Surface Pro 8 and Surface Laptop 4 pics leak ahead of rumored January launch

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By Darren Allan
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But they reinforce recent rumors that the Pro 8 won’t change its design

Surface Pro 7
(Image credit: Future)

The Surface Pro 8, or at least the purported next device in Microsoft’s hybrid range, has popped up again online in a leaked image – this time alongside a snap of the supposed next Surface Laptop.

Windows Central spotted the images which were shared on Twitter by @cozyplanes, a Korean leaker who we’re not familiar with – so take this with the usual helping of caution around these kind of rumors.

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So this is what could be the Surface Pro 8 and Surface Laptop 4, both products which have just been certified over in Korea, and that certification is what these images relate to.

As you can see, if these are indeed the new incoming models, the design is staying pretty much the same in both cases. And that’s rather disappointing – folks were certainly crying out for change with the Surface Pro 7 last year, so if another iteration arrives with nothing doing on that front, such complaints are likely to get much louder (particularly after the introduction of the much slicker looking Surface Pro X, which certainly underlined the SP7’s outdated appearance).

Launch imminent?

Theoretically, these Surface devices are set to launch early in 2021, possibly mid-January, as Windows Central speculates. And as mentioned at the outset, we’ve already seen spilled pics of the purported next Surface Pro –  as well as some benchmarks which indicate solid performance levels.

The beating heart of the Pro 8 (or whatever it ends up being called) will apparently be an 11th-gen Tiger Lake CPU – seemingly the Intel Core i7-1165G7 – and users will be offered the chance to up the system RAM to 32GB (rather than the maximum of 16GB with the Surface Pro 7 models). All of that’s speculation, of course.

The incoming Surface Laptop spec remains a mystery, but Windows Central reckons that both Intel and AMD CPU options will be offered again, as with the current incarnation of the notebook.

Darren Allan

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).