

Tolerating the Surface Pro - peschkaj
http://ozar.me/2013/05/why-im-tolerating-the-surface-pro/

======
rayiner
I don't see battery life as being a small problem on a tablet. My ipad mini
(with LTE) has become my primary communication device because I can use it
intensively and forget to charge it for days at a time. 12 hours usage in
addition to several more days of standby with all the features (push email
etc) enabled means I go to my ipad over my blackberry that can't last a day or
my mba that can't last a day. 3-4 hours for a portable tablet device is just
pathetic. It defeats the whole purpose of the form factor.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
_“3-4 hours for a portable tablet device is just pathetic.”_

True, but I wouldn’t call the Surface Pro ‘tablet portable’. It’s fairer to
compare it with a notebook. With TypeCover, the Surface Pro is 2 centimeters
thick, while a MacBook Air 11" has an average thickness of 1 centimeter. The
Surface Pro is also a little heavier than a MacBook Air. Curiously, both
devices have the same CPU, GPU, SSD, and RAM – but a MacBook Air 11" is $30
cheaper and has 5,5 hours of real world battery life.

If we were to compare Surface Pro with a 10" iPad, it would look even worse.
The Surface Pro is twice as thick, 3 times as heavy, has one-third of the
battery life, has a screen with a lower resolution, and it’s $300 more
expensive.

~~~
dangrossman
The MBA 11" is 0.68" thick. The Surface Pro is 0.53" thick. The Type Cover
adds .23"; the Touch Cover only .08".

It gets the same run time per charge.

It weighs less, not more; less than 2 pounds versus 2.38.

The difference is that you can snap off the optional keyboard in a split
second if you really care about thickness -- well, that and the fact that it's
a tablet with a touch digitizer behind the glass too.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
_> The MBA 11" is 19.2mm thick_

No, it’s not: “Height: 0.11-0.68 inch (0.3-1.7 cm)”
<http://www.apple.com/macbookair/specs.html>

The body has a wedge shape, on average 10mm thick: <http://imgur.com/Ung7IQ3>

_> It gets the same run time per charge._

No, it doesn’t. The Surface Pro gets 3,75 hours of battery life.
[http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/05/microsoft-surface-pro-
rev...](http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/05/microsoft-surface-pro-review/)

~~~
dangrossman
For what conceivable purpose would you want to compare _average_ thickness? I
own an SP; it does not get 3.75 hours of battery life no matter what I do with
it, and I could pull out a dozen review links to say that as well. Why are you
trying _so_ hard to make it look worse than it is?

~~~
Samuel_Michon
_“For what conceivable purpose would you want to compare average thickness?”_

Along with length, width and depth, that’s what determines the volume of the
object (=portability). The Surface Pro has 60% more volume as a MacBook Air
11". And yet, it gets hot, has loud fans, and has less battery life. That’s
just bad engineering. As a replacement for a notebook and a tablet, it really
should have _at least_ as much battery life as an iPad. Given its volume, that
would’ve been possible.

Surface Pro: 10.81 x 6.81 x 0.76" = 55.95 cubic inches

MacBook Air 11": 11.8 x 7.56 x 0.39" = 34.79 cubic inches

EDIT: in an earlier version I mistakenly wrote 'mass' where I meant 'volume'.

~~~
dangrossman
Weight and size are what determine portability for everyone else, not how much
water it could hold if it were doubling as a canteen. That's not mass, it's
volume, by the way. The MBA is longer, wider, taller and heavier -- yet you've
contrived a way to label that as "more portable"... ridiculous on its face.

I'm not going to make this valueless discussion thread any longer, so to your
reply: those numbers are made up. Larger screens make things less portable,
not more.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
The MBA is less than an inch longer and wider (because of the larger screen).
It’s not as thick (‘tall’?) as the Surface Pro and it weighs less (2.38lbs)
than a Surface Pro with TypeCover (2.55lbs).

------
hkmurakami
So the gist is "good hardware, really really unacceptably crappy software
experience"

> _I bought the Surface Pro to use as a backup laptop: a secondary
> presentation device in case my main laptop bit the dust. I make a living
> teaching people via PowerPoint. For a long list of reasons, I can’t really
> switch presentation tools, and the iPad doesn’t cut it as a secondary
> presentation device. The Surface Pro does._

This isn't a typical situation, and if this is the only justification one can
have (or perhaps one of the few) in owning a Surface Pro, MSFT has a whole lot
of issues on its hands.

~~~
Random_Person
Essentially, yes. I convinced work to buy me a Pro after around a decade of
being Windows free... and I'm underwhelmed. I like the hardware. But having
two entirely separate interfaces is really terrible. Like he pointed out, it's
no longer intuitive how to interact with the device, you have to constantly
switch between input modes which is extremely annoying.

