And in practice, the Surface Pro is better as a tablet, and certainly great to draw on, but it doesn't do as much for the rest of us who live in the slightly more buttoned-down world of offices, meetings, word processing and all the things that work best on a traditional laptop.ġ3.5 -inch 3,000 x 2,000 touchscreen display Microsoft's other new system, the less expensive Surface Pro 4, is clearly intended as a full-time tablet that can double as a part-time laptop, thanks to its clever (but sold separately) keyboard cover. Sure, I've got a few standby sketches I can whip up when the need arises, from the googly-eyed generic newspaper strip character to some forced perspective boxes, but does that mean I need a $1,499-and-up laptop-plus-stylus Microsoft Surface Book that practically begs to be used by someone with actual artistic talent? What good is a touchscreen tablet and stylus if you can't really draw? Despite a teenage comic book collection thousands of issues deep (dating roughly 1985-1991), I never had much of a knack as a visual artist, beyond idle doodling.

Surface book i5