My favourite takeaway from this article is: The Surface Pro is a work machine. It is not a tablet for checking your mail and playing angry birds (although it can do that stuff). This is a computer for getting shit done. It’s for creating not consuming. — finally someone gets the Surface. It's not an iPad competitor, it does more than the intentionally limited iPad can do, has options for external storage, external monitors, touch covers, XBOX controllers and more using standard connections like HDMI and USB without requiring a custom propriety cable a la Thunderbolt or the likes.
The Surface 2 is going after a different market than the iPad is. Maybe at the beginning Microsoft tried marketing itself in too many directions, but they're finding their feet. The Surface Pro 2 wants to be the iPad of the business and enterprise market, not a device for checking email and playing Angry Birds. Sure it also appeals to other needs as well, but going after the business sector is smart because ultimately that's where the money is. Heck the Surface isn't even a tablet, it's technically an ultraportable.
I am thinking of getting one of these as a laptop replacement for coding on plane and train trips. You can't code on an iPad, but you could code on a Surface for sure and run all needed IDE's like Sublime Text and an NGINX server with PHP and or Node.JS.
> The Surface 2 is going after a different market than the iPad is...Heck the Surface isn't even a tablet, it's technically an ultraportable.
Yet you keep comparing it to the iPad when you should be comparing it to the MacBook Air which has similar hardware, roughly the same price, the ability to connect external storage, external displays, has USB 3.0, has an SD card slot (on the 13" model).
But the MBA has so much more going for it: PCIe based SDD, Intel HD Graphics 5000 (vs 4400 on the SP2), 802.11ac (vs 802.11n on the SP2), Thunderbolt, a "real" full-sized backlit keyboard, a useable trackpad, the ability to run OS X or Windows, and the trump card, 9 to 12 hours battery life (reportedly 15 hours with Mavericks).
I think it's more fitting to compare the Pro 2 to a 11" macbook air. So the SD card slot is out.
The better WiFi and graphics capabilities and will make no difference for the majority of use cases. The HD 5000 will perform better for gaming of course, but then again you're on OS X... not really too many games available there compared to Windows.
Thunderbolt is nice, but most people will only use it to hook up an external monitor, which you can also do with the Pro 2. The keyboard on the MBA is not full-sized at all and at least the German keyboard layout that Apple provides is a pain in the ass for programming purposes compared to the Windows based layout (though not really a problem with the US layout). The trackpad on the MBA is much better, but the Pro 2 comes with a touch screen and Wacom pen.
Don't forget about the great IPS screen on the Pro 2. The MBA's screen is getting kind of pathetic for 2013, I really hope they up it to Retina in the next revision.
Battery Life is in my opinion however still the biggest disadvantage of the Pro 2.
> The Surface Pro is a work machine. It is not a tablet for checking your mail and playing angry birds (although it can do that stuff). This is a computer for getting shit done. It’s for creating not consuming.
This seems pretty heavily aimed at Gabe's usecase, which isn't universal. I'm not an artist, but I do create things, and I do it on my iPad sometimes. I don't even hold it against this review for not pointing that out. And for what it's worth, you can code on an iPad, you just need the right tools.
The Surface Pro 2 hits two of the biggest weak points of the original design: battery life and heat/noise. The battery life is underwhelming relative to say the MBA 11" (which has a smaller battery), but the Surface Pro 2 takes that from unusably bad to just bad.
That said, I don't think it's "good enough." It's not a cheap machine: 8GB/256GB model reviewed by Gabe retails for $1,299. It's got a small screen and a keyboard/touchpad combo that, on an Ultrabook, would be considered absolute trash. I think you have to really love that Wacom pen to justify the Surface Pro 2, and that makes it a pretty niche product. Of course, "niche" can be turned into "market-creating" but with continued mis-steps like underwhelming battery life, it's not clear Microsoft can make the "pen tablet PC" market happen.
You compare the battery life, but not the screen to the macbook air? The screen is higher resolution, has a better coating, and is touch. Other than that, it's smaller and lighter (around 20%, actually), and comparably priced ($1299 for 256GB/8GB surface, $1299 for 256GB/8GB Air). It also has a micro SD card slot, to add further provisions.
This isn't a tablet competitor, it's an ultraportable competitor.
It's an everything competitor. It's the tablet/ultrabook answer to the way smartphones merged PDAs and cellphones.
And like those early smartphones, it's got some growing to do. But the market it's trying to carve out strikes me as a real one with real demand. I'm surprised we're not seeing more doctors and other specialists-on-the-go wielding them.
Kinda tired debating the surface pro on HN, but you hit the nail on the head. This is a desktop computer that sacrifices very little, yet is the size of an iPad with comparable usability. Anyone who voluntarily indoctrinated themselves on the merits of toy mobile operating systems will never understand how awesome the Pro-range surfaces are.
Much like the HTC Dream was basically a first generation joke, I'm hopeful and very much intend to be carrying one of Surface's offspring in my backpack in a few years time.
The only problem with using Linux is that there isn't (as far as I can tell) a good Linux UI that's very touch-friendly. The closest one is Unity, and well, that's all I need to say there. (I realize some people like it, but I'm just not one of them, sorry...)
I'm excited to see what comes of the Ubuntu tablet distro, but at the same time, they were the ones who made Unity, which isn't really good at anything. So I'm not super optimistic either.
Windows's "metro" UI is obviously touch friendly, but even the desktop can be made touch friendly-ish via its DPI scaling, which I think works pretty well. I haven't been able to get that same usability out of any Linux desktop environment yet. (If someone has, I'd love to know about it!)
> The only problem with using Linux is that there isn't (as far as I can tell) a good Linux UI that's very touch-friendly. The closest one is Unity, and well, that's all I need to say there. (I realize some people like it, but I'm just not one of them, sorry...)
I hope Jolla and Sailfish will help in that department.
Yeah, from a technical standpoint, it runs pretty well. There's still at least one hardware compat issue to be resolved (when I last tried Ubuntu Saucy beta, the wifi didn't work), but it was very performant, and looked nice.
That's good to know. No wifi would be a pretty big buzzkill though. I like the idea of replacing my Mac/iPad combo with a single device. It sounds like the high-DPI screen would be a reasonable replacement for my iPad (a.k.a. PDF journal reader) but I'm far too invested having a competent Unix-like environment on the computer side to live in Windows. Ubuntu's "convergence" tablet vision cannot come quickly enough.
I run my dev servers in VMWare in Ubuntu on my Surface Pro. It's good enough, but more than a little fussy when it comes to touch (or the wacom issues), so I tend to just use it with the keyboard.