~~~
PaulHoule
A big part of the Metro nightmare is that the built in apps (other than the
core shell) suck.

For instance, Metro lacks a file chooser where you can easily find files
anywhere in your system. If the Metro interface had a good file chooser, you
wouldn't have to drop out to use the file desktop chooser to find a file on
any filesystem.

If Windows 8.1 adds a good file chooser and if Microsoft addresses a few
specific problems like that, life in Metro could get much better.

I hope Microsoft can get its branding straight -- I find it weird that I click
on a music file across the network and it pops up in a pretty Metro app with
the tag line "Xbox Music". There's also some thing (which has never quite
worked for me) called "Xbox Games" which I'm not sure will do anything for me
if I don't own an Xbox.

Or is everything that runs Windows 8 an "Xbox" of some kind? And how come I
see tiles for all kinds of music except for the music that I've got in my own
collection?

~~~
canthonytucci
Why are you trying to work with files in the metro interface?

I'm having trouble coming up with a use case where I'd need the file chooser
to do any of the things you'd want to do in the touch interface.

I can't speak to the music file thing because I haven't dealt with music files
in years, it's always been an annoying and tedious experience for me (as is
working with any large number of files with wonky metadata), so I switched to
streaming and haven't looked back.

EDIT: That said, videos on my NAS just show up in the metro "Videos" app and I
can watch them without issue. I haven't tried it with music but I can't
imagine why that would be any different.

~~~
BrentOzar
Videos and music based on a NAS do indeed show up automatically. I just don't
need that part - I need the music and videos when I'm on the road. (Streaming
doesn't work on most airplanes.)

------
nextstep
All Surface reviews read like this. "It's pretty good, except for this long
list of things that are terrible about it."

------
mikerg87
I switched to the Surface Pro as my primary development box. Surprised that I
could get VS2012, SQL Express 2012 and IIS working with decent performance.

If you are using an SDXC card to supplement your storage and don't intend to
eject it on a whim, you can get better performance by going to the device
manager and changing the removal policy and the write caching.

Options for 256gb or 512gb SSD would have made this an easier choice for many.

~~~
xradionut
Wow, glutten for punishment.

My primary development box is a fully loaded 17" laptop. Tablets are too small
screen wise and performance wise when doing real work either in the OSS or
Redmond realm. (I deal with tons of Data and run a few VMs as well.)

~~~
mikerg87
I carried a Lenovo W510 15" that was simply not workable on flights and heavy
and clumsy for standing in line at security checkpoints. And "pro" systems
like this don't play well with airline power systems. The surface has worked
on Qantas, Air Canada and Lufthansa flights where I have had power. At my desk
I project to a big monitor and it has worked out pretty well.

------
dangrossman
My biggest gripe is that you really need DPI scaling to use some desktop apps
at 1920x1080 on a 10" screen, but half the apps I use don't scale well or at
all (I'm looking at you, Chrome). I still use the SP on a daily basis and it
was a worthile purchase for a few things:

1) It's a great tablet when you want a tablet. With no keyboard attached, it's
a joy to read reddit and play games on in bed.

2) I throw it in the car with me whenever I leave home. I'm always on-call if
a site/server goes down. The SP is a full computer with a hard keyboard, so
there won't be any situation I need to drive back home to handle, even if it
takes several hours to resolve.

3) It's a suitable desktop replacement for anything but hard gaming. I stick
it on my desk, plug in a big monitor, and pair a bluetooth mouse. Now screen
size and DPI scaling don't matter, and the Core i5 has all the power I could
need for compiling software, photo editing, etc.

------
PaulHoule
My boss uses a Surface Pro like a laptop and is happy with it.

Add a good quality wireless mouse and a USB 3 hub, leave the keyboard at the
desk and you've got a docking station as good in practice as anything on the
market.

~~~
BrentOzar
That's interesting. How does he work around the high-DPI resolution problems
when connecting an external display? I'm assuming he's using one - when you
say "a docking station as good in practice as anything on the market", that
usually means an external display.

~~~
PaulHoule
I'll say that if you've been using Windows for years you get used to using
Windows on strange screen systems, everything from 640x480 to video wall
panels. If you adjust magnification factors, font sizes, and such for the apps
you actually use to help out a lot.

