I went large on the surface pro 4 - essentially purchased it to replace my laptop. Its a shame that in the UK the surface book was not available however, I felt the only thing I was losing was the extra battery life, screen size and the Nvidia graphics chip (I know this isn't a pro 4 vs book thread so I will leave it there)
on discount I got the 256gb i7 16 gig pro 4 version
Early Thoughts:
Cons:
The software was initially buggy as hell (the screen sometimes turns off in sleep mode but wont wake up again???? software updates fixed this occurring maybe 9 out of 10 times, but every now and again, it gets stuck with the screen off and I have to force reboot it)
The battery life is not great at all. A tablet will easily outlast this bad boy. However the M3 version is meant to have much much better battery life than this.
The lack of accessories like a replacement POWER CABLE has me completely gobsmacked.
Sometimes the fan can get quite noisy. My best friend here is task manager. windows 10 has a great task manager and I can work out
The windows store literally has no useful applications. You will have to rely mostly only full windows applications
Sometimes when I am gaming, (Ghost recon phantoms mainly ) with the power cable plugged in, my battery still gets drained!
The battery gets heavily drained in sleep mode and also I think in shutdown mode? (how is the latter possible??)
The Pros:
The sheer power of this thing is immense. I have not yet experienced a slow down yet and apart from the screen off and on bug and every now and again some apps or the edge browser refuses to open until I reboot - such bugs are acceptable, because...windows 10 boots within seconds!!!
The screen really is quite incredible.
The pro 4 keyboard is really nice.
Not that I expected it, but the kick stand is great and also the device sits quite nicely on my lap - I was concerned it would fall off all the time but no. Also the kick stand can be set to some very impressive angles.
The pen is quite nice and moderately useful I suppose.
I really like the facial recognition to log into the device (note this does not work when you have sunlight directly on your face)
Overall conclusion:
I really like this device. In fact, I love it. though once in a while the fact the screen gets stuck off really annoys me. It is beautifully designed and has immense power and runs full windows. I'm a fan. I'm glad I didn't waste my money on another android tablet. This is probably the best portable device I could have purchased (though I still cant quite believe how much I paid for it).
I hope windows will start selling replacement power cables on their website!! though I suspect this is backward compatible with the surface pro 3 but I don't want to waste ?65 and find out it doesn't work with this device.