Hacker News Reader

Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

Surface Book is brilliant. Solid as a rock, keyboard better than a Mac. Battery life in tablet mode sucks, but as a laptop it's excellent.

View on HN

I really wanted to like the SB but I didn't like that it doesn't have a full keyboard with End, Home, PgUp, PgDown. It's not that there isn't space to include them. I ended up returning it. For something that I paid $3k for it was a dealbreaker.

People actually use those buttons?! Genuinely curious.

Yup, I use them a lot of in Excel. Outside of Excel, End to go to the end of the line and Home to go to the beginning. Ctrl+Home, Ctrl+End to go to the beginning/end of a file.

Some folk use them for emacs keybindings for the shell (I use crtl-left etc)

I've had some minor gripes about the reliability of the hinge connection, the behavior of the FN key, and DPI switching on Windows in general.

That said, ever since the Intel firmware fixes addressing the power management issues, the Surface Book has been the perfect general purpose mobile computer for me. Crisp screen, solid keyboard, long battery life, lightweight, and the stylus has been sufficient for replacing good ol' pen and paper when I need to scratch out some math for my occasional graphics programming hobby work. (I have a dedicated GPU model.)

It's the first new computer I've bought in 4 years, so despite paying over $2000 for it, I'm quite happy with the value I've gotten.

Did the Intel firmware fixes come via Windows Update or did you have to do something specific?

DPI oddness (moving between low DPI external monitor and high DPI internal one triggered it) seems much less now.

They arrive via Windows update.

The battery life in tablet mode is only bad when you leave it detached (at least for me).

Yep I'm talking about leaving it detached - chilling out on the couch using the tablet, without the weight of the bottom part. I'd hoped the Surface Book would replace my iPad but it just replaced my Macbook.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com