A Year with the Surface Go | Hacker News Reader

A Year with the Surface Go

andregarzia.com

116 pointssoapdog71 comments

I've had a Surface Go since August 2018. Aside from the small size, I hate it. I can't think of a time when I bought a new computer (including phones and tablets) and was immediately underwhelmed by its performance. It is so slow.

The other issue is the keyboard. Unless you have it on a solid surface, you have to be very careful about putting any weight on it. The keyboard will flex, which causes it to think the trackpad has been pressed. You can imagine the issues that come from that.

A Microsoft Store exchanged my keyboard for a new one, thinking it must have been a defect. After using it for a while and having the same experience, Microsoft support told me that's how the keyboard is designed and I need to be more careful when using it. OK...

If you don’t travel much I always recommend used thinkpads coming off lease on eBay. Higher end models used by business people who probably used them as PowerPoint display devices. They aren’t usually light or fancy, but they are cheap and powerful. Every 3-5 I spend ~$400 on one as my personal device and never disappointed. I like them more than my work macbook pros but they are not as portable.

Don't forget business-grade laptops have good keyboards ;-) I find Thinkpad keyboards great, btw.

The problem I have with thinkpads is the same as I have with almost all OEM windows machines---the branding is impenetrable. Like, which one is the good one? Is it the T series? The E series? The X series? The QZT series? Which is the Thinkpad X̡̨͟T͏̧͢Y̶̨͏7̷̀5̶̷Q̵̶͡͠͝Q͠͡ mark XZY? Is that the best one or the worst one? And you can't look at the prices to tell, and just assume the most expensive one is the best one, because the prices are for the current generation, and you're looking on eBay on the last generation. Screw that.

Thinkpad T4##/s(14”), X2##(12”) or x1c(12” + thin) series are the ones to look at. Others not really much of a reason to bother and are in much less supply.

The original XTRAs system was like:

X: portable for Japanese(B5, 12”)

T: portable for American/European(A4, 14”)

R: office typewriter for secretaries(A4, 15”)

A: office computer for bosses(A4, 15”)

s: experimental ultraportable

Post-Lenovo acquisition system is:

X1xx: junks for kids

X1C : MacBook killer for China(14”)

X2 : stretched office typewriters for Japanese(12” wide)

T : Proper American Portable™️(14”)

R: Still office typewriters

A: X2 but uses AMD CPU

W: the most best ones that you order only by accident Yoga: ones that flips fragile keyboard exposing 11, 13, Flex, Helix, Tablet, whateverett: experimentals

The only ones you’d care are X1C, X200, or T400 depending on your region, religion and body size.

Not going to solve your problem but...

Actually, the convention is really simple, when they follow it. It goes [model line] [Screen size] [Intel CPU generation] [0 for intel, 5 for AMD CPU of same vintage] + Yoga if flippy

Model lines: X is premium business, T is mainstream business, E is economy, L is legacy/economy (extra ports). So by looking at "L380 yoga" you know it's a 13" convertible with lots of ports and an 8th gen Intel CPU.

That is actually really cool! Except for the "if they follow it" part, which rather threatens to scupper the whole thing. :-)

No 10th gen CPUs?

There's no "good one", since the different series represent design tradeoffs other than just price. Some people want the lightest device, some the most powerful, others want the longest battery life. You can't have it all.

If you just took the most expensive ThinkPad, you'd probably end up with a P-series workstation, which is far from most people's definition of "best". And that's okay.

Are there specific sellers that you follow?

Greencitizen. Find sellers that sell broken stuff for parts. Those are the honest people. If everything is perfect on their profile you know it’s not. If there’s a lot of broken stuff for parts the stuff they say works usually works.

The X220 cost nothing (last one I got was 50euro from ebay) and, with Linux, have very long battery life. Put in a good ssd and extra memory and it for the feel (I did not benchmark) will outperform the Go for everything I do.

Also the battery can be swapped so you can take 2 for travelling.

They are not heavy but they are bulky indeed.

