Tempted but they're not quite there yet

[omniusovermind]

So here we have a device that can be used as a full mobile OS as well as a touchscreen tablet. At first glance this should be a slam dunk. After all, nobody else really has anything like this yet. Apple is staying out of this game and continuing to offer MacOS on full laptops and iOS on tablets. Although it does appear now that Ubuntu is trying to get into this game (this is just my personal opinion but: there's a reason that Ubuntu desktop only has around 20 million downloads worldwide. I'll pass.)

The problem I have with it is that windows 8 Pro tablets are ready for hardware to catch up, but the hardware isn't ready for it Battery technology isn't ready to keep these puppies going for 10+ hours, and chips aren't ready yet either.

At a $1200-ish price point, you can get a regular laptop that will come with 500GB storage and 8MB RAM and be able to handle pretty much anything you can throw at it. Not so with the Surface Pro. At $600 and below you can get an ARM based tablet that will consume media just fine and last more than twice as long unplugged.

My opinion on these new x86 tablets is that they cannot perform as powerfully as a full laptop yet they cost just as much, and in many cases more, and they can't last as long unplugged as a tablet.

Do I think this is a brilliant idea though? Oh Heck yeah! But I need to wait until the CPU's and batteries catch up to this enough to offer at least 300GB storage, 6+MB of RAM, last as long as ARM based tablets unplugged, and have the processing power of regular laptops. Until that happens, I'll be using an actual PC for x86 Windows 8 media creation, and a separate ARM based tablet for portable media consumption.

 

[anon(5370748)]

You're paying extra for form factor. Yes, you can get a full-featured laptop for the same price that has 8GB of RAM, a TB drive or 256GB SSD, i7, 1080p screen, etc etc... can you fit that in a small messenger-style camera bag?

From what it sounds like your needs are, I'd certainly wait for Haswell devices if I were you.

 

[rdubmu]

I currently love my surface, if I need to use it for 10 plus hours I probably need to get some fresh air. My battery life is about 3-4 hours depending on what I run. I do get your point, but I agree with the second poster the form factor is awesome!

 

[Laura Knotek]

I agree. I'm going to get an ultrabook, probably from Lenovo, since I want an x86 device with a touchscreen, that has more robust peripherals and can be easily used on one's lap. It'll still be more portable than older laptops.

Surface Pro's form factor does not appeal to me.

 

[pdch]

You guys don't know what your missing. Sucks for you. I haven't found anything my Pro can't do (really surprised with only 4 gigs of ram). Though I know Haswell will help with battery life, I have no complaints with the Pro. The battery lasts all day with normal use. Today, I worked off of battery for OVER 5.5 hours while continuously working on a PowerPoint presentation using the type cover, wedge mouse, and multiple IE10 windows open (was importing a LOT of images), outlook open, PhotoShop, and constantly saving to skydrive. I finished the pres and plugged in before getting a battery warning. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to check how much was left.

 

[anon(5335877)]

What's a full laptop? A gaming laptop?

 

[runamuck83]

Surface Pro has become my primary PC. I use it on my desk in the office with a USB hub to connect my peripherals, and a Mini DisplayPort to DVI adapter for my external monitor.

When I leave for a meeting or for the day, I throw it in my messenger back with the type cover attached and I'm off to the races.

The thing doesn't miss a beat.

At home, I have a wedge mouse and wedge keyboard setup if I need to do some heavy desktop action. If that's not on the agenda, I flip the type cover back, sit back on the couch, and relax as I surf the web using the raw speed of my Surface Pro.

It's got it all....

Using it straight on battery at home I've managed about 6 hours. If I am using it between charges and sleep, I can probably get it to last a day or more.

 

[Daniel Ratcliffe]

Cut out the personal attacks please. I am not pointing any fingers, this is just a general warning.

 

[anon(5370748)]

Consumers like you will never be satisfied. You will always want more. When the next gen pro releases with 6 GB memory. You will want to know why it doesn't have 8? 6 is not enough.

Please tell me what you need to be doing that and i5 and 4GB memory is NOT enough for you? Mac Book pro battery life. Why don't you talk about that? Average laptop give you 1 and a half maybe 2 hours battery life depending on what you're doing with it. What MORE do you want from the surface pro?

The hard drive space isn't enough? Sky drive? Dropbox? Google drive? The future of computing is in the cloud. Heck! Plug in an external hard drive. Or is that too much work for you? Can you do that with an iPad? Nope.

The surface pro CAN handle anything you throw at it. Unless you have conclusive evidence that shows the surface pro struggling with something.I would prefer you actually test one before saying it's not enough. I know a few power users who are happy with their pro's.

To me, it's more than just a tablet.

Specs aren't everything. You remind me of a friend of mine who said his Z10 has more memory than my 920 so that makes it faster and better. That's not the way the world works anymore.

