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Comment by mariusmg | Hacker News Reader

For me.

I like to use it as a tablet for the brilliant gesture based UI , as a ultrabook when i have to reply to a email and to plug in a monitor + real keyboard (104 keys or bust) when i'm doing development in Visual Studio.

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Visual Studio on a 10 inch screen? Are you kidding me?

> plug in a monitor

Surface will happily drive a 2560x1440 30" IPS panel display. Plenty of real-estate for Visual Studio.

So will a desktop. Why spend $1000 then?

Cause you can't take your desktop with you and code when you're visiting grandma.

But you can an external monitor, right?

It's better to take a surface + external monitor than a desktop + external monitor though

What if you have a small desktop, like a mac mini? Actually, a mac mini is better than a Surface in this scenario.

To correlate. I do much of my programming at home on two 23" monitors on a desktop, or at work on a 15" mbp and a 27" cinema display - and I absolutely love the excessive screen real-estate. But sometimes I am visiting family, at an airport, &c and want to be somewhat productive. I won't write as much code as I would with my normal setup, but there is an allure to keeping a tiny laptop/ultrabook in my go-bag and writing some small bit of code whilst sitting at a coffee shop. I'm not normal though, I take great pride in having ssh'ed home from the top of a 14'er. My absolute dream is to have a phone that can plug into a docking station and drive a full workstation setup. When it's time to leave I would love to just pick up this device, and have everything with me and operational (albeit in a limited capacity). Until the Ubuntu phone announcement, the Surface is the closest thing to my fantasy device (a major problem as well being that I'm a game developer - the HD4000 in the thing makes me cringe).

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