 A lot has changed in the last year. Beyonce stunned the world with the release of her visual album Lemonade. Donald Trump stunned the world by packing his bags and moving into the house on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And, perhaps most importantly, Microsoft slashed the price of the Surface Pro 4, earning it, after a year and a half to reach full maturity, a spot in our review lineup. So while the Surface Pro 4 looks very similar to the 3, which is good, it's possible, nay probable, that the changes lurking under the hood are enough to make it very different from its predecessor, which received a pretty tepid review from yours truly. But, are they enough to elicit a recommendation at the new lower price? Let's have a look. Zotac's GTX 1080 Mini is extremely compact and powerful, measuring just 8.3 inches in length. Check it out at the link in the video description. The Surface Pro 4 feels really good in the hand, it is reasonably light, and as we've come to expect, the overall build quality is fantastic. The magnetic mount for the stylus is on the left now, so you can have it clipped on while you charge the device, and, more importantly, it is much stronger than the Surface Pro 3. Under the hood, there are more upgrades over the old-er model. And while Skylake CPUs have been on the market for 18 months now, they still hold up surprisingly well, given that Intel hasn't done much performance-wise in that time. So you should be able to find something that's right for you, depending on how much you want to spend. I think the sweet spot sits somewhere in the i5 with 8 gigs of RAM range. An i7 costs a lot more for a pretty small performance boost, but you might find the Core M3-equipped model a little sluggish in even day-to-day tasks like web browsing and PowerPoint creation, and it doesn't include a Surface Pen. One thing to watch out for, make sure you buy the amount of RAM you need, since it cannot be upgraded after. Which brings us back to the exterior. The front camera is 1080p and is equipped with an IR emitter for Windows Hello, which is still amazing. And there's also a 1080p rear-facing camera, which is probably worse than whatever's on your phone at this point. And one of my life rules is to never use a rear tablet camera anyway, so we didn't spend much time on that. On the right, it has a mini DisplayPort port. This is a huge plus for something that is at least on the Surface, a tablet, so that can be easily adapted to HDMI, DVI, or even VGA for boardroom presentations. But it's 2017, and while it kind of kills me to say this, a single USB 3.0 Type-A port does feel a little dated, and I hope that the refresh features Thunderbolt 3 or at least USB Type-C with the option to use it as a power input. Not that I'm asking for the magnetic power connector to go away. Another upgrade I'd love to see on the rumored upcoming Surface Pro would be a full-size SD card reader, instead of a micro. I mean, there's got to be enough space down there. And those new 300 megabyte per second cards from Sony would make a great extra storage drive. The screen on the Surface Pro 4 maintains the 2 by 3 aspect ratio of previous versions, which sacrifices some real estate for widescreen aspect media consumption, but with the average sounding speakers, that clearly wasn't the primary focus for Microsoft, and this aspect ratio is great for productivity and reading articles, and its full coverage of the sRGB color space and excellent viewing angles, as well as out-of-the-box calibration means that it has stood up very well to the test of time, just like the CPU. Microsoft went for a suede feel on the keyboard cover that, in spite of its binder-like edge construction, managed to really impress me. The touchpad is understandably a little small, but feels good with a satisfying audible click, and the keyboard? Wow. If I'd known it was this good, I'd have reviewed this when it was released. The keystrokes felt good, there's a fairly long travel, and there's a satisfying click that I didn't expect from my experience with previous Surface products. I was able to quickly get up to speed, and this entire review was typed on the Surface Pro 4. The backlight is also a nice touch. On that subject, as one of those weirdos who genuinely likes touchscreen devices, it shouldn't surprise you that even in kick-standed laptop mode, that was one of the highlights for me of using the Surface Pro 4. In Word, you can easily highlight misspelled words, and navigating in the browser is cake. I mean, other than that, I was using Edge to kind of have the full Microsoft experience. I know many people still think that laptops don't need touchscreens, but I suspect many of them have just never used one regularly. The included stylus is also one of the areas that Microsoft really stepped up on the Surface Pro 4 compared to the 3. Writing notes in OneNote was easy and felt much closer to actually putting a pen to paper, and I could see this being extremely useful as a university student, and it even inspired me to learn a bit about thermodynamics from one of our new writers. A bit, not much. This is definitely a huge improvement over the previous versions, with the only downside being that it occasionally picked up a palm while using the stylus, opening up the notifications panel. Another area that the Surface Pro 4 impressed me with was the thermals of this little guy. Despite its super thin size, it was able to keep the i7 in its guts nice and cool during our i2-64 stress test, stabilizing it at around 75 degrees, while still turbo boosting to 3 GHz. And as a bonus, it actually stayed reasonably quiet, too. So who is this thing for, then? The tablet with a keyboard concept still won't be perfect for everyone, and if you never plan to use the pen or fold back the keyboard, a normal laptop like the LG Gram or HP Spectre X360 might make more sense. But, I will say this, I genuinely regret not bothering to review this thing when it first came out, because the fourth version of the Surface is where the concept finally lives up to Microsoft's vision. And if you can compromise on a somewhat dated I.O., and you want something now, today, that's great for productivity tasks, such as taking notes, using Word, and surfing the internet, at the new lower prices, it's pretty killer. I'm just excited to see how they follow it up, maybe with a more timely piece of content this time. Have you ever heard of TunnelBear? Well, if you're a regular viewer, you probably have, but maybe today's the day you do more than just hear about it. 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