He did say media creation. I love my Surface Pro, but It's certainly not going to replace my workstation for rendering 4K After Effects or Cinema 4D movies, which we really do want 300GB+ of available storage at SSD or RAID speeds for. I _guess_ USB 3 would be serviceable to offload the final work to, but Thunderbolt or eSATA would be better. I think he also meant 16GB of RAM (not 6), which is what we really need for these types of projects, though more would certainly be welcome. While we're at it, is 8 or 12 cores in the CPU really that difficult to include? with 2GB per core, that would certainly up the simultaneous frames we could render... The HD4000 chip in it is also pretty worthless. Displaying entire C4D scenes, or using AE plugins like Mir are much smoother and can display more geometry on a dedicated NVIDIA card with 1 or 2GB of RAM, so I'm thinking it should contain a Quadro or the like. Oh, and forget the stupid 1080p screen - they should put a 2560x1600 10" display in (you know, to keep the form factor small). The Quadro would easily be able to run that puppy. Naturally this would require liquid cooling, so just throw that in too. Oh, and even the best rig can sometimes take 10-20 hours to render a particularly complex scene, so I'm thinking a 48 hour battery in case I can't get to a plug in two days. $1100? Sold!

 

[martinmc78]

He did say media creation. I love my Surface Pro, but It's certainly not going to replace my workstation for rendering 4K After Effects or Cinema 4D movies, which we really do want 300GB+ of available storage at SSD or RAID speeds for. I _guess_ USB 3 would be serviceable to offload the final work to, but Thunderbolt or eSATA would be better. I think he also meant 16GB of RAM (not 6), which is what we really need for these types of projects, though more would certainly be welcome. While we're at it, is 8 or 12 cores in the CPU really that difficult to include? with 2GB per core, that would certainly up the simultaneous frames we could render... The HD4000 chip in it is also pretty worthless. Displaying entire C4D scenes, or using AE plugins like Mir are much smoother and can display more geometry on a dedicated NVIDIA card with 1 or 2GB of RAM, so I'm thinking it should contain a Quadro or the like. Oh, and forget the stupid 1080p screen - they should put a 2560x1600 10" display in (you know, to keep the form factor small). The Quadro would easily be able to run that puppy. Naturally this would require liquid cooling, so just throw that in too. Oh, and even the best rig can sometimes take 10-20 hours to render a particularly complex scene, so I'm thinking a 48 hour battery in case I can't get to a plug in two days. $1100? Sold!

You could use remote desktop on the pro? I get what your saying though. I would love a surface pro to be able to open up large architectural revit models that i work on but there are just some things tablets and laptops will never be able to do and that desktops will only ever be able to handle. My machines at work are running with 256gb SSD's, geforce 690's Xeon processors and 32gb ram and sometimes even they struggle. Can always hope though i guess

 

[pdch]

He did say media creation. I love my Surface Pro, but It's certainly not going to replace my workstation for rendering 4K After Effects or Cinema 4D movies, which we really do want 300GB+ of available storage at SSD or RAID speeds for. I _guess_ USB 3 would be serviceable to offload the final work to, but Thunderbolt or eSATA would be better. I think he also meant 16GB of RAM (not 6), which is what we really need for these types of projects, though more would certainly be welcome. While we're at it, is 8 or 12 cores in the CPU really that difficult to include? with 2GB per core, that would certainly up the simultaneous frames we could render... The HD4000 chip in it is also pretty worthless. Displaying entire C4D scenes, or using AE plugins like Mir are much smoother and can display more geometry on a dedicated NVIDIA card with 1 or 2GB of RAM, so I'm thinking it should contain a Quadro or the like. Oh, and forget the stupid 1080p screen - they should put a 2560x1600 10" display in (you know, to keep the form factor small). The Quadro would easily be able to run that puppy. Naturally this would require liquid cooling, so just throw that in too. Oh, and even the best rig can sometimes take 10-20 hours to render a particularly complex scene, so I'm thinking a 48 hour battery in case I can't get to a plug in two days. $1100? Sold!

You will NEVER be able to run on battery for what you are talking about. That said, take a look at the new GeForce Titan (http://gizmodo.com/5985291/nvidia-titan-a-massive-gpu-that-might-be-unbeatable). I guarantee if you install 3 of these with a good i7 processor and 32GB of ram, you will never wait 48 hours for a scene to render. My current video rig has a single overclocked 680, LOTS of memory and SSDs and an overclocked i7 extreme processor and I think the longest I have had a scene take with multiple FX layers was a few hours.

