Microsoft Surface v. iPad and MacBook Air

[jamezr]

I own a Pro and an iPad. Used a MBA plenty of times.

The Pro is a converged device, the first of its kind, disrupting a bunch of different markets. You got a device that acts like an iPad, a MBA, and a Mac Mini all rolled into one. It's like when the first smartphones came out and disrupted phones, PDA's, cameras, etc. Notice the first smartphones also didn't do these tasks as well as the devices they disrupted. Yet they're everywhere now.

It's not gonna kill either market any time soon but it's a welcome paradigm shift that could become a gold standard in a few years, especially because Intel's roadmap is set to make midrange x86 chips extremely viable on mobile and because MS is currently laying the groundwork in creating a singular mobile/desktop OS.

There are a lot of tablet benefits to using the Surface Pro. For one, it uses Win 8 instead your typical mobile OS. With a full desktop OS, you don't have to wait for things like ARM based apps for web services (IE Yelp, Tumblr, etc) to hit app stores - you can just pin the actual website and get full functionality. You also have a blazing fast SSD instead of slow flash memory. You can immediately tell the difference doing everything from browsing the net to using it as an E-reader.

Far as an Win8 Atom tablet vs the Pro, you wanna play a game or use something that requires processing power, you're gonna need that i5. I'm running Sim City and Guild Wars 2 on my Pro. Those games would slideshow on an Atom device.

Something that's not talked about a lot is you can also use it as a small form factor PC like a Mac Mini. When I bring it home, I stick it on my desk and hook it up to an HDMI monitor and the touchscreen basically becomes a huge trackpad.

All I use the iPad for nowadays is clicking on mines in Clash of Clans once a week.

Nice write up on the Surface Pro! What kind of battery life are you getting on the Pro?

 

[Vegastouch]

I was really impressed with the Surface Pro. I think ill get one at some point and maybe a Nexus 7 II as well...hopefully it will be a Nexus 8 with the device staying the same size.

 

[Technarchy]

I voted Macbook Air.

 

[Liquorpuki]

Nice write up on the Surface Pro! What kind of battery life are you getting on the Pro?

If I'm doing something processor heavy where the fans ramp up and kick in full blast, the battery is gone in 3 hours. If I'm just surfing the net on and off, it'll last a day. I took my Pro to Hawaii last weekend and it lasted from surfing the net at LAX 6 in the morning until I got to the condo at night. OTOH if I play Civ 5 for 3 hours straight, battery is dead.

I tell people if battery is a dealbreaker, wait for the Haswell iteration because the lower TDP and sleep states should make a big difference. Me, I've always kept one charger at work and one at home (not just for the Surface, but for every phone I've owned as well as my iPad) so it's not a big deal for me.

 

[lordofthereef]

I voted other, because I am really waiting to see what kind of battery life the surface pro can pull with the next gen cpus that are supposedly just around the corner. If they can get 6+ hours (8 would be amazing, but I am trying to be realistic) I feel that it will be the better product overall.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

I voted for the surface too. the iPad is just too limited in what it can do, even compared to the RT. And Windows 8 on a touch screen absolutely blows iOS out of the water.

 

[B...]

What are your hopes for the next generation Surface, Surface Pro, MacBook Air and iPad? We know almost for sure the iPad is going to get thinner and lighter, but will Apple endorse a keyboard attachment? Better processor? Lighter Air?

 

[Liquorpuki]

What are your hopes for the next generation Surface, Surface Pro, MacBook Air and iPad? We know almost for sure the iPad is going to get thinner and lighter, but will Apple endorse a keyboard attachment? Better processor? Lighter Air?

Surface RT - I'll never buy

Surface Pro - Haswell, type cover with a better trackpad, 256-512gb storage, official dock

MBA - Haswell and a $100-200 pricedrop

IPad - for Apple to raise the pricepoint of software on its iOS ecosystem so better apps can be developed. IOS 7 revamp

 

[durant35]

I have both an iPad mini and an Air. I use the mini for web browsing and the Air for actual work.

 

[Night Spring]

Can't realy answer without knowing *for what.*

The iPad and the iPad mini are the devices I use the most, as in the number of hours I spend on them. And I would be really, really sad if I didn't have at least one iPad. But I need the MacBook Air for my job. So I can't really pick between the Air and the iPad, I need them both for different things. I could do without the mini, however.

As for the Surface, just no. It's not as good a laptop as the Air, and it's not as good a tablet as the iPad.

