Surface Pro $200 Price Cut Celebrates 2-In-1's 5th Birthday

It's the fifth anniversary of the Surface Pro, and Microsoft is marking the occasion with a $200 price cut, though only if you act fast. The President's Day Surface Pro deal will run from February 17th through to February 19th, bringing the cost of the 2-in-1 down to as little as $799.

Only select models will be included as part of the sale, mind. You'll be able to pick up the Surface Pro Core i5, with 4GB of memory and 128GB of storage, for $799. Alternatively, there'll be the Core i5 model with 8GB of memory and 256GB of storage, which will be $1,099.

Sadly, the recently announced Surface Pro LTE, with its inbuilt 4G LTE modem for getting online without WiFi or tethering to your smartphone, isn't included in the promotion. Microsoft says that it'll be running the deal from 2:00 AM PST on February 17, 2018 to 11:59 PM PST on February 19, 2018, while Surface Pro supplies last, and you'll only be able to buy one per customer.

"We wanted to challenge the concept that people should have to choose between the portability and convenience of a tablet and the power and productivity of a PC," Microsoft's Panos Panay says of the original Surface Pro, which was announced back in mid-2012 and then went on sale in early 2013. According to Panay, the core essentials were already clear from the outset. The tablet would need to have a pen, a powerful processor, and a 22-degree kickstand, along with a keyboard that could be clipped on.

Since then, of course, we've seen the Surface range expand. The most unexpected announcement was in 2015, when Microsoft surprised everybody with the reveal of the Surface Book. That eschewed the 2-in-1 design that the Surface Pro had stuck to, in favor of the form-factor of a more traditional notebook, albeit one with a big surprise. Hit a button on the keyboard and the screen section could detach, turning it into a pen-enabled tablet.

After that came the Surface Studio, a desktop PC with a huge, easel-like touchscreen. That could be pulled upright to use as a regular all-in-one, or pushed down almost horizontally and used as a vast art and multimedia surface. Sadly neither it nor the Surface Book are being included in this President's Day deal – presumably we'll have to wait until they're each five years old, too.