Thanks for that indepth post, Philtastic.
Would I be satisfied with that level of performance you mentioned? I care about (in a random order):
- Smooth performance when performing every day tasks. If an i7 (even when 4 years old) is a big factor in that, I will likely care if performance is (a lot) less on an M3. But only if everyday tasks like browsing, booting, etc take significantly longer.
- Mobility.
- A tablet mode.
- Battery life in said tablet mode.
However, you own a SP4. What made you take the leap?
Let me put it this way: there are people satisfied with the performance they have on their phones while other people aren't satisfied unless they have the bleeding edge. Whether you will be satisfied is purely a subjective question that revolves a lot around what you have experienced before. Compared to my Core i5-4690K desktop (Geekbench score ~12,000 at stock clocks) with a 960 GB SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD, the Surface Pro 4 Core i5-6300U often feels a bit sluggish: opening a new tab in Chrome takes a few seconds longer, rendering a movie takes almost twice as long, Powerpoint isn't as smooth, scrolling pdfs isn't as smooth and sometimes takes a few seconds to fully render pages in large pdfs (one of the most annoying things).
However, I bought the SP4 as a mobile work and light gaming platform because I'd had enough of lugging around a 4+ lb laptop so I had realistic expectations going into this first with the SP2 and now the SP4. Many of my comments will pertain not just to the SP4 but about why I got a hybrid tablet-laptop. Mobility of the SP4 is incredible: it's thin and light, so it slips right into my messenger bag and off I go. Tablet mode is much better on the SP4 than the SP2 due to being lighter and having the 3:2 screen ratio which makes it more usable in portrait orientation. The larger screen makes it feel more like you're viewing or drawing something on a sheet of paper compared to smaller tablets. I was also interested in getting into drawing so the stylus was a big plus. It's also very useful for taking notes at meetings and seminars in tablet mode instead of having a big laptop sitting on my lap and having the keyboard sounds tapping away. Obvious benefits to being a tablet when I just want to surf the web in bed or on the couch where I can use the stylus for sites that have either very small or pointer hover elements. Being able to remove the keyboard to watch a movie while I eat is also a cool bonus.
When real works needs to get done, I can just snap on the keyboard and away I go. All my files are available to me at all times and consolidated on one device. Due to the stylus, you can even get some good non-typing work done in tablet mode, such as arranging images in Powerpoint and adding titles, making graphs and light cell editing in Excel, marking up pdfs with the pen for future editing when you've got the keyboard attached, Photoshop editing. Basically, it's a device that let's you be productive at any time without having to go fetch your work laptop since you were enjoying a movie on your tablet but got an email saying that they needed you to edit something. Instead, you just pause the movie, download the file from your email, edit with your stylus (I've found the writing recognition to be pretty good), send it off, and back to your movie.
For those reasons, I got the Surface Pro 2 and then 4. In my experience, the battery life of the SP4 is fine. I regularly get 5-8 hours depending on what I'm doing. You can basically ensure that you get 7-9 hours by enabling the power saver mode with two taps (tap on the battery icon then tap power saver mode). There are still a few bugs with the SP4 but, having now read a bit about the other tablets, they have a lot of their own problems. For example, here's Cnet's review of the HP Spectre x2:
HP Spectre x2 review: A Surface clone that's actually a better deal. The biggest thing that I took away from the review is that, although the review ends on a positive note, the Spectre x2 feels cheaper in many ways. Note the screen comparison picture where the Spectre's screen has a huge bevel and is really dull compared to the brilliant SP4 screen (you can especially see the difference in the video. I found a better screen analysis at Ultrabook Review that also demonstrates that it has pretty bad colour accuracy:
HP Spectre X2 review - gets the looks and the performance, but...), the problems with using the U-shaped stand, needing to carry around a dongle just to use USB devices since it only has USB-C (way too early to only have USB-C ports), and the 15-25% slower CPU. If you like the stylus, there's also no secure place to put it on the Spectre.
In my opinion, among tablet-laptop hybrids, Microsoft still has far and away the best take on it but it does come with a steeper price which I believe to be justified due to the extra features you get. I don't think I'll ever go back to the large and bulky laptops and there's no point to me in getting an ultrabook since they basically cost just as much while using the same hardware without the versatility that a detachable keyboard and stylus give you. I also find it just as easy to type on the Surface keyboard on my lap as a laptop so the 'lapability' of traditional laptops isn't an advantage to me.
Concerning whether you should go with a Core m3 or Core i5, given what you've said, you'd probably be fine with a Core m3 BUT I'd still recommend the Surface Pro 4 over the much cheaper alternatives purely for that godly screen which is both pretty bright and has excellent colour accuracy (here's Anandtech's SP4 review:
The Microsoft Surface Pro 4 Review: Raising The Bar). This is a device that you're going to use all day, every day, and the screen is how you will view all of your content. If there's something to splurge on, I'd splurge on a wicked good screen, and that's what the SP4 has. Another aspect not really touched on is that the SP4 has an insanely fast PCI 3.0 NVMe SSD rather than standard SATA. This results in sequential read/writes that are about 2-3x faster than the SSD in the Spectre x2 (numbers found in both the Anandtech SP4 review and the Spectre Ultrabook Review review), which means that you'll rarely encounter long waits when you load programs or write files due to an SSD bottleneck. The speaker placement on the SP4 is also a lot better than other tablets: they face forward out of the screen rather than pointing out from the sides (I always find that I have to cup the side speakers to hear them properly).
If I've convinced you that you should get the SP4 Core m3 over cheaper alternatives, then I would recommend getting the Core i5, 4 GB RAM, 128 GB SSD because it's only $100 more which is a 15% increase in price for a 40% faster system: much better value while still affordable. This whole post is a lot longer than I originally envisioned but it's basically the long form of what most of us say here: the Surface Pro 4 is the best tablet-laptop hybrid available and the Core i5 is the best balance of performance and price.
Edit: I just read more of the Ultrabook Review HP Spectre x2 review, and its operating temperature tops out at 95 degrees Celcius while playing a game!!! Cannot recommend at all! Holy crap!
I am planning on trying it soon
