
Ask HN: How do you like your Surface Book? - bloomca
I heard good things about hardware and not so good about software. I have a MBP 2017 and I don&#x27;t like it, so I am thinking about getting a new working machine.<p>Is Surface Book a good choice? Do you regret getting it?
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moksly
They’ve been showing up in my circles a lot recently. I work in the public
sector and we’re pretty much all windows, and that’s sort of the problem with
it. Or at least my problem with it. It’s genuinely a great device, I’ll admit
that I’m not a Mac power user as such, but the trackpad feels on par with my
Mac and the keyboard and screen are better. The fact that it also doubles as a
mbp and iPad Pro for things like note taking makes you wonder why it’s not
made by Apple. It’s windows though, and I realise that I may be one of the few
people who doesn’t like windows 10, but I just don’t. I can’t put my finger on
it exactly, I even like CMD and powershell as is, but it just doesn’t sit
right with me for some reason.

I’m personally regretting getting a MBP 2018, but the resale value is still so
high that it will be able to pay for most of the XPS that I’m considering
replacing it with. I’m just really worried that Ubuntu won’t be able to plug
and play with my 4K monitor.

If you don’t mind windows, however, I think the surface books are everything
the mbp ought to have been by now.

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EnderMB
A few years ago, I was holding out for a new MBP for ages, and when it didn't
come I decided to bite the bullet and buy a Surface Book.

I own the first-gen Surface Book, and it's probably the best laptop I've ever
owned, Windows or otherwise. The keyboard is great, the screen is fantastic,
and while the trackpad isn't as good as the MBP it's a close second-place.

The touch-screen and pen are nice, and they work well, but I never use them.
I'm not much of a tablet guy anyway, so it was never going to appeal to me
like it would to others.

In terms of OS, Windows continues to improve while OSX deteriorates. I used to
do a lot of work with .NET, so my opinion is probably biased, but I'd consider
Windows to be a better development platform than OSX, especially with WSL.
It's still a pain in the ass with some languages like Ruby, but it gets better
every year, and if OSX continues to get worse I can see people ditching it and
going with Linux or Windows.

~~~
deepaksurti
> but it gets better every year?

Also, can you say how/why it is getting better?

~~~
EnderMB
Safety. I always use my dad as the perfect metric for this, because he fits
the elderly tech stereotype perfectly. I can give him Windows or OSX and he'll
usually butcher them into a mess. Their Mac is an absolute mess of toolbars
and bloatware, whereas the Windows machine has zero issues after several
years.

Speed. Windows always used to have issues with installs getting slow over
time. I've had the same base installation of Windows 10 on my Surface Book and
it's as fast as it was the day I bought it, despite several hundred gig
sitting on the hard drive, numerous VM's, and several IDE's.

Stability. My Surface Book hasn't crashed in years, and my other Windows 10
machines have crashed so infrequently that I forgot what a BSOD looked like
nowadays.

Cleaner UI. I think toolbars are still a bit of a mess on Windows 10, but they
dud a good job to get away from the mess that was Windows 8, and I'm yet to
meet someone that struggles with Windows in the same way they struggle with
other OS's.

These aren't headline features, but they're the key points where Windows
improves and where OSX seems to struggle. I still love the OSX UI, but I fear
that we're not far away from things becoming more iOS friendly on the desktop,
and parts of that fantastic UI being torn down.

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shahbaby
It depends on how you'll use it.

The mechanism to detach the screen is not really reliable. It may work without
issue 90% of the time but knowing that there's a 10% chance that I'll have to
deal with some annoying bug means that I usually avoid using it.

Taking notes with the surface pen works great and is a huge convenience but if
the goal of your notes is to learn something, pen and paper work better
(bonus: reviewing physical notes gives you a break from the screen).

If you take away the detachable screen and the digital notes, you're left with
an overpriced laptop.

With that said, I can't say that I regret owning one. I've used it for
university, for work and for some light gaming.

I would also say that it works great for travelling (slim, light weight, good
battery life, comfortable touch pad, etc.)

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caw
I have the first gen Surface Book for home after replacing an old Macbook and
I like it. The pen feature, battery life, and the OS are all great, with the
following caveats

\- It’s the only device I’ve ever cracked a screen on. There’s a vertical
crack from the bottom of the screen to the top, which I attribute to some kind
of weight on the laptop in my bag since there’s a gap between the keyboard and
screen when closed.

\- My WiFi chipset required me to disable an advanced TCP setting (offload?
Can’t recall, found in a forum) in the registry to not crash my WiFi router or
slow it down to 3Mbps

\- Periodically my laptop will crash while sleeping (maybe it’s going to
hibernation? Haven’t dug too hard) and prompt me with Bitlocker recovery every
time.

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lukaszkups
I have a SB2 since ~ half of the year. It's beautiful machine, but I would
definitely not buy it if I would have to travel with it pretty often
(fortunately, I work remotely).

My story is that I was a linux user, who switched to OSX, then gone back to
linux and recently, thanks to WSL (linux subsystem for windows) I can still
work comfortably in the environment I like.

Btw. windows surely has changed since I was working on it last time in the
long run (for the better!)

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pikapikamtf
awful, if you've used a macbook before you might hate this, i do. the
keyboards is crap, the mouse pad is not as responsive ... just not worth the
money, i'd rather get half the RAM and compensate with being super productive.

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PixelPaul
I have been thinking of one for a while now. But I love OS X over windows so I
am not sure how I would go. It’s been a while since I have been on a windows
machine.

