macmee
Active Member
It was probably a stupid decision. The iPad will be almost as much money as my Sp4 was because of how overpriced apple products are in general. I can't believe I'm going to be one of *those* people who actually own a product called the "Apple pencil" and that I willingly paid $130 for this pencil without having a gun to my head.
I will say to start, that the final straw for me was how yesterday, not *once* did my surface turn on when I pushed the power button (since the last update this has been a big problem), and when I was in the metro drawing app (which is a stock app I'll point out), it crashed twice, the second time the device literally just went black and rebooted. All I was doing was drawing with the pen, & I even lost my work.
Nobody was more excited than I was when I heard Microsoft was making the original surface. I grew up with Windows 98 and Windows XP and ever since I was little nothing made more more excited than having a full x86 Windows device in the back of my pocket (seriously how lame was I?!). But anyway I was over the moon when the Surface came out. I've owned a SP2, SP3, and SP4. I would've bought a Sp1 but at the time I was an unemployed student.
But I think I've now learned a very important, very expensive lesson. For what I need a tablet for: the surface line completely blows.
I write software, server software and iOS software. You can't do that very well on a Surface, and I prefer to use something a lot more powerful anyway. I thought that was okay, and that the Surface would be a nice companion device, and at the very least a nice machine to use when I need to run Windows (for light gaming or whatever). But for the software I write (and that most people write tbh) deploys to unix like environments. Unless you're building a game, Windows as a deployment target makes no sense these days, from my point of view anyway.
So I just want a solid companion device. And as a companion device the Surface line brings a lot of skin to the game. I will no doubt be disappointed that I can't torrent movies on my iPad, run Chrome or run any Java software at all. But looking back at the past few years, my ideal tablet is optimized for reading books, taking notes with a pen in a lecture, and web browsing / movie watching in airports and otherwise randomly. And if I'm honest with myself, the Surface is actually *really* bad at mostly all of these things, and I've been apologizing for it and making compromises this whole time.
(note: obviously if you use your Surface as your daily driver then you have a completely different use case to me, and the cases I care about wont be the same as yours)
But yeah, the device is pretty thick so not so great for me to use for reading in bed (plus there's not many good reading apps anyway). OneNote is very very buggy in windows 10 and I've actually recently stopped using my SP4 for note taking for this reason, web browsing on the device is admittedly fantastic, BUT its a battery killer, and would anyone here say Edge or Chrome are touch optimized? (metro IE was but MS killed it off, which is sort of upsetting). Watching movies? Actually the Surface is probably better for that then the iPad is to be perfectly honest, but the difference between the two in this regard is negligible for me (i.e. they both run netflix).
And the bugs. This product has been plagued with bugs. iPads also have bugs, the worst thing that happened to an iPad for me was that I updated to iOS 4 and it wiped ALL my user data. But believe me, the Surface has so many crazy and numerously small bugs that I really consider it a slap in the fact that they'd market these to us without more quality control. I want my tablet to turn on when I push the power button. I want my device not to lose 4% battery an hour in standby, to have reliable wifi, to have good stylus support and a rock solid note taking app. The Surface is many wonderful things, but reliable it is not.
So yeah, I might keep the Sp4 around for a little longer, maybe forever, but I can't see myself carrying on to buy a Sp5 and onward. If I needed a daily driver machine with Windows that didn't need to be overly performant then I'd probably pick one up again, but as just a companion device, I think the Surface is an expensive (and very nice looking) slab of silicone containing many bugs.
I will say to start, that the final straw for me was how yesterday, not *once* did my surface turn on when I pushed the power button (since the last update this has been a big problem), and when I was in the metro drawing app (which is a stock app I'll point out), it crashed twice, the second time the device literally just went black and rebooted. All I was doing was drawing with the pen, & I even lost my work.
Nobody was more excited than I was when I heard Microsoft was making the original surface. I grew up with Windows 98 and Windows XP and ever since I was little nothing made more more excited than having a full x86 Windows device in the back of my pocket (seriously how lame was I?!). But anyway I was over the moon when the Surface came out. I've owned a SP2, SP3, and SP4. I would've bought a Sp1 but at the time I was an unemployed student.
But I think I've now learned a very important, very expensive lesson. For what I need a tablet for: the surface line completely blows.
I write software, server software and iOS software. You can't do that very well on a Surface, and I prefer to use something a lot more powerful anyway. I thought that was okay, and that the Surface would be a nice companion device, and at the very least a nice machine to use when I need to run Windows (for light gaming or whatever). But for the software I write (and that most people write tbh) deploys to unix like environments. Unless you're building a game, Windows as a deployment target makes no sense these days, from my point of view anyway.
So I just want a solid companion device. And as a companion device the Surface line brings a lot of skin to the game. I will no doubt be disappointed that I can't torrent movies on my iPad, run Chrome or run any Java software at all. But looking back at the past few years, my ideal tablet is optimized for reading books, taking notes with a pen in a lecture, and web browsing / movie watching in airports and otherwise randomly. And if I'm honest with myself, the Surface is actually *really* bad at mostly all of these things, and I've been apologizing for it and making compromises this whole time.
(note: obviously if you use your Surface as your daily driver then you have a completely different use case to me, and the cases I care about wont be the same as yours)
But yeah, the device is pretty thick so not so great for me to use for reading in bed (plus there's not many good reading apps anyway). OneNote is very very buggy in windows 10 and I've actually recently stopped using my SP4 for note taking for this reason, web browsing on the device is admittedly fantastic, BUT its a battery killer, and would anyone here say Edge or Chrome are touch optimized? (metro IE was but MS killed it off, which is sort of upsetting). Watching movies? Actually the Surface is probably better for that then the iPad is to be perfectly honest, but the difference between the two in this regard is negligible for me (i.e. they both run netflix).
And the bugs. This product has been plagued with bugs. iPads also have bugs, the worst thing that happened to an iPad for me was that I updated to iOS 4 and it wiped ALL my user data. But believe me, the Surface has so many crazy and numerously small bugs that I really consider it a slap in the fact that they'd market these to us without more quality control. I want my tablet to turn on when I push the power button. I want my device not to lose 4% battery an hour in standby, to have reliable wifi, to have good stylus support and a rock solid note taking app. The Surface is many wonderful things, but reliable it is not.
So yeah, I might keep the Sp4 around for a little longer, maybe forever, but I can't see myself carrying on to buy a Sp5 and onward. If I needed a daily driver machine with Windows that didn't need to be overly performant then I'd probably pick one up again, but as just a companion device, I think the Surface is an expensive (and very nice looking) slab of silicone containing many bugs.
