True, but I wouldn’t call the Surface Pro ‘tablet portable’. It’s fairer to compare it with a notebook. With TypeCover, the Surface Pro is 2 centimeters thick, while a MacBook Air 11" has an average thickness of 1 centimeter. The Surface Pro is also a little heavier than a MacBook Air. Curiously, both devices have the same CPU, GPU, SSD, and RAM – but a MacBook Air 11" is $30 cheaper and has 5,5 hours of real world battery life.
If we were to compare Surface Pro with a 10" iPad, it would look even worse. The Surface Pro is twice as thick, 3 times as heavy, has one-third of the battery life, has a screen with a lower resolution, and it’s $300 more expensive.
It gets the same run time per charge.
It weighs less, not more; less than 2 pounds versus 2.38.
The difference is that you can snap off the optional keyboard in a split second if you really care about thickness -- well, that and the fact that it's a tablet with a touch digitizer behind the glass too.
>I bought the Surface Pro to use as a backup laptop: a secondary presentation device in case my main laptop bit the dust. I make a living teaching people via PowerPoint. For a long list of reasons, I can’t really switch presentation tools, and the iPad doesn’t cut it as a secondary presentation device. The Surface Pro does.
This isn't a typical situation, and if this is the only justification one can have (or perhaps one of the few) in owning a Surface Pro, MSFT has a whole lot of issues on its hands.
For instance, Metro lacks a file chooser where you can easily find files anywhere in your system. If the Metro interface had a good file chooser, you wouldn't have to drop out to use the file desktop chooser to find a file on any filesystem.
If Windows 8.1 adds a good file chooser and if Microsoft addresses a few specific problems like that, life in Metro could get much better.
I hope Microsoft can get its branding straight -- I find it weird that I click on a music file across the network and it pops up in a pretty Metro app with the tag line "Xbox Music". There's also some thing (which has never quite worked for me) called "Xbox Games" which I'm not sure will do anything for me if I don't own an Xbox.
Or is everything that runs Windows 8 an "Xbox" of some kind? And how come I see tiles for all kinds of music except for the music that I've got in my own collection?
I never switch modes unless I am switching tasks.
Desktop tasks (writing code, workign with office apps) all mouse/keyboard/trackpad
Consumption tasks (news, video) all use touch with keyboard folded out of the way
Drawing and taking notes I use the stylus.
I see this as having the right input mode available for each of my tasks, not some sort of "nightmare".
My only gripe about the RT is that even though I like the UI better, it's every bit as useful (and useless) as an iPad.
If you are using an SDXC card to supplement your storage and don't intend to eject it on a whim, you can get better performance by going to the device manager and changing the removal policy and the write caching.
Options for 256gb or 512gb SSD would have made this an easier choice for many.
My primary development box is a fully loaded 17" laptop. Tablets are too small screen wise and performance wise when doing real work either in the OSS or Redmond realm. (I deal with tons of Data and run a few VMs as well.)
1) It's a great tablet when you want a tablet. With no keyboard attached, it's a joy to read reddit and play games on in bed.
2) I throw it in the car with me whenever I leave home. I'm always on-call if a site/server goes down. The SP is a full computer with a hard keyboard, so there won't be any situation I need to drive back home to handle, even if it takes several hours to resolve.
3) It's a suitable desktop replacement for anything but hard gaming. I stick it on my desk, plug in a big monitor, and pair a bluetooth mouse. Now screen size and DPI scaling don't matter, and the Core i5 has all the power I could need for compiling software, photo editing, etc.
Add a good quality wireless mouse and a USB 3 hub, leave the keyboard at the desk and you've got a docking station as good in practice as anything on the market.
One thing I found with Windows 8 is that it is even better to use keyboard shortcuts to access the shell. Instead of groping for the 'Start' button, I hit the Windows key and the same thing happens if I am running Win7 or Win8. So Win8 didn't cause me disorientation at all, it just trained me to do the right thing.
The other angle is to consider that Surface is but one choice. Other manufacturers make excellent tablet/hybrid Windows 8 devices. They are probably a far better choice for general business use.
I don't really get people who complain about, for example, not being able to use Excel with your fingers. I'm sorry, touch is not the best solution for every application. Using touch absolutely sucks for a wide range of applications. A on-screen keyboard is the simplest example. It sucks. Functional, but it sucks. I can't even think of the idea of using Excel with mi fingers on the screen. It would be ugly, cumbersome and slow, very slow.
Tablets have their place. Please don't complain if you try to force it into a non-ideal application.
I still own a ten year old little Sony mini notebook with a nice 10 inch display. It's about the size of an iPad and twice as thick as an iPad 3. I still have XP on it. It is absolutely wonderful for travel, even in the most cramped aircraft. It has a great physical keyboard. It is fantastic for PowerPoint presentations. Battery life is 6 to 12 hours. I have written tons of code on this thing in flight. I can run a Linux VM. And do web development, etc. I could go on.
Tablets have their place.
About Excel with your fingers - you'd be surprised. The touch experience is surprisingly compelling once you get used to it. I'm always surprised at how often I reach out to touch the display on my laptop after I've been using my iPad or the Surface, even just for a few minutes. (This is especially true when using the Surface because the Type Cover's trackpad is laughably small.)
Anyhow, for business travel I would nearly always buy laptops in pairs. Really easy to clone them just before a trip and have true backup.
Two laptops and a Wacom are not going to be a significant departure from one laptop and surface. You can easily fit all of it in a laptop bag with room to spare. For convenience I eventually migrated towards wheeled laptop cases. You don't have to lug them around and they offer lots of room for gear and sometimes even a minimal overnight set of clothes, etc.
I am sure that eventually some tools will develop usable parallel touch UI's. I guess my point is that I can do everything I might generally have to do during a typical business trip on a ten year old notebook. Newer notebooks are far cheaper (I paid $3,000 for the Sony ten years ago) and far more capable. A tablet would be my absolute last choice as they are still really cumbersome and inconvenient to use.
Touch devices were not meant to replace laptops or desktops. In most cases, they were meant to fill a space that wasn't already filled.
It's possible for a program to not register file extensions.
once I got used to the form factor and what it was designed for it's changed how I compute in subtle ways.
Last night for example.. rather then going to my desk .. I watched some lectures on the couch while using the pen to take notes in one note .. then docked it to do some work.
that's just one example of many; but for me personally i feel like i'm doing more with my computer then I was before
though, I've usually docked my laptops when doing any serious work .. and my mobile work is usually restricted to coffee shops for only 3-4 hours at a time ..
battery life I guess could be better .. I usually only get 4hours or so off power when streaming movies off amazon but it's not really bad IMO, but of course I'd like it to be longer .. my main worry when it comes to the battery is that it's not user replaceable honestly
