Bandito
Active Member
I'm going to jump in and offer my opinion here, too.
I've supported both Macs and PC's in an enterprise environment and my experience is the opposite of Kif's. We would get called on to support the Macs maybe once per quarter, but were constantly fiddling with and working out problems on the Windows machines on an almost daily basis. Of course, YMMV.
Since you're dependent on Xcode and a long battery life, that leans very heavily towards the MBA.
You mention the SP3's touchscreen and lots of modern touch apps being available. Here, I must differ with your opinion. The touchscreen does add a little to the functionality of the SP3, but not really as much as I had hoped that it would. For me, I really only use the touchscreen when in tablet mode, and that's not really all that often. I mostly wind up using the SP3 as a notebook, which brings me to the end of your statement about the availability of touch-based apps. The main reason that I use the SP3 in notebook mode/style is because of the lack of touch-based apps. There simply aren't that many good apps available yet, and I find that most of my time is spent in legacy apps, particularly Office, where touch is simply too difficult and unreliable to use effectively. If you do any file management, you'll also find yourself using Windows File Explorer a lot, too, which isn't very touch-friendly.
As for note taking, I'd ask you a couple of questions. First, how good (clear) is your handwriting? Second, how fast is your handwriting? Again, for me, my handwriting is terrible and difficult for even me to interpret sometimes, let alone the computer. So, handwriting notes isn't much of a benefit to me. Also, I tend to write very small characters, and the SP3 seems to prefer larger writing, which, for me is unnatural. Finally, I'm a much faster typist than I am a handwriter, so taking notes on the keyboard is far better for me. You should consider these same things for your writing.
If you ever need to run Windows on a Mac, Parallels Desktop (or VMWare, second choice) are always there for you and do an excellent job of giving you both worlds at once. If you only occasionally need Windows, then you can just Bootcamp for free.
Hopefully this doesn't sound too much like I'm against the SP3. I do like the machine and find it interesting to use, but it is rather a Jack-of-all-trades, master of none type of machine in my book. I think the hardware is pretty great, but Windows 8.x leaves much to be desired. MS should have started over with a ground up new OS for Windows 8.x and touch and kept compatibility with all the former apps by providing VM support for Windows 7 or earlier releases. The way Windows 8.x is now, it's only half an OS and you still wind up in the desktop to complete many operations. With an entirely new OS, we could have lots of great new features, but still have access to all of the legacy stuff, and developers could have focused their efforts on new software rather than trying to straddle both worlds and split their resources or simply not bother with touch support.
I've supported both Macs and PC's in an enterprise environment and my experience is the opposite of Kif's. We would get called on to support the Macs maybe once per quarter, but were constantly fiddling with and working out problems on the Windows machines on an almost daily basis. Of course, YMMV.
Since you're dependent on Xcode and a long battery life, that leans very heavily towards the MBA.
You mention the SP3's touchscreen and lots of modern touch apps being available. Here, I must differ with your opinion. The touchscreen does add a little to the functionality of the SP3, but not really as much as I had hoped that it would. For me, I really only use the touchscreen when in tablet mode, and that's not really all that often. I mostly wind up using the SP3 as a notebook, which brings me to the end of your statement about the availability of touch-based apps. The main reason that I use the SP3 in notebook mode/style is because of the lack of touch-based apps. There simply aren't that many good apps available yet, and I find that most of my time is spent in legacy apps, particularly Office, where touch is simply too difficult and unreliable to use effectively. If you do any file management, you'll also find yourself using Windows File Explorer a lot, too, which isn't very touch-friendly.
As for note taking, I'd ask you a couple of questions. First, how good (clear) is your handwriting? Second, how fast is your handwriting? Again, for me, my handwriting is terrible and difficult for even me to interpret sometimes, let alone the computer. So, handwriting notes isn't much of a benefit to me. Also, I tend to write very small characters, and the SP3 seems to prefer larger writing, which, for me is unnatural. Finally, I'm a much faster typist than I am a handwriter, so taking notes on the keyboard is far better for me. You should consider these same things for your writing.
If you ever need to run Windows on a Mac, Parallels Desktop (or VMWare, second choice) are always there for you and do an excellent job of giving you both worlds at once. If you only occasionally need Windows, then you can just Bootcamp for free.
Hopefully this doesn't sound too much like I'm against the SP3. I do like the machine and find it interesting to use, but it is rather a Jack-of-all-trades, master of none type of machine in my book. I think the hardware is pretty great, but Windows 8.x leaves much to be desired. MS should have started over with a ground up new OS for Windows 8.x and touch and kept compatibility with all the former apps by providing VM support for Windows 7 or earlier releases. The way Windows 8.x is now, it's only half an OS and you still wind up in the desktop to complete many operations. With an entirely new OS, we could have lots of great new features, but still have access to all of the legacy stuff, and developers could have focused their efforts on new software rather than trying to straddle both worlds and split their resources or simply not bother with touch support.