I don't know why Microsoft is doing this to themselves. Instead if being the best in one market they try to create a new one which competes with the tablet and ultrabook market. But their product can be never as good as a tablet or ultrabook. I just don't think that there are many people who are willing to accept that trade-off.
Being the best on one market isn't always as beneficial as being good in a couple of markets. Apart from that you're looking at it from a single perspective making you see only certain trade-offs (which are only there for those expecting a tablet or ultrabook anyway) and not the other side of it. Other people might just see a full-blown laptop running a desktop OS with touch and Wacom. And when you get rid of the keyboard you're left with something that's quite usable as a tablet ans still runs a full desktop OS.
There are professionals on the go who want to carry one device, not two, and have both the use-case for a tablet and a notebook. You can't use a notebook standing up, and you can't run real Windows software on a tablet.
I'm surprised every single doctor in a hospital doesn't own one of these yet, for example.
Part of the reason for this is that a lot of the 'Windows' apps I've seen for healthcare are really, really bad (and have UI much too small/complex to use on a touchscreen), whereas the iOS apps I've seen are much more polished, user-friendly, and accessible because they're designed for touchscreens from the start.
It would be impractical in a hospital. It's relatively heavy and where would you put it when you don't need it without risking theft? And how would you prevent unauthorized access to hospital records when stolen? I think the whole tablet at hospitals thing is a fantasy.
And has a (certainly decent for a tablet but) awful keyboard and trackpad compared to other ultra-portables. There are clear trade-offs here (there always are and there is nothing wrong with making clear and opinionated trade-offs) and I’m not sure whether the Surface Pro makes the right ones. No doubt Microsoft made all the right trade-offs for some people, the question is only whether those some people are more than a niche.
Right, at least the bad trackpad is offset by the fact that you can touch. The need for apple-level trackpad is offset by the fact that you can manipulate pages with your fingers, instead.
And from what I've heard and used, both the touch and type cover aren't "awful" or "terrible". They're not 'good' either, but I'd certainly put them in the 'usuable' category. Would I write a book on it? Hell no, but I'd also be tempted to swap my mac's chiclet keyboard for a mechanical keyboard anyhow. There is certainly room for improvement, but people in HN seem to have an particularly high disdain for the surface's covers... they're not the demon they're made out to be.
I think you slightly misunderstood me. I think the cover is pretty awesome. To me it seems like a winning combination with a $500 tablet. But a $1000 tablet/ultra-portable with the keyboard and trackpad? Is that the right trade-off to make?
If the products competing here are $1000 ultra-protables with pretty great keyboards and $1000 tablets with crappy keyboards, which has the bigger audience?
What is the most accessible creative occupation? Writing? STEM fields? Or drawing? We could draw before the written word existed. We could write before we created more abstracted languages like modern symbolic math.
I think the end game is to include high resolution, precise, accurate stylus input, a'la Wacom technology or something like it.
I cry a little every time I see a Microsoft product with Wacom built in and an equivalent Apple product without it. What I'd really like is something like a Surface 2 running Ubuntu or SuSE, but with an Apple-worthy battery life.
Maybe it can be done beyond the niche. My current guess would be no but I’m not super sure about that. Admittedly, do not expect any great insights from me in this regard, all I’m going on is that drawing (with a stylus) has been a (pretty big) niche application in computing for a very long time now and always nothing more. It’s useful for some people, but very far from everyone. Maybe that can change. Actually, I don’t really doubt that (look at all the previously niche-tech that’s in current smartphones because it became cheap enough and that had to find its mass-market applications first, stuff like gyroscopes) but I’m not sure whether it’s the Surface Pro that will do it.
But it has, admittedly, a better shot at doing it than anything else that came before it.
As it is, I think it's still in niche territory, but I think with some polish it could be a really great product. The big question is whether microsoft can pull off the polish, which historically they haven't been able to (maybe with the new management this will change).
There have definitely been many microsoft products I've seen that were incredibly impressive, but were simply not taken the rest of the way.
Maybe a 3rd party manufacturer can take where the surface is now, and provide that polish, which I think was the goal of the surface anyways. Show what is possible to 3rd parties and let them take the ball the rest of the way. If that can happen, then the surface will have done its job.
Surface Pro actually has a worse GPU than MBA, too (Intel HD 4600 vs Intel HD 5000), which contributes to that, plus a higher clocked CPU. And we already know that Windows' battery life is terrible [1].
It's all a perfect storm of bad decisions the reason why Surface itself has bad battery life.
Windows doesn't have the best power consumption--the facts are irrefutable--it's empirically visible.
In the Surface's defense, it is running a wacom digitizer over a 1080p IPS display. Not only is it pushing 2x the pixels as the 11" MBA, but it's doing it over IPS (up to 15% greater power consumption according to Wiki).
But yes, Windows has much poorer battery life, my speculation is that since Apple targets their hardware to a few small (comparatively) number of hardware permutations, they can take this to their advantage, and power-optimize the shit out of everything.
The most effective optimizations will probably be on the driver level, which microsoft would have little say over (in terms of the surface, they should but they're weak in the hardware game).
Remember how everyone used to give Microsoft a free pass on its awful installation process (driver hell) because it supported so many options, but then Knopper (one guy!) created a Linux distro that auto-installed on almost anything. Microsoft makes tons of money on Windows and has tons of engineers, it could power-optimize for a heck of a lot of configurations. Given that a fairly small number of chipsets account for a huge proportion of PCs, I think it would be easier than we think.
Actually, that's not really true re: the GPUs. They're pretty roughly comparable, and trade off different specs (execution units vs clock speed) with the result that the HD 4600 is actually better in some benchmarks and worse in others.
Although, that said the Surface Pro 2 actually has an HD 4400 which is definitely inferior to the HD 5000, though the difference is not that really huge (probably roughly 20% overall), which in most cases is not enough to make a difference in playability of games - if you're getting 25fps average on the HD 4400, 30fps on the HD 5000 will be noticeably better but still bad IMO, especially in high load scenarios when the framerate dips. Personally I prefer to play with over a 60fps average so that even in more intense scenes it doesn't drop to below 30fps.
And if you're not playing games, it's really not even relevant.
I've seen it suggested that the higher EU count of the HD 5000 allows it to be clocked lower and thus operated at a lower voltage, adding up to a net power savings for the same level of performance. I imagine this could be particularly significant at moderate GPU loads, rather than fully loading the GPU with a game.
I don't think of it as an ultraportable competitor. The Surface pro seems to be running into the same issues with the very first tablet computers that ran Windows, they were/are a niche product. Great if you have a need for a stylus, but simply not worth it compared to a regular laptop. Like others have mentioned, to make it ultrabook capable,(getting a keyboard/storage upgrade) it's far more expensive than nice Windows based ultrabooks.