One thing I found with Windows 8 is that it is even better to use keyboard
shortcuts to access the shell. Instead of groping for the 'Start' button, I
hit the Windows key and the same thing happens if I am running Win7 or Win8.
So Win8 didn't cause me disorientation at all, it just trained me to do the
right thing.

~~~
BrentOzar
Yes, but then you're constantly switching magnification factors, font sizes,
and such every time you plug into the desktop dock or unplug to hit the road?

------
axus
"I end up using the finger very often, and not to touch the screen, either".

------
robomartin
The author needs a laptop, possibly augmented with a Wacom tablet to draw
during presentations. With the myriad of amazing laptop/netbooks available in
the windows ecosystem a tablet would be my absolute last choice for his use
case.

The other angle is to consider that Surface is but one choice. Other
manufacturers make excellent tablet/hybrid Windows 8 devices. They are
probably a far better choice for general business use.

I don't really get people who complain about, for example, not being able to
use Excel with your fingers. I'm sorry, touch is not the best solution for
every application. Using touch absolutely sucks for a wide range of
applications. A on-screen keyboard is the simplest example. It sucks.
Functional, but it sucks. I can't even think of the idea of using Excel with
mi fingers on the screen. It would be ugly, cumbersome and slow, very slow.

Tablets have their place. Please don't complain if you try to force it into a
non-ideal application.

I still own a ten year old little Sony mini notebook with a nice 10 inch
display. It's about the size of an iPad and twice as thick as an iPad 3. I
still have XP on it. It is absolutely wonderful for travel, even in the most
cramped aircraft. It has a great physical keyboard. It is fantastic for
PowerPoint presentations. Battery life is 6 to 12 hours. I have written tons
of code on this thing in flight. I can run a Linux VM. And do web development,
etc. I could go on.

Tablets have their place.

~~~
BrentOzar
Brent the author here. As I stated in the article, I do indeed do have a
laptop. However, carrying around a laptop, plus another backup laptop, plus a
Wacom tablet is a little beyond what I'd like to travel with.

About Excel with your fingers - you'd be surprised. The touch experience is
surprisingly compelling once you get used to it. I'm always surprised at how
often I reach out to touch the display on my laptop after I've been using my
iPad or the Surface, even just for a few minutes. (This is especially true
when using the Surface because the Type Cover's trackpad is laughably small.)

~~~
robomartin
Ultimately we all make the choices that make sense to us. I've travelled
extensively in the US, Europe and South America conducting seminars and
product demonstrations. I know the pain of carrying hundreds of pounds of
equipment with you. Most memorable: picking up my large Pelican cases at
Schiphol only to feel they were covered with yellow slime.

Anyhow, for business travel I would nearly always buy laptops in pairs. Really
easy to clone them just before a trip and have true backup.

Two laptops and a Wacom are not going to be a significant departure from one
laptop and surface. You can easily fit all of it in a laptop bag with room to
spare. For convenience I eventually migrated towards wheeled laptop cases. You
don't have to lug them around and they offer lots of room for gear and
sometimes even a minimal overnight set of clothes, etc.

I am sure that eventually some tools will develop usable parallel touch UI's.
I guess my point is that I can do everything I might generally have to do
during a typical business trip on a ten year old notebook. Newer notebooks are
far cheaper (I paid $3,000 for the Sony ten years ago) and far more capable. A
tablet would be my absolute last choice as they are still really cumbersome
and inconvenient to use.

~~~
mst
Yellow ... slime?

