Extreme, which was used to test last year’s Surface Pro 5. We got 43,042, which, again, is a good – if average – result.

For completion’s sake, I also ran Cinebench R15 on the Surface Pro 6. Cinebench is a video and graphics benchmarking tool that generally gives you an idea of how well suited a laptop is to heavy gaming and video editing. While it’s unlikely that you’d want to run Adobe Premiere Pro on the Surface Pro 6, the scores at least give you an idea of graphical processing prowess.

On that note, here’s how I got on with drawing and making art with the Surface Pen. The Surface Pen features 4096 levels of pressure sensitivity and uses N-trig technology, instead of Wacom, which most styli use. This time around, Microsoft has installed everything you need to start using freeware drawing programmes, such as Krita, out of the box – no need for you to faff around hunting for custom drivers.

The stylus also works with Microsoft’s Sticky Notes, so if you like, you could jot down things and add them to your daily to-do list with the Surface Pen, as well as/instead of typing.

As with previous Surface Pros, the magnetised strip of the Surface Pen means it can be easily attached to the sides of the tablet. This is more useful for having somewhere to keep your stylus when you’re sat at your desk. The stylus is liable to fall off if you carry it around, so take it off and stash it in your bag when you need to move around.

Our lab results mostly backed up my immersive viewing experience, starting with a brightness reading of 408 nits. That beats the Surface Pro 5 (396 nits) but the ThinkPad X1 Tablet reached a higher 415 nits. The Galaxy Tab S4's OLED screen reached 463 nits and the new 12.9-inch iPad Pro reached 484 nits.

When I watched the Aquaman trailer on the Surface Pro 6's screen, Jason Momoa's scaly gold superhero uniform gleamed, and the red laser beams coming from Black Manta popped off the screen.

According to our colorimeter, the Surface Pro 6's display covers a good 136 percent of the sRGB color gamut. That's better than the ThinkPad X1 Tablet (118 percent) and the XPS 13 (117 percent at 1080p,130 percent at 4K). The 12.9-inch iPad Pro notched 128.4 percent, and the Galaxy Tab S4 destroyed them all at 219 percent.

Audio

The two front-firing speakers on the Surface Pro 6 deliver loud and clear audio. In fact, the sound is so good I gave my Amazon Echo Show a rest and used the Surface Pro 6 to rock out to some early-2000 hits in my kitchen. Microsoft's tablet easily filled the room with Beyonce's Halo; her vocals soared without getting harsh at max volume and the piano sounded crisp.

Keyboard and Touchpad

The typing experience on the Surface Pro 6's keyboard is remarkably good for a 2-in-1. The layout offers 1.3 mm of key travel, which is cushy given how thin the Type Cover is. By comparison, the iPad Pro's keyboard has only 0.5mm of travel.

On the 10Fastfingers typing test, I typed my typical 65 to 70 words per minute, but I made a few more errors compared to my MacBook Pro. I was in the 90 percent range, when I'm usually closer to 95 percent.

The glass touchpad on the Surface Pro 6 is as precise as ever. Scrolling was smooth and gestures like switching apps with three fingers worked well. My only nitpick is that that clicking down on the touchpad is fairly loud.

Not only does the pen offer 4,096 levels of sensitivity and a rubber eraser on the back, you can use tilt for shading in various apps.

I'm not an artist by any stretch, but I appreciated the smooth inking and lack of lag when drawing and sketching in the included Sketchpad and Paint 3D apps.

The Surface Pen also comes in handy when you're annotating in apps like the Microsoft Edge browser, making handwritten notes in the Mail app and penciling in edits in Microsoft Word.

Performance

Compared with the last Surface Pro, the Surface Pro 6 is a major leap forward in performance, thanks to its 8th-generation, quad-core Core i5-8250U processor and 8GB of RAM. (Serious power users can step that up to a Core i7 chip and 16GB of RAM.)

Even with 28 tabs open in Chrome, the Surface Pro 6 delivered smooth performance as I wrote this review, streamed music from Spotify and watched some of my favorite parts of Black Panther on the Netflix app.

On Geekbench 4, which measures overall performance, the Surface Pro 6 scored 13,025. That's nearly 50 percent better than what the 7th-gen Core i7-powered Surface Pro 5 turned in last year (8,879). The Surface Pro 6 also beat the ThinkPad X1 with a 8th-gen Core i5 chip (12,772) and came in slightly behind the Samsung Note 9 Pen (Core i7; 13,129).

The Galaxy Tab S4 and its older Snapdragon 835 processor didn't stand a chance (6,592), while the last-gen 12-inch iPad Pro notched an amazing score of 17,995, thanks to its A12X Bionc chip.

Surface Pro 6 delivered smooth performance as I wrote this review, streamed music from Spotify and watched some of my favorite parts of Black Panther on Netflix.

The Surface Pro 6 also made quick work of our Excel test, which involves matching 65,000 names and addresses. With a time of 1 minute and 12 seconds, Microsoft's slate was neck and neck with the ThinkPad X1's 1:13. The Samsung Notebook 9 Pen took a bit longer at 1:31.

Microsoft Surface Pro 6 – Battery

Using Powermark to simulate 10 minutes of browsing and five minutes of streaming video, we got a result of seven hours and 55 minutes, with the screen’s brightness set to 150 nits.

Typically, a day spent writing and streaming Spotify playlists to a Bluetooth speaker would give us around seven to eight hours of power, and we’d get about the same out of an average Netflix binge session, too. That’s about what we’d expect from a hybrid device of this kind. The Surface Pro 5 gave us approximately eight hours of use off the back of a single charge.

Microsoft quotes you 13 hours 30 minutes of looped video playback in the spec sheet, but in our experience, you’ll get an hour or so less than that. Like most tablets, once the battery falls beneath the 10% mark, battery-saving mode kicks in, but power still tends to fall off a cliff.

From an empty tank, we’d get around 60% full after an hour. Generally, it takes about two hours to completely charge a Surface Pro 6.
Should I buy the Surface Pro 6?

The Surface Pro 6 is no longer the best in Microsoft’s 2-in-1 series following the Surface Pro 7 launch, but there are still plenty of reasons to buy it.

While it may not have the performance power of the Surface Pro 7, or connectivity options such as USB-C, it’s essentially an identical device in almost every other regard with a slightly lower price. The Surface Pro 6 is also bound to feature in all the Black Friday deals, seeing the price driven down even further.

So if you’re after laptop/tablet hybrid that can steamroll through basic tasks, then the Surface Pro 6 really is great option, even in 2019.
Verdict

Microsoft’s Surface Pro 6 is a light and portable 2-in-1 with a decent display that’s ideal for work and streaming.