This is the point everyone seems to be missing. Microsoft tried releasing tablets with styluses, keyboards, and a desktop OS before - they failed, big time. The market hasn't suddenly changed in the intervening years to one that wants that kind of form-factor. As Apple proved, the market wants a very minimal tablet, with an on-screen keyboard, a great touchscreen, and an OS optimised for those features. For FUN, not for work. A handful of people will use tablets for 'work' and for being creative, a couple of niche industries will find they can integrate tablets into their workflow, but for the average office worker who wants to watch some videos, the iPad is perfect, the surface is 'overkill'.
(edit to correct incorrect autocorrect on ... iPad ;-)
> The market hasn't suddenly changed in the intervening years to one that wants that kind of form-factor.
I'll agree that most of the market doesn't want that kind of form factor, but two segments in which the convertable tablet has really taken off are in the education and health care industries. I work with a few schools that manage to hand out tablet + stylus + keyboard laptops to all of their students and do pretty well with it.
My school isn't a fan of the Surface due to serviceability issues (non-replaceable battery being a big one) and that it is a great tablet, but gives up some ground in the general-use laptop area to do that. The other schools in our group share the same sort of sentiments.
It really isn't though. I own a Surface Pro 1 and as much as I like it, it's a terrible portable computer. I hook mine up to a monitor, keyboard and mouse 90% of the time.
I think they have all the right elements to make something really great. I think they still need to nail the price point, but with new tech products, that shouldn't be a problem in a few years. The surface is very appealing to me in terms of form factor and features though.
Why is the battery life bad? It seems like you can get it to last up to 8 hours if you're careful. Gabe was using photoshop which is an energy intensive application and got 6 hours. The new iPad is supposed to get 10 hours if you're careful, so does a difference of 2 hours make the battery life bad? I'd call it acceptable.
Agree. I really want to like this, but at about $1450 (with keyboard) for the 8GB/256 model (and 8 GB is minimum I consider for a laptop/ultabook)....I'm not sure I want the Wacom Digitizer that badly. I can still use my Wacom Intuos 3.
The screen looks great, though.
I'm kind of curious now how the Dell XPS 11 turns out. I'm looking for some alternative to MB Air 11", but with better screen and digitizer pen input/hybrid.
Well, if you look at Macbook Air and then Surface 2, they both are high end and expensive. I dont understand why to complain when you guys already use Macbook Air.
I've had a Dell XPS 12 and been really happy with it, so the XPS 11 is on my list along with the 11" version of the Yoga 1 when that comes out. Oh, and of course the Surface Pro.
This weekend when I checked out the SP2, I also looked at the 11" Yoga and the 13" Yoga 2. The screen on the Yoga 2 was just spectacular. I'd really like something similar on the 11 (I think the Yoga 11" I tried this weekend was a 3rd gen intel, though).
I love my Mac Book Pro Retina, but I admit, it's grueling whenever I have to use Windows on it. Either really slow emulation or complete boot over to boot camp, which is a pain in the ass maintaining another OS. I could easily see someone wanting a native Windows options if they had to do the things I do in Windows more often. Many SDKs only work in Windows, like Intel Perceptual Computing, Samsung AllShare, etc. unfortunately. Right now I keep a spare Windows netbook around, but definitely considering upgrading to a Surface now that they are competitive.
After reading Gabe's reaction to the original Surface Pro (and as an artist of sorts myself) I was determined to buy a Surface Pro but was stymied by the awfulness of the keyboard covers (which is silly, since it was the stylus that attracted me, but if I'm getting a do-everything machine, I expect to do everything on it), which I found less useful than the iPad's "glass keyboard".
So far, there are some Sony convertible tablets that almost seem to make the grade, but that's about it.
Funny. I posted below on why I like my Surface so much (Pro 2), but didn't touch on screen size.
The screen size is perfect for me. The resolution is phenomenal so I fit more onto it than my old Samsung Series 7, which had 11", same as my MBA. The other problem with 11" is that it's the tipping point for bag size. I like to travel light, and the 10.3" of the Surface fits onto as large a bag as I like to comfortably carry over one shoulder.
Don't most people compare this to other tablets i.e. the ipad given the form factor and touch screen? I would think comparing it to a macbook air would be inappropriate.
Fully agreed. Microsoft has shown that boring business is big business and it's continued to generate great revenues for them. They should be marketing this towards business professionals, engineers, digital artists, etc. This isn't a device you lay on the couch with to read; it's meant to be something an analyst can take with him on a business trip. Time and time again I'm seeing Surface ads at bus stops that do not make any sense, like "click in", "thinner, faster", all with very artsy images clearly geared towards the young and hip demographic (even then, the ads poorly convey just how hip the product is).
They need to be more concrete and directed in their marketing. IMO, they should be running series of ads targeted to very specific professions.
The ad I've seen for it on Hulu focuses entirely on a variety of industry professionals using it for work, so I think they're starting to get the right idea.
You can't blame Microsoft's marketing here. The use case for Surface Pro 2 is pen computing. It's real, but it's also niche. To justify the expenditures on the product, Surface has to be more than niche, and that's why it's marketed the way it is.
Niche? I have a Pro 2 (in fact it's the 8Gb/256Gb model). I use it to take hand-witten notes in meetings. I draw diagrams on it, read and reply to mail using Outlook, and create documents and presentations.
Best of all, I have Visual Studio, SQL Server and everything else I need for my job. Oh, and Video, which is awesome. It's the best non-desktop device I've ever used.
So niche it may be, but definitely broader than just pen computing.
For the record, I have a MBA too. It hasn't been switched on since the Surface arrived last week.
For taking notes, reading and replying to email, and creating documents and presentations, Visual Studio, any Ultrabook with a bigger screen or better keyboard is a better tool (say a Vaio 11 with similar thickness/weight). That leaves drawing diagrams as the only think the Surface Pro is a better tool for. I call that niche.
"any Ultrabook with a bigger screen or better keyboard is a better tool"
Actually, the device that gets you creating in the way most comfortable for one's self is the better tool. You also skipped over the "take notes, and draw diagrams" -- pen computing there.
He mentioned drawing diagrams. And, for 99% of people, the handwriting recognition is not good enough to beat the effectiveness of just typing or dictating.
That might be a great poll - what percentage of HN posts are done with a pen versus dictation (which I do a lot of mine with when I'm on a smart phone) versus keyboard (vast majority) versus pen.
Right now the Wacom tablet is the niche that justifies the high-price for the Pro. Bring it down another $200-$300 and it starts to make inroads into the mass market (where it most certainly is not a player right now)
Yer not getting it. The point is to take notes in a format useful the user, which frequently is not computer-friendly. I know at the office we frequently take smartphone photos of whiteboards. Same usecase.
