
Microsoft Surface vs. iPad and Linode - moconnor
http://yieldthought.com/post/60180703528/microsoft-surface-vs-ipad-linode
======
300bps
_I can do more with the Surface, but it is not beautiful, nor do I enjoy using
it - or being seen using it._

You come across as someone that went into the Surface not wanting to like it
and you found a bunch of reasons from reasonable to erroneous not to like it.
Does it seriously bother you what other people think about the devices you
use?

 _Word doesn’t save your work unless you click on a 3.5” disk icon regularly._

This is an example of one of your contrived reasons. Word auto-saves at a
user-definable interval. It also creates AutoRecover files at a regular
interval. I've had situations like power outages hard shutdown my computer and
AutoRecover restores them up to the second.

[http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/help-protect-
you...](http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/help-protect-your-files-
in-case-of-a-crash-HP010354296.aspx)

[http://support.microsoft.com/kb/107686](http://support.microsoft.com/kb/107686)

 _Some things are saved on SkyDrive, some on the local disk, which isn’t
automatically backed up either. So now I am forced to be aware of this leaky
abstraction, to manage the remote and local state and at this point I might as
well just have a MacBook Air and be done with it._

Just buy a MacBook Air because that's obviously what you want. This is another
contrived reason. Backing up the local and remote (Skydrive) data on your
Surface RT is pretty darned easy to set it and forget it:

[http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/support/music-
photos-...](http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/support/music-photos-and-
video/back-up-photos-documents-and-more)

[http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/set-drive-
file-...](http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/set-drive-file-history)

~~~
moconnor
It's not about fashion-conscious style. Pulling out the Surface in a nice cafe
to work in feels... awkward. Out of place. It's clearly a business device for
office work, and doing office work in a cafe feels like an imposition. This is
not true in Starbucks, but is in the more provincial cafes around here.

Word autosave isn't good enough. Here's what happens regularly: I leave Word
open without manually saving for days in the background without realizing.
Eventually the Surface decides to reboot itself for an update or runs out of
power. The next time I open a Word document from an email attachment during a
conference call some stupid side bar pops up with a number of revisions of
documents that I instincively ignore. Cancel, go away! I'm busy! Oh, now I've
lost that work.

I've retrained myself always to save the 'recovered' copies now, and then
manually check whether it's newer or older than the last 'saved' copy. I
shouldn't have to do that.

I really, really wanted to like the Surface. Just check my previous posts and
tweets about it. I still use it, but I am also disappointed.

~~~
KurtMueller
| It's not about fashion-conscious style. Pulling out the Surface in a nice
cafe to work in feels... awkward. Out of place.

This is your own hangup and has nothing to do with the tablet.

~~~
javajosh
_> This is your own hangup and has nothing to do with the tablet._

A few things.

First, that's rude, especially to someone who's taken the time to express an
honest view.

Second, he never claimed to be speaking on behalf of some objective viewpoint.
This is clearly an opinion piece, and it's redundant to say, "Well, that's
your opinion." Of course it is!

Third, and this bears repeating: his opinion is valid and useful in-and-of
itself. It doesn't need to be "correct", and you don't need to agree with it
for that to be so. What you did there was attempt to _invalidate_ his
viewpoint, his reaction. It is a form of control, of bullying, and you should
be ashamed of yourself for trying it.

~~~
threeseed
What on earth are you ranting about ?

It IS his own hangup if he feels uncomfortable using a laptop in a cafe.
Millions of people do it every single day and see no issue.

------
nicholassmith
The Surface sums up for me why Microsoft is a disappointment (to me at least),
it's an area of boundless potential that's besmirched by poorly thought out
execution. Microsoft has the potential to really nail these things, but
instead they deliver a product that works and you get no joy out of it at
best, and actively dislike it at worst. It's 2013, don't expect a user to
remember to click save, and especially don't on a tablet as they've already
become accustomed to data persistence, don't force updates every 2 weeks
unless it's something critical (zero day critical), really nail transitions
and animations and encourage developers to build applications that take
advantage of the form factor.

But they didn't, and here we are. It's like having a set of drawers where the
third one down needs to have the second draw pulled open half way and the
bottom all the way in to work properly. It's totally liveable, but you'll
always resent it.

~~~
JonFish85
_The Surface sums up for me why Microsoft is a disappointment_

Completely agree. Microsoft can't win for losing. They have some great
products and the cash to really make a dent, then they completely flub the
opportunity. I feel like they're trying to cast too wide of a net and in doing
so miss the important details.

They have almost the polar opposite approach of Apple, who will happily give
up features in order to have other features work solidly (in my opinion). A
former boss of mine once said that users will forgive a lack of features, but
not a lack of stability/usability. I agree with that. I'd rather have a
limited set of features that WORK than a larger set of features that "sort of"
work. I don't know if this comes from Microsoft's background of working with
corporate partners (and delivery dates are important to fulfill a contract,
bugs or not) or what.

------
Pxtl
On the one hand, I love that MS made an Arm OS that embraces the file-system
instead of hiding me from it. Android often suffers from making me think about
the files (like my downloads) while trying to pretend there is no
filesystem... Win8RT accepts the burden of files and goes to work trying to
make them pleasant to handle.

But yeah, the save thing, the lack of automatic cloud support... that seems
anachronistic. The disconnected, versionless way people still handle their
documents is incredibly haphazard and it's staggering that we've allowed it to
persist like this so long. You can't really blame MS for this - everybody has
a blind spot with office documents, even people who try to compete with MS -
It's not like LibreOffice avoids these problems.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
Unfortunately, Open-/LibreOffice has never been more than a free and open-
source two-versions-ago copy of MSOffice. Thanks to the network economies that
MSOffice enjoys, LibreOffice is under enormous pressure to aim for
compatibility, not superiority.

------
moconnor
Author here. Before spending so much time with the Surface I'd have been
really enthusiastic about the idea of a Microsoft Phone following the Nokia
purchase. Now, I just can't see them getting all the little details right.

It's a real shame, there's so much potential here. I know people with Windows
Phones love them; do they also do things like screw up the screen rotation,
force a reboot with 15 minutes warning and update every few days? I'm guessing
not; if only the Surface division had made the same choices.

I feel as if a tablet really needs to be a magic slate first, a general
purpose PC second (if at all).

