Surface Pro is Microsoft's long-awaited Surface Pro 4 upgrade, restyled as a laptop

From PC World: Microsoft’s Surface Pro lineup has remained largely unchanged for the last two generations. Now you can make that three: The new Surface Pro (2017)—no, not the Surface Pro 5—features substantial internal improvements, but otherwise refuses to mess with a good thing.

Announced Tuesday with a base price of $799, the Surface Pro is slightly more expensive than its Surface Pro 4 predecessor, which has been discounted from $799 to $699 at Microsoft’s store. All of the new Surface Pros are available for preorder, and will ship on June 15, the same day as the Surface Laptop. They'll launch in 26 markets—including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, India, Taiwan, and more.

Perhaps the biggest change is semantic: Microsoft has decided to call the Surface Pro a “laptop” rather than a 2-in-1. Microsoft’s not abandoning the idea of a “tablet that can replace your laptop,” but the company believes that users now buy Surfaces as laptops, doing everything on them that they'd do on traditional notebooks.

The Surface Pro (2017) gives Microsoft three families, including the high-performance Surface Book with the Performance Base and the more balanced Surface Laptop. What's not clear is where Microsoft is going with this "laptop" rebranding. The Surface Pro's form factor has always had "lapability" issues, and changing the name isn't going to make that go away. The Surface Pro 4 is aging rapidly, however, and we're glad to see this refresh, even if it's mostly internal.

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