Now I will say this, we just used my Pro to help with a 72 hour shoot and it was EXTREMELY helpful. I would never use this as my dedicated AE machine, but it was great for offloading and previewing the raw footage and for scene sequencing on the fly to see how something played out before moving on to the next location. The best thing was, by the time it got to the editor Monday night, most of the scenes were laid out in sequence for him, which saved a load of time.

I would like to see one of these with 16GB of ram and a 500GB SSD. I would pay the premium.

 

[failed1234]

I'm pretty sure he was being sarcastic. Or maybe that's just me.
Sent from my HTC 8x using Board Express

 

[pdch]

I'm pretty sure he was being sarcastic. Or maybe that's just me.
Sent from my HTC 8x using Board Express

I know, so was I. I meant to put that in there.

 

[anon(5370748)]

You could use remote desktop on the pro? I get what your saying though. I would love a surface pro to be able to open up large architectural revit models that i work on but there are just some things tablets and laptops will never be able to do and that desktops will only ever be able to handle. My machines at work are running with 256gb SSD's, geforce 690's Xeon processors and 32gb ram and sometimes even they struggle. Can always hope though i guess

I guess what I'm really saying is that the Pro is a solid, fast little machine that has a tablet form factor, but runs desktop-class applications which makes it infinitely more useful than a consumption-type tablet. The "pro" part of it means it's for business professionals, not media professionals. You don't need more than 4GB to run Office, and after owning a Surface Pro for a couple of weeks and playing around with it, I'm actually pretty convinced that you don't even need more than 4GB for the type of Photoshop work you'd do on a tiny tablet like this - it even handled all of the high-res multi-layer PSDs I threw at it without choking. Specs don't mean as much as they used to for general-purpose machines (they still do in gaming and high-end visualization, sure), so it's silly to discount a great computer like the S.P. solely because of the numbers.

 

[jpw21683]

Ummm...I'm pretty sure cameradork was being sarcastic. WOOSH'ed over some heads, looks like. :wink:

As I shoot video, I'm excited to use my Surface Pro as an on-location video review monitor, among other things.

 

[theefman]

Thats the beauty of Windows, everyone has different needs and there is a more than likely a device that will meet those needs. Surface Pro, Sony Vaio Duo 11, Transformer Book, Sony T15 - take your pick, just like those of us who chose the Surface Pro and enjoy it. And this time next year it will be the Surface Pro 2 or something else so really there is always something better, so lets stop expecting the Surface Pro to be the be-all and end-all of personal computing devices.

 

[anon(5370748)]

You will NEVER be able to run on battery for what you are talking about.

Ohhh, I dunno about never, but certainly not soon. Look into Thorium plasma batteries Or, just wait 10 years and the specs I just mentioned will be stock in every TI calculator.

That said, take a look at the new GeForce Titan (http://gizmodo.com/5985291/nvidia-titan-a-massive-gpu-that-might-be-unbeatable). I guarantee if you install 3 of these with a good i7 processor and 32GB of ram, you will never wait 48 hours for a scene to render.

I'm sure once you strip the big ugly casing and heatsinks and fans and crap off it, the chips would fit very nicely behind the screen without having to expand the chassis. Yes, I suppose that will do. Until the next one comes out that's better, and then mine will SUCK!

My current video rig has a single overclocked 680, LOTS of memory and SSDs and an overclocked i7 extreme processor and I think the longest I have had a scene take with multiple FX layers was a few hours.

Now I will say this, we just used my Pro to help with a 72 hour shoot and it was EXTREMELY helpful. I would never use this as my dedicated AE machine, but it was great for offloading and previewing the raw footage and for scene sequencing on the fly to see how something played out before moving on to the next location. The best thing was, by the time it got to the editor Monday night, most of the scenes were laid out in sequence for him, which saved a load of time.

Yes - that's exactly the sort of thing the Pro excels at! - it's a super-helpful companion machine for the road, not a workstation.

I would like to see one of these with 16GB of ram and a 500GB SSD. I would pay the premium.

I would have paid several hundred dollars extra for an 8/256 or 16/256 as well (though I'm starting to question now if that would have been worth it, honestly). With current SSD prices 512 would probably have doubled the cost.

 

[pdch]

@cameradork - Maybe they should make a Surface Dock that houses 3 Titans where the Surface just switches over when docked. The dock should have a bank of LI house batteries or car batteries, lol.

My initial statement about the battery was supposed to have a (j/k) after it, I guess I typed it in my head but not on the keyboard.

 

[anon(5370748)]

@cameradork - Maybe they should make a Surface Dock that houses 3 Titans where the Surface just switches over when docked. The dock should have a bank of LI house batteries or car batteries, lol.

That would probably give the dock enough mass to allow for a proper adjustable hinge so you could view the Surface at any angle while the whole rig is sitting on your lap. Slap a good keyboard on there, and it's the perfect device for running Office at full speed from the couch.

 

[Laura Knotek]

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