The Surface Pro 4 is 30% faster than Surface Pro 3, 50% faster than MacBook Air

We covered Microsoft’s phone announcement yesterday, but the company also announced two additional items: the Surface Pro 4 and the Surface Book. These two product announcements require an attention to detail that one post would never do justice to, so we continue our discussion of Microsoft’s new products here.

The Surface Pro 4 boasts a 12.3-inch display with PixelSense technology that provides a clear viewing experience. The Surface Pro 4 has a pixel density of 267 pixels per inch (PPI), with 5 million pixels in the device’s display. We weren’t told the exact resolution of the device, however.

Let’s talk more about the Surface Pro 4 display. The Pro 4 features a 0.4mm Gorilla Glass 4 panel (the toughest panel on the market right now is Corning’s Gorilla Glass 4), a photo-aligned negative LC oxide panel, a 1mm backlight unit to power the LCD screen, and a Microsoft Pen and Touch chipset designed to maximize the power of the Microsoft stylus and its integration with on-screen writing and gestures. Negative (or “N” type) LC oxide panels contain negative liquid crystal, which increases luminance or brightness, provides more of a color reproduction range, reduces power consumption, and is cheaper to manufacture. In short, the Surface Pro 4 display not only features the most durable glass on the market (Gorilla Glass 4), but it also provides the most pleasant viewing angels and color reproduction while keeping costs low for Microsoft. More value for the price is the ideal.

We couldn’t end this discussion of the new Surface tablet without discussing its performance when compared to the competition. Microsoft’s Panos Panay took time to provide some numbers to compare the Pro 4’s performance with that of the MacBook Air. The Surface Pro 4 is 30% faster than the Surface Pro 3, and 50% faster than the MacBook Air (which is considered to be Apple’s thinnest and lightest laptop).

The Surface Pro 4 also has a detached keyboard cover that has backlit keys, along with a precision glass trackpad for a smooth, refined, and classy feel.

At 8.4mm thin (the thinnest Pro 4 tablet yet), the Surface Pro 4 features the sixth-generation, Intel Core i7 processor, up to 16GB of RAM (four 4GB RAM chips), and up to 1TB of storage, and is available for pre-order today, October 7th. The Surface Pro 4 costs $899 and will be available for the public on Monday, October 26th. We’ll get to the Surface Pen in another post.