 

[Southernboyj]

Although I use my iPad much more than my MBP, this is mainly because I have an iMac. However, given your choices.. I'd take a MacBook. I find the MacBook Air's screen to be terrible with bad viewing angles though. I use a retina MBP but I find even the non-retina 13"'s 1280x800 display to be overall better than the 1440x900 MBA.

 

[Essenar]

Yeah the atom tablets have much more functionality than the surface pro. Against the iPad they completely blow it away IMO.

Sorry, I have to disagree here.

Have you USED an Atom powered Windows tablet? I mean REALLY used it?

I picked one up from my friend who's a Geek Squad manager. He wanted me to try it out and let him know what I think about tweaking it. I asked him why and he said it's been getting returned a LOT.

It turns out the VivoTab runs like crap. Reviewers powder it by giving GeekBench scores and saying very subtle things like "it runs very great but don't expect PC performance". They're being VERY conservative with that statement. What they should say is, "it gets good benchmark scores but don't expect smooth performance".

It's choppy and noticeably so. I tried to de-bloat it and I was only able to notice a slight difference in performance. The iPad Retina has maybe 40% of the features that a full Windows 8 OS tablet offers, but the iPad opens apps ON demand. You hit the icon and bam, the app is up and you're running.

On the VivoTab, I probably opened up 5 or 6 of them, and with ALL of them, Word took nearly minutes to open. Nothing opened quickly and saving or writing data was always a waiting game. Having more than 3 or 4 tabs open on Chrome overwhelmed the hardware. HD videos didn't run smoothly for the most part. I had to lower the resolution. And forget gaming. The GMA graphics that it comes with isn't enough for much beyond maybe Source based games. And due to the fact that it's a desktop OS with a touch overlay, don't expect on screen digital controls for games. You would have to emulate a mouse with on screen gestures which means no movement mapped keys.

When I tried to play games, I had to run a mouse through a USB port and at that point, the tablet turned into a huge bag of accessories I had to carry around. Gaming required, at MINIMUM, a mouse and keyboard dongled with a USB hub.

Remember that performance is all 'relative'. The iPad technically has an inferior processor to the Nexus 7 and other tablets, but due to OS optimizations, it runs quicker than other competing tablets. I would say, if you do pick up a VivoTab or similar, try it out first. Because there's a reason it has the highest return rate of any tablet at stores like Best Buy.

 

[sectime]

I'm one week into having a Surface Pro. The steep learning curve is beginning to flatten out. Heat , battery life, and important to me, lack of a lighted keyboard option are reasons our relationship might not last. I work in low light rooms, studios and live venues. I'm using a USB light but it sucks compared to my Mac Air.
I use Parallels with Windows 8 on my MacMini, using it on the SP is so much better experience. Had to endure the jokes about lucky charms from mac coworkers

 

[Vegastouch]

Sorry, I have to disagree here.

Have you USED an Atom powered Windows tablet? I mean REALLY used it?

I picked one up from my friend who's a Geek Squad manager. He wanted me to try it out and let him know what I think about tweaking it. I asked him why and he said it's been getting returned a LOT.

It turns out the VivoTab runs like crap. Reviewers powder it by giving GeekBench scores and saying very subtle things like "it runs very great but don't expect PC performance". They're being VERY conservative with that statement. What they should say is, "it gets good benchmark scores but don't expect smooth performance".

It's choppy and noticeably so. I tried to de-bloat it and I was only able to notice a slight difference in performance. The iPad Retina has maybe 40% of the features that a full Windows 8 OS tablet offers, but the iPad opens apps ON demand. You hit the icon and bam, the app is up and you're running.

On the VivoTab, I probably opened up 5 or 6 of them, and with ALL of them, Word took nearly minutes to open. Nothing opened quickly and saving or writing data was always a waiting game. Having more than 3 or 4 tabs open on Chrome overwhelmed the hardware. HD videos didn't run smoothly for the most part. I had to lower the resolution. And forget gaming. The GMA graphics that it comes with isn't enough for much beyond maybe Source based games. And due to the fact that it's a desktop OS with a touch overlay, don't expect on screen digital controls for games. You would have to emulate a mouse with on screen gestures which means no movement mapped keys.

When I tried to play games, I had to run a mouse through a USB port and at that point, the tablet turned into a huge bag of accessories I had to carry around. Gaming required, at MINIMUM, a mouse and keyboard dongled with a USB hub.