Give me a bit of credit for knowing something about taking notes. Having notes immediately searchable and recallable is useful to the user. When I take notes in a meeting with evernote, they are available on my tablet, my smartphone, my laptop, and, when I head back to the office, on my desktop. They are collected in the appropriate notebook, and tagged. Searching for notes over the last few years based on their content is invaluable - and, my writing will never be good enough for handwriting recognition to do the job of understanding what I've written.
For those people with neat handwriting, that the recognition algorithms can pick up - I can understand how writing with a pen might be more cnovenient.
Your scenario is different to mine. I use meta data to find handwitten notes in OneNote. I tried EverNote and found it had bells and whistles but wasn't anywhere near as easy as OneNote for tap to open app, yap again for a new note, and write with a stylus.
Just to butt in regarding the handwriting recognition, I used OneNote extensively to take class notes during my Masters. It faired pretty well. The pen is godsend, just not for writing but other tasks too like software menu selection.
People underestimate the social construction of writing in meetings versus typing. I used a Newton MP2000 for several years as a replacement for paper notes (and calendar, etc.) and it was magnificent in that role -- pulling out a laptop, however tiny, and typing in meetings was and likely often still is socially unacceptable.
By contrast, an iPad won't replace a Newton in this context -- you can't write on it worth a damn, and typing on a glass keyboard is still typing.
I think Microsoft's vision for the Surface as a do-everything computer is admirable, but their execution has been fairly poor thus far, and I suspect it's because the hardware and software aren't there yet.
Does anyone doubt that Apple would release a Surface-like device if they thought it was good enough? I'm sure there are prototypes at Apple dating back years (in fact I saw a demo of a pen-based Duo back in the mid-90s -- between Jobs's first and second comings). Mac OS X already has handwriting recognition and all kinds of supporting infrastructure in it, the difference is that Apple doesn't release products it doesn't think it can sell; Microsoft is willing to experiment and kind of desperate.
Ultrabook you can't use as a tablet. For me Surface Pro is a good enough tablet combined with a good enough ultrabook, so it saved me from buying two devices.
> It hasn't been switched on since the Surface arrived last week
How's the handwriting recognition? Evernote integration? What do you use for diagrams? Drawing? Will Inkscape and Gimp run and work with the pen? How does handwriting work when there's no network connectivity?
Microsoft solved handwriting recognition over a decade ago with Tablet PC. (Disclaimer: I worked as a vendor on some Tablet PC goodness, and currently work for MS, though in an unrelated area.) My old Windows XP Tablet PC 2003 machine could recognize my chicken scratch with ease, and things have only gotten better since then. Handwriting recognition in Windows has never required a network connection.
As for notes, OneNote is by far the best note taking app out there (IMHO), I went an entire year in college without using a single sheet of paper. Though I understand Evernote's appeal as well. (It has always been a bit too heavyweight for me, I just want a really big piece of lined paper and some tabs for organization)
Can you recommend anywhere to learn about the capabilities of one note? I start to take a look at it and then get overwhelmed and vow to come back when I have more time to figure it out, but keep forgetting.
Can anyone comment on how is it with different languages? Or mixed languages?
For notes I use my native language, sometimes the language of the country I work in, and I mix in a lot of English as well. I think my android keyboard prediction (SwiftKey) hates me.
I haven't played with using different languages alongside handwriting recognition on a Tablet before, sorry. :(
In regards to just note taking though, I can tell you that OneNote doesn't have to auto convert your handwriting into text, rather it allows you to keep everything as Ink. OneNote then allows you to search your ink as if it was text, and that is the amazing part! Diagrams, sketches, math equations, etc, can all be searched as if they are a document. Really cool stuff. Again though, I am not sure how well it works across multiple languages. (Now I wish I had a proper Wacom enabled tablet so I could try it and find out!)
(You can of course choose to have everything auto converted into text, but for pure note taking I find leaving things as ink to be far more useful!)
I was a 'freak' for having such a device, but doing an engineering degree, it was perfect. Equation I scribble down to LATEX yes!
One note is still my favourite note taking program, frankly puts evernote to shame.
I noticed I was the only one in a class of about 200 with one. 3 years later that had changed to eight, based on people asking me.
These things were expensive, I was lucky enough to get some grants for being dyslexic.
I honestly think they are great devices, battery life is now adequate, ultimately a Pro would be my go to university machine, enough power for any engineer that didn't require a rack. Great note taking.
However the price is objectionable. Most uni students I know would waste money on an iPad. Most people who buy iPads don't want a real computer, and RT offers little in apps they use. Outlook?! Why do they want that for their simple emails, its too complex.
Same here, I was the only one at my MBA school 2003-2005 with a pure slate tablet PC. Pen computing is awesome not just for note taking but also for business apps like excel and powerpoint. Anything that requires a lot of precise clicking across different areas of the screen works easier with a pen. Due to Microsoft's utter failure at marketing, nobody has any idea about this. Even web browsing is great with a pen. Actually much easier to browse the web and hit small links and buttons with a pen tablet than with fat fingers on an iPad or phone.
Should it? Outside STEM, a traditional laptop works better for taking notes. Inside STEM, well it's a crapshot whether any given professor will be okay with your bringing in a tablet to take notes on. $1,099 is a lot of money for a device that you can't necessarily bring with you to class.
I hate that I can't use my laptop for notes in most of my STEM classes- not because the professors disallow it, but because there's simply no equation editor that I can use quickly and efficiently enough to take notes with. I tried latex, but it just requires a few too many formatting keystrokes and isn't WSYISYG enough to do on the fly (at least for me).
I'd be pretty happy with a digitizer, I think, but I wouldn't be able to stand all of the other little quirks of the surface.
For typing equations quickly, I found that a quick (not so pretty) ascii-art notation was fastest. I would transcribe them to latex later.
I only did that for a year or two before I decided that laptops and note-taking in general were counterproductive and switched to never taking notes at all. I still occasionally took notes on my own time while reading the course material, but I found that paying closer attention instead of trying to write things down ultimately worked better.
I found Word's equation editor (2007 onwards, not the crippled MathType before) very good for real-time typing of math in class. It's quite close to LaTeX when it comes to symbols, smart enough to use / for fractions or convert ² to a superscript 2, etc. and generally requires far fewer braces because spaces or operators are used to separate tokens, e.g. a^15+4 yields 𝑎¹⁵ + 4 because it makes more sense than 𝑎¹ 5 + 4 (what LaTeX would make of it). It also features WYSIWYG build-up of the equation as you type.
windows has an app that's surprisingly not publicized a lot called math input panel which allows you to input equations quite easily in other programs like word or onenote.
