Microsoft Floor Professional (12-inch) Assessment: Smaller, Cheaper, Longer Lasting

8.0/ 10
SCORE

Microsoft Floor Professional (12-inch)

Professionals

• Similar nice Floor Professional design at a smaller worth, measurement
• Good measurement for pill mode and lightweight laptop computer use
• IPS show is sharp and brilliant
• Good total efficiency for the worth and distinctive battery life

Cons

• Obligatory equipment add to the invoice
• Significantly, the charger is an additional $70?
• 12-inch show can really feel cramped in laptop computer mode
• Exterior connectivity restricted to a pair of USB-C 3.2 ports

Microsoft shrunk the worth and display of its Floor Professional for individuals who, like me, view the pill PC not as a main each day driver however as a flexible secondary machine for searching the online, watching YouTube and Netflix (and shortly once more MLB.TV) and taking part in the occasional cell sport once I cannot determine on what to stream. Even the bigger 13-inch Surface Pro is simply too small for me for each use, and as a lot as I just like the removable keyboard, I would not need to sort on it for a whole workday. So, the 13-inch mannequin is overkill for my wants, however the 12-inch Floor Professional is one other story.

The 12-inch mannequin does sacrifice some issues to hit a lower cost however maintains the superb Floor Professional design: a skinny aluminum chassis with an awesome kickstand and an “non-obligatory” keyboard that neatly snaps into place magnetically. The areas the place you sacrifice are with the processor, show and webcam. And you may have to pay greater than you need for an influence brick as a result of a USB-C cable is included within the field, however not an influence adapter. If you will get previous that kick within the pants, then you definitely’ll nonetheless stroll away with a well-rounded removable for one or 200 {dollars} lower than the 13-inch model.

The Microsoft Floor Professional 12-inch begins at $650 for an eight-core Snapdragon X Plus processor, 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. For one more $50, you will get it with a 512GB SSD, which is effectively price that minor upcharge. With the 512GB fashions, you get colour decisions Ocean and Violet along with the usual Platinum. The one CPU supplied is the Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100, and also you get 16GB of reminiscence, take or depart it.

Then come the equipment, beginning with an virtually insulting $70 for a 45-watt USB-C energy adapter. (For those who’re enthusiastic about utilizing an outdated iPad charging brick, these are solely of the 10- or 20-watt selection.) You then’ll have to pay one other $150 for the keyboard or $250 for the keyboard and Slim Pen. The Flex Keyboard that is out there with the 13-inch Floor Professional, which provides Bluetooth connectivity, is not supplied on the 12-inch mannequin.

The whole worth for my evaluate pattern with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD breaks down like this:

• 12-inch pill with 8-core Snapdragon X Plus: $700
• 45-watt charger: $70
• Keyboard: $150
• Whole: $920

Examine that to the 13-inch Floor Professional, additionally with 16GB of RAM and 512GB SSD:

• 13-inch pill with 10-core Snapdragon X Plus: $850
• Keyboard: $170
• Whole: $1,020

• 13-inch OLED pill with 12-core Snapdragon X Elite: $990
• Keyboard: $170
• Whole: $1,160

The above pricing displays the reductions on the time of this evaluate. You may virtually at all times discover each fashions at a reduction from Microsoft, and I like getting the 12-inch Floor Professional with a 512GB SSD for lower than $1,000 with its present $200 low cost. What I like much less is the $70 cost I have to pay for the charger with the 12-inch mannequin, which narrows the hole to solely $100 between it and the baseline 13-inch mannequin. 

The 12-inch Floor Professional begins at £799 in the UK and AU$1,198 in Australia.

Microsoft Floor Professional 12-inch efficiency

Microsoft gives only one processor for the 12-inch Floor Professional: the eight-core Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100. You are additionally caught with 16GB of RAM and may go as much as solely a 512GB SSD until you go for the 12-inch Surface Pro for Business, which permits as much as 24GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. With the 13-inch Floor Professional, you possibly can pack it with as much as 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD.

Regardless of utilizing the lower-powered Snapdragon X Plus, the 12-inch Floor Professional managed to provide scores aggressive with the higher-powered 13-inch Floor Professional. Its benchmark outcomes have been consistent with the HP OmniBook 5 and Acer Swift Go 14, which characteristic the identical Snapdragon X Plus processor. That’s to say, it did effectively on Geekbench 6 scores, trailing the 13-inch mannequin by 15% on the multicore check and truly outpacing it on the single-core check. 

The place the 12-inch Floor Professional fell behind the 13-inch mannequin to a higher diploma was on the multicore Cinebench 2024 check, however once more the 12-inch edged it in single-core efficiency. Our 3DMark Metal Nomad check was a convincing win for the 13-inch Floor Professional, however with built-in Qualcomm Adreno graphics, neither Floor Professional will probably be mistaken for a content-creation or gaming laptop computer.

