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Microsoft Surface Pro?

Discussion in 'Tilted Gear' started by KirStang, Feb 6, 2013.

  1. KirStang

    KirStang Something Patriotic.

    Location:
    In the 17 Judicial Circuit
    Seriously considering being an early adopter of this platform. From the preliminary reviews, it seems to be a highly mobile laptop. My only concern is that I purchase it and don't use it. Battery life's also been rated to about 3-4 hours. I would love the input of the tech gurus on this forum and see what they think about the Surface Pro, and most importantly, whether it's worth adopting as a main work platform. Will this become something akin to a net-book?

    [​IMG]
     
    KirStang, Feb 6, 2013
    #1
  2. snowy

    snowy so kawaii Staff Member

    From what I've seen, reactions to the Surface Pro are pretty mixed. David Pogue of the NYTimes had a good writeup:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/technology/personaltech/microsofts-surface-pro-works-like-a-tablet-and-a-pc.html?smid=pl-share
     
    snowy, Feb 7, 2013
    #2
  3. Lordeden

    Lordeden Part of the Problem

    Location:
    Redneckhell, NC
    Work with win8? If you connect to any windows shares, network drives and (worse) a domain, you are SOL. I had to work some major magic to get a windows 8 pro pc to talk to my server and could not get it to join the domain. Know you are an early adopter, so things will not work as advertised.

    I personally think Windows 8 is a heaping pile of shit. I hate it and don't wish it upon my worst enemy. If I wanted my main interface to look like AOL, I would travel back in time to the 90's.
     
    Last edited: Feb 7, 2013
    Lordeden, Feb 7, 2013
    #3
    • Like Like x 1
  4. Baraka_Guru

    Baraka_Guru Möderätor Staff Member

    Location:
    Toronto
    I think tablets will eventually replace netbooks if not laptops as the main portable computing tool. It really depends on your productivity needs and style. I think a good combo is a tablet with a keyboard and a "home base" workstation, whether it's a powerful laptop with a big screen or a desktop with a really big screen.

    That said, I don't see how this product can compete with the iPad or other products in the category. It seems to be trying too hard to be the best of everything and failing.

    I could see so many people calling the 3 to 4 hours of battery life a deal-breaker. People are becoming more averse to plugging into something, and this product goes in the wrong direction. The new Retina display iPad boasts 9 to 10 hours. The MacBook Pro? 7 hours.
     
    Last edited: Feb 7, 2013
    Baraka_Guru, Feb 7, 2013
    #4
  5. Craven Morehead

    Craven Morehead Very Tilted

    Location:
    third rock from the sun
    3 to 4 hours of battery life should be a deal breaker. That's a huge advantage that the iPad has. And I assume other devices as well. Try using it for travel with that short of a window. It would fail miserably. I took the bus to OHare last week and was on my iPad for an hour. Then approximately an hour at the airport. Then a 2.5 hour flight. Who wants a dead tablet once you get to your destination? Assuming the Surface has increased functionality, it would suck once it becomes a brick with a dead battery.
     
    Craven Morehead, Feb 7, 2013
    #5
  6. Baraka_Guru

    Baraka_Guru Möderätor Staff Member

    Location:
    Toronto
    I'm constantly amazed at the battery life on that device, especially after coming off from using my Sony Ericsson X10 phone, which didn't seem to last the day on standby. My SO uses the iPad a lot. She'll watch TV on it, read books, use her teacher planning apps, message people, do FaceTime. Then I'll pick it up hours later and see it still has half a charge on it.

    The iPad isn't just hype.

    You make a good point about travellers, CM. If you simply cannot get to an outlet, 3 to 4 hours is crap.
     
    Baraka_Guru, Feb 7, 2013
    #6
    • Like Like x 2
  7. snowy

    snowy so kawaii Staff Member

    My Nexus 7 has similarly awesome battery life. I can use it as I would normally do for 2 days before it really needs a charge. However, I do have home workstations in my laptop and desktop. What I like about the Nexus is that it has lightened my backpack load significantly. If I just need to take some notes while out at the coffeeshop, I bust open Evernote (thanks, redux ) and scribble down some notes. When I get home, I can log into Evernote and there they are. It also seamlessly transitions between the article I'm reading and Evernote. Also, I've had no trouble using it to access documents on my Microsoft Skydrive.
     
    snowy, Feb 7, 2013
    #7
  8. Plan9

    Plan9 Rock 'n Roll

    Location:
    Earth
    Fuck Windows 8. And fuck whiz-bang gizmos with docking parts and dongles. Get yourself a regular netbook or a fancy ultrabook instead.

