I've got to agree with OP. Best laptop/tablet I've used, and I've done professional tech reviews. (i7/512GB) My parents still use their SP1 on a daily basis and love it.
I wrote ~80% of my PhD thesis and did 50%+ of the neural data analysis on it. Upgraded to Windows 10 a week before my defense and no problems. Hell, I finally did a fresh install two months ago out of habit, rather than necessity, and I've owned the damn thing since the week it launched.
Yes, the battery life isn't spectacular compared to what's on the market now, but I'm so used to laptops lasting ~3 hours on battery with constant vigilance that the poor thermal design actually HELPS a bit. It's like a little efficiency alarm that says, "More than happy to do all this, but know I'm not gonna last long." Hey, at least it means I don't have to run a monitoring program like CPUZ or Rainmeter to know when the system is under load. But, that's my only real gripe.
This puppy still gets used on an almost daily basis (though my desktop is the main workhorse now, since I'm traveling less). Double the battery life and a 50%+ performance bump are the only things that would make me consider an upgrade right now. It's just been a really great experience all around and I don't see getting a non-Surface laptop/tablet in the foreseeable future.
I wrote ~80% of my PhD thesis and did 50%+ of the neural data analysis on it. Upgraded to Windows 10 a week before my defense and no problems. Hell, I finally did a fresh install two months ago out of habit, rather than necessity, and I've owned the damn thing since the week it launched.
Yes, the battery life isn't spectacular compared to what's on the market now, but I'm so used to laptops lasting ~3 hours on battery with constant vigilance that the poor thermal design actually HELPS a bit. It's like a little efficiency alarm that says, "More than happy to do all this, but know I'm not gonna last long." Hey, at least it means I don't have to run a monitoring program like CPUZ or Rainmeter to know when the system is under load. But, that's my only real gripe.
This puppy still gets used on an almost daily basis (though my desktop is the main workhorse now, since I'm traveling less). Double the battery life and a 50%+ performance bump are the only things that would make me consider an upgrade right now. It's just been a really great experience all around and I don't see getting a non-Surface laptop/tablet in the foreseeable future.
