Surface Pro 4 vs new Surface Pro
by Volker Weber
Did you just buy a Surface Pro 4 and feel left behind after the announcement for the new Surface Pro? Or are you still looking forward to your first Surface Pro? I want to give you a few reasons to consider the old model.
- What you are looking for is the Core i5 with 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage, which is the sweet spot for most people. That's 1449 €. Surface Pro does not come with a pen, which costs an extra 110 €. Then you need a keyboard. 180 € for the Signature cover. That brings the total to 1740 €. Surface Pro 4 has seen some aggressive sales where the price gets cut by 200 € and more, the pen is included, and often even the type cover. Amazon.de lists the Pro 4 in i5/8/256 configration with pen at 1049 €. That is a whopping 500 below the new machine. Expect more clearance sales once the new model ships.
- Microsoft claims 13.5 hours of battery life for the new model in the Core i5 configuration. They claimed 9 hours for the Surface Pro 4. Both are dubious. I get arond 6 to 6.5 hours (on a Core i7). The battery goes from 38 Wh to 49 Wh. It's a newer CPU, but still. I think you will be looking at 9 hours, especially if you do more than watching video at low brightness. Or if you use Chrome instead of the more power conscious Edge that I work with.
- Surface Pro 4 had teething problems in the area of power management for many months after it came out. The new i5 has no fan, but it's still a 15 W CPU. I can imagine it takes a while until Microsoft gets the power throttling right. Pure speculation on my part, but there is a risk.
Of course I would swap the old machine against the new one on short notice. We test things so you don't have to. But if you are on a tight budget I would be looking at the "old" Surface Pro 4. The difference between the two isn't that large.
If you are on the road a lot, you may want to wait for the LTE option which is only available on the new model, later this year.
Comments
The 15W CPUs can be configured down to 7.5W TDP (which drops the base frequency from 2.6GHz to 800MHz - see: http://ark.intel.com/products/97472/Intel-Core-i5-7300U-Processor-3M-Cache-up-to-3_50-GHz ).
I'm afraid this could be the case for the fanless i5 model.
As mentioned in another thread, I just bought a Surface Pro 4 a few days ago without feeling left behind. I didn't think it was worth waiting for the new Surface Pro since it does not seem to add anything significant other than a 50% increase to the purchase price. My main reasoning was: If the SP4 is still good enough for Volker it is definitely good enough for me :)
As recommended by vowe I chose the i5/8GB/256GB configuration which looks more than powerful enough for my needs. Everything great so far, and an excellent upgrade from the smaller Surface 3. Thank you, Volker.
Same here. Got the Surface Pro 4 i5/8GB/256 configuration this week at Amazon for 1050. From my point, there is no need to spend 500 more for 2017 Surface iteration.