> Aside from the small size, I hate it. I can't think of a time when I bought a new computer (including phones and tablets) and was immediately underwhelmed by its performance. It is so slow.

Put Linux on it and it's not so slow anymore. With 4GB of RAM you can even run the GNOME desktop (for its touch friendliness) with few or no memory issues, without ever hitting swap. The 'tablet' experience is vastly better on recent versions of GNOME than it ever was on Windows 10, and easily on a par with the new iPadOS. It actually turns tablet computers into a form factor you can use professionally.

How exactly do you do that? I have been using windows on my surface go solely because I gave up trying to figure out all the secureboot settings and how to turn enough things off to get a live USB to boot. I would love to switch, but it was so difficult and I never did accomplish it!

If you can get to the firmware settings, there should be an option to 'disable secure boot', 'enable third-party OS's' or the like. Then you should be able to boot anything that has been properly signed, at least. I'm quite sure that people have done this, even on the Surface Go.

https://www.infofuge.com/install-ubuntu-18-04-on-microsoft-s...

Ubuntu support secure boot. You probably mean fastboot?

I have the 8GB / 128GB SSD variant and I haven't had issues with its performance, though I came at it from the angle of replacing an Android tablet as that market has dried up.

I've found it pretty pleasant for that use case, and even some light coding on it during the holidays at my parents. Compile times are not great and I've been meaning to set it up so I can use VS Code's remote feature to use it as a frontend to my home server, but actual interaction in VS code and completion etc. is totally acceptable for Rust and JS.

and was immediately underwhelmed by its performance. It is so slow.

I think it says more about the state of software today than anything else, when 4GB of RAM and a CPU that's faster than the laptop I was using 10 years ago (compare https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+Duo+T240... and https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Pentium+4415Y...) is still considered "slow" for those everyday tasks that haven't changed in 10 years.

The current standard machine sets the available features and the optimization level in stone, not the machine from 10 years ago.

I know there are situations where a "real" desktop OS is helpful, but at the same time it's remarkable to me how well my 2016 iPad Pro holds up with only 2 GB of RAM.

The 2015 model actually had 4 GB, but that was a 12.9" screen and substantially pricier.

They stuck with the same 4 GB in 2018's redesign unless you buy the very expensive 1TB storage option, in which case it's silently bumped up to 6 GB. Apple oddly doesn't even advertise that difference, it only came out through benchmarking.

Hopefully the 2020 refresh bumps it up to 8 GB which I think would future proof new devices for 5+ years of solid performance.

Honestly, they just need to get their flash storage supply chain under control, and configure swap memory support for iOS. Or perhaps add a microSD port and let the device swap to a (disposable) microSD card. It's just preposterous that RAM-constrained mobile devices still can't use virtual memory (something that has been known since the 1960s) because of their bottom-of-the-barrel eMMC storage.

At least it puts a limit on how much RAM something can use. VM is always extremely slow, and once your RAM is full performance slows to a crawl...

I thought apple devices used nvme storage now?

Electron apps I am forced to use are probably the problem. I love vscode and would support other similar electron apps but people are using electron without even a need for it and locking down features that you can implement with some work for the browsers.

They are hostile too. Some of them won't let me build my own client or use a third party one.

Keep in mind there's an important difference between the 64 and 128 GB models: 64 GB ones use an eMMC for storage, while the 128 GB model uses a NVMe SSD

Feels like we're talking about 2 totally different machines - I'm using one right now, and always use it or a Surface Pro 7, and I couldn't be happier. I use one of them on my lap 95% of the time (I generally work from a recliner). I love the keyboard in this situation. I guess I've never tried putting weight on it - maybe that's a different keyboarding approach; I think the ergonomic recommendation is to not rest your hands on the keyboard, IIRC.

I'm entirely satisfied with the performance. Although mainly I'm coding in a terminal through ssh, so I don't push it much. But for videos, browsing, etc I've never had any issues.

