I did manage to get one gaming benchmark to run on the Surface Pro X: Monster Hunter. Critically, Microsoft says that Adobe’s Creative Cloud is being ported to run on the SQ1, but no one is offering a timeline, which may as well mean never. Want to run Photoshop? Fortnite? You can’t-at least, not in any meaningful way. (It’s also worth noting: The system takes three times as long to boot up as the Surface Pro 7.) In other words, I hope you like Microsoft Edge. Running browser-based tests like Speedometer and JetStream on Chrome put performance on par with your typical $300 Chromebook. Apps that do run, like the 32-bit version of Chrome, are noticeably slow. An old 32-bit version of PCMark 8 (originally released in 2013) crashed midway through its run, for example. Even apps that did install didn’t always work right.

I tried downloading a number of the most popular apps from the Microsoft Store and found that several wouldn’t install-nor would the vast majority of the standard benchmarks I run. After several days of working with the Surface Pro X, I remained confused as to why the product exists.

Windows surface 10 pro