TLDR:

The Surface Pro is a great personal laptop replacement, but don’t expect it to replace a workstation.

Intro

This isn’t going to be a numbers based review. I’m not going to run benchmarks, talk about the screen refresh rate , or rattle off the specs of every component in my Surface Pro. Instead, I’m going to go though how I’ve used the it for the last year, and how it performed in different situations. There are 4 general categories of how I’ve used my Surface Pro

Graduate School Leisure Creative work Field work

What do I have

Here’s the quick specs of my Surface Pro 4 so you can compare it against what you are looking at:

Processor – Intel i7-7660U

Ram – 8 GB

Memory – 256 GB

I also have Microsoft’s Type cover, and the Microsoft pen.

Grad school – Research

I’m a PhD student studying aerospace engineering and I use my Surface for both my traditional classes , as well as my research. My research is in astrodynamics, or how spacecraft and natural bodies move in space. It does not require me to use CAD, FEA, or CFD, three graphics heavy tasks. Instead, my work requires me to write a lot of my own code. I, currently, use Matlab for most of my dynamics work, Python for machine learning tasks, and C for assorted Embedded systems. I don’t work with big data. The largest data sets that I’ve worked with in astrodynamcis so far take up about 40% of my ram. I have a dedicated desktop for research, but when I’m at home or away from the lab I use the Surface as my research machine. The speedup of running scripts on my desktop is nice, but not major enough to cause me to discard doing reserach on my surface, expecially inital programming and troubleshooting before I run an long-duration script.

Grad School – Classes

The second major part of grad school so far has been classes. I take three a semester. I use One-note to take notes in class and as scratchpad to do my HW. So far it’s worked out great. It makes taking notes easier and my battery easily lasts through the whole school day without needing to be charged if my brightness isn’t on full. In class I like my brightness on minimum and I’ve never had my surface die during class. The surface pen is great to write with and because of all the symbols in class I wouldn’t be able to type notes unless was writing in LaTeX and that would make drawing diagrams hard. One-note has also been super useful in keeping a research journal and as scratchpad.

Leisure

Most of my leisure on my computer either consists of watching videos or reading articles. The screen is gorgeous and has great colors which makes watching videos great. For browsing the internet, the Surface Pro, like most modern laptops, is fine. I can have lot’s of tabs open without it slowing down (unless I’m using chrome and slack which eats up all your ram). One thing that I am not, is a video gamer. I play the occasional game of Civ5 or Kerbal Space Program. I normally have a YouTube playing in the background of games and I only suffer a slight performance hit in my games. I don’t think the Surface Pro will make for a good machine if you are playing graphics heavy games.

Creative Work – Blogging

The final large category of things I use my Surface Pro for is creative work. I write this blog almost exclusively on my surface pro. The type cover is a pleasure to type on.

When you first encounter the type cover with it’s weird fabricey feel it does feel weird, but after a day of using it I started to love it. The keys feel nice and between typing code, or writing prose I’ve never considered getting a Bluetooth keyboard. I do have a Bluetooth mouse, because I still prefer mice to track-pads, but the track-pad on the type cover is still quite good. It’s possibly the second best track-pad I’ve ever used after an apple track-pad. Using the pencil to create drawings/ Free body diagrams/hand annotate figures in the Surface Pro’s builtin sketchpad is really nice. The same responsiveness that makes taking notes easy also makes drawing easy.

Creative Work – Other

Aside from the weekly blog posts, which makes up most of my creative output, I also dabble in a few other areas. For photo editing I use RawTherapee and Gimp

They both keep up quite well and there’s only a small amount of lag when loading in images. Considering that my Surface Pro has no dedicated graphics card, I’m extremely happy with how snappy it was compared to my last laptop. With creating vector graphics in Inkscape, again the Surface Pro is nice and snappy. Unfortunately, I cant recommend this computer for anything more than light video editing as I felt it was too slow.

Note: I tried out Adobe’s CC free trial, and while they are really nice, I wouldn’t use it enough to warrant paying for it. They all had their normal interfaces and then touch interfaces. I used their normal interfaces as I felt restricted by the touch screen interface.

Field Work

Summer 2018 I participated int he Spaceport America Cup, an international rocketry competition which I wrote about here. I was in charge of the payload, and because of my dabbling in photography, I also was taking most of the photos while we were there. We were in a region of New Mexico that regularly reached over 100F, had daily dust-storms, and less than 5% humidity. I used my Surface Pro and a SDR as the ground station for the payload and for running through testing as we were integrating the rocket. It worked well as long as it wasn’t left in direct sunlight or running a CPU heavy script. This wasn’t uncommon as a lot of electronics (Phones, my DSLR, on rocket electronics, and even a gopro ) would overheat if left in the direct sunlight for too long. Overall the Surface Pro performed well enough that I would take it out with me to fieldwork provided it wasn’t too wet or too rough.

Conclusion

As I already said in the TLDR, the Surface Pro is a great replacement for a laptop if you also get the type-cover and pen. I love mine. It can’t replace a workstation, but for 95%+ of people, it doesn’t need to. Who would I recommend this for?

People happy with their laptop, but want to upgrade

People who use their Computer mainly for Microsoft Office and the internet

Programmers

Students

Engineers with access to a more powerful machine for specific tasks (CAD, FEA, CFD, etc…)

People who need to draw on a tablet

Who wouldn’t I recommend it to

Professional photo/video editors without a second more powerful machine

Engineers (without a more powerful machine for CA, FEA, CFD, etc)

Hardcore gamers

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