(Apple has a very long history in the education space, and now that is paired up with some truly exceptional products. It's a potent mix, at least in theory. In practice, well, you get the LA school district iPad catastrophe...)
Keep in mind that the consumer marketing of the Surface Pro is perhaps 10% or less of the total product marketing. The targets for most of Microsoft's products are giant corporations, and the marketing to them is both direct, because each of these companies spends millions of dollars with Microsoft each year, and indirect, by encouraging system integrators like Accenture to deploy multi-hundred-million dollar "solutions" incorporating Surface tablets.
If I could upvote this a million times, I would. I don't understand why they think people would rather have an iPad with USB ports than a laptop shaped like a tablet.
In a similar vein, it'd be perfect if it was 13". That would cement the "for creators" aspect of an "iPad Pro". Instead, the 10" form factor means it's just slightly too small to get work done nicely while slightly too big (or too small, depending on your orientation) to read on comfortably.
To be clear: if the Sony Vaio Duo 13 was using Wacom as the original did, I'd have bought it instead of the Retina 13 (and in addition to the first Surface).
The surface especially. This thing honestly sounds like the ultimate college notebook. I, like countless other students, preferred to write my notes by hand. Using a surface pro means that these notes can be digitized and accessible on any device at your convenience.
Not going to lie, posts like these make me really want one for myself. I've toyed with using a tablet and keyboard combo and doing all my work as a networked thin-client but it is nowhere near the experience of working on a laptop.
Having a tablet form factor with the hardware to run everything locally and a physical keyboard is exactly what I am looking for. Sure there is the MacBook air which is an awesome device and has its advantages over the Surface 2, but to use it you need to be in a "deployed" state even if it is just on your lap. With a surface you can quickly check up on email or just relax and then deploy when necessary or convenient.
I think the only thing that still would bug me is the touchpad, I haven't used the new keyboard cover but I'm almost certain the touchpad experience is no where close to a MacBook, correct me if I'm wrong because I'd love to hear it. I feel carrying around a bluetooth/usb mouse with it everywhere is going to be required to get a comfortable production experience which would be a nuisance.
The touchpad is bad. On the Touch cover, it's that leather-like material that rubs up against the screen normally. On the Type cover, that part's fixed, but the whole thing is roughly the size of two US Quarters put together. The Surface really isn't big enough to have a properly-sized keyboard and touchpad attached.
If they hadn't wasted the top row of the keyboard on a bunch of charm buttons that absolutely aren't needed (they're all touch gestures you could do directly on the screen), and volume buttons (when the tablet has physical volume buttons inches away), they would've been able to almost double the surface area of the touchpad. I wish they had.
Its true that the touchpad on the touch cover isn't great, but on the other hand the _whole_device_ is a touchpad at the end of the day. For scrolling and zooming it quickly becomes very natural to touch the screen rather than the touchpad on the keybaord.
I agree, more space for the keyboard. Using a Trackpoint on a T400 was suboptimal, but very much improved from a standard windows touchpad and I would be happy settling with one on a Surface.
The touchpad is not just bad, it is unusable (I find). I'd rather slit my wrists than try... A laptop with a very poor keyboard and an unusably poor trackpad is not useful. I use mine only for OneNote with the stylus and have to keep carrying my Air for everything else.
Here's another use case for it: Contractor.
I've got a Surface Pro 1, got it secondhand for £600. It runs Visual Studio very well. I'm also running IntelliJ IDEA for Android development. Its light so easy to take when I visit clients. Through the single USB3 port I can connect a USB hub and run VGA, ethernet, mouse and keyboard, so when I'm at a client site I dock into the screens/keyboards they have on site. When I'm at home I dock into my own setup. When I'm in-between I can use the touch cover to get stuff done on the train. The 96GB or so that I have on the SSD is fine for everything I need. Its not like I'm storing DVDs or music on this thing. When I'm in meetings the stylus and one-note is awesome. As for the Surface Pro 2, obviously faster and better battery sounds good. Also the two-stage kickstand would definitely help.
But actually as I was plugging a USB hub in anyway, it was easier to just use a cheap USB to VGA adapter. Similarly, there are loads of cheap USB to Ethernet adapters around. You can get away with USB2 devices, they dont need to be USB3 standard. Basically, its a windows laptop so pretty much any USB thing will work with it.
I notice that people make 'usb docking stations' (a docking station that connects via one usb port) but they all have separate power supply. I think there's a gap in the market for an unpowered all-in-one usb docking station, because such things can clearly be made to work.
I haven't tried more than one external screen, but presumably between the display port and the USB hub you should be able to connect several. USB-to-display adapters are basically outboard graphics cards, right?
I develop iOS apps on the side using a Mac, but for my day job I use Windows. Because of this, I've never felt the need to buy an iPad (except Gen 1 due to the novelty), nor try to justify getting one for work. However, I've always wanted to get a Surface Pro since the day I learned it can run full Windows apps, and the Surface Pro 2 just makes this desire stronger.
I just feel that this tablet is more practical and more functional for me.
Like I said, I do have an iPad - a Gen 1 that we got for casual use, and for testing the lone iPad app that I created. It saw a lot more use in its first year than all the years since, and we (wife and I) never got the urge to upgrade. However, we upgrade one or both iPhones each year. I just don't see the iPad as approaching the potential practicality for me the way a Surface Pro does.
He was a huge fan of the Surface 1 when most other people were calling it terrible, so this is not in any way surprising and not an indication that Surface 2 is likely to do any better than Surface 1.
The problem is that while Surface is an amazing device for people like him, there are very very few people like him to sell them to. "A mobile drawing machine I can also play games on" is just not a mass-market demand.
I was a Microsoft intern last summer. They gave all the interns a Surface Pro at the end of the internship. As a student, I've used my Surface to dodge any use of paper this semester. OneNote + Wacom stylus is a great combo.
Friend of mine got a similar experience with a galaxy note 8.0, for much cheaper. Add a keyboard case and you can write papers on it too. Runs faster than her netbook or her iPhone.
Galaxy Note 8 does not run Matlab, Mathematica, AutoCad, Visual Studio, LaTeX, Linux, Virtual Machines, or any of the stuff that I used throughout my college life.
Being a student is _more_ than just taking notes in class. First and foremost, I need to be able to do my homework... and for an Engineer, that also means being able to use high-powered mathematical programs.
I think he means running linux using a vm. Possibly with vagrant for dev/testing purposes. As far a I now there isn't a general purpose vm for android/arm.(There are some javascript x86 emulators with linux and probably something else but I don't know how easy it is to use for developmnt). android by default doesn't have even a minimal linux cmdline toolset although you can install it.
