Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Microsoft Surface Pro X vs Apple iPad Pro”.
Hey, what’s up folks how’s it going. This watch hope you guys are all doing well and today we’re going to be taking a look at the new microsoft surface pro x tablet and comparing it directly against the ipad pro 12.9 inch version. Now the ipad pro came out last year, but it’s still super relevant. Both tablets are very sleek in terms of design, have amazing built-in displays and fairly powerful internal specifications and with the respective keyboard attachments as well as stylus pen configuration.
They ultimately want to replace the old laptop. They have lying around we’re going to see how they fare up against each other, see how they kind of compare in terms of moral performance, versatility, form factor design, all those fun things. So, if you’re interested in getting the ultimate tablet, uh right now in 2019, going into 2020 we’re gon na see how they do against each other and which one is best overall, let’s get right into it now, in terms of the price perspective, both tablets are pretty Much exactly the same in terms of starting price, both around 9.99, just under a thousand dollars the surface pro x all come with the sq1 processor, that’s co-engineered by qualcomm and microsoft. That’S an eight core chip that can turbo up to three gigahertz. We also have an integrated adreno, 685 gpu, as well as 8 gigabytes on the stock configuration with an upgrade option of 16 gigabytes of ddr4 memory. Now the ipad pro is using the a12 x processor, that’s also an octa-core, but we have a little bit less memory. Configuration on the stock configuration so you’re, looking at 64 gigabytes of internal memory, uh versus the surface pro x has 128 gigabytes and we have slightly less ram at four gigabytes now, if you do upgrade to the one terabyte option for the ipad pro, you also get A little bit more ram memory up to six gigabytes now the display size from a diagonal perspective is actually quite similar. 12.9 inch versus 13 inch on the surface pro x, but they’re a different aspect ratio. The ipad pro uses a 4 3 aspect, ratio versus you’re.
Looking at a 3 2 aspect, ratio on the surface pro x and that’s why you’re going to see the general shape of both devices are a little bit different. If you’re, looking at the landscape mode, you’re gon na see that surface pro x is a little bit longer and not as tall as the ipad pro, but when we’re taking a look at the overall thickness and weight of both devices, the ipad pro wins. On that front, it’s only measuring around 5.9 millimeters in terms of thickness and much lighter at 631 grams versus the surface. Pro x is a 7.3 millimeters in terms of thickness and about 776 grams in terms of weight. Now both devices are actually made of similar build materials aluminum mostly now, due to the fact that the ipad pro is so thin. It is a little bit vulnerable to bending at times and in extreme situations. You can find yourself uh, bending the entire display, there’s tons of videos on youtube that demonstrate that uh quite well, i’m not going to do it here now. The surface pro x seems a little bit more resilient and a little bit more rigid due to the fact that it is a little bit.
Thicker and just the overall construction feels a little bit more solid than the ultra thin ultra portable design that we have on the ipad pro now on the finishes themselves. The surface pro x uses this iodized matte black finish, which looks really sleek and stylish, but it is a total fingerprint magnet, unlike the similar matte finish, that we have on the ipad pro. But the color is a little bit different. It’S more of a metallicy gray.
Color and it’s definitely more resilient to fingerprints plus you have an oleophobic coating on the front of the display, which definitely makes it a little bit more resilient to fingerprints, and it’s certainly a little bit better in terms of general upkeep. To make the thing look a little bit cleaner at all times. Now, probably one of the biggest reasons why microsoft wanted to make the surface pro x is to kind of modernize the design of their very popular surface, pro lineup of tablets that they put out for several years. In fact, the surface pro 7 looks pretty much identical to the past few generations of surface tablets, and this is where the surface pro x really departs from that design, making the bezels ultra thin and the overall kind of form factor a little bit more modernized. We also have a more modernized kind of approach to ports, connectivity options. We don’t have a headphone jack, unfortunately much like the ipad pro and we’re using usbc, primarily for all of the physical connection interface.