Along with the very pleasant WSL Linux experience, I also wouldn't want to go back to a computer without a touchscreen and excellent stylus support. Of course, I could get that with an iPad Pro, but then I don't have a real computer - so I'd need 2 devices (which I used to do, and hated it). Being able to read and annotate papers with a pen (including in portrait mode) is very nice, as is presenting from a computer I can draw on directly.

I'm surprised at how long the battery lasts, and like the magnetic connection to power or docking station. The dock is really nice too, although I don't use it as much as I used to, since I'm mainly using it on my lap nowadays.

That seems totally different than my experience as well. Especially the part about the battery life: mine seems almost immediately empty so I have to bring battery packs, cables and/or multiple devices. I did address this with MS support, sent it in for repairs (twice) but nothing wrong with it so the light work I use it for apparently is very different from what you do. I do the same on the iPad pro (although that was not the intention: I wanted to do more dev on this one) and that one has 20%+ end of day while the Go shuts down within a few hours. Not even 6 months old. Useless...

I think it's more that software today is absolutely awful, because almost no software developers care if their software is slow. "CPU is cheap!"

I have had endless keyboard hardware issues; MS refuses to anything even though it is inside warranty. Tells me I have to be more careful and it is my fault. Absolute opposite of my experience with Apple and the iPad Pro. So I just use a bluetooth keyboard and a mouse with it now as the keyboard cover (2nd one) just completely stopped working. I have not had the thing for 6 months...

Besides that, the performance but especially the battery life is just depressing to work with. I could live with the performance if the battery life would be anything like my iPad, but for a device so slow having battery life this bad seems weird.

I have 8GB variant and performance on Win10 was abysmal. But i bought it to install Linux on it - and it's perfect. Best small-form Linux tab on market.

If we're making this a little bit of a surface line conversation: I'm absolutely amazed at how bad the latest Microsoft Surface Pro 7 is. I bought it for OneNote and as a second computer to my main laptop.

The pen regularly is not recognized, the entire computer freezes for 2 seconds when rotating including stuttering video and audio. The entire computer freezes for 1s when opening the keyboard which happens for me two or three times every five minutes of active work in OneNote. I've done about 20 hours of work in OneNote now and couldn't recommend it to anyone for any workflow, not formal design work, not annotating PDFs, not drawing, not storyboarding or wireframing or writing by hand. I only keep using it hoping I'll stop hitting it's fail cases by learning it all and that has yet to happen. I plan to try out the iPad next week. Any other recommendations for a thinking workspace with digital pen?

I have a list of 10-15 OneNote peculiarities that seem insane to have made it into production, and that OneNote is almost unusably laggy on Microsoft's latest device is wild to me. They center around the virtual keyboard and non-ink object selection and manipulation, of which there are zero official Microsoft tutorials or manuals. There is no way in OneNote on the surface to "exit" an action, selection or keyboard. Any tap will open the keyboard, cycling the 2x 1s freeze for opening and closing the keyboard. It's maddening.

OneNote on the iPad Pro is great, just go for it.

Make sure to get the matte screen protector for the tablet for additional pen-to-surface friction.

I think I'll give that a shot. I'm just greatly disappointed with OneNote's organizational features. In that they don't exist. I have notebooks > sections > pages but nothing within pages. No portals, no tools in place (leaving a pen or two in the canvas where I'm switching often). In portrait mode it takes me 3 taps to get from highlighter to pen when I'm reading papers. The PDF import as a stack is almost useless for anything larger than 30 pages. I could go on for a while. I want to try a formal design application and maybe I can make use of layers to save on the "miles" of scrolling I do in OneNote.

I have both a Surface Go and an iPad Pro, and while using the pen on the iPad Pro on its own offers a satisfactory experience, I find that it's not nearly as good as the Surface Go when it comes to accurately recognizing the correct input method when quickly switching between pen and touch inputs.

My iPad Pro very often would treat my finger as a stylus and start drawing when I meant to use my fingers to scroll around, while on my Surface Go I honestly can't even recall that happening even once, and it's a night and day difference in terms of ergonomics for me. I think Microsoft's much longer experience in handling hybrid pen & touch input in OneNote for Windows still gives it an edge at the moment.

