I picked one of these up from Newegg at a good price. I was going to get the base level surface book but the video card doesn't meet my needs and neither does the battery. Figured I would get something I can use for myself as well as at work since the laptop at work is a brick.
So far, it's been a good experience. I liked the Surface Pro line, especially the 4 and had bought my sister-in-law a surface 3 for a graduation gift. Since I do travel occasionally and my primary role at work is a senior technical instructor, I find myself in front of folks a lot and needed more screen real estate than the surface pros offered. The little gaming that I do will hold up nicely on the 965M Nvidia card since I don't run anything that requires a crap ton of resources.
The detachable screen is nice. Figured it would be heavy but the keyboard seems to be where the bulk of the weight is. These things are priced at or above apple prices, so I think that is what steers most folks away from the upper level ones. The basic ones can be had for cheaper though. Seems well built, like my wife's MacBook. A nice lit keyboard, super fast i7 mobile processor, and a nice PCI-E SSD with an SD card slot for expandable storage. ifixit.com actually has instructions on how to remove the PCI-E SSD if you really had the itch to upgrade at a cheaper price without paying Micro$haft the extra cash.
The face recognition to log in is nice, I was in a dark room and it was still able to work. I had to go through and disable most of the spyware crap that is inherently in windows 10, but that isn't anything new to me. The other nice thing is that it doesn't come with bloatware that you need to either do a fresh reformat on or uninstall like you would on a 3rd party laptop/desktop.
Once I spend some more time with it, I will get a better feel for how things are. As it came out of the box, everything worked extremely well. Stylus, keyboard detachment, all of the features that is advertises it does well. Seems like most of the bugs people ran into during the first year of release in 2015 are pretty much gone as I haven't had any driver problems that others reported. It may also be the fact that I am on a different Nvidia chip that wasn't designed from the ground up.
With coding, blender, course development for my side gig that I am starting, and use at work, on the road, and at home, I'm satisfied. The only issue that irks me a bit is that you need battery power to detach the screen as it is software driven, not raw mechanical. Being that my devices never drain 100%, I don't see this as an issue but it would have been nice to have the ability to detach it mechanically instead of the OS doing it. Will update this thread in a month with any other comments.
So far, it's been a good experience. I liked the Surface Pro line, especially the 4 and had bought my sister-in-law a surface 3 for a graduation gift. Since I do travel occasionally and my primary role at work is a senior technical instructor, I find myself in front of folks a lot and needed more screen real estate than the surface pros offered. The little gaming that I do will hold up nicely on the 965M Nvidia card since I don't run anything that requires a crap ton of resources.
The detachable screen is nice. Figured it would be heavy but the keyboard seems to be where the bulk of the weight is. These things are priced at or above apple prices, so I think that is what steers most folks away from the upper level ones. The basic ones can be had for cheaper though. Seems well built, like my wife's MacBook. A nice lit keyboard, super fast i7 mobile processor, and a nice PCI-E SSD with an SD card slot for expandable storage. ifixit.com actually has instructions on how to remove the PCI-E SSD if you really had the itch to upgrade at a cheaper price without paying Micro$haft the extra cash.
The face recognition to log in is nice, I was in a dark room and it was still able to work. I had to go through and disable most of the spyware crap that is inherently in windows 10, but that isn't anything new to me. The other nice thing is that it doesn't come with bloatware that you need to either do a fresh reformat on or uninstall like you would on a 3rd party laptop/desktop.
Once I spend some more time with it, I will get a better feel for how things are. As it came out of the box, everything worked extremely well. Stylus, keyboard detachment, all of the features that is advertises it does well. Seems like most of the bugs people ran into during the first year of release in 2015 are pretty much gone as I haven't had any driver problems that others reported. It may also be the fact that I am on a different Nvidia chip that wasn't designed from the ground up.
With coding, blender, course development for my side gig that I am starting, and use at work, on the road, and at home, I'm satisfied. The only issue that irks me a bit is that you need battery power to detach the screen as it is software driven, not raw mechanical. Being that my devices never drain 100%, I don't see this as an issue but it would have been nice to have the ability to detach it mechanically instead of the OS doing it. Will update this thread in a month with any other comments.
