Surface Book vs. MacBook Pro - Your thoughts?

[James Falconer]

Love all the feedback here.

@NYChaos - can't say I can support your analogy from experience, but all in good fun

 

[mcf517]

I've lost a lot of time troubleshooting, rebooting, and holding the power button with the SB. I had a macbook air, and it was indeed reliable, portable, and a pretty sleek piece of hardware at the time. I have to say, there is something weird in my head that makes me enjoy the SB's shortcomings. Don't get me wrong, I hate the damn bugs, but when an update comes along, I really look forward to seeing all the things that get fixed -- It's like getting a new computer or unlocking upgrades. Again, I know this might make little sense, but I get bored with technology that just works and sort of doesn't do anything new. It's a twisted way of thinking.

 

[tgp]

I've lost a lot of time troubleshooting, rebooting, and holding the power button with the SB. I had a macbook air, and it was indeed reliable, portable, and a pretty sleek piece of hardware at the time. I have to say, there is something weird in my head that makes me enjoy the SB's shortcomings. Don't get me wrong, I hate the damn bugs, but when an update comes along, I really look forward to seeing all the things that get fixed -- It's like getting a new computer or unlocking upgrades. Again, I know this might make little sense, but I get bored with technology that just works and sort of doesn't do anything new. It's a twisted way of thinking.

Ha, you remind me of something someone posted on here awhile ago. I do not remember who it was or what thread it was in, but it was about how "exciting" Windows Phone had become. He said something like "Do we want the kind of excitement that when we tap the Live Tile we think, 'Will it open the app or will the phone reboot?'" :amaze:

 

[mcf517]

Ha, you remind me of something someone posted on here awhile ago. I do not remember who it was or what thread it was in, but it was about how "exciting" Windows Phone had become. He said something like "Do we want the kind of excitement that when we tap the Live Tile we think, 'Will it open the app or will the phone reboot?'" :amaze:

Haha... I realized this when upgrading android phones twice a year, since 2010. I tried using an iphone, but it was just boring, despite it being the more polished and reliable product, years back.

 

[real0395]

Don't know if you're still deciding at this point, but I recently got a surface book (base model) off ebay (a little risky I know, but wayy cheaper) and have been very happy with it. I can't speak to how the SB was performing maybe 2+ months ago, but I have had no issues since purchasing it (doing a full reset/clean install, and making sure everything is updated). I haven't had the bugs/issues with detaching the tablet portion either. I know macs are known for their good trackpads, but the SB trackpad is probably the best out of all windows 10 laptops. I also haven't had any sleep/power draining issues that the SB and Surface Pros have been known to have with the latest updates.

I see clients on a weekly basis, so I'm always detaching and using the table portion to write notes in Onenote. The nice, not as commonly known thing, is that you can still charge the tablet portion alone without having to have it plugged into the keyboard. Also, be wary that the only port you have on the tablet portion is a headphone jack, no USB or anything because the device is designed as laptop first, tablet second. The convenience of having it detach as a tablet is awesome, especially when you're just wanting to consume media like read article/ebooks/browse the internet. When the whole concept of hybrid devices came out, the surface pro series was the closest to what I had envisioned but my usage of a device is more along the lines of the SB so when the SB came out I had instantly thought this is what I always wanted with a hybrid/2-in-1 device. I love Windows Hello too, it's very very fast to recognize you.

Edit: the only thing with Windows Hello that I want them to improve is being able to recognize you regardless of the orientation of the camera. When I have the tablet portion detached and am using it in clipboard mode, if the screen locks then Windows Hello won't recognize me until I turn it landscape facing me.

 

[zipro]

For a graphics professional, I'd recommend a MacBook Pro plus an iPad Pro. There are more high quality graphics apps for iOS than for Windows. Plus the Apple Pencil is more accurate and gives you a much more direct feeling than the stylus on surface devices. I'm a teacher and have resorted to that combo as well. The Surface Book is nice, if you somehow manage to get an error free one. But scaling issues in Adobe apps etc. make it a worse experience than it could be. The iPad Pro is much nicer to work on with the stylus.

as mentioned above, the touchpad on the SB is a mixed bag. It works as well as those on the MacBooks as long as you stick to Microsoft apps, like the Edge browser. For other apps, the experience can be very different. E.g. Scrolling in pretty much any other browser is pretty lousy. Adobe Lightroom is borderline unusable with the touchpad - gestures are extremely buggy. I don't know how Apple manages to create a consistent touchpad experience throughout all apps, whereas Microsoft fails miserably to achieve the same.

The MacBook Pro and the iPad series are extremely robust, stable products without any major issues, whereas the SB line is a pioneer product with lots of innovation, but it has some ways to go before I'd recommend it to anyone but the most die-hard enthusiast.

