Hi All,
I am a very disappointed customer. I have been following the Surface for years, and when I saw the new developments in the 3rd generation, I couldn't resist. I brought my Macbook Air into the store for an exchange, and walked out with an i5 SP3. Unfortunately, it didn't take me more than a couple of hours to sour on the device. I intended on this device being a replacement for my macbook air, as well as providing new functionality--that of a tablet. Part of what I used my macbook air to do was play games casually (Which, Microsoft says in their ads, is what the SP3 also provides). The SP3 has a newer i5 than my 2012 MBA had, so you can imagine how distraught I was when I found that it could not play any of my games at anything close to a reasonable framerate. What's more, when monitoring CPU usage while playing, I noticed that the processor seldom was able to run above 1 ghz, even though it is a 1.9ghz i5. The heat is so intense that my i5, for which I paid a pretty penny, cannot operate over 50% of its capacity. I play WoW (on low settings), Hearthstone, and various old RPG's, and my SP3 performed MUCH worse than my MBA did. These are not taxing games. Wow, what a disappointment.
Okay, I said, so maybe this isn't a gaming device (Even though Microsoft said it could handle casual gaming in their ads, and even though it has a better processor than my old MBA which COULD handle these games), so let me test this on something outside of gaming. I fired up excel and ran a large update operation on a spreadsheet. What happened? The device hangs, the fan whirls up, and eventually Excel crashes. Not what I expected at all. I returned my SP3 the next morning, and was sorry to learn from the Microsoft Store employees that they would not be able to return my MBA to me as I had traded it in for non-refundable store credit. I guess I learned my lesson here, but I just want to say how INCREDIBLY disappointed I am in this product. The SP3 in almost all respects is a beautiful device. It looks beautiful, the pen works amazingly well, the screen is gorgeous, and I love the keyboard and trackpad. However, if it cannot perform the basic tasks that the devices it aims to "replace" can, then how can I keep it? It would be a very silly choice for me to do that. Now I am struggling to come up with a device that I can get from the Microsoft store that will be better than my old Macbook Air. It's quite an unfortunate turn of events, and as much as I'd like to support Microsoft and this device, I have been soured by this whole experience.