But not necessarily the Vim / Shell / Apache / MySQL environment which is very useful to Computer Engineers. At least, that sort of stuff is not easily done on a (non-rooted) Android Tablet yet.
Well that is a relatively specialized requirement. For most students their computer is email, web, photos on the web, facebook, word processors, textbooks and some light spreadsheets. More specialized students can spend $800 more to get something like the surface pro 2.
* Graphic Designers require Photoshop... maybe Maya, 3d Studio Max or Blender as well.
* Other art majors will benefit from pretty much anything in the Adobe Suite: not just Photoshop, but Premier, After Effects (for Video Editing).
* I'd bet that a Communications major would use the same tools as art majors / graphic designers use.
* Architecture majors require CAD of some kind. Ditto with Landscape Architecture majors, Civil Engineers and Mechanical Engineers. Building homes and testing how they look like in virtual environments: turns out to be useful ya know?
* Everyone in the Biology field uses some form of statistical software. (The one that was big in my school was SAS, but IIRC there are lots of competitors)
* Actually, to hammer the above point even more, any subject that ever touches upon advanced statistics more or less requires training in SAS. So not only Math/Statistics majors, but Business, Sociology, Psychology, Economics, Health Policy (with potential applications into nursing...)... a lot of people use SAS.
* Any "lab" science practically requires Labview. Be it Physics, Chemistry, or Materials.
Basically, every major except English in the top 10 list requires advanced programs that run on Laptops. For many of these purposes, I guess a $2000 Macbook Pro would be usable... but the $899 Surface 2 just seems like a better buy in comparison.
IIRC, even English majors touch upon specialized software in the form of Library Management Systems, but I'm not very familiar with those.
I was, too. I take it to class every day. I used to not take notes at all, but now I do because it's easy. I have all my lecture notes for the whole semester right there. A tablet at a Surface RT pricepoint with a Wacom digitizer will storm the student market.
I agree that Mike is not necessarily an indicator of overall market acceptance, but then again he isn't really representative of that.
I post these because, despite my own preference for Apple, he represents a very specific demographic of power users and his opinion is very well thought out.
He's more of an average Joe than a power-user. Maybe my definition is wrong, but I think one of the qualifiers for being a power user is knowing how computers work. He admits in the review that he doesn't really know anything about computers unless it has to do with making awesome cartoons.
I'd argue that not being a power user is what makes him such a good spokesman for Microsoft.
I define "power user" by what they do, not what they understand. I consider him a "power user" because his workflow goes beyond the standard browse the web, send email, write some Word documents. He uses a suite of programs specific to his profession and has a workflow situated around those programs and the OS.
Having used the Surface Pro 2 for less than a week, I'm in a love / hate relationship with it. I've been using Macs for the last seven years and as I'm on a Mac as I'm typing up this comment.
The good.
- I love being able to have this device sit flat on my lap similar to a tablet.
- Having a touchscreen on a full fledge PC is pretty darn useful.
The Bad.
- My qualms are mainly with the Windows 8.1 more than anything.
- It seems by default Chrome opens as a tablet app. I downloaded a software, clicked the installer and nothing happens... turns out I had to hit the windows button and get back into desktop mode to give the installer administrative access to install.
- Chrome app (desktop mode) in high res DPI is not compatible with touch. Hell, I'm finding a lot of apps aren't.
- How I haven't missed the registry... uninstalling an app, doesn't really mean its uninstalled, there's still reminisce of the app lying around.
- If you connect your device to skydrive, you have to use the same password you use online to login. WTF? The best part, there's a character limit restriction on the password so you can't even have a complicated one, but why would you? You wouldn't remember it. (Yes there is a pin option to unlock the device, but at times you have to put in your full password).
- The UI is not intuitive at all. I gave the device to my friend who primarily uses Windows and he had a hard time with the metro UI.
- I rarely find myself using the tablet mode. I almost wish I could disable it... apps by default actually open in the tablet mode... Double click an image, hey it swaps over to the tablet mode. Great...
- This sucker attracts fingerprints like no other.... my MBA still looks pristine after 1.5 years... where as I've already gotten three or four light scratches on the Surface by merely placing the device on my table...
Despite all the shortcomings, I have to say, I'm still loving the Surface. Now if only Apple would put OS X into the iPad form factor and I'd be sold.
When you double-click an image and it opens that viewer app, that is pretty annoying. You can switch the default viewer for images to be the windows 7 'image preview' app.
I've never thought about the surface's gaming ability outside of the touch games. Being able to plug in an xbox controller and play any compatible game that came out before like 3-4 years ago is amazing.
That's much better, but still terrible. Its a perfectly forgettable commercial, although I appreciate that they made an attempt to relate to scarf-wearing male fashion designers, an oft neglected demographic.
I don't think it is. I'm no fan-boy either - I use Kubuntu and the only MS think I have is a mouse (the only part of my system that doesn't work, needs replugging half the time to be recognised on startup, only half the time though).
The "your favourite apps, next to your favourite apps" didn't make sense to me without checking back - so they allow a fullscreen app next to a phone-mode app. Seems ... interesting.
This video is so much better at conveying what the Surface offers. I really did facepalm back when the first ad came out and was not surprised at all by the low sales.
"The pro 2 comes with 200gb of Skydrive space so I went ahead and created an account. Now I’ve got my phone set up so that every time I take a picture it sends a copy to Skydrive."
Just make sure you don't take any naughty pics or you might get your Live account banned.
"So basically, it's OK to store nude images on a private SkyDrive folder, with the exception of any that are clearly about the exploitation of children. Another person during the AMA asked if it was fine to store a family album of pictures that had images of the person and his siblings swimming nude as a kid. The SkyDrive team said, "yes. def allowed.""
"You will not upload, post, transmit, transfer, distribute or facilitate distribution of any content (including text, images, sound, video, data, information or software) or otherwise use the service in a way that:
- depicts nudity of any sort including full or partial human nudity or nudity in non-human forms such as cartoons, fantasy art or manga."
The Surface doesn't have to make money. It would be nice, but I doubt Microsoft really needs it to sell well.
I think they really want to pioneer a mobile form factor which works with Windows. They need to have people inside the tent telling their UI people what to do. No-one else is going to take the risk, because it's there's a big danger that other vendors will copy them once they've done the hard yards, and they don't want to risk Microsoft screwing up the interface for Windows 9.
Eventually, MS will get there - they'll have a great x86 tablet, which can run Windows and Office. Then the OEMs will copy it, and sell it at a lower price point, keeping Wintel (and the Windows App store) competitive with iOS and Android.