I know it's not exactly on topic, but please do elaborate.

~~~
robomartin
Funny story. Not at the time, but it was hilarious once I got to the hotel and
wrote an email describing what I went through.

This was my first time going to Amsterdam, about twelve years ago. Last minute
business trip. I had no choice but to carry about 400 pounds of equipment with
me. I think the excess baggage bill was about $2,000. It consisted of a set of
anvil cases and pelican cases with all manner of equipment, even FPGA
prototyping boards. I effectively had fully finished product as well as
prototype hardware in order to be able to work on code based on feedback and
demonstrate it.

The ordeal started in Los Angeles when I didn't have all of the right
paperwork, including the necessary carnet, etc. Mad rush to get it all sorted
the week of the trip.

I planned ahead and designed a custom heavy-duty dolly out of 80/20 extrusions
to be able to move all of this stuff at both airports and within the
city/hotel. The dolly had large wheels and could be taken apart and stored in
the pelican case. Pile it on with the gear and a couple of ratchet straps held
it all in place. Great plan.

I arrive at Schiphol and go to the carrousel. These things were pretty heavy,
60 to 90 lbs per case. This meant that when I saw one on the carrousel I had
to be "all in". There was no messing around. Grab and get your whole body into
it to pull the thing off the carrousel.

I see the first anvil case come around. I setup to grab it. The plan was to
rotate it quickly onto my leg and use that as a fulcrum of sorts to rotate the
case off the carousel. When I go to grab the case one of the handles feels
really slimy. I mean, imagine if you squirted it with motor oil or pudding,
somewhere in between those two. I was committed, so I ignored it. I pulled
hard with both hands, put it on my leg, then, supporting it with my chest I
got it down. It sounds awkward but it was a very natural move. Think olympic
dead lifting but not quite going over your head.

Then I realize I am absolutely covered in yellow slime. Again, think somewhere
between oil and pudding. Not quite liquid but not quite solid. Yellow and
cold. Didn't smell. A few expletives later I had no choice but to get the
other cases. All four of them were covered to some degree with this stuff.

By the time I get my luggage I look like I had gone mud wrestling in yellow
slime. I was both angry and laughing my ass off. What are you going to do?
Just roll with it.

I literally sat on the floor to take a moment. I was wearing loose fitting
exercise clothes to be comfortable during flight. Thankfully the slime didn't
go through the fabric.

I couldn't leave all of that gear alone. There was no way to clean myself up
at that time. I got my dolly out and assembled it right there. Loaded all of
the slime-covered cases onto it and set out to find the Custom's office.

When you travel with a lot of gear like that you need to have this document
called a "Carnet" signed just about everywhere you go. It lists what you are
carrying so that you don't have to pay import duties everywhere you go.

I soon learned that the Customs office was three buildings away from my
terminal. And, of course, the only way there was to use this walkway that
ramped up between buildings.

By the time I get to the Customs office I was sweating like a pig and covered
with yellow slime. I can't even imagine what I must have looked like.

When I entered the room it was like I was Moses and the water parted. I mean,
everyone got the fuck out of my way. It was hilarious. I get to the counter
and the customs officer just signs the paperwork without even attempting to
look inside the cases. I guess she didn't want to play with yellow slime.

As I go back to the hallway a janitor is making the rounds with his cart. He
sees me and takes a look at my pile of cases covered in yellow slime. Without
either one of us uttering a single word, the guy grabs to large rolls of paper
towels and a full bottle of cleaner (like windex) puts them down on the floor
next to my gear and continues walking.

Again, laughing my ass off as the entire thing was surreal beyond belief. So,
here I am, windex-ing the shit out of everything, including myself, in front
of the Customs office. Of course, when it came to my clothes I got a lot of
slime off but also ended-up smearing a lot of it everywhere. I mean, I looked
like shit.

Now I had to make the trip back three buildings to get back to my terminal and
go through the immigration area. Everyone was pretty nice. I was asked about
the contents of the cases, my paperwork was checked but nobody was interested
in opening the cases. Also, oddly enough, not one person asked me what
happened or why I looked the way I did. Are the Dutch that polite?

Once out I was able to go into a bathroom and at least wash off some of the
slime and sweat. I didn't change my clothes because I just didn't want to
dirty another set. I did clean the cases to a reasonable degree.

Getting a taxi was a real challenge. Few seemed interested in carrying that
much stuff.

When I finally got one the guy took one look at me and another look at the
equipment and said "I have a bad back, sorry". So, I had to load all of the
equipment onto the van. By this point in time I was absolutely exhausted.
Under those conditions humor and a good attitude makes a good situation
bearable and you just move on.

When I get to the hotel I found out that the hotel attendant also has a bad
back. Throughout my stay in Amsterdam it seems I always managed to find people
or taxi drivers with bad backs. Again, it became really funny after a while.

In talking to the airline I came to find out a shipment of some sort of
lubricant was ruptured in the cargo area and, wouldn't you know it, all of my
cases were located right next to it. They apologized and bumped me to first
class for the trip back. Good deal.

It's funny how we don't remember the museum trips or the city tour but stories
such as this one remain etched into your mind and actually become the kinds of
stories you smile about when you remember and tell them.

Also, every time I think "CEO" I remember myself covered in yellow slime and
sweat.

------
contextfree
I’m not sure what was happening with his MD file extension, but I don’t think
it could be what he thought it was. Windows 8 has only one unified set of file
type associations – there’s no concept of desktop versus “Metro” there.
Probably the app just didn’t register for that extension?

~~~
freehunter
That's a fair point. I know 7Zip has this same problem; no matter which
computer I'm using, I have to manually tell Windows that 7Zip is the program
to use to open a .7z file.

It's possible for a program to not register file extensions.

------
kwinzman
"On the regional jet I’m on now, even first class doesn’t have a tray big
enough for the Surface." "In comparison, when I take my MacBook Pro or my iPad
[...]"

<http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3ufht1/>

------
ninetenel
I've had a surface pro since launch -- and all I can say is that I can't
imagine using different portable right now (before that I was using a x230).

once I got used to the form factor and what it was designed for it's changed
how I compute in subtle ways.

Last night for example.. rather then going to my desk .. I watched some
lectures on the couch while using the pen to take notes in one note .. then
docked it to do some work.

that's just one example of many; but for me personally i feel like i'm doing
more with my computer then I was before

though, I've usually docked my laptops when doing any serious work .. and my
mobile work is usually restricted to coffee shops for only 3-4 hours at a time
..

battery life I guess could be better .. I usually only get 4hours or so off
power when streaming movies off amazon but it's not really bad IMO, but of
course I'd like it to be longer .. my main worry when it comes to the battery
is that it's not user replaceable honestly

