Microsoft: more people are switching from Macs to Surface than ever before
I decided to get a Surface Pro 4 instead of upgrading my Macbook Air for my casual&#x2F;portable computing device as I thought the combined Keyboard&#x2F;Tablet mode would be more useful than an Air. My initial impressions after the first few days use:<p>- The Surface tablet Hardware has a nice build quality, but the Touch Pen doesn&#x27;t register touches when it touches the screen you need to press down a little (unlike Apple&#x27;s pencil). The Type Cover keyboard is wobbly when it&#x27;s folded up so when I&#x27;m at a desk&#x2F;flat surface I leave it completely flat as it&#x27;s more sturdy. The touchpad is really small but I find myself using the touchscreen more so I don&#x27;t notice it much. Otherwise the Type cover is usable, not as productive as a laptop keyboard, but more productive than a virtual keyboard.<p>- It&#x27;s pretty fast, especially for its small profile<p>- The display is gorgeous, screen&#x27;s a little small but it makes the device ultra portable.<p>- User Account management is atrocious, I bought the Surface Pro as secondary ultra portable for my Wife and so creating a new User Account is one of the first things I tried to do but couldn&#x27;t at all, it kept failing with the useless generic &quot;Something went wrong&quot; dialog. You&#x27;re meant to sign in with your Hotmail and I couldn&#x27;t add another Local or Internet account for my wife for over 36 hours! it kept failing with &quot;Something went wrong&quot;. I really hate needing to use an Internet account or requiring an Internet connection to create User Accounts, I&#x27;d prefer to completely disable any notion of Internet&#x2F;hotmail accounts for Windows 10, it &quot;just works&quot; in Chrome OS but is highly infuriating and unstable in Windows 10. It still didn&#x27;t let me add any Users after a complete reset, I had to wait 36 hours for that luxury.<p>- They have this &quot;Hello&quot; face recognition where it&#x27;s able to log you in without entering a password which was a nice surprise and works pretty well.<p>- You now get annoying ads on your Lock Screen<p>- You also get nagged trying to keep you using Edge when trying to switch default browser to Chrome<p>- The AppStore is also unreliable, I couldn&#x27;t install 2&#x2F;4 Apps on the App Store Home Page (Halo and Planner 5D). Just failed with &quot;Error, see details&quot; with details being an empty dialog saying &quot;Something went wrong&quot;. The Netflix App stopped loading after a 2nd restart (just an empty black screen) even after completely killing&#x2F;restarting the App multiple times, only a full OS restart could get it working again. This experience falls way short of any of Apple&#x27;s App Stores which &quot;just work&quot;.<p>- Win 10 Apps aren&#x27;t that great, the Facebook App is fairly polished but lacks feature parity with Website, Twitter&#x27;s App is worse than its website, Netflix is the only Win 10 App I&#x27;m using over their website<p>- Win 10 isn&#x27;t a great OS for touch, the icons are too small, took me a few goes trying to open a folder in VS which VS thought I wanted to move the folder, so you&#x27;ll try using the touchscreen first than if it fails fallback to using the small touchpad.<p>- Within 3 hours of a new install I got by first BSOD, I installed VS 2017 beta with Docker + Hyper V. Docker for Windows refused to install the first time and crashes on Startup, I also couldn&#x27;t run an empty .NET Core + Docker template, hand a number of build errors saying it couldn&#x27;t find &quot;System&quot; namespace. The empty .NET Core Web App worked. In the end I uninstalled VS2017 beta, I&#x27;ll try again in the next release.<p>These software issues happened after installing all Window updates. It was surprisingly buggy, I&#x27;d expect a hardware&#x2F;software controlled device to be rock solid but the Surface was the most unreliable computing device I&#x27;ve owned.<p>In summary the Surface Pro4 tablet hardware is nice, quite thin for being able to run full Windows but also gets noticeably hot after a while (unlike iPad), has great display, Touch Pen isn&#x27;t as solid as an Apple Pencil also its unproductive switching between Finger Touch and Touch Pen but the finger registration is good so I&#x27;m only using the Touch Pen for drawing apps.<p>Overall it&#x27;s not as productive as a Macbook or as useful as a tablet than an iPad, so definitely not a Macbook or iPad killer, but has a useful niche as a secondary portable Windows 10 device. It&#x27;s software unreliability issues and stupid User account management means I could never recommend it as on option to my parents who love and spend most of their time on their iPads and use iMac + Chrome OS for more heavy duty tasks - which are automatically backed up and have both been virus free for years which we&#x27;re both happy about.