'Just as troubling as the limited app compatibility are the bugs I experienced, Low writes. Adobe was still working to make some of its creativity apps, like Photoshop, work with this special version of Windows.' Bugs and poor performanceĬompounding these app compatibility issues are performance problems some reviewers faced.Ĭherlynn Low at Engadget ran into several problems while attempting to execute simple tasks on the Surface Pro X. 'Dropbox, the online storage service that I rely on every day for work, doesn’t fully function on the Surface Pro X. 'Another downside is that some important apps were not compatible with this ARM-based computer,' Chen wrote. The New York Times' Brian X Chen ran into problems running the apps he uses on a regular basis. But compared side-by-side against a similarly priced laptop, you can see when the Pro X is forced to render parts of the image in chunks or how trying to crop a photo feels a bit more sluggish,' he added. 'If you want to edit a photo, no problem, the Pro X can handle that just fine.

Another good example of less than ideal performance is Photoshop in Adobe Creative Suite, which right now, doesn’t have ARM64 support.' 'But when I ran the test again in Chrome, numbers fell by nearly 40 percent to 226. 'For instance, when I ran the WebXPRT 2015 browser benchmark in Edge, I got a score of 372,' Rutherford wrote. Sam Rutherford at Gizmodo dove into the performance hit you take when using an emulator to run 32-bit x86-based app. Heck, even Microsoft’s own app store doesn’t properly filter out incompatible apps when you visit it from this computer,' he added. Dropbox, for example, only works as an insular “S-Mode” app and can’t sync your files automatically. 'With the Surface Pro X, there’s no real way to know if it will run well (or at all) without doing a ton of research ahead of time.

'Everybody has one or two apps they absolutely need to do their job,' Bohn wrote. But those programs don't always run as well as they should.ĭieter Bohn at The Verge noted these problems and gave an overview of what can and cannot run on the Surface Pro X but noted that determining exactly which apps are compatible can be an ordeal.

Fortunately, most apps are available in 32-bit versions, which the Surface Pro X can run via an emulator.

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