How does this compare against the Macbook?
- You take handwritten notes or draw diagrams. - You're an artist who would prefer to draw on the screen rather than on an external tablet. - You want a 'consumption' device rather than a 'workstation'.
I would have never believed I would be saying to avoid a MS product of you want to get traditional work done but it's true in this case. Typing on it is not a good experience -- the keyboard is small, cheap, and missing many valuable keys, the touch screen is great but the mouse is atrocious.
Although they're trying to target artists, until the 'mobile' version of CS6 is ready is might be a pass. Pretty much any CS6 application will being the tablet to its knees and nearly burnt my lap.
The software selection is abysmal which sounds silly since just about everything is developed for Windows, but pretty much no one of consequence (except for MS themselves) is developing touch or pen friendly apps so you're left with muddling around with regular desktop apps which were designed with mouse/keyboard input in mind. It's not bad, but it's a little frustrating and not the best experience.
This is a general comment on Win 10 but the UI now has absolutely no consistency. This has pretty much been true for all iterations after XP but it's much more noticeable and jarring now. It's like they got half way through developing Win 10 but then gave up because the deadline was coming. I don't blame them for rushing after the failure that was Win 8 but it shows. Apple might put form over function but as least they care about it.
You might not really care because your IT department will be imaging it anyway but holy crap did MS choose the most user-hostile defaults. I really shouldn't have to comb through every setting and group policy disabling all their tracking and other assorted bullshit.
The new Office is nice but it has the same problems the Adobe suite. Unless you're using the mobile versions you'll just watch your battery life drain away -- Desktop OneNote is by far the worst offender and is almost unusable because of it.
Biggest weakness of the SP3 keyboard is the lack of gaps. It's a little flimsy but that's not a huge deal. SP4 looks like it fixes both of those things and finally has a solid trackpad.
Either way once you get used to the keyboard, Office applications are still far better on windows than Mac. Even with the new Mac Office. If I were an Excel heavy user, it's Surface without a question.
Comparing El Capitan to Windows 10, I wouldn't say OSX better anymore. Windows 10 certainly looks far better, no competition. Similarly spec'd, my Macbook air feels a lot slower although I do still prefer browsing on it. For productivity, I much prefer the way MS snaps windows to each side and find it far superior to OSX's new split view. Now that Windows has their own 'mission control', the feature gap has closed significantly.
Touchscreen for browsing is pretty nice too.
I can't take Windows seriously as a primary computing platform with that in mind - it was the foot over the creepy line IMO.
I don't mean to be contrarian, but for all the years Microsoft took heat on HN for sucking, I think they deserve some real credit for developing a product that, at least for me, works really, really well.
Cortana works better than Spotlight on OS X, and it doesn't cover up the middle of the screen to boot. I can actually do arithmetic with it without covering up the article with the numbers in it.
The Windows 10 virtual desktops are basically a copy of Mission Control, except a bit nicer. Windows doesn't hide your desktop thumbnails by default the way that El Capitan perplexingly does.
The window snapping feature in Windows 10 is vastly better than anything built into OS X by default. The split fullscreen view in El Capitan is a joke and extraordinarily clunky compared to just being able to snap windows to any half or quarter of the screen in Windows 10.
I've never heard anybody think of it as a "consumption" device. It's the most useful/productive piece of tech I've ever bought.
>The software selection is abysmal
>It's not bad
Bizarre
That's not what I find with my i7 sp3. Instead I find that it struggles to cool itself when the CPU is running at max for a period of time. Worse when I was living in Singapore I would have to have the AC on if I didn't want it to throttle itself as the ambient temp was 30°C.
That reminds me; one of the main reasons I'm still running 8.1 pro on my "gaming" partion that I occasionally dual-boot into for gaming (and now, sadly, playing with Rift DK2, as Oculus have given up Linux support indefinitely).
I know I'll have to bite the bullet at some point, and as a note-to-self that might be of interest, some frantic searching if someone hadn't published some PowerShell scripts to turn off the madness, turned up this:
https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10
I haven't looked at it, but it certainly seems more sane than clicking through lots of gooeye just to take back one's OS.
- has a stylus
- has a detachable keyboard
Kind of bummed that Microsoft didn't go with the USB Type-C on these.