 

[TLRtheory]

From someone who came off a MacBook Pro+iPad combo to a dGPU Surface Book, I'd have to say the SB has been absolutely superior.

Right off the bat, being able to have dedicated Home/End/PgUp/PgDn keys instead of a shortcut made this a clear victory for efficiency with me spending so much of my life in IDEs. I can't comment much on bugginess/instabilities because honestly my Surface Book experience has been devoid of them. I can't recall even a single BSOD or operational annoyance in the entire time I've owned it (aside from Edge being premature... but I won't blame the SB for that).

Toting around a laptop and tablet are still the tradition, I suppose... but the convenience factor of simply having it all on one device is splendid - especially opposed to having some things you can do on one device, and some things you have to do on another.

MacBooks lacking a touch screen make it miss out a lot on what I've been calling "dynamic input"... so while typing notes is faster than handwriting, things get complicated as soon as a graph, a chart or anything dynamic comes into play... and Surface Book is simply better equipped to handle that job since I can easily detach and handwrite whatever's too intricate for text (or having to swim through tons of submenus to find the matching dynamic input for anything free-handed). The thought of having to stop mid-sentence and switch to another input mode is just horrid... and for a while, I was fighting denial to convince myself a ClamCase was the answer (protip: it was not).

Now touch-screens are a dime a dozen, but few of them reach the grade of practicality as one that has the stylus capabilities I get out of the Surface Book. I've tried paying a crap ton of money on "nice" Bamboo styluses for iPads which all seem to lack very integral things the Surface Pen has even if I weren't to attack the low hanging fruit of "toy" software iPad has in comparison to any given Windows tablet. Looking purely at the stylus; there's no button to select and move content meaning I have to switch input types, no eraser meaning I have to switch from my pen to finger or change from brush/pen to eraser to wipe content, and I've noticed a trend that they all seem to want me to disable gestures to make them work right. I've messed with the iPad Pro stylus too... it at least resolves the annoyance of having to disable gestures, but it still falls short in the areas of having dedicated buttons for actions or even an eraser.

So yeah, in my case - the Surface Book resolved a lot of annoyances and shortcomings that the MacBook+iPad combo brought to the table.

 

[zerospace-net]

For a graphics professional, I'd recommend a MacBook Pro plus an iPad Pro. There are more high quality graphics apps for iOS than for Windows. Plus the Apple Pencil is more accurate and gives you a much more direct feeling than the stylus on surface devices. I'm a teacher and have resorted to that combo as well. The Surface Book is nice, if you somehow manage to get an error free one. But scaling issues in Adobe apps etc. make it a worse experience than it could be. The iPad Pro is much nicer to work on with the stylus.

And here I thought true graphics pros and hardcore artists use Wacom devices like Cintiq with either a Mac or a PC running Adobe's full suite of real applications (no, not app store junk), depending on preference. :wink: I use my Surface for some drawing/designing, but I'm a fabricator, so my drawings are just ideas/rough plans and do not need to be perfect. Definitely a YMMV thing here, especially if the OS matters to the user. Some of us really, really don't care for Apple's OSes -- I'll gladly recommend a Mac or i-anything to the right person, but for me ... nope. iOS is still too much of a walled garden, no matter what they boast for apps, and iPad Pro is just an overgrown, overpriced iPad that tried too hard to compete with the Surface Pro (which we aren't talking about here). Now if we're talking iPad Pro vs Surface Pro, then give me back my Surface Pro 3. That thing is amazing. I can't speak for the SP4, as I haven't owned one. I currently own a Surface Book (i5/8GB/256GB/dGPU) and a Surface Pro 3 (i5/8GB/256GB).

Why do we keep perpetuating this discussion, anyways? Macbook Pro and Surface Book are 2 completely different beasts to me. I find it hard to compare them because of the massive differences. SB has a touchscreen and a detachable tablet mode and a hybrid OS (Win10) vs the old tried-and-true Macbook. If someone's really on the fence between these two machines and wants reliable and solid, go with the horse -- the Macbook. If you want the cutting edge (and all the bugginess that goes with it), go for the SB. Expecting anything else from either machine will only result in disappointment.

 

[zipro]

I'd say very few photographers use Wacom tablets. Apart from that, the iPad Pro does offer a solution that has much lower latency compared to, say, the Cintiq. It also has a higher-res screen, much better battery life and weighs half as much. Also, not everyone is into cables, if a connection to powerful workstation is necessary. Plus the Cintiq starts at around 1500$ for the entry-level device. While the iPad Pro won't satisfy everyone, it's an excellent device for drawing, sketching and markup. The SB could be that as well if all the features it comes with actually worked without any problems - but that's not reality.