My wife has the first generation and loves it. She uses it in place of her dead mb. She is finishing her masters degree, so a lot of paper writing and research. To compare it to an ipad or android tablet does a huge disservice to the device.
> To compare it to an ipad or android tablet does a huge disservice to the device.
Microsoft deserves the blame. Why they saddled such a powerful device with the same brand as the failed SurfaceRT and undesirable Windows8/Metro is a mystery to me.
Actually it's not a mystery. It's pure hubris. They thought they could brute-force the market by sheer will.
>They thought they could brute-force the market by sheer will.
Not saying i agree entirely with this comment, but they haven't been proven that they can't "brute-force the market by sheer will" as long as they're still in the game. Some would say that's how they won the first OS wars.
I've noticed complaints about the price, but isn't it a good idea for MSFT to avoid completely alienating their OEM partners by leaving room for them to compete with lower cost models?
If MSFT were more aggressive in pricing the Surface units then those Chromebook "experiments" (dare I say "hobbies"?) the big OEMs are running might also get more aggressive..
I am testing a Samsung 700t (pretty much the same form factor) and it's horrible. The keyboard is nice, but the big problem is that it's very unstable. It's always dropping back. Especially if you are trying to use the touch screen. I had to tape the pen into it's closure otherwise it fell off the whole time.
When I've tried to update the device to Windows 8.1 the WLAN driver refused to work and I had to update it from another computer.
Using it as a tablet is okay, but it's very heavy and big.
I hope the Surface Pro is better - but the Samsung is really underwhelming. I'd rather buy a small desktop or a tablet.
I'd like to take a step back and recognize that the computer landscape is really good right now. We have 3 major pc options that all provide a very good baseline experience, and fill different niches effectively. It's at the point where if someone asks me for a computer recommendation and they don't have any needs besides the most basic, I wont make them a recommendation because whatever you buy will satisfy your basic needs.
I'm part of a company which sells hardware/software/other assorted technology solutions to businesses. That's what we do. We are the technology providers for literally 80% of the businesses in the town we are in.
There is no way we can buy a lot of say 10 Surface Pros and resell them without going through one of the three retail stores (and adding another block of GST + general markup).
Because of that, we can't on sell them to business, users with money won't use them and they'll get barely anywhere.
IPads were originally marketed as fun devices for on-the-go "things", so people were happy to go and buy one for themselves to use personally. Kind of expanded to the point where so many people had them that app developers had the market to go towards businesses. - If the Surface Pro 2 is intended for business at all, it needs to let the people that sell to businesses get their hands on them.
I'm absolutely in the market for the Surface Pro 2 at $400-500 (keyboard/case included). I'd have to really think about it at $500-700. I'm totally not interested at the current price point -- it's about 2x what I'd consider paying for it.
For obvious reasons, the RT/non-pro/whatever they're calling the bastard ARM version, is of zero interest to me at any price point.
It would be a high-end netbook replacement for me (of which I get tremendous usage out of), not a desktop replacement. For the kind of money the SP2 is at, I can get an excellent desktop or a really nice laptop. The touch-screen and stylus support would be a cool enabler, but not so much a differentiation that I'd be willing to part with more than $50-75 premium over a normal tablet.
Anyone know if there is a triple monitor (3 external displays, not 2 external + 1 on-board display) solution for the Surface pro? From what I read it doesn't work with the Club3D MST hub, even though it does have a mini displayport connector. And the port replicator solutions I have seen are all limited to 2 external displays.
That, and the slightly slow CPU (for development work) are what is keeping me from getting one. Other than that, it is a very interesting and attractive device as an alternative to a high(ish)-end laptop.
I'm at my desk 80% of the time, plugged into my 27" monitor, with an external keyboard and mouse, the Surface 2 Pro would be just fine, basically no difference compared to using my Lenovo 12.5" or MB Air 11" (though the Lenovo was significantly cheaper at $700).
On the go would be the biggest difference, and though I like the idea of the Surface 2 Pro, Microsoft has yet to convince me that it would be a better device than either of my current machines.
I'm not sure which $500 cost difference you're referring to? The difference between my Lenovo and my MB Air or the Lenovo and a potential Surface 2 Pro, or other?
If you're comparing my Lenovo to my MB Air, the price difference is significant because I prefer my Lenovo, and therefore, the cost of my MB Air isn't the $500, but the full $1100, as the only reason I have it is to package an iOS app occasionally.
irony times. macbooks are the boring last decade thing that every startup guy (the new Suit) carries around, it doesnt even have touch screens. on the nonprofessional front every kitchen had an ipad.
meanwhile creative types buy microsoft hardware and tries to say how it is a machine for creators and not consumers.
and jobs is not even cold. (bye karma. but i cant resist a bad taste joke)
Should "creative types" really be pluralized? This is one guy. I know a lot of the best musicians in my area and see a lot of national ones - I almost never see Windows laptops. Let alone a single Surface.
Modbook has been doing this for years. They put a Wacom digitizer on top of a display installed over the bottom half of a Macbook Pro to make a tablet: http://www.modbook.com
I’d much rather Apple creates an iPad Pro. For instance, a 13.3" screen @ 3072 by 2048 pixels could fit two regular iPad apps (in portrait mode) alongside each other. Then, apps could be adapted to take advantage of the double screen real estate (looking at you, Photoshop Touch.)
As for pressure sensitivity, Apple doesn’t need to build that into iPads, Wacom already sells pens for iPad that have 2048 pressure levels and palm rejection. [1]
Windows 8 is still very schizophrenic. Pick one, either the tablet optimized one, or the desktop. You're going to do a lot of back and forth stuff if you have both on the same device, like devices like Surface Pro are trying to do.
Also, on a non-tablet device, Windows 8 actually feels like a downgrade because of the many annoying UI quirks it's throwing at you. You're better off sticking with Windows 7.
> Full disclosure MS did give me this Surface Pro 2 since I was so vocal about my love of the first one.
So the lesson here is that if you like/pretend to like Microsoft's products in your reviews, they will give you free stuff?
That's not an attack on the author here, but on Microsoft. They find out which reviewers praised their devices most, and then send them free stuff, so they're more likely to review positively their future products, too, knowing that they will probably be "rewarded" afterwards, again.
I agree with you regarding Windows 7, but having a go at Microsoft for handing out devices for review is non-sensical.
Microsoft would send out free devices to all kinds of reviewers - including tech news sites that may or may not review it favourably. Just like Apple does, just like Samsung does, just like Google does.
> so they're more likely to review positively their future products, too, knowing that they will probably be "rewarded" afterwards, again.
That's a fairly big assumption you're making there - bribing future reviews. As if no one who has written a poor review has been gifted the next generation with the hopes of redeeming themselves.