Remember that performance is all 'relative'. The iPad technically has an inferior processor to the Nexus 7 and other tablets, but due to OS optimizations, it runs quicker than other competing tablets. I would say, if you do pick up a VivoTab or similar, try it out first. Because there's a reason it has the highest return rate of any tablet at stores like Best Buy.

So your are talking about atom computers. Does the surface pro use one? I don't know what a vivotab is so im a bit confused.

 

[Essenar]

So your are talking about atom computers. Does the surface pro use one? I don't know what a vivotab is so im a bit confused.

Really expensive Surface Pro uses a better processor but they cost upwards of $ 1000 or mere with the keyboard cover and you still have to deal with atrocious battery life and heat issues.

I will say this though, these "Desktop" style tablets with full x86 operating systems adapted for touch ARE the future without a doubt but the Surface Pro is the Alpha of what they should be and I think it's better for you to make a 3-4 year investment into a proven platform and jump puts Surface or Osx based tablet PC's in a few years when they're matured.

 

[spinedoc77]

Sorry, I have to disagree here.

Have you USED an Atom powered Windows tablet? I mean REALLY used it?

I picked one up from my friend who's a Geek Squad manager. He wanted me to try it out and let him know what I think about tweaking it. I asked him why and he said it's been getting returned a LOT.

It turns out the VivoTab runs like crap. Reviewers powder it by giving GeekBench scores and saying very subtle things like "it runs very great but don't expect PC performance". They're being VERY conservative with that statement. What they should say is, "it gets good benchmark scores but don't expect smooth performance".

It's choppy and noticeably so. I tried to de-bloat it and I was only able to notice a slight difference in performance. The iPad Retina has maybe 40% of the features that a full Windows 8 OS tablet offers, but the iPad opens apps ON demand. You hit the icon and bam, the app is up and you're running.

On the VivoTab, I probably opened up 5 or 6 of them, and with ALL of them, Word took nearly minutes to open. Nothing opened quickly and saving or writing data was always a waiting game. Having more than 3 or 4 tabs open on Chrome overwhelmed the hardware. HD videos didn't run smoothly for the most part. I had to lower the resolution. And forget gaming. The GMA graphics that it comes with isn't enough for much beyond maybe Source based games. And due to the fact that it's a desktop OS with a touch overlay, don't expect on screen digital controls for games. You would have to emulate a mouse with on screen gestures which means no movement mapped keys.

When I tried to play games, I had to run a mouse through a USB port and at that point, the tablet turned into a huge bag of accessories I had to carry around. Gaming required, at MINIMUM, a mouse and keyboard dongled with a USB hub.

Remember that performance is all 'relative'. The iPad technically has an inferior processor to the Nexus 7 and other tablets, but due to OS optimizations, it runs quicker than other competing tablets. I would say, if you do pick up a VivoTab or similar, try it out first. Because there's a reason it has the highest return rate of any tablet at stores like Best Buy.

I would honestly have to ask you if YOU have really used an atom tablet, I mean really used it. Here has been my experience:

Samsung Ativ S, owned 2 of them, one for 2 weeks the other for a month.
Asus VivoTab smart, owned one for 30 days.
Acer W510 owned 2 of them, each for 2 weeks.
Lenovo Thinkpad Tablet 2 owned 2 of them one for 30 days, the other for about 2 months and is the one I've kept.
Surface Pro (not an atom tablet, but for comparison) owned for 2 weeks.

I'd say I'm pretty qualified to comment on the day to day performance of an Atom powered windows tablet. I'd hardly say they run like "crap", that's a huge exaggeration and a disservice to your fellow forum members who may rely on you for reviews and helpful buying information.

I can honestly say that it was rare for my atom tablets to slow down, and they ran everything I threw at them smoothly including biggies like Photoshop and Office. I would have to assume you had a flawed or broken tablet. Things like open tabs and your performance are a HUGE mystery to me, I regularly run IE10 with 10+ tabs open and I can minimize it and run the desktop with NO slowdown anywhere, sometimes I even have 2 IE10 windows open each with a bunch of tabs, for web browsing these are pretty potent machines. Contrast that with my wifes ipad3 which CHOKES badly on 3 or 4 tabs, usually it doesn't even get to choke, as it usually just force quits as it runs out of memory. Worse is if it doesn't choke it will load the pages very slowly, as you scroll down the ipad is still loading pages, so as you scroll down all you see is checkerboard for several seconds until its loaded, then again when you scroll down again. You get no such nonsense on an atom tablet. Now granted a more fair comparison would be the ipad 4, but honestly I haven't tried one out. Other than the horrible internet browsing performance on the ipad3, I can't say it lagged much though in most everything else I did, although it did have this annoying habit of just force quitting programs at times which I would assume was it just simply running out of memory. Let's not even bring up things like Flash on the internet, which my atom tablet ran with aplomb, no stutters or slowdowns, the ipad can't even run these websites at all.