That literally never happened to me, not even once. I vaguely recall there’s a setting in one note to never accept touch as pen input, so all touches are navigation and all pencil input is drawing. Give it a try?

Interesting. I received an SP7 for christmas from my wife after I made one too many comments about the crummy battery on my XPS 13. I didnt expect to like it as much as I do. Your issues with 1N are not thinks I encounter regularly myself but for my use it's an amazing machine.

I have the 4GB Surface Go. I have mixed feelings about the device. I misjudged it. I expected a lightweight laptop that can work as a tablet, but Surface Go is primarily a tablet that can do some desktop work.

The performance is OK for my needs. The screen bezels are too thick for my taste, but I guess that's the tablet part coming into play.

The device is a bit too thick for my taste, it's matching a Macbook Pro in thickness. The weight isn't special either, sure, the tablet alone is light, but add the keyboard and it's not that light anymore.

The keyboard is the best and worst part. I enjoy using it, but the way it's designed, it's completely unusable on a lap. You need a flat, solid surface to use the keyboard, full stop.

I thought it'd be more usable as a laptop. Next time, I'll look for something like Asus Transformer, they have a rigid keyboard that holds the screen, or a used Macbook 12 (I love the form factor of that one).

I am not sold on the kickstand. I don't really see many benefits of it. I guess it's useful if you want to watch a movie on your tablet and want to put it standing up? I don't know.

My primary computing device at home, for leisure, side project coding and sometimes work, has been a surface pro 6 (13” i5) for almost a year. It replaced my MBP 2018 edition that I resold for almost its purchase value around this time last year.

It was my first move to Windows after a decade of Mac at home, though we use Windows at my place of work so it’s not unfamiliar territory to me, and I have to say that I really enjoy the machine. The combination of VSC and WSL is just so great a way to box away your development parts, without contaminating the OS you use to watch movies. I know some of you are probably good at running setups that never bricks, but I’m not, and having it in a container you can easily replace with a new Linux image has been so nice.

I use the tablet part quite a bit. The keyboard is nice, and I don’t really mind that it’s slow. The only real downside about from the privacy issues with Windows, is that it’s not as good as a laptop when you’re lying down with it on your stomach.

Not the OP but I've also had a Surface Go for a while. I use it to fill the following niche:

A device that is light, small, fanless, has a usable keyboard and touchpad, runs a real OS, can be used to write and debug code, has built-in LTE, runs a Kindle app.

Other than a tendency to hang on reboot (shared with previous LTE Surfacen I've used), I've liked using it. I stopped carrying a tablet (iPad or Samsung Tab) with me when traveling since the Suface Go does pretty much everything a tablet does and is not much larger/heavier, and also replaces a laptop on short trips. Since phones are now so large (I use a Note 10+), I typically read books on my phone anyway, reducing the need for a tablet sized device for that purpose. On longer trips I carry both the Go and a regular laptop.

The Go is the only computer that I have actually found usable on an airplane. Fits on a tray table very easily.

Yes forgot to mention that. Although in 1st class you can use a Macbook 16...

International first/business. Most domestic airlines (US or European) don’t have the room for a 16”, sadly.

I took my Chromebook Go to a 15 hour flight last weekend and it worked great.

Incredible battery life. Amazing keyboard and perfectly usable on an airplane.

Crostini to run Linux in a container supported basically right out of the box however I needed to pass arbitrary USB devices into my container so I set up crouton next to crostini and had:

(1) ChromeOS

(2) Ubuntu user-space running with crouton using the ChromeOS kernel, with full native access to the hardware and also all USB devices.

(3) crostini's "termina" container running its own Linux kernel, with no access to the native USB devices except for the ones whitelisted by Google.

The nicest thing is, you can set up a VPN client in crostini and can enjoy network isolation.

I'd get on my VPN on crostini and do my trading there while everything else on the device goes through the default route, without the VPN.

