The cheapest MacBook Pro option is the 13-inch model, which comes with the Apple M1 processor. You can get the Surface Pro 7 with 4GB (again, not recommended), 8GB or 16GB of RAM, plus 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB of SSD storage.

That's doubly true when it comes to graphics power: the Intel Iris Plus graphics of the Surface Pro 7 are around a third less powerful than the Intel Xe chip in the Surface Pro 8, making it drastically behind any of the Apple options. All are Intel 10th Gen processors, but the Surface Pro 8 and 9 offer better performance and battery life. The quad-core Core i5 or Core i7 options are what you'd want to stick with. The cheaper Surface Pro 7 is available with an Intel dual-core i3 processor in its cheapest version, but we wouldn't recommend that for creative work. You can get the Surface Pro 9 and 8 with 8GB, 16GB or 32GB of RAM, and it's available with 128GB, 256GB, 512GB or 1TB of SSD storage. The difference is that you have the option of a Microsoft SQ 3 version, but from what we've seen the performance of that is actually slower than the Intel versions, at least on emulated apps.įor graphics, these processors all come Intel Xe integrated graphics, which will do perfectly well for light photo and video editing, and is of a similar level of power to the GPU in the Apple M1 processor used in the 13-inch MacBook Pro – the larger MacBook Pros double and even quadruple this power.

The newer Surface Pro 9, released in October 2022, is very much an incremental upgrade, with 12th Gen Intel Core i5 1235U / i7 1255U. You can step up from a Core i5 to a Core i7 to add a bit more power to both processor and graphics. There's no question here: if you want raw performance, the MacBook Pro models are the way to go, or at least the 14-inch and 16-inch models. The Surface Pro 8 is available with quad-core Intel 11th Gen processors, all with HyperThreading so that they can act as eight virtual cores. The new MacBook Pro houses a beast of a processor (Image credit: Future)

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