First impressions: Microsoft Surface Pro 12-inch and Surface Laptop 13-inch, the small Surfaces that forgot how to be cheap

Any small Windows machine has to argue its way past the MacBook Air on my desk, the one I write most of my drafts on. Microsoft made its latest attempt at that argument on September 23, using Snapdragon Summit to refresh the Surface Pro 12-inch and the Surface Laptop 13-inch. Same bodies as last year. New chip.

That chip is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Plus, and Microsoft brought a wall of percentages to sell it. I care about one of them. The part of the launch I keep rereading is the price.

I haven’t held either machine. My opinions come from Microsoft’s launch material and a few days of early buyers arguing online, and I’ll call my verdict provisional until both go through a proper test.

The Surface Pro 12-inch finally gets the brightness I wanted

Last year’s Surface Pro 12-inch topped out at 400 nits. Too dim, in my book, for a tablet built to leave the house. The 2nd Edition climbs to 500, and I’d trade most of the chip gains for those 100 extra nits on a sunny…