Also when it comes to how Google called that container "termina" really makes me think someone at Google wrote some quick code to spin up a PoC and then never changed the name.

The Surface Pro also fits nicely on a 737 tray, you just need to find the correct placement for the kickstand, I usually take my Pro 4 while flying for this reason

My XPS13 9350 from 3 years ago fits comfortably on every airplane tray I've bothered to put it on as well. This is not a small or super light machine.

That's not really saying much.

I adore the Surface Go form factor, but I'm baffled by its hardware choices, especially the CPU. To be frank, the 4415Y is godawful. Microsoft's last small tablet the Surface 3 used the Z8700. Let's compare them for illustrative purposes. The 4415Y is two years newer than the Z8700, but has twice as high an SDP, and has a Recommended Customer Price 4.35 times as high. The 4415Y Geekbenches at 2,000 and 4,000 for single and multi-threaded performance. The Z8700 comes in at 1,100 and 2,800. A two year newer CPU that costs over four times as much is just barely matching the Z8700 on per-watt performance.

I don't know what kind of fuckery has been going on at Intel with regards to their low-power chips but it isn't good.

Otoh the Go is usable for most purposes in terms of performance, whereas the previous small Surfaces really weren't. Perhaps faster SSD helped.

Intel's newer design that will come for the Surface Neo and such are also nightmares.

1 big core (from the regular Core architecture lineup) + 4 little cores (Atom), how the hell did they even want to make that?

> "1 big core (from the regular Core architecture lineup) + 4 little cores (Atom), how the hell did they even want to make that?"

I'm guessing the idea was adopted from ARM since they have had mixed-core chips for years now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_big.LITTLE Probably the best known line of devices that use them is Samsung's Galaxy S series of smartphones.

Yes, those tend to/always have at least two big cores, not only one. Having only one complicates scheduling needlessly.

I also noticed that the processor has no AVX or AVX2. So no nice speedups for highly optimised avx code.

I don't understand Microsoft's logic with the Surface line.

- The Surface Go didn't get updated in 2019, despite having as a main issue its performances.

- The Surface Pro X is the future hardware-wise but has a ton of issue software-wise.

- The Surface Pro 7 is an iterative change and it's been like that since a few years already.

- The Surface Book 2 (the only one I used extensively) is still a mess hardware-wise. The weight and angles feel atrociously weird.

- The Surface Laptop is good but too expensive compared to the competition.

Apple has fixed a few things last year with a MacBook Pro 16" that is nearly perfect and a MacBook Air that gives a lot, I was expecting Microsoft to answer to that with a spec bump of the Go and a reduction in price of the Laptop but it didn't happen.

My guess would be that the "Surface" product line doesn't have one deciding visionary that knows and decides what to deploy in the market, that the teams building these things follow.

So instead of having a product line that hits each section with a device that makes sense, there is bunch of different devices that are OK, but doesn't make 100% sense for any of the segments, and the devices are overlapping a bunch.

How does it compare with an iPad Pro?

I had the choice of going with a Surface, or with an iPad Pro + a macbook air.

I chose the latter option because:

1. programming sounded better on the macbook air. Maybe it is different now with WSL? But I didn't know enough at the time.

2. airdrop, and all the cool stuff you get when you stay within Apple's ecosystem (I already had an iPhone).

I'm not too happy about 2, because honestly I'd rather have devices that can all work well with each other no matter the brand, and I would have rather had one device like the surface that could be both a great tablet and a great laptop.

I'm super satisfied with the iPad pro though. So I'm wondering how this compares.

This post spurred me to learn that linux, specifically Ubuntu runs nearly perfect on the surface go. Only cameras don't seem to work which is an accomplishment. Would be curious to see if the power usage improvements of Ubuntu 19 could give 9 hours of actual battery life on this compared to the 6 it usually has provided in windows.

Semi related; I've wanted to run MacOS with full update support on a surface pro for some time. Hackintosh can provide one working snapshot, but I want a device I have to hack to keep running. In case this has changed would love to know. I love the form factor of the Surface.

