Review of Microsoft Surface Pro 4 (i5 / 256 / 8 model)

This machine has two distinct modes: tablet and desktop.  You are explicitly in one mode or the other, so we should look at each one separately.

In tablet mode, the Surface running Win 10 doesn’t make any sense.  Here’s a great application for this machine: Let’s run Acrobat and markup a PDF using the pen.  If you select the highlight tool, your pen (and finger) are a highlighter.  That’s good, but you can’t use your pen (or finger) to scroll by touching the page (because you are now a highlighter).  So you have to use the scroll bars at the margins.  What’s the point of being a tablet here?  It’s just easier to use a mouse wheel and be done with it.  It's a great novelty to do this in tablet form, but ultimately much less efficient.

As a tablet, it absolutely needs a “home” button and corresponding home interface, like both Android and iOS have (for good reason).  Every time you want to launch an app, you have to get to the Start icon, and then find the desired app icon on the Start menu or dig it out somehow from a hierarchical menu off of Start.  The text and icons are small, which would be fine on a desktop, but much less fun with your finger.  The whole time you are thinking “this would be so much easier with a mouse”.

In tablet mode, you can look at the pretty weather app and surf the net well enough, send an email maybe.  But then you basically have a $1,299 iPad, only without the depth of the iTunes store offerings and with an awkward interface.  If I can't actually *do anything for real, I might as well run Android or iOS where the tablet experience has been refined.

On the positive side, OneNote seemed really interesting with the pen.  You can click the eraser on the pen to launch OneNote and make freeform notes.  The eraser on the end of the pen erases parts of notes when you turn the pen around.  Very neat.

The overall experience is of a desktop running on a tablet form.  iOS doesn’t feel like MacOS running on a tablet.  On the S4, the screen keyboard didn’t always show up when you needed it.  Very often you find yourself touching into a textbox and then touching the taskbar icon to bring up the screen keyboard.

As a laptop, it’s a modest effort.  The keyboard cover is atrocious as a keyboard while being decent as a cover.  The entire experience with the keyboard (especially when angled up) is very squishy.  The keys are surprisingly noisy and soft.  The touchpad is also loud to click and relatively resistant to click.  The touchpad appears to be hinged at the top, so the bottom half is better than the top half for clicking.

The screen looks great; very highres and bright.  However, beware of the “backlight bleeding” issues (Google it) which persist on the S4. My copy had the same bottom right glowing patch about an inch from the corner as everyone else seems to have.  The fault on mine was only noticeable when watching a letterbox movie, when it was quite apparent.  This should not be considered a manufacturing defect, it’s just a result of their loose tolerances.

The cooling fan is absolutely horrific.  When on AC power, the slightest provocation will send the fan to the highest speed.   I reformatted, reinstalled with just the basics (Adobe CS, Office) and ran only Chrome.  Even at <10% CPU and downclocked to .5GHz, the fan would blast away.  While it was wasn’t clear what causes the fan to engage, it seemed that if you got to about 50% CPU for even a brief moment, you would have full speed fan for the next five minutes or so.  But if you booted up and didn't actually do anything, the machine was absolutely silent.  It was only when you start to use it that the fan would crank.

Battery life was mediocre.  With the screen at 100% and under a relatively light load of web use, I saw four or five hours to deplete a fully charged battery.

As an actual "laptop" it is completely unrealistic.  The combination of the floppy keyboard, magnetic keyboard attachment, and kickstand back make using it on your lap a balancing act.  You can do it, but one mistake and the Surface is hitting the deck.

That all leaves me typing away on the worst keyboard ever devised while the machine sounds like an airplane about to take off, combined with a marginal tablet experience.  I’d rather cart around both an iPad/Android tablet and a proper laptop.