~~~
kevingadd
There's some weird stuff in your linked article that makes me wonder if
Surface RT is some parallel nightmare universe version of normal Windows 8
beyond the typical 'ARM only' bit. Don't consider this nitpicking; just some
questions that came to mind, since your experience is so different from mine
using win8 on a tablet.

Word doesn't have autosave anymore? It's had it since like Office 95!

Did the machine really power itself off, losing your work, every week even if
you had it in hibernate or sleep mode? That would really surprise me, I
haven't seen my tablet do that. Windows Update is a troublemaker, for sure,
though...

Why is the keyboard behavior you describe such a problem? For me, I consider
the Windows 8 behavior the only optimal choice: Windows software in general is
designed on the assumption that screen geometry will not change constantly
every time you tap. The android/iOS behavior of keyboards popping up at random
as the focus moves around can be a real pain when trying to precision target
objects, scroll around, or highlight content. There are certainly cases where
it's unambiguous and the keyboard could just be popped up, but at most I found
that a minor nitpick when interacting with W8 on a daily basis - and you've
got a Surface, where you can just attach a keyboard and start typing. Is it
just something that really annoyed you, from a friction perspective, even
though it doesn't have a big workflow impact?

~~~
twinwing
> Word doesn't have autosave anymore? It's had it since like Office 95!

The last Microsoft Word version with Autosave is 97[1], from 2000 onwards it
was changed to Autorecover (from crash)[2].

[1]
[http://support.microsoft.com/kb/77535](http://support.microsoft.com/kb/77535)
[2]
[http://support.microsoft.com/kb/107686](http://support.microsoft.com/kb/107686)

------
wnevets
"I can do more with the Surface, but it is not beautiful, nor do I enjoy using
it - or being seen using it."

But mom what if the cool kids see me using it?

------
farinasa
I bought a Nexus 10 with the hope of using it for dev. At first, I tried just
using terminal emulators. This was quickly ruled out after finding most of
them had screwy key bindings when used with a keyboard.

Then I thought I would try using splashtop to remote into my home desktop. I
thought this was perfect; I could use the power of my home machine and the
portability of the Nexus. Worked great on my home network. After going to a
conference, I found that it just could not hold the connection. I'm only using
vim on a terminal. It just would not work.

Now here I am eyeing an 11 Macbook Air. Great portability and battery life,
but the price is just hard to swallow.

~~~
rwolf
I'm curious if the problem here is splashtop--does it work when you go to
cafes with spotty wifi? For example, running vim from an ec2 instance might
give you better connectivity.

~~~
farinasa
I would tend to agree. The problem would then come back to the terminal
emulators. I would miss out on keys like tab complete, home, end, del, and
others. Not essential for vim, but definitely for CLI.

------
samhoice
I have been using an iPad + ssh to connect to my linux desktop for a while,
similar to the way the author did in the linked article. I found it to be an
excellent way to work, using a bluetooth keyboard on the iPad. I did this for
about 6 months before I, too, switched to a Surface about 3 weeks ago. I found
that I no SSH client worked consistently enough on the iPad + bluetooth
keyboard for me to get things done.

Here are my (hopefully) brief thoughts on the Surface (Pro). I agree with the
author's take that it's clunky as a tablet. I noticed the same sort of
rotation issues with windows resizing oddly. I find the lack of automatic
auto-correct to be frustrating, since typing on the screen keyboard is hard
(although in some ways I do like the Surface's screen keyboard better than the
iPad's, mainly because it has a fuller range of keys, like a programmer
typically expects, and I like having the number pad since you're having to
switch the keyboard to get to the numbers anyway).

I also found that scrolling windows in the browser (a common task on a tablet)
works considerably less well on the Surface. It seems to be best in IE, but in
Firefox and Chrome sometimes my finger will scroll the window with a touch,
but sometimes it just seems to select text. Window management is the same old
problem as on every windowed device, but now more difficult when trying to hit
the small window border with your finger. Of course, full screen is still an
option.

I considered buying a MacBook Air, and in some ways wish I had (battery life
comes to mind) but I like that the Surface is a real PC as well as an OK
tablet, and I really wanted the Wacom pen (something I have a particular
fondness for). While I wouldn't recommend the Surface generally to people, it
fit my usage pattern well. I can still connect to my desktop, SSH works as
expected, but I can also work locally if I want to install stuff. For me, it
beats the iPad + ssh pattern, but really only in the way any ultra-portable
laptop would.

~~~
moconnor
Jailbreak it and use PuTTY as your SSH terminal, it does a stellar job.

------
programminggeek
At some point just buying a MacBook Air makes more sense than either. Just
have 2 gadgets and deal with it.

------
YeahKIA
Well anytime you see yourself missing a real laptop, remember you could have
always gotten the Surface Pro. Its a complete laptop and more.