    Think of it this way, KirStang: A stripped-down M4 sure is easy to carry but that doesn't mean you want it when you have to go to work.

    ...

    I'm not particularly concerned with super ultra mega battery capacity. First world problem that doesn't hamper most people engaging in actual work.

    Business traveler? Most airports have charging stations and most of the first/business class seats I've rode in on modern airplanes have outlets.

    I'd imagine 3 to 4 hours is crap if you judge the usefulness of a device by how long you can play Angry Birds / watch Netflix or porn on it.

    Whenever I'm actually doing legit work, I'm either in a hotel room, an airport lounge or at some type of desk-chair-outlet office.

    /Contrary Cornelius
     
    Plan9, Feb 7, 2013
    #8
    • Like Like x 3
  9. Speed_Gibson

    Speed_Gibson Hacking the Gibson

    Location:
    Wolf 359
    I so agree with this. I helped a friend with a new laptop running Windows 8 and that bloody thing was horrible until I mostly disabled the horrific geocities look microsoft thinks people want and had it booting to the standard windows desktop for everything with a working start button.
     
    Speed_Gibson, Mar 4, 2013
    #9
  10. CinnamonGirl

    CinnamonGirl The Cheat is GROUNDED!

    Location:
    Central Republic of Where-In-The-Hell
    Wait, you can do that? 'Cause I wanna do that.
     
    CinnamonGirl, Mar 4, 2013
    #10
    • Like Like x 2
  11. Baraka_Guru

    Baraka_Guru Möderätor Staff Member

    Location:
    Toronto
    Baraka_Guru, Mar 4, 2013
    #11
    • Like Like x 3
  12. Speed_Gibson

    Speed_Gibson Hacking the Gibson

    Location:
    Wolf 359
    I saw that "Everybody Dance Now" on the 2:07 mark and before that and my first thought "Nice Text to Path".
    This reminds me of the Arsenio Hall show.
    --- merged: Mar 5, 2013 4:16 AM ---
    *Hops in Delorean, curses when 30 year old car that was a POS when it was new fails to start*
    *Steals the time machine from H.G. Wells time traveler stranding him in 2013 with this oh so wonderful music. Heads back a few years to watch Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Fats Waller, Art Tatum, and especially Benny Goodman all perform live.
    --- merged: Mar 5, 2013 4:20 AM ---
    On a positive note if you actually like Windows 8 a touchscreen like this is the optimal way to go for it. And even better as I said before you can bury that horrible new interface where it will not appear unless you ask for it with the correct keystroke. The start button MS removed in their infinite foolishness is easy to replace for free.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Mar 12, 2013
    Speed_Gibson, Mar 4, 2013
    #12
    • Like Like x 1
  13. martian

    martian Server Monkey Staff Member

    Location:
    Mars
    ...Yeah.

    So the problem with the Surface Pro is that it's trying to cram a laptop into a tablet form factor. At a glance that sounds like a brilliant idea, but there's a problem. We get laptop threads every so often here and at some point in each of them I mention how laptops are all about tradeoffs. There's always a compromise, and the more you try to make it do and the smaller you try to make it, the bigger the compromises are.

    So you've got the Surface Pro. It's an x86 processor with a whack of RAM and a dedicated graphics processor, all in a ~10" package. That means you're running something equivalent to your full size laptop on a tablet-sized battery (hence the 3-4 hour battery life). It means you're dealing with the heat from these components, without the room or power to run active cooling properly. It means you've got no room for any real amount of storage.

    I think the Surface Pro isn't a horrible device. I think it's a niche product. I think most people are better suited to a dedicated tablet, like the above mentioned iPad or Nexus 7 (or Nexus 10, if you want a 10" device). And I will be very surprised if this thing can find a market -- I just can't imagine there are a lot of people who are going to want to pay a grand for what amounts to a gimped laptop when you can get either a netbook or a tablet for half that or less.

    I think it's actually good for artists. A nice touch that you don't often see in tablets is that the Surface Pro's touchscreen is pressure sensitive. Mike Krahulik of Penny Arcade did a review of one and praised it's touch sensitivity and utility as a mobile platform. That's a great endorsement for Microsoft, but most of us are not artists who make our living off thrice weekly webcomics, and thus don't need a mobile drawing device like Mr. Krahulik does.