As for gaming performance, you are 100% correct, the atom tablets SUCK at games, no ifs or buts about it. Hopefully this will improve, but certainly the ipad and android tablets trounce it in this regard. New chips with new video power are coming though, but hardware isn't the full answer and developers and MS have to step up to the plate. If you buy your tablets for gaming then the Atom ones are not for you, but I do mostly web browsing and business on mine so it's perfect for me, I wish I had the time for games. I'm still amazed on a daily basis that I can run things like Photoshop and Office, that I have a "REAL" computer with 10-12 hour battery life and in a package as small/thin/light as an ipad, something that ran the internet as it was meant to be, ie: Flash, etc. Once again though for anyone thinking about Atom, WAIT until the new chips come out, either baytrail, or haswell and make your purchase then. But I bought my first Atom tablet about 6 months ago in December and have enjoyed them enormously since then, I'm looking forward to the hardware revisions.

BTW Chrome sucks, IMO it sucks on a regular desktop, but the Atom version of Chrome is horrendous. IE10 is really quite nice, it zooms in / out incredibly smoothly for example, and it can run a ton of tabs and is pretty light on memory. I'm talking about the desktop version of IE10 btw, as I don't run the garbage Metro IE10 ever.

 

[Night Spring]

Contrast that with my wifes ipad3 which CHOKES badly on 3 or 4 tabs, usually it doesn't even get to choke, as it usually just force quits as it runs out of memory. Worse is if it doesn't choke it will load the pages very slowly, as you scroll down the ipad is still loading pages, so as you scroll down all you see is checkerboard for several seconds until its loaded, then again when you scroll down again.

That sounds like an iPad 1. I've used all iPads 1-3 (skipped the 4 because all it had over the 3 was speed, and I didn't need more speed). Even with the 2, which I still occasionally use, I haven't noticed the problems you describe. I can open much more than 3-4 tabs without any slow down, I experience a force quit once so often, probably like once a week, at the most once every few days, and I can't remember the last time I saw the checkerboard effect.

Does your wife visit particularly graphic intensive websites? Or ones that run weird scripts? (I gave up on a website the other day after it kept crashing Safari on my iPad -- unfortunately, I don't remember which one it was.) Perhaps you have a slower Internet connection than I do?

 

[spinedoc77]

That sounds like an iPad 1. I've used all iPads 1-3 (skipped the 4 because all it had over the 3 was speed, and I didn't need more speed). Even with the 2, which I still occasionally use, I haven't noticed the problems you describe. I can open much more than 3-4 tabs without any slow down, I experience a force quit once so often, probably like once a week, at the most once every few days, and I can't remember the last time I saw the checkerboard effect.

Does your wife visit particularly graphic intensive websites? Or ones that run weird scripts? (I gave up on a website the other day after it kept crashing Safari on my iPad -- unfortunately, I don't remember which one it was.) Perhaps you have a slower Internet connection than I do?

To be more specific my wifes ipad is an ipad 2, I owned an ipad 3 but sold it a while ago. I may be mixing up my memory between the 2 ipads though, but I can't remember the ipad 3 being particularly smooth when web browsing. I know the 2 is horrible and I try not to use it unless it's an emergency and my windows tablet isn't around. In all honestly it wouldn't force quit until I hit maybe half a dozen tabs, and of course it depended on what websites I was on. Contrast with my windows tablets I can have multiple Flash enabled sites on multiple tabs and even be playing video on some of them and still runs smooth. No compromises.

 

[Night Spring]

To be more specific my wifes ipad is an ipad 2, I owned an ipad 3 but sold it a while ago. I may be mixing up my memory between the 2 ipads though, but I can't remember the ipad 3 being particularly smooth when web browsing. I know the 2 is horrible and I try not to use it unless it's an emergency and my windows tablet isn't around. In all honestly it wouldn't force quit until I hit maybe half a dozen tabs, and of course it depended on what websites I was on. Contrast with my windows tablets I can have multiple Flash enabled sites on multiple tabs and even be playing video on some of them and still runs smooth. No compromises.

