The all-black hybrid is considerably thinner than the new Surface Pro 7, and has a narrowly-bezeled 13-inch PixelSense display with 2,880 x 1,920 resolution that looks fantastic. It’s extremely good looking - The SPX is a beautiful piece of hardware engineering.

The bezels around the screen are super thin. In the way that the iPad asks you to compromise on certain features for other advantages (battery life, a gesture-based interface, cool games you never play, etc.), the SPX wants you to accept the tradeoffs because it provides other advantages. For many users, that software is the baseline - so this will not be their machine of choice. Want to run Adobe Creative Cloud apps like Photoshop? You can’t right now (though the company says versions are in the works). And that can be fine, but it’s annoying too. It’s a mostly-featured Windows laptop that really wants you to stick to Microsoft apps. The SPX is not a full-featured Windows laptop. If you’re a power user who expects Windows to do whatever you want it to do, this simply is not a computer you should even consider buying.

Microsoft even has a support page detailing the issues you’ll run into. And you’ll be out of luck for a whole bunch of stuff. You can get a neutered version from the Microsoft Store, but it’s really just a glorified file browser. Which is why if you want to use Dropbox the way you do on a normal PC on your SPX, you’re out of luck. Although it provides longer battery life and more consistent features like “instant on,” it isn’t fully compatible with the x86 universe of Windows software, drivers, and accessories. It’s an ARM-based PC running a version of Windows 10 that isn’t totally regular Windows 10, which seems like it shouldn’t matter, but it actually does quite a bit. I say “kind of” because this actually isn’t a Windows 10 PC. The kickstand flips almost 180-degrees back.

Microsoft surface pro x sq1 review