How are you finding it across different applications? I need a new device and I travel quite a lot. This seems to fit my needs quite well. Had a quick play on a workmates and the keyboard seems way better than expected. Will need to get used to windows after a few years of macbook love but so far all looks positive. What say thee?

Impressed with mine – first tablet pc I’ve used that genuinely works in both modes. Then pen is also better than others I’ve used – I generally use the tablet mode for sketching molecules, do a bit of teaching on it – works flawlessly. Quite a few colleagues have them and response has been uniformly positive. Although if you want to hear some negativity on the surface, no doubt you’re posting in the right place 🙂

One thing it can’t do is to rdp into my work desktop in a usable way – (I don’t know if people still do this much with cloud computing, but I have the habit of it and like it) there is a big resolution gap that creates a tiny desktop window and I’m not sure if this is a solvable problem. Other than that, though – great machine.

I used one as a work machine for a long time – very, very good, it handled everything from CAD to Lightroom to web development stuff with no problems. The only reason I now use a MacBook is that my accounts package only runs on Mac.

As above, a few legacy things don’t scale to the high-res screen very well.

One thing it can’t do is to rdp into my work desktop in a usable way – (I don’t know if people still do this much with cloud computing, but I have the habit of it and like it) there is a big resolution gap that creates a tiny desktop window and I’m not sure if this is a solvable problem. Other than that, though – great machine.

Have a look at the link below ( I’m not blessed with a super hi res screen though so can’t confirm if it works )

https://blog.falafel.com/remote-desktop-on-a-high-dpi-screen/

I find the screen a bit small for day to day use but with a docking station or just plugging in an external screen it rocks

Sounds very positive, cheers 🙂

I had one of the top end ones for a couple of months. It was OK, but unless you need the portability and pen, then a high end slim laptop is better IMHO. I preferred the Lenovo Carbon X1 with the touch screen that it replaced.

I’ve been using mine for two years at work. I loath it.

– it fairly regularly goes into something of a very deep sleep mode that it cannot be woken from and needs a hard restart to get going again. The hard restart requires you to hold the power button down for an eternity.
– the screen resolution chops and changes when connecting to an external display. Sometimes I get a very odd preesntation where the tool bar of an application is in super large font size whereas everything in the window is regular size. It also forgets what it was connected to and needs you to reset and reconfigure it to the external monitor.
– The pen is useless and i never use it as a tablet. I’ve tried using it for photo procesing in this way and it’s hopeless (I tend to only take it on work trips and use it to process any images I take while I’m travelling).
– the screen is really small and limits productivit while I’m working away from my office.
– the travel connectors are good in that they are nice and light, but they are limited in terms of connectivity. The connection block and the transformer are relatively huge compared to the Surface itself.
– The keyboard is good though.
– I have the Pro version with 8gb RAM and an i5 processor. It’s fine in terms of power for office work but it is a pain for photo processing; it’s just too slow especially comapred to my four year old MacBook Pro.
– The power management function isn’t great. Quite often you’ll think you’ve put it in sleep mode only to open it up on the way to a meeting the following day and find it’s drained the battery to zero. That’s perhaps the most annoying thing it does.

Overall it’s small, light and looks very cool but it runs a fine line between style over substance and there are lots of small niggles about the way that it works that do from time to time add up to being a real pain in the ass and significant lost productivity.

I have had one for over over two years now! It’s a good machine at heart, spoiled by numerous bugs and gotchas that should have been fixed by now.

Originally (for the first 6 months) it was bordering on un-useable, now it’s merely annoying mostly. For example, you come to use the pen, and for some reason it’s unpaired itself, or the touch screen, er, doesn’t, or the screen resolution has changed itself, or the camera won’t autofocus, or you can’t turn it off, or turn it back on again, or some network driver has fallen over suddenly and you can’t connect to to stuff or you use the USB3.0 and the WiFi crashes etc etc etc

Most of those are fixed (temporarily) by turning it on and off again (requires a hard OFF not just turning off in normal way) but it can be a real PITA if you need to get something done and it spanners itself at a vital moment etc!

Also, one single USB port is a massive limitation for me, as i’mm always wanting to plug stuff in to it.

On the plus sides:

1) it’s small and light and the battery life is reasonable
2) The touch type keyboard cover is actually pretty good to use for typing
3) When the pen works, i like the right click that built into it, and the fact i can assign shortcuts to the buttons.
4) Speed and progam exectution seem pretty good, it seems to play media etc well
5) The built in camera is good (when the autofocus works!)
6) The screen resolution and brightness are great for such a small device

Would i recommend one? er, that’s a firm “maybe”!

One of my colleagues has a Surface Laptop and that seems to be a little stable and better resolved.

All of the points that Maxtourque just made are exactly what I was saying in my post.