I'm inching towards getting a Pro 4 to use as a extended display for my Mac. Need some native windows again after switching to MacOS. A Surface Pro 4 will be discounted and not a bad pick up.
I have an SP3. It is the best device I've bought in years.
I interact with the device in a fundamentally different way. I will sit and read a document with a pen and no keyboard (to proofread, highlight and makes notes). I'd tried this on ipad and it never fit in my workflow well.
I will use it to take notes at a meeting in OneNote. Again, the ipad workflow never worked for me for this.
The benefits definitely aren't for everyone. But it fits me perfectly, and I wouldn't go back from it now. Its probably at least a year before I upgrade (I also have a desktop for heavy lifting). I'm feeling the pinch of the older SP3 cpu a bit on some of the work I do, but not enough to warrant an upgrade yet. If I had money to throw around, I'd get the new one as a drop in upgrade without a second thought.
OOC, can you explain why the iPad workflow has never worked for those things you mentioned? Seems like one of its core intended designs is taking notes/reading documents much like an actual notebook
When I tried it might have worked if you'd fully bought into the apple ecosystem, but in a mixed corporate environment it just wouldn't work.
A document had to be somehow transferred into each viewer, and manually saved back out so I could use the reviewed document on the desktop.
With the SP3, live documents are stored in either dropbox or a network share and its seamless.
I do a lot of design work in indesign and photoshop, and even word. Being able to make both simple and substantive changes on the fly is a lot more use than far more limited ipad apps.
The SP4 pen is far more pleasant to write with than any ipad stylus I came across. This is all just a matter of taste, but I found my muscle memory reacts for better to the SP4 stylus.
My ipads were great for many things, but work was never one of them for me.
The form-factor is pretty amazing. The portability is very good. The performance is also very good within the above two factors.
The problem is the software and features:
- Windows 10 is a known factor, and it constantly frustrates.
- No Thunderbolt or USB-C is ridiculous in 2017.
I'd like to see Microsoft releasing Linux drivers for the Surface Pro. If they really love Linux enough to support it on Azure, they should support it everywhere. (I know, they support it on Azure to compete with AWS and Googs)
I've pretty much gotten used to Windows 10 at this point, and there are even a couple of minor UI tweaks that I miss when I use my Windows 7 machine at work. What frustrates you?
Windows 10 updates frustrate a lot of people. It will attempt it when you have a bad wifi connection and make the internet unreachable, or it will reboot when you're in the middle of something. And woe if you run out of battery power in the middle of the update... I'd rather have more control.
My pro 4 works perfectly fine. I'm just a desktop apps junkie (sales mainly) and so there is no real reason to upgrade. That said the new pen's deeper resolution is impressive, as I switched (primarily) from Evernote to OneNote and haven't looked back. (I still pay for Evernote, now it is purely for legacy info).
Awesome! I wasn't aware of that and did briefly google for one a while back. Hopefully I can migrate, the $5 bill every month, while not expensive, is becoming a bit annoying now as the value exchange simply isn't what it used to be for me.
I have an iPad pro, a MacBook, and a Surface Pro. I carry the MacBook and the iPad. The surface is too hot, cooks off battery too fast, the screen is small, the UI for the desktop app I use has icons too small to Target with the pen. The charger is janky.
I realize by "too hot" you were mainly talking about how it affects battery life. But I thought I'd add that I have a 15" Macbook Pro (work) and a Surface Book (home) and at times I find the MBP's keyboard almost unusable as it generates so much heat I can barely touch the keys. I've resorted to using third party apps to run the fans at higher speeds earlier to try and mitigate this. One of the features I love about the Surface devices is that the CPU is in the display and thus the keyboard never gets hot.
This new Surface Pro supposedly has longer battery life and the core i5 is fanless. We'll see how it translates to actual real world usage in future reviews hopefully.
In my case, I wouldn't upgrade just for the sake of upgrading to a newer device since the ones we have are still doing the job, maybe parent poster is in the same boat.
You got it in one. I'm very happy with my pro4, so no need to upgrade. It is perfect for meetings and quickly doing work on the move. I will never[1] go back to a standard laptop, my desktop does the heavy lifting.
[1] Never say never, but it is a pretty big improvement!
As an apple fan who gave the surface 3 pro (with surface 4 keyboard) a try, yes you can mix and match the keyboards, I didn't end up keeping it long. My MacBook Air's keyboard and touchpad was much superior to the surface and I found coding on the tiny surface cumbersome.