There are no usb a connection for legacy. Support that you’ll find on the new surface pro 7. now. Another key feature is that we have a nano sim slot for lte support. That’S something that you don’t find on the surface pro 7. Now there are versions of the ipad pro that support lte, but certainly not in the stock configuration. Furthermore, just like the ipad pro, there is no micro sd expansion slot, which is unfortunate. That’S something that you do find. However, on the standard surface, pro 7 tablet and much like removing the headphone jack, it looks like microsoft is really taking a page out of apple’s book in order to minimize the amount of important connectivity options in order to streamline their product. But, ultimately, for me as an end user, it’s more of a lack of feature and a lack of versatility compared to what is available in other laptop replacement tablets, including the surface pro 7..
Furthermore, the type cover and surface pen is completely different. On the surface pro x, it’s a separate from what you’re going to find with the surface lineup of tablets, so the actual type cover is very similar in terms of overall design compared to the standard surface tablets. Exactly the same keyboard configuration you have a track pad as well as an alcantara finish that feels super nice and comfortable to type on it’s a much better typing experience than the smart keyboard attachment that we find on the ipad pro just in terms of general spacing And overall comfort is better due to the fact that you actually have a nice palm rest that accompanies the keyboard. Much like you would find on a traditional laptop now. What’S interesting over here is that the new surface pro x pen is actually integrated inside the type cover itself and actually charges through the type cover. Now the functionality and overall performance of the surface pen is exactly the same as you would find from the previous generation surface pen.
So it has the same level of pressure, sensitivity, super accurate way to interface with the touchscreen display and the overall pixel sense technology that we have built into the microsoft display is a phenomenal. It does a great job of rejecting your palm. So if you’re going to doodle, take notes on the screen or just use the pen itself to control your windows interface, it’s truly an uncompromising experience. Now, let’s talk about the displays on both platforms, which are fantastic in both regards now.
The resolution is slightly higher on the microsoft surface pro x, about 2880 by 1920, with the ppi count about 267 ppi versus the liquid crystal retina display on the ipad. Pro is 27 32 by 20 48, with the ppi count about 264. A very minor resolution difference now there is a pretty big difference in terms of overall display quality and brightness. The ipad pro has one of the best uh displays on any consumer electronic device. Even though it’s now more than a years old, it has a 120 hertz uh maximum refresh rate versus 60 hertz on the microsoft size and it’s also a lot brighter rated up to 600 nits versus 450 nits. So if you’re gon na take the ipad pro outside it’s super bright, you won’t find too many issues with uh using the surface pro x outdoor, but you can definitely notice the brightness and the overall luminosity and vibrancy on the ipad display is just uh stunning.
From a resolution and sharpness perspective, as mentioned before, it’s very minor difference you’re, probably not going to notice anything whatsoever between the two in terms of general sharpness, color rendition and overall accuracy i do have to give to the ipad pro. It just looks stunning in real life, haven’t really encountered a tablet display as good as the ipad again, even though it’s a year old now, the internal speakers on the ipad pro are also superior. Not only do you have more speakers, it has a quad speaker configuration pretty much speaker in every corner, but the dynamic range is better than the dual stereo speakers that we have on the microsoft surface pro, even though they’re tuned by dolby digital premium and the microphone Is also a triple configuration on the ipad versus dual near field: microphones, on the surface pro x now both have custom socs, specifically designed for their tablet architecture. So microsoft has co-engineered the sq1 chip with qualcomm to specifically make the surface pro x tablet and it’s the same thing with the apple a12x architecture, which is their fastest eight core cpu that they have made to date, specifically designed for the ipad pro platform.
Now, in terms of actual performance, the a12x is an absolute monster, based on our experience. It’S actually faster than the uh baseline version of the macbook air and we even rivals the performance of some fairly moderately powered laptop, including the entry-level macbook pros and compared to the sq1 chip. That’S in the surface pro x, uh.