Yea, so does everyone. John Gruber, to name one, wrote his 5C/5S review on 'reviewer models' of both phones - it's pretty standard, and good reviewers will call it out. You sound a little unfamiliar with the entire system.
To be fair, Apple expects the devices sent to reviewers to be returned. I'm pretty sure Gruber has mentioned this more than once on his site or podcast.
I hadn't heard that, but I probably haven't read everything he writes so would have missed it easily. I know that larger organisations like the NYT require reviewers to return/pay for items they review, but from the way they call it out had assumed that it was not the default practice.
> They find out which reviewers praised their devices most, and then send them free stuff, so they're more likely to review positively their future products, too, knowing that they will probably be "rewarded" afterwards, again.
This is like finding out someone still thinks Santa is real.
Sometimes people need to drive. Sometimes they need a boat. Why not combine two into a boat-car? They both have engines. They both have steering wheels. It's perfect!
I have been interested in the Surface Pro and now SP2 for the reason it appeals to Gabe. I considered buying a Wacom Cintiq for some time now, but it's difficult to justify its price, nearly the same as the SP2, when it's useful only when tethered to a computer, and then it's only useful for painting.
With the Surface Pro 2, which is only ~$100 more than a Wacom Cintiq, you get a comparable painting experience, and the additional benefits of having an portable laptop.
I think it comes down to what you intend to use if for and from that, how to draw your comparisons and justify whether it is right for you or not.
I'm migrating from a 2011 Macbook Air to a Surface Pro w/ type cover and am thusfar enjoying the experience. Battery life and performance for most of my setup is adequate; battery life is actually better than the air, but to be fair the air had less memory and often has 3+ JVM procs going. Type cover 2 is adequate for development, touch cover 2 does not seem click with me. The biggest shift is really trying to move into Windows for fun-dev (as opposed to corporate-dev). I miss spaces and still feel a gap between navigating iterm2 against darwin and conemu against powershell. Chocolatey serves the purpose of homebrew very, very well. The Metro/Modern UI / Desktop schism for multi-tasking needs a expectations check... basically you are in one or the other experience, and AFAIK you cannot split-screen a Metro App and Desktop App.
Oh, and calibration of pen in the corners still feel off even after the 130/272 pt calibration task which gets ultimately ignored by wacom feel drivers.
Edit: Tomb Raider & Saints Row 3 run at playable framerates in low settings when in battery mode (as opposed to charging mode); this is important if gaming is an important data point to you. When people have been discussing gaming performance, I think reviewers have been tethered to an outlet, which probably is more generous with allocating hardware to games. The one USB slot and Windows 8 were fine w/ third party xbox 360 controller bluetooth dongles after installing official drivers. snes8x (the metro app version of snes9x) makes for a fun plane ride. :) OH, and audio coming out of the surface pro is surprisingly good for an ultraportable. As a tablet, the weight balance in portrait mode feels off but web browsing is pretty fantastic in portrait. On some sites that aggressively optimize for the fold, you might even see some significant white space at the bottom of a page. Kindle books (mobi) not purchased from amazon (e.g. O'Reilly, PragProg, etc) aren't supported in the app. But if you buy ebooks from a great publisher like PragProg you have them in epub and PDF format. For programming books, epub doesn't seem to work out well, even in the popular Freda app. Then again, without the bells/whistles, I've enjoyed the code formatting advantages of reading PDF files. If you're wetware supports it, the bizarre aspect ratio affords for a great PDF book reading experience when reading 2 pages per screen in landscape mode.
TL;DR Overall I’m impressed with the Pro 2. They fixed the big problems I had and didn’t change any of the shit I loved. It’s for creating not consuming.
A guy who doesn't know much about computers and who draws cartoons likes that he can run his old Windows cartoon software on a touch screen laptop PC without a keyboard.
It is basically an "I like Surface Pro because it isn't an innovative product" review where the reviewer could have had the same experience with a convertible ultrabook or previous generations of Window tablet computers.
The author has been writing his honest feelings about things for years. He has gained a lot of trust for doing that. It's not spam, it's a product review by a guy who is known for being honest and generally a good person. For artists and designers it's also important to see reviews by actual artists and designers rather than people who may not have been compensated for their reviews and only review published specifications and an hour of light, purposeless mixed use.
Well, except in the case of Gruber, he buys the iPhones that he keeps. My guess is that Gabe is going to get to keep that Surface-Pro.
I'm fine with that, as long as the person doing the writeup makes it clear he was comped gear. The ATP (Marco/Casey/Siracusa) crew recently scored some synology gear, and I, while I'm sure it impacted their objectivity, it was still interesting hearing about how they were using it / configuring it.
Anyways - nobody who reads Gruber frequently would suggest he isn't partisan, and he doesn't pretend otherwise.
Not sure why. He's clearly stating his expertise - he's a user, not a computer builder, and he wanted to get that out of the way. After that, he relates his experience as a user, which you can choose to inform with his earlier comment about not knowing the technical differences.
If you knew anything about Penny-Arcade or how they run their business, you know they're not paid shills. They are a pair of gamers who are very vocal about their loves and hates. They have a history of supporting a wide assortment of devices in their history. In the beginning they used to be ardent supporters of Windows based tech, but now they both sport Mac based products as their work machines. These can clearly be seen in their videos on their Web Series as well.
They even have a history of only allowing advertisers whose products they enjoy advertise on their website as well. These adverts are almost always games. They have no problem lampooning 'AAA' games with large advertising budgets if they think the product is crap. However, if they enjoy the product they have no problem supporting it either by doing custom content for the developers, which is put off on a specific section on their website and given the disclaimer that it is content paid for by developers.
Mike, in his time as a Surface user, has been very explicit about what he enjoyed about the device and what he didn't enjoy. He has also wrote up blog posts about what Microsoft sent him for free or where they sent him and has given his readers full disclosure about his relationship with Microsoft.
I think it's rather silly to lampoon a person, based off of an article of him giving a favourable review of a product that you think is bad or dubious.
The Surface 2 is going after a different market than the iPad is. Maybe at the beginning Microsoft tried marketing itself in too many directions, but they're finding their feet. The Surface Pro 2 wants to be the iPad of the business and enterprise market, not a device for checking email and playing Angry Birds. Sure it also appeals to other needs as well, but going after the business sector is smart because ultimately that's where the money is. Heck the Surface isn't even a tablet, it's technically an ultraportable.
I am thinking of getting one of these as a laptop replacement for coding on plane and train trips. You can't code on an iPad, but you could code on a Surface for sure and run all needed IDE's like Sublime Text and an NGINX server with PHP and or Node.JS.