Which sites do you visit that still use Flash? I can't remember the last time I came upon a site that had Flash content I cared about.

Anyway, even on my iPad 2, I used to come to macrumors every morning and open up all threads I wanted to read, anything from 6-9 tabs, and they all opened without a problem. On the 2, I think some of the tabs would have to reload when I opened too many, but on the 3, they all stay open and I rarely have to wait for any of them to reload. Of course, this is macrumors, so most of the pages are just text.

 

[lordofthereef]

I would honestly have to ask you if YOU have really used an atom tablet, I mean really used it. Here has been my experience:

Samsung Ativ S, owned 2 of them, one for 2 weeks the other for a month.
Asus VivoTab smart, owned one for 30 days.
Acer W510 owned 2 of them, each for 2 weeks.
Lenovo Thinkpad Tablet 2 owned 2 of them one for 30 days, the other for about 2 months and is the one I've kept.
Surface Pro (not an atom tablet, but for comparison) owned for 2 weeks.

Don't take this the wrong way, but why did you blow through so many of them? Was there something you were looking for that just wasn't there? Or do you really like trying everything there is to try? Honestly curious, because I've never come across a person who has cycled through that many tablets.

 

[MuffCabbage]

As far as the Atom tables, they are fine in my experience. I use an Atom tablet every day as my portable computer and I love it. It does so many more things than the iPad could, that work well for me as a student. Plus it has Flash and a desktop browser so it works as a regular computer too.

Active Digitizer + OneNote + Detachable Keyboard = Dream system for notes
Performance is bearable. It runs most stuff fine and IE10/Metro apps are very responsive to touch. Load times are fine for the most part.
Chrome/Opera scrolling/touch is not great, but IE10 is iPad good with touch/smoothness.
Office is a great selling point for me as I use it with SkyDrive every day.

I actually spend most of my time in Desktop using touch and trackpad together except for using a few Metro apps like Hulu and Mail.

People love to say the iPad has more apps, but the desktop browser and flash fills most holes people need the apps for. In the end I have no desire for iPads anymore.

 

[Night Spring]

Don't take this the wrong way, but why did you blow through so many of them? Was there something you were looking for that just wasn't there? Or do you really like trying everything there is to try? Honestly curious, because I've never come across a person who has cycled through that many tablets.

As I recall (there's a thread or two somewhere around here where he discussed his Win8 tablet saga), it wasn't any one thing. It was early days for Win8 devices, and every few weeks new tablets would be released with some feature that made them better than the one he had now. I remember following along until he was disappointed with the Surface Pro, but I hadn't realized he'd gone back to the Lenovo.

 

[spinedoc77]

Don't take this the wrong way, but why did you blow through so many of them? Was there something you were looking for that just wasn't there? Or do you really like trying everything there is to try? Honestly curious, because I've never come across a person who has cycled through that many tablets.

No it's a very legitimate question. The Samsungs had hardware issues, both of them, I'm not a big believer in Samsung quality. The Acer and Asus I loved, both very nice quality tablets, but they didn't have the digitizer/pen. The Thinkpad tablet 2 was my favorite, the first one I got had no 3g because it was not available at first, I returned it and eventually got a digitizer/pen one with 3G cellular data on it and I've settled into that one quite nicely until the new cpu's come out.

I also like to try stuff out a lot, it's a sickness. During that same time I also owned an ipad mini, a nexus 7, and various smartphones including a Note 2.

----------

As I recall (there's a thread or two somewhere around here where he discussed his Win8 tablet saga), it wasn't any one thing. It was early days for Win8 devices, and every few weeks new tablets would be released with some feature that made them better than the one he had now. I remember following along until he was disappointed with the Surface Pro, but I hadn't realized he'd gone back to the Lenovo.

Lol, I like how you put it, it certainly was and is a "saga". . I think I bounced thru tablets a lot waiting for the surface pro, but that was so disappointing I returned it and finally settled on an atom tablet.

 

[cnev3]

I spent a good amount of time with the Surface Pro. To me it's filling a niche that I don't need. I would much rather have a laptop for it's larger screen, physical keyboard, mouse, and ability to run all software.

When using a tablet for casual things like netflix, games, web browsing, the iPad is more than capable enough.

But that's just my opinion. There are users who enjoy and use the Surface a lot.

 

[Vegastouch]

I like the surface Pro. I just think they are over priced since you have to buy the keyboard separately. The next laptop i get will have a touchscreen though.
I also really like the Note 8.0 but would rather have a full computer capable device.