There and Mac Again: a Surface Tale.

Those of you who know me know that I have an affinity for all things Apple.  My daily carry bag always rocks an iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch and my Grid-IT is filled with various white accessories.

(The aforementioned Grid-IT)

That being said, I work in a mostly windows shop and have begrudgingly used an HP desktop since I started in 2011. I’ve been working remotely more and came up for an upgrade so decided to upgrade to a laptop, specifically the Surface Book. I was excited to see Microsoft’s flagship product and willing to jump ship after Apple’s lackluster offerings lately.

My primary mobile computer the last 5 years has been my personal Macbook Air that has gotten me through all sorts of off-hours maintenance, Microsoft classes and been a great travel companion.  We opted for a refurbished Surface Book with Intel Core i7, dGPU, 16GB of Ram and 512SSD with a Surface dock to see if it would change my mind.

My first impression of the Surface Book was great. The screen pops off and can operate as a separate tablet for up to 4 hours.  The screen is fairly high resolution (3000 x 2000), the keyboard is solid and the touchpad is pretty close quality-wise to that of my beloved Mac.

(Surface Book next to some delicious cold brew and lemon pound cake from Everybody’s Coffee.)

Software is where things get dicey. Windows 10 is a good product. Microsoft fixed a lot of the problems with Windows 8 and created a stable, decent operating system.  Despite any stagnation Apple has had lately, they’re still winning in the little things. When I press Play/Pause on my Mac it will play or pause whatever media is playing at the time. The Surface Book does it about 10% of the time. I can connect to a new bluetooth device with two clicks on my Mac, takes about 7 in Windows 10.

Scaling is a mess. Since the display is higher resolution than most monitors, plugging in an external monitor (or two via the dock) will cause any open windows to resize, seemingly all picking the same random size that has no relation to any resolution being used.

The Surface Book is a great windows computer, possibly one of the best and I’m very thankful for the work-provided upgrade. However despite Microsoft’s solid offering if given the chance I’d totally pick up a new MacBook Pro instead.