It makes the whole unit look and feel like a fancy notebook when closed up, soft and fibrous to the touch. Our ‘Sapphire’ keyboard is constructed using a ‘partially bio-based Alcantara material’, containing 12% renewable content derived from sugarcane waste. The keyboard is super lightweight and is magnetized to stay shut against the screen when you're carrying it. Although it’s a rarity nowadays when actually using it on your lap, the top-heaviness of the unit makes it feel pretty unstable, and we certainly wouldn’t be comfortable using it that way on public transport. Microsoft included an accessibility kit in the box for us, and the additional tab to lift up the screen makes it a lot easier to open up. It feels slightly strange at first having the keyboard weighing much less than the screen and also makes it slightly awkward to open as the keyboard is magnetized to the screen. The kickstand works nicely when you’re at a desk, allowing you to easily change the angle of the screen.

It’s a little bulkier than our MacBook Pro, but not by much. Whether it’s cost-savvy producers who want to spend less or just those who are tired of not being able to use their plugins after an update, there’s certainly an argument to be made that nowadays you don’t have to be loyal to a particular operating system to make great music.

Yet there are still loads of Windows users out there who get by just fine. It’s often said that the Mac ecosystem is where it’s at when it comes to the best laptops for music production, and it’s a given when you go into a pro studio that you’ll find one of Apple’s machines somewhere, such is their adaptability when it comes to hardware integration. The Microsoft Surface Pro 9 is a crossover of laptop and tablet with some serious firepower under the hood, offering something uniquely different from a MacBook Pro, but can it compete with the king of music production? Let’s find out!

Microsoft has long played second fiddle to the popular music production tools of the Apple ecosystem.

Windows surface pro 9