Syndicated from fashand
My tepid excitement in getting a Surface Pro became tepid horror when I discovered I literally just dropped it on the street while driving around on my scooter last week. I was in a rush through construction at night and the bag just fell off (or so I’ve concluded)… And sadly, the bag may be the true tragedy of this story. It was one of my favorites from Monki that I scooped up at the Central Studios Spring Fair, and inside was a brand new blue tiger wallet… I lost a bit of RMB which always sucks, but losing my constantly-maxed-out Amex may actually be a blessing in disguise (but still inconvenient)… I’m not quite convinced that losing a Surface Pro is necessarily a blessing, but I’m trying to see it as an opportunity to get a better laptop.
So it was a “great” time to lose my laptop because Intel just launched their new low-power Haswell CPUs at Computex… And because the cooling system can be eliminated by using this power-efficient SoC (system on chip), we’re going to be seeing some very thin, long-lasting Ultrabooks (think a couple of pounds and 8-12 hours of battery life). And that’s way better than my Surface, which barely clocked 4 hours before it demanded that I plug it in. Now I am a specific type of user, but I generally look for the following in a laptop:
Light and portable: 4 pounds at most
Solid battery life: at least 4-6 hour
Sizable hard drive: at least 256GB, but preferably 500GB – 1TB
A selection of ports: USB ports a must, HDMI/SD preferable
I think these are pretty reasonable expectations, but my Surface Pro was really only outstandingly light and portable… But not really even that, because I could usually only use it on a flat surface as a laptop (because it’s a pretty fat, useless tablet). So a mobile computer it certainly is not. And brand new it barely got to my minimum battery life requirement with very light usage. And lastly, I shelled out an extra $100 for the 128GB version because Windows 8 is a bloated 40+ GBs, rendering the 64GB virtually unusable, and so I couldn’t really store any serious data on it. But the worst thing about Windows 8 is that the stock photo viewer is absolutely pathetic and crashes when you try to open a picture. And there was one USB 3.0 port, SDHC, and Mini DP. Woo hoo.
So anyway, here’s a summary of pros and cons:
Pros
-Super portable
-Pressure-sensitive screen for sketching
-Intel x86 architecture (so you can run any program made for a full-fledged PC)
-Khan Academy (because the website doesn’t work properly in China)
-Plays well with my Samsung Galaxy Note 2
Cons
-Stock programs are useless unless you buy into the Microsoft ecosystem (and there is no Office on Microsoft’s own hardware…)
-Especially bad for viewing media (particularly pictures), and pretty poor at storing media files because the hard drive is so small
-Not a tablet as advertised (you can only watch videos and for a short time), but definitely a laptop
-Doesn’t always work as a laptop because the keyboard doesn’t always attach
-Input methods aren’t really either natural or streamlined
-No GPS so Microsoft can’t help me find it
So in retrospect, for how much it costs after the keyboard, tax, warranty, and Office (around $1400), the Surface Pro is not the best deal ever. For that kind of money, you can get a serious laptop… So I’m going to start doing some laptop reviews over the next few weeks to determine a Big Bang Book (biggest bang for your buck) and Best Form Laptop (aesthetics are important too). And Apple’s WWDC is coming up in the next few days, so I’m sure that in addition to the Haswell Ultrabooks there will be some competitive Apple laptops in the mix.