If you take a look at our geekbench score, which is really the only cross-compatible benchmarking suite that we can use to compare these two you’re, seeing a pretty decent difference, both on the single core and indeed on the multi-core performance, even though both cpus have eight physical Cores so on the single core performance you’re, looking at over 1100 points on the ipad side versus about 729 points on the surface pro x and about 4 700 points on the multi-core score versus 2 800 points on the surface pro x. Now, for the question of replacing your physical laptop, both tablets are certainly adequate for most of your day-to-day needs in terms of surfing web. Doing some uh microsoft office uh related tasks, and you can certainly do some multimedia based applications on the surface products such as photo editing and even some basic video editing, but when it comes to uh doing anything, uh specifically related to multimedia creation and things like that. You’Re going to be limited on both platforms, but for different reasons on the surface pro x side since we’re using an arm based processor uh. Some applications just are not compatible with that specific architecture and will not run even though the system is being run on the full windows, 10 operating system, and indeed the sq1 qualcomm chip is just not as fast as what you’re going to find with a moderately powered I7 or i 5 processor, from intel or the equivalent amd mobile chip and on the ipad pro it’s a little bit tricky because the apple a12 processor is more than powerful enough to do. Most of your video photo and multimedia editing needs specifically on imovie iphoto and the apple suite of a software that’s available as well as some third-party uh software, but due to the fact that it’s still not running a full desktop based uh application.
Suite like uh the adobe premiere suite and things like that, you’re still gon na be limited and ipad os is becoming more and more like a full, fledged operating system. With better file management, you can even hook up a mouse and have a cursor movement and everything like that. But at this stage of the game, it’s still not as versatile and as a full-fledged as what you’ll find with a macbook pro and indeed a powerful windows based laptop now.
Moving on both of these two have rear and front-facing cameras. In terms of the front-facing side, we have five megapixel front-facing on the microsoft tablet, for seven megapixels on the apple tablet and both actually have a face unlock system. So if you want to use that, you can utilize that, on both platforms, the rear cameras are a little bit different.
We have 12 megapixels on the ipad versus 10 megapixels on the surface pro x. Both can do 4k video at 30 fps, as well as at 1080p uh. The ipad can also do a little slow motion at 240 frames per second 720p and 120 frames per second at 1080p, so the rear-facing camera from a quality perspective and from a sheer versatility perspective is superior on the ipad pro side, based on my experience now.
Lastly, let’s talk about the battery performance from a capacity standpoint, we have a 40 watt hour battery on the surface pro x versus 36.7 watt hour battery on the ipad pro now. According to the manufacturers, apple claims about 10 hours of wireless web or video playback, and about 13 hours on the microsoft side. In that typical use case scenario, now we like to do a video playback test in order to keep the battery date and test as simple as possible and to basically simulate the experience of watching a tv show or tv series or a couple of movies on a Long plane journey or something like that, so on airplane mode 50 screen brightness, we got a total run time about 12 hours and four minutes on the surface pro x versus in the exact same scenario, we got 12 hours and 51 minutes on the ipad pro now Of course, in terms of general use, it’s going to depend upon your specific tasks, your usage profile, things like that, but i bet that you’re probably going to get some decent battery performance out of both of them, but on average i bet you’re, probably going to get A slightly better on the ipad pro, that’s certainly the case that i have experienced thus far now. To sum up everything, we’ve talked about from a pure versatility standpoint. Certainly, the surface pro x has a slight advantage in the fact that it is running the full windows operating system. Granted.
There are some limitations with the arm based cpu that we have inside. You might run into some compatibility issues with your particular software. In that instance, you probably want to check what software you’re using on a day-to-day basis and see if it supports arm based hardware, if not then go with the surface pro 7 in that regard, and the ipad pro uh from a pure hardware perspective is definitely the Superior device – i think the display is nicer. The internal specifications from that a12x standpoint is a definitely the faster cpu you’re, definitely going to get better graphical performance as well uh, not to mention uh from a pure creative standpoint, there’s so many great applications on the ios platform that specifically optimized for the ipad pro.
If you’re into drawing or any of that creative kind of stuff, there’s many many things that the new apple ipad os offers, that makes it more of a full-on laptop base. Pc than anything else and coupled with the keyboard attachments, it is definitely a feasible laptop replacement device that will get you slightly better battery performance as well uh, but, besides those general things, guys, that’s really it now. We will also have a direct comparison between the surface pro x and the microsoft surface, pro 7, which is their latest and current surface pro lineup of a tablet, and that will clarify the real differences between the surface pro x and the standard surface pro 7.. If you’re interested in that definitely check that out on the card or click in the description down below for more details, also check out the description down below for more product links and information and if you’re interested in getting any of these tablets go through our affiliate.
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