Sadly, in practise, we found that not only did the Surface Pro 7+ fail to deliver a full day’s usage before dying, but it’s also actually noticeably worse than the Surface Pro 7. Not for the speed of the SSD itself, which is a rather middling affair - in the AS SSD benchmark, it notched up sequential read and write speeds of 1,849 MB/sec and 631 MB/sec respectively - but for the fact that the drive can now be accessed without sending the whole kit and caboodle back to base. Storage, meanwhile, is a notable feature. You’re also not likely to find better speeds in this form factor - at least, not until someone builds a Ryzen-powered equivalent. Still, the performance on show here isn’t bad, and you certainly won’t struggle with anything in a day-to-day context. Fan noise is also noticeable, although not as disruptively loud as on some machines. Another point to note is that the rear of this device gets distinctly toasty when under load, and we measured CPU temperatures of around 50 degrees when running at full pelt. While strong single-threaded performance at the expense of multi-tasking may potentially be acceptable in a workstation, the Surface Pro is aimed at general-purpose users who will likely be bouncing between a number of different tasks and applications. It managed an overall score of 91, which is an improvement of around a third compared to the earlier model and puts it about on par with the XPS 13 that Dell released in early 2020. However, it didn’t quite live up to these promises in our benchmark tests. The 7+ offers more than 2x faster performance compared to the Surface Pro 7, according to Microsoft. It’s available in Core i3, i5 and i7 flavours, and with a maximum of 16GB of RAM - on test is the top-end variant, with a quad-core i7-1165G7 and the full 16GB RAM allocation. The 7+ has now been updated to run on Intel’s latest 11th-gen Tiger Lake processors, stepping up from the 10th-gen Ice Lake chips used in the previous model. So far, so Surface Pro 7, but where the real changes have been made is under the hood (or in this case, kickstand).

Microsoft Surface Pro 7+ review: Specs and performance It’s an intrinsic part of the Surface Pro’s appeal, and selling it separately still feels like an unnecessary bit of gouging.

Its positive qualities remain unchanged, but sadly so do its flaws, with the biggest one being the fact that Microsoft continues to charge an additional £150 for the TypeCover.

Surface 7 pro