Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

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You'll probably be more interested in a Surface if one of the following is true:

- 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.

I disagree completely. I have two Macbooks (2015 air and 2014 pro) for work and home but also use an SP3 at home.

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.

If we're talking pure fit and finish, they did come a long way from the disaster that was Win8, but honestly, in a feature comparison, "non-optional telemetry uploading" is a massive point in the favor of literally any other choice.

I can't take Windows seriously as a primary computing platform with that in mind - it was the foot over the creepy line IMO.

To each his own. I've used an SP3 hard for a year now, and came from a 2012 MacBook Air. While the keyboard is inferior, I value the functionality, and honestly, it works fine. The trackpad is among the best I've used with Windows. As for software, as a lawyer I require little more than the Office Suite, Acrobat, and a browser (I use Chrome). All work beautifully on the Surface (and Windows 10 made it better), and I've been pleased/impressed with battery life. Finally, I could not disagree more about desktop OneNote. It's my favorite piece of software. I use it all day, every day.

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.

I agree with everything here except that I find the Windows 10 UI to actually be quite nice and fairly consistent.

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.

Bizarre. I've replaced an MBP, iPad, and desktop PC, with my SP3.

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

> Pretty much any CS6 application will being the tablet to its knees and nearly burnt my lap.

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.

> 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.

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.

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