The Surface's screen looks sharper, it supports a faster 120Hz refresh rate, and its slightly taller 3:2 aspect ratio means you have to scroll less when reading articles or formatting text. The MacBook is a mobile workstation aimed at content creators with heavy workloads, whereas the Surface is a tablet meant for productivity use. The Microsoft Surface Pro 8 (2021) and the Apple MacBook Pro 16 (2019) are both very different laptops. Some tests, like black uniformity and color accuracy, may vary between individual units. If you come across a different configuration option not listed above, or you have a similar Microsoft Surface Pro 8 that doesn't correspond to our review, let us know, and we'll update it. Our display and performance results are only valid for the configuration we tested.

Graphite (unavailable with an i5/128GB or i7/1TB).

32GB LP-DDR4x 4267MHz (i7 with 1TB SSD only).

Intel Iris Xe Graphics G7 (integrated, i7-1185G7, 96EU).

Intel Iris Xe Graphics G7 (integrated, i5-1135G7, 80EU).

Intel Core i7-1185G7 (4 cores/8 threads, up to 4.8GHz).

Intel Core i5-1135G7 (4 cores/8 threads, up to 4.2GHz).

Aside from the screen, all the components are configurable you can see the available options in the table below. We tested the Microsoft Surface Pro 8 (2021) with an Intel Core i7-1185G7 CPU, integrated Intel Iris Xe Graphics, 16GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD, in the Platinum color scheme.

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