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Comment by oceanswave | Hacker News Reader

A fabric covered keyboard... wondering how that's going to look in a year of use.

1 USB 3.0 port and a proprietary Surface Connect port... So more surface-only dongles if you want to connect to a VGA/DVI/HDMI display. Is the Surface Connect port completely proprietary or is a rebranded Thunderbolt?

Starts at $999 for a 13.5" i5/4GB/128GB SSD, and then you have to upgrade to Windows 10 Pro for $49 if you want to use Steam or non-ms appstore apps... and after 1 year pay $70/yr or $7/mo for O365

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The pricing is one thing I don't understand. If you're asking a customer to pay the same price as a MacBook air, which comes with productivity apps and a basic cloud service for free, why don't you let them use O365 for free, in perpetuity, at least on that machine?

The other thing I don't understand is the overarching message. The line we've been fed from Microsoft's marketing team is that the "convertibility" of the Surface line is what everyone wanted, and what made it better than any Apple product in every way. Now, they're back to a plain, old laptop configuration? Is this an admission of defeat? Have Surface sales flat-lined? (You'd think that was an easy question to answer, but search results show a lot of conflicting headlines, and I can't find any graphs in the first 5 tries.)

I heard from a surface book user that he never use the tablet mode in practice, outside sometimes to make it a tablet in a plane.

I owned a surface pro myself, and I tend to agree. It's a terrible device as a tablet. Slow to wake up, buggy, low battery life, not really the kind of device you can carry around and check something on it quickly. And if you use it as a laptop, it's better to have a proper laptop with more ports, a true keyboard, a screen which can stay up while sitting on your laps.

I use my surface book as a tablet only occasionally, for watching videos or playing one particular game.

But it's well worth it just treated as a laptop with a touchscreen. Little things like being able to tap a button occasionally, or sign a PDF with the pen rather than printing and scanning, all add up. And the dock works really nicely - I leave everything plugged into my desk for a proper gaming/development setup, but I can disconnect one cable and take it on a train or plane and it's small enough to work there.

Yep for me the lack of self-supporting screen has meant I hate using it - can't use it on my lap properly, can't use it on a desk because the screen is so physically tiny whilst the resolution is insanely high, causing me to run everything at 200% scaling (as supported by Windows 10, even for non-scaling older applications which then appear blurry), thereby defeating having a high-res screen.

You should be complaining to app devs who have blurry apps. This is exactly the same as the OS X transition to high DPI, you're supposed to run things at 200%

you used it wrong. its not a single task tablet like android or ios. it is a computer. which you can interact with as a tablet (touch, pen).

it can do things a mobile device will never be able to. the downside is that instant on is 2s instead of 0.5

I dont use it myself. while I loved the interaction of touch+pen, it wont run linux well. so thats a no go for me, as with any mac product.

Then it's more than I don't really have any use case for it. Either I need to just check something quickly, my emails, something on the web, watch a video, read some text, and then the ipad experience is just fine (though perfectible). Or I need to produce content, write emails, prepare a presentation, write code, work on a spreadsheet. Then anything that doesn't involve a mouse (with its precision) and a keyboard is unpractical (and the surface pro keyboard is pretty bad). Even for taking notes in a meeting, nothing beats the pen and paper, I don't really need any advanced feature (my notes are always at most a reminder of follow ups), and I can't (and shouldn't) focus on the meeting and play with a computer at the same time. But I don't have the feeling I am working in a fundamentally different way than 99% of office workers.

I just don't get what is the use case for a surface pro. Graphic designers possibly, but they usually don't work on a tiny screen, and it's a niche market.

I still miss when I had the surface pro 2 and I could use it like a wacom tablet. I spent a lot of time doodling between work sessions. The shitty snap-on keyboard with the utterly worthless mousepad and the fact that you have to hunch over like a disney witch in order to use it laptop-style totally killed it for me though. Windows 8.1 is garbage compared to Linux for development, but when I was a student I spent most of my time using it for web stuff so I could live with it. I should totally buy a wacom tablet so I can start doodling again.

People will list it as an attribute that they get add-ons for free.

I'm sure Microsoft is confident in releasing hardware that is relevant to our digital lives under the Surface brand. It's pretty obvious if you go back and look at the pattern, there's either a sect of engineers or product people who really believe in the original Surface table vision, it's a very viable strategy until v1 of the HoloLens is complete

> they're back to a plain, old laptop configuration?

why not both?

surface book if you want tablet\convertable

surface laptop if you want a traditional laptop

From the page there appears to be a minidisplay port and a card reader. The main use for the surface connect port is attaching it to the dock. I have a Surface 4 Pro here and the experience with the dock and the connector is great.

And charging it!

Re the keyboard, if it's anything like the SP3 and SP4 material it will look pretty bad after about 6 months of use. We've got a fleet of about 100 and the keyboards on them all look pretty rough - they also have a tendency to soak up moisturiser and hand creams like you wouldn't believe.

Huh? There's a standard mini-Display on there too so no proprietary dongles. My work even had them just cable tied to the HDMI ports in all our meeting rooms.

I have a SP4 and I love the fabric on that. As long as you take a bit care of it it looks great even after a year. Mine is almost a year old and is like I bought it yesterday.

However, I don't use it everyday.

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