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Comment by Mythrl | Hacker News Reader

It has about the same battery life as an 11" MacBook Air. If you add a keyboard, then it is about the same price as an 11" MacBook Air but the MacBook Air only has 1366x768 resolution vs. 1920x1080 for the Surface Pro.

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It's nearly impossible to use in your lap, so it's not a LAPtop, and as a tablet it's just weird. Uncomfortable to type on when on a flat surface, and in portrait mode it's a joke.

But most importantly, the Surface Pro appears to be limited to 4GB of memory.

That's really not enough if you're a desktop / mobile software developer that wants to use this as a laptop and tablet. 8GB is really the minimum.

You're better off with either a MacBook Air or an equivalent Windows laptop where you can actually get more memory.

Oh sure it is. I use a Dell laptop with 4GB of ram running visual studios (sometimes two instances), full blown SQL Server, SQL Server management studio (graphical database client), Chrome with a bajillion tabs and a handful of corporate-required background applications. I still don't get any noticable lag due to paging.

I strongly disagree. As someone that has done quite a bit of development work on a laptop with only 4GB of memory, I can tell you right now that life was significantly better after I upgraded to 8GB.

If the built-in disk has low enough latency, your memory needs go way down as giant predictive disk caches become unnecessary and swapping is less of a performance killer.

Moving to SSD let me put a VM on my 8GB laptop that stole half the RAM without destroying my ability to run a couple of visual studios, office and a pile of chrome tabs. Under 4GB and spinning disk that was unworkable.

RAM needs might be stagnating for a few years as high-performance flash becomes commonplace and applications don't have to be as aggressive about keeping everything in memory.

You're suggesting that dramatically shortening the lifetime of my SSD through needless writes is better than simply adding more memory?

And what if my working set is incapable of fitting into that measly 4G of memory (which likely will only be 3GB at most once the OS and Visual Studio is loaded) even with swapping? I can tell you right now that's easy to do with Visual Studio with even "relatively" small applications once you start loading debug symbols.

That's fine if the projects you are loading in Visual Studio are reasonably sized. If you load a single monolithic legacy solution, the Intellisense database is huge, and you run into cases where you have to close every single thing other than Visual Studio just to have enough memory to load all the debugging symbols when debugging the application. Life got so much better when we switched to 64 bit Windows 7.

Unfortunately very few people will be comparing it against a MBA and other 'ultra'books as MS seems intent on positioning it as a tablet that you can do work on. And compared to other tablets in the market, it seems a bit absurd. They're going to have to do an amazing marketing job to separate the two products into their proper categories, but considering they look the same, and sport the same features I imagine they're not going to succeed.

If you read the comments under the linked article, plenty of people are comparing it to the MBA.

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