While it seems like Microsoft has been focusing on lighter shades for its devices in recent years, the darker colors with this year's lineup look incredible.

The easiest one to notice is the new graphite color, which simply looks incredible. The Surface Pro 8, luckily, brings some much-needed design improvements to the table. But now it needs a pretty substantial redesign, especially in the face of the new iPad Pro, which Microsoft has pretty much left alone since its introduction. That wasn't necessarily a bad thing, as four years ago, the Surface Pro was a pretty fresh device. Both the Surface Pro 6 and Surface Pro 7 were just spec updates of the Surface Pro 2017. The Surface Pro lineup kind of started to stagnate for the last couple iterations. (Image credit: Future) Microsoft Surface Pro 8: Design

Microsoft has some pretty stiff competition with its oldest rival. In our testing, the Apple M1, which is in both the iPad Pro and some Macs, absolutely wipes the floor with 11th-generation Intel U-series processors. That makes the Surface Pro 8 the same price as the 12-9-inch iPad Pro to start, and we're not sure that's a comparison Microsoft wants, at least when it comes to performance. In the UK and Australia, the Surface Pro 8 tops out at 16GB of RAM, but with the same specs otherwise, and that top-end spec will set you back £2,059 / AU$3,299. You can upgrade the Surface Pro 8 all the way to an Intel Core i7 processor, 32 GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, which will set you back $2,599 in the US.

Of course, if you want a more powerful Surface Pro 8, you can pay to upgrade it. But the Pro 7 configuration with a Core i5, 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD launched for just $899/£899/AU$1,499, which is a full $200 cheaper in the US. However, that was for a configuration with just a Core i3 processor and 4GB of RAM. It's a pretty big bump from the Surface Pro 7, which launched at just $749/£799/AU$1,249.

Surface tab