Is Surface Book a good choice? Do you regret getting it?
I’m personally regretting getting a MBP 2018, but the resale value is still so high that it will be able to pay for most of the XPS that I’m considering replacing it with. I’m just really worried that Ubuntu won’t be able to plug and play with my 4K monitor.
If you don’t mind windows, however, I think the surface books are everything the mbp ought to have been by now.
I own the first-gen Surface Book, and it's probably the best laptop I've ever owned, Windows or otherwise. The keyboard is great, the screen is fantastic, and while the trackpad isn't as good as the MBP it's a close second-place.
The touch-screen and pen are nice, and they work well, but I never use them. I'm not much of a tablet guy anyway, so it was never going to appeal to me like it would to others.
In terms of OS, Windows continues to improve while OSX deteriorates. I used to do a lot of work with .NET, so my opinion is probably biased, but I'd consider Windows to be a better development platform than OSX, especially with WSL. It's still a pain in the ass with some languages like Ruby, but it gets better every year, and if OSX continues to get worse I can see people ditching it and going with Linux or Windows.
1. Improvements on OSX have stagnated, and any new features that have been added over the past few years have been a side-product of iOS. With all the talk of the OSX team at Apple being scrapped for a unified OS team, this kinda makes sense, since iOS is their cash cow, but it's not great for those that rely on a modern OS.
2. With every release there are new bugs, and Apple takes their sweet time fixing them. A prime example is the bug where a huge white block appears over your menu bar if you've got two monitors plugged in, and you're using an Electron app. I'd understand bugs like this on Windows, since they've got to cover thousands of different hardware types, but OSX is on one set of hardware. This should be a trivial bug to fix.
3. Finder seems to get worse and worse with every update. Nowadays, if I drag too many files from one place to another I have to kill it. No such problem on Debian or Windows.
4. Sometimes, Spotlight just "forgets" its index, and any time I try to find something I get unreliable results.
They might seem fairly minor, but I feel less value from OSX updates than I do from Windows, and that perception is a dangerous thing.
Also, can you say how/why it is getting better?
Speed. Windows always used to have issues with installs getting slow over time. I've had the same base installation of Windows 10 on my Surface Book and it's as fast as it was the day I bought it, despite several hundred gig sitting on the hard drive, numerous VM's, and several IDE's.
Stability. My Surface Book hasn't crashed in years, and my other Windows 10 machines have crashed so infrequently that I forgot what a BSOD looked like nowadays.
Cleaner UI. I think toolbars are still a bit of a mess on Windows 10, but they dud a good job to get away from the mess that was Windows 8, and I'm yet to meet someone that struggles with Windows in the same way they struggle with other OS's.
These aren't headline features, but they're the key points where Windows improves and where OSX seems to struggle. I still love the OSX UI, but I fear that we're not far away from things becoming more iOS friendly on the desktop, and parts of that fantastic UI being torn down.
The mechanism to detach the screen is not really reliable. It may work without issue 90% of the time but knowing that there's a 10% chance that I'll have to deal with some annoying bug means that I usually avoid using it.
Taking notes with the surface pen works great and is a huge convenience but if the goal of your notes is to learn something, pen and paper work better (bonus: reviewing physical notes gives you a break from the screen).
If you take away the detachable screen and the digital notes, you're left with an overpriced laptop.
With that said, I can't say that I regret owning one. I've used it for university, for work and for some light gaming.
I would also say that it works great for travelling (slim, light weight, good battery life, comfortable touch pad, etc.)
- It’s the only device I’ve ever cracked a screen on. There’s a vertical crack from the bottom of the screen to the top, which I attribute to some kind of weight on the laptop in my bag since there’s a gap between the keyboard and screen when closed.
- My WiFi chipset required me to disable an advanced TCP setting (offload? Can’t recall, found in a forum) in the registry to not crash my WiFi router or slow it down to 3Mbps
- Periodically my laptop will crash while sleeping (maybe it’s going to hibernation? Haven’t dug too hard) and prompt me with Bitlocker recovery every time.
My story is that I was a linux user, who switched to OSX, then gone back to linux and recently, thanks to WSL (linux subsystem for windows) I can still work comfortably in the environment I like.
Btw. windows surely has changed since I was working on it last time in the long run (for the better!)