The 12-inch Floor Professional might ship merely common multicore efficiency and below-average graphics efficiency, nevertheless it makes up for these with prolonged battery life. And it is no shock as a result of the HP OmniBook 5 14 is the present battery life champ for laptops, and the Acer Swift Go 14 is not far behind. The 12-inch Floor Professional lasted 22.5 hours on our YouTube streaming battery drain check, which is sort of 10 hours longer than the 13-inch mannequin for actually all-day battery life.

Similar Floor Professional design, simply smaller

For balancing the calls for of each laptop computer and pill use, the 12-inch show positively favors the pill facet of the ledger. With out the keyboard, the show weighs only one.5 kilos — that is half a pound lighter than the 13-inch mannequin. And while you add the removable keyboard, the 12-inch Floor Professional stays extremely transportable at 2.2 kilos.

The 12-inch IPS show encompasses a 3:2 facet ratio that is barely boxier than the usual 16:10 ratio of most laptop computer shows. The three:2 format continues to be broad sufficient in panorama orientation to make navigating Home windows really feel pure whereas on the similar time making the pill really feel pure in portrait mode. I discover that longer, narrower shows appear and feel awkward as tablets.

The 12-inch Floor Professional is an affordable facsimile of a Home windows laptop computer, however I started to really feel a bit cramped when juggling greater than two home windows. Then once more, the one barely bigger 13-inch mannequin is not a magic multitasking machine both. 

You get the identical nice Floor Professional design with the 12-inch mannequin, a well-crafted, all-aluminum chassis with properly rounded edges and corners. The skinny but sturdy kickstand enables you to prop the show up in a variety of angles and preserve it there. The one disadvantage of the kickstand is that its skinny edge tends to dig into thighs for those who’re utilizing the Floor Professional in laptop computer mode in your lap.

The two,196×1,464-pixel decision delivers crisp pictures and textual content, and the 90Hz refresh fee permits clean scrolling and display motion. The 13-inch mannequin gives a higher-resolution show and an OLED possibility with a 120Hz variable refresh fee. The 12-inch mannequin’s decision and refresh fee are each enough to my eyes, however the black ranges do not look as inky as an OLED’s. 

Brightness is not an issue; the 12-inch Floor Professional hit a peak brightness of 435 nits in my checks with a Spyder X Elite colorimeter. Colour efficiency is slightly missing, nevertheless, with protection of solely 96% of sRGB when most shows can cowl 100% of that colour gamut. The numbers dropped on the bigger colour areas: 72% of AdobeRGB and 71% of P3. It is uncertain you’d use such a small show backed by an built-in GPU for severe graphics work, however these colour efficiency numbers actually douse any flicker of hope there.

There are two hidden design variations when transferring from the 13-inch to the 12-inch Floor Professional. For one, the smaller 12-inch model has a fanless design, so it operates in full silence. The opposite change is within the solid-state storage drive. The 13-inch mannequin options an NVMe SSD widespread to laptops, and the 12-inch mannequin has common flash storage that is extra generally discovered on telephones and tablets. UFS drives often provide slower learn and write speeds than NVMe drives, however the 13-inch Floor Professional did not precisely set the world on hearth with its drive. Its rating of two,015 on 3DMark’s Storage check was a lot nearer to the 12-inch Floor Professional’s rating of 1,986 than different laptops with NVMe drives, with scores round 2,500 and better.

The removable keyboard is nice for fast typing actions like coming into URLs or firing off a number of emails — keys really feel punchy for such a skinny keyboard — however I would not need to use it for longer writing classes. The keyboard would not depart a lot room for the touchpad, which is undersized however oddly broad. It will do in a pinch, and you may at all times depend on the 10-point contact show as an alternative.

One other space the place you’re taking a step down from the 13-inch mannequin to the 12-inch mannequin is with the webcam, going from a 1440p to a 1080p cam. This shouldn’t be a deciding consider deciding between the 2 as a result of the 1080p additionally produces a clear, well-balanced picture that’ll have you ever trying clear to your video convention mates.

Just like the 13-inch mannequin, ports are restricted to a pair of USB-C connections on the 12-inch Floor Professional, however they’re slower right here. They don’t seem to be Thunderbolt or USB4 however the slower USB 3.2 selection. 

Is the Microsoft Floor Professional 12-inch price shopping for?

As a secondary machine to have round your own home or condominium for searching the online, watching exhibits and taking part in informal pill video games on a display that is bigger than your cellphone’s, certain, it is price at the least contemplating. I would not need to spend greater than $1,000 on such a purchase order, and the 12-inch Floor Professional enables you to try this, even while you issue within the keyboard cowl and overpriced charger. 

To maintain the worth within the triple digits, I am prepared to surrender some efficiency and use a barely lower-resolution show and webcam. (Simply be certain that all of your must-have apps work effectively with the Arm-based chip, too.) With a greater construct high quality than most laptops at its worth, the 12-inch Floor Professional gives nice worth and flexibility, however its worth proposition could be even higher if Microsoft did not cost an extra 10% ($70) of the worth of the system ($700) for the charger, which is included within the field with the 13-inch mannequin and practically each different laptop computer offered right now.