    Personally, I'd pass on it. If you have specific needs that it meets then by all means. I'd just take a look at some of the alternative devices that don't cost a grand first, and see if one of those will do what you need first. I suspect you'll find there's not much the Surface Pro is doing for you that can't be done for less.
     
    martian, Mar 4, 2013
    #13
    • Like Like x 2
  14. Bodkin van Horn

    Bodkin van Horn One of the Four Horsewomyn of the Fempocalypse

    Location:
    Inside The Nucleus of Feminism
    I'm going to go ahead and be a contrarian here. Shocking, yes?

    I picked one of these mofos up two weeks ago. No regrets. For me, it very nearly replaces my Macbook Pro and completely replaces my iPad. The only reason it doesn't completely replace my MBP is that my MBP has 8GB of RAM and the SP only has four.

    The nice thing about the SP compared to the iPad: Fully functional OS. I like the idea of the iPad, and I got a lot of use out of mine, but, its OS is fucking lame. Why no native file browser? Why is everything so ridiculously sandboxed? Why do I have to violate the warranty in order to look at what files are on the damn thing? You can make arguments about Windows 8 being shit, but if you're making these arguments on an iPad, you are being ridiculous. I have no complaints about Windows 8. Sure, the OS kind of tries to straddle the fence between touch devices and more old school Windows action, but whatever, so does OSX.

    The first thing I did when I got the SP was install some statistical analysis software and generate a million random numbers. I don't fucking know why, but I did. Then I tried to plot 4 million data points at once and got a memory error because I only have 4 GB of RAM. Those last two sentences sum up the kinds of tradeoffs you should expect to make with the SP. That being said, I made it almost all the way through grad school on a slightly faster computer with 4GB of RAM. I wish this thing had been around when I was shopping for my last computer. Because not only could this machine have handled my school work from a computational perspective, it is a great machine for taking notes. I did my time taking notes on an iPad with a rubber-nib stylus and there was really no way for me to avoid feeling like I was taking notes in Crayon. Say what you will about the bloated foolishness that is Word and Excel, but OneNote works really well for taking notes.

    The battery time isn't great. But to be perfectly honest, the battery time on my MBP (three years old) is about the same, maybe a bit worse. Unless I'm using my MBP as an electronic picture frame, I get about 4-5 hours per charge out of it, too. This is generally not a problem for me, because I tend to be around electrical outlets all the time. I have yet to find myself in a situation where I have to stop using the SP for wont of electricity. But that's more of a lifestyle choice for me. Sure iPads last longer, but the things you can do on an iPad are a very small subset of the things you can do on an SP. If those iPad-specific things are all you care about, go for the iPad.

    Plus, the SP runs Civilization 5 and I can play Super Nintendo games on it on my big TV with an XBox controller.
     
    Bodkin van Horn, Mar 23, 2013
    #14
    • Like Like x 2
  15. Plan9

    Plan9 Rock 'n Roll

    Location:
    Earth
    Real World Use:

    Keyboard > Not a Keyboard
     
    Plan9, Mar 23, 2013
    #15
  16. Raghnar

    Raghnar Getting Tilted

    Surface Pro is not comparable with iPad.
    ARM processor with crappy OS vs x86 processor with full fledged OS.
    One just see content, the other make it.

    Battery life is the other side. If you need a media tablet, Surface Pro have no sense. If you need a work (and/or fun) tool to produce something out of your device, iPad is pain in the arse...

    SP have Civilization 5 and x86 games (with all the retro goodies without crappy and ridicously expensive "enhanced edition" in the way), complete and totally compatible office suite (in that sense also Surface RT seems to have someting to say) graphical suite from Lightroom to 3D Studio Max, every single program that works on your x86 computer, and is light and tight almost as an iPad.

    In anycase IMHO is still too soon for Surface Pro. The next months Intell Haswell platform will be released. ULV processors will scale from 17 to 15W and new 9.5W will be availble for the end of the year (not a so new concept, also the SU7300 of the note I'm writing on is 10W). Haswell reference ultrabook will have detachable screen and all sort of new goodies like "air" touch... interesting times for laptops and computing mobility, I was waiting this moment for years!
     
    Raghnar, Mar 23, 2013
    #16