The keyboard attaches to the bottom of the Surface Pro 11 using two little points that slot into the device. Then you flip up a flap that magnetically chicken road attaches to the front of the tablet, raising your keyboard to a comfortable typing level.
More than 15,000 Microsoft employees companywide have been laid off since May. With Monday’s layoffs, disclosed in a state regulatory filing, the number of Washington-based workers affected has passed 3,200. Adam Doud is a freelance journalist, product reviewer, and editor based in Chicago, Illinois.
The design is derived from the Islamic architecture of the region, such as in the Great Mosque of Samarra. The Y-shaped tripartite floor geometry is designed to optimise residential and hotel space. A buttressed central core and wings are used to support the height of the building. The Burj Khalifa’s central core houses all vertical transportation except egress stairs within each of the wings.7 The structure also features a cladding system which is designed to withstand Dubai’s hot summer temperatures.8 It contains a total of 57 elevators and 8 escalators.
Adam has bylines at a number of different tech publications and hosts the Benefit of the Doud podcast. He uses both iOS and Android (a six-month rotation for each), and he’s regularly testing tablets, smartphones, and laptops. The design of the Surface Pro 11 has one flaw that’s tricky to overcome — it’s top-heavy. Unlike a traditional laptop, where most of the components (and the battery) are in the lower part of the clamshell, the Surface Pro 11 has to fit literally everything into the tablet itself. The “bottom half” of the Surface Pro 11 is just a keyboard cover, and it’s fairly light at that. It just flops open and lands on the table you presumably have in front of you.
Open search in the Windows 11 taskbar, and it didn’t come up. It’s a little hard to keep up with, to be perfectly honest. The 13-inch Microsoft Surface Pro 11 starts at $1,199.99, but if you want to upgrade from a base Snapdragon X Plus processor to a zippy Snapdragon X Elite chip (and trust me, you do), you’ll need to pony up $1,499.99 — or more.
(Mashable has complained about this before.) It absolutely boggles my mind that Microsoft can’t figure out that a productivity tablet needs to have a keyboard in the box. I know, “Adam is complaining about no keyboard again,” is basically an evergreen statement, and that’s totally fair, but I will never not complain about this. Microsoft is laying off 42 Redmond-based employees, continuing a months-long effort by the company to trim its workforce amid an artificial intelligence spending boom. The hinge on the back of the tablet in particular is a lovely innovation.
Austin, Texas-based cloud computing giant Oracle, which has an engineering hub in the Seattle area, laid off more than 260 Seattle-area employees this summer as part of companywide cuts. In the middle of Microsoft’s waves of layoffs this summer the company reported record quarterly revenue and profits for the final three months of its 2025 fiscal year, which ended June 30. The 13-inch Microsoft Surface Pro 11th Edition is lightweight, powerful, and has really great battery life. It is also easily upgradable — the SSD is placed under a small door in the back that has toolless removal.
I have laid that tablet down to its lowest setting and drawn/used the Surface Pen on a number of occasions, and every time, I absolutely adore it. So, if you’re into it, and you often sit at a desk or table to work, there’s nothing to worry about here. There’s one other issue I have with the design that I will get into in a bit. I’ve been using the 13-inch Microsoft Surface Pro 11th Edition from mid-2024 as my main laptop for about two weeks, and here are my thoughts.
That’s the kind of user friendliness you don’t often see in laptops this thin. But along with that power comes longevity — something the Snapdragon X Elite was designed for. In our battery rundown test, the Surface Pro 11 offered 15 hours and 56 minutes of video playback (off of WiFi and Bluetooth and set to 50 percent brightness). That’s worse than the Surface Laptop 7, which lasted almost 23 hours on a charge, but on par with the 14-inch M4 MacBook Pro. Plus, this year, the Flex keyboard has a space in it to store the Surface Pen (also sold separately), which is a great thing to have when you need it, and nice to stow away when you don’t.
Microsoft has always made wonderful hardware, and I’ve been a fan of the Surface line of devices for a long time now. Surface introduced new form factors, such as the Surface Laptop and the (now-defunct) Surface Duo phone, but the garden-variety Surface Pro has been pretty consistent. The building is named after the former president of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan.6 The United Arab Emirates government provided Dubai with financial support as the developer, Emaar Properties, experienced financial problems during the Great Recession. Then-president of the United Arab Emirates, Khalifa bin Zayed, organized federal financial support. For his support, Mohammad bin Rashid, Ruler of Dubai, changed the name from “Burj Dubai” to “Burj Khalifa” during inauguration. Enjoy beautifully-designed rooms and premium facilities at Armani Hotel Dubai.
Personally, I don’t use the Surface Pen all that often — it’s just not a part of my workflow — but I appreciate having it when I want to. The Surface Pro 11’s Bluetooth Flex Keyboard upgrade can switch to Bluetooth connection when it’s detached. That’s a fun addition to the keyboard that I first saw with a OnePlus tablet last year. Granted, my use cases for the Bluetooth keyboard are limited, but it’s a “better to have it and not need it” kind of situation. The keyboard in particular takes some getting used to, but I really like it.
That’s expensive, but still a touch less than elite M4 Apple MacBook Pros and other high-end laptops. And unlike the MacBook Pro, the Microsoft Surface Pro 11 can function as a tablet and laptop in one. It’s a bad thing because in all the time the Surface Pro has existed, Microsoft has never sold it with the keyboard cover.
Three tower cranes were used during the construction of the uppermost levels, each capable of lifting a 25-tonne load.92 The remaining structure above was constructed of lighter steel. NORR was also responsible for the architectural integration drawings for the Armani Hotel included in the Tower. Emaar Properties also engaged GHD,40 an international multidisciplinary consulting firm, to act as an independent verification and testing authority for concrete and steelwork. Construction of the Burj Khalifa began in 2004, with the exterior completed five years later in 2009. The primary structure is reinforced concrete and some of the structural steel for the building originated from the Palace of the Republic in East Berlin, the seat of the former East German parliament.5 The building was opened in 2010 as part of a new development called Downtown Dubai. It was designed to be the centerpiece of large-scale, mixed-use development.
That becomes problematic if you, you know, don’t have a table in front of you. More specifically, when I detach the keyboard, I’ll usually want a virtual keyboard to appear. Microsoft muddies those waters when it introduced the Bluetooth-connected Flex Keyboard — you know that feature I was just extolling the virtues of? The problem I ran into was that the virtual keyboard popped up seemingly at random.
