Surface Pro Copilot+ 5G – My Impressions

I’ve had the new Surface Pro Copilot+ PC with 5G for about 10 days now and thought I’d share some impressions so far. I upgraded from a Surface Pro 8 LTE and my biggest motivations for upgrading were battery life and a hope for improved stability, particularly with waking from sleep. Paul’s reviews of various Snapdragon X based PCs helped to build confidence that there would be significant improvements in these areas and my experience so far has shown that to be right. I’m getting about 10 hours of regular, unplugged use, which is at least double what I typically got with the SP8. I’ve also found that I can finally keep hibernation disabled without having to worry about the computer not waking up from sleep or, worse yet, basically turning into a space heater. It’s been rock solid so far. I even took it on an overnight trip and felt comfortable with never fully shutting it down. While I didn’t use it extensively while on the trip, I also never plugged it in and still had around 50% battery when I got home.

Obviously, my biggest qualm about going to a Snapdragon based computer was compatibility and, fortunately, I haven’t had any major concerns so far. While I have followed Paul’s past suggestion of building out a Winget script for re-installing applications on new or re-built systems, I didn’t use it so I could make sure to seek out ARM64 builds where available. The script was still helpful as essentially a checklist to follow while setting up the system. Outside of the expected browsers, Teams, Photoshop, Visual Studio Code, and Office, I didn’t find a huge number of applications that were ARM64, although there were a handful of others. Probably the biggest surprise was Altirra, an Atari 8-bit emulator that I use to play some of the old games from my childhood. In fact, that one was such a surprise that I didn’t even realize there was an ARM64 version until I got a pop-up recommending it when I ran the x86 version.

For the most part, I’ve found performance on emulated x86 apps to be fine. My two biggest worries were Lightroom Classic and Quicken, two applications that I use pretty extensively and knew were not available in ARM versions. I was a bit surprised to find that both not only work fine, but that their performance actually seems to be better than on the Surface Pro 8. Quicken, in particular, is very noticeably faster. The only application that I have found to have a significant performance hit was Notion, which really just crawls. I recall that Paul had previously mentioned it as one that works fine, so perhaps it is specific to the way I use it, which is very heavily database centered. As a workaround, I just installed the website as an application, and it seems to work just fine.

I haven’t messed around with games much yet, but as I mentioned above, I did play around with emulators a bit. I have a collection of retro games, mostly that I remember from my youth, that I manage with Launchbox. Even though there isn’t an ARM64 version, Launchbox works fine as do the various emulators that I use, including the Atari one I mentioned above as well as ones for the TRS-80, Commodore 64, and Colecovision. The only thing I’ve tried that didn’t work, was Launchbox’s built in instance of Dosbox, which just goes to a blank screen. A little research found that the enhanced Dosbox-X has an ARM64 build and it didn’t take much effort to reconfigure Launchbox to use that. I did set up Steam but haven’t really experimented with it much yet.

So far, the only hardware incompatibility that I have found is a Kensington USB fingerprint reader that I have attached to my docking setup at my desk. The Surface Pro just detects it as an unknown device and there is no driver available for it. The rest of my docking set up, including dual monitors, a Logitech mouse and keyboard, an Ethernet adapter, and a Logitech Brio camera all worked without a hitch. Windows Hello works with the Brio, but if I disable Windows Hello Enhanced security. I’m still a bit torn on whether the enhanced security is worth losing the convenience when docked. I will note that the one hardware device I was most worried about was a Fiio external USB DAC that I use when listening to music at my desk. It was detected immediately and works perfectly with no fuss at all.

Finally, I have been really impressed with the 5G performance. Both at home and at my office, the signal strength and speed of the 5G signal is dramatically better than the LTE performance on the Surface Pro 8. At home, the SP8 got an LTE signal that was usable if wifi was down but was pretty slow. The new Surface shows pretty much full strength and gets well over 200 Mbps at home. I didn’t think to measure speed on the SP8 before moving over the SIM card, but I know it was a lot slower. At my office, the SP8 generally couldn’t get an LTE signal at all, but I’m getting around 75 Mbps on the new Surface. Frankly, this is a much bigger improvement than I expected. I noticed that the new model has visible antenna cutouts on all four edges, which I’m sure play a big part in this. The move from LTE to 5G and the use of a Qualcomm modem instead of Intel, likely contribute as well.