I have a new Surface Go with a Verizon LTE SIM card. Being online all the time is great, and the portability of it is also great. But the keyboard is really painful as the keys are all about 30% smaller and scrunched together. I've even contemplated using a regular Surface keyboard on my Go, but it looks ridiculous. So I've been traveling with both my Surface Go and new Surface Laptop- and I'll probably roll down the Go to someone else at the office who can use it.

I got it as soon as it started shipping. It just replaced every other computer, smartphone and tablet I was using.

Best device I ever got, period. I've the business version with 256 NVMe SSD, Win10 Pro, 8Gb of RAM, and the dock hooked to a large screen.

I've lost quite a few pen. I now purchase the cheaper ones on Amazon. I wish the pen went into a hole like on the thinkpads

How can it replace a smartphone? Can you use it for calls? Does it fit into a large pocket?

With VOIP like skype it can be used for calls.

Also it fits in a small bag I carry everywhere.

It's a great little Linux laptop. Perfect form factor for me and everything except the webcam works perfectly in Linux.

I have a surface pro that I have been very happy with, but it has a couple of issues that make me still use other computers many times. I got it thinking it could replace both my laptop and my tablet, since it can be both.

One, it is a bit too heavy to use as my primary tablet. It gets heavy to hold for a long time, especially laying down. Also, the on screen keyboard is not great; the iPad keyboard works much better.

Second, the fact that the keyboard is detachable means it can't really be used on your lap. I often like to lean back in a chair and use the keyboard on my lap; the flexible keyboard makes this not work. You need a table to set it on.

It is a pretty powerful laptop for its size, though, and I like being able to take only it when I am traveling. It even plays games fairly well (at least as well as can be expected with onboard graphics)

It's worth mentioning that you can get third-party keyboards made for Surface Go, that are wireless. It makes the form factor even more interesting when you can separate the keyboard from the screen if you want.

Brydge makes keyboards with clamps and a rigid hinge. I've not used one but it seems like a neat concept. Also Surface Go model is not out yet.

I like light machines too. My favourite right now is the Pixel (book) slate. It's light, battery life is fine, screen is great and can run Android and Linux apps. I spend most time in chrome, but often switch to Emacs and SSH into other machines. The keyboard is the weakest part, but I got used to it and started to even like it. The key movement is pleasant and it's very quiet.

I've had the (4GB) Surface Go since launch and always thought it was too slow to be usable. Finally did a full reinstall a month back and it's somehow been great since, it's not a powerful machine but feels very snappy in daily use now. Basically wasted a year.

Must be something going on that's fixed in a later Windows version because the difference is night and day.

I have an Acer Spin 1 that is a slightly larger form factor (11", .65? thick) and quite snappy and delightfully portable. The laptop form factor (convertible to tablet) and keyboard are great.

Only downside is the 1366x768 screen, which I find just tolerable for the 11" display.

I have the 8gb model running Arch Linux with sway wm. Instead of the default keyboard I have a split ergonomic mechanical keyboard. A bit unconventional, but it's my favorite dev machine! Helps me keep my shoulders and neck happy.

I thought about doing exactly that! Down to using sway and a "proper" keyboard. Are you happy with the performance?

I'm really happy! The 8GB model is super snappy with Arch+Sway. Battery life with full brightness is ~4-5 hours. If I'm overloading it maaaaybe 3.5 hours, but that rarely happens. It's so small that I'll throw a battery pack in my bag with it and charge it while using it if needed too.

So... Are these reviews paid for? I've known a few people who got stuck with a surface, usually because their work forced it on them, and they invariably hated it. The thing is barely a computer. They've sacrificed physical usability for the sake of some form factor pissing contest with Apple. Why are all the "best laptop of 20xx" reviews led by the surface and Dell's equally awful XPS? I don't want an eight ounce conversation piece. I want a brick I can drop down the stairs with a bunch of RAM in it. I can't be the only one.

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