GypsyDanger

chia said:

suddenly newton said:

Every Surface Pro users I know bought theirs for work, and uses it as an ultra-portable laptop, not as a tablet. It's always in landscape mode, keyboard attached, propped up on its kickstand, running the classic desktop apps.

As suddenly newton's observations hint at and the champions of running "real apps" on the Surface unwittingly confirm, the Surface is used mainly as a Windows laptop that happens to have a detachable touchscreen. There's no incentive for developers to create touchscreen  apps for the Surface when "real apps" work on the Surface. What does a developer have to gain from the extra time, resource and support demands of making their "real apps" work with the Surface touchscreen?

Those same developers aren't making iOS versions of those apps either so the point is moot. And their apps already work with the touchscreen. No special development is required for that. They just aren't optimized for it.

You can't run any kind of scripting in iOS so that makes it worthless in lots of use cases. You could never have a fully functional version of ArcGIS with that limitation. Or MatLab. And as was already stated by others, any sort of programming or web development is a no go unless you want to write a bunch of text files and hope they actually work when you get them to an OS that will allow them to be compiled and run. And anything beyond basic word processing is a major headache in iOS I've found.

You buy the tool tool that fits the job. I enjoy my iPad for basic tasks: web browsing, wasting a few minutes on games, checking email, social media. But the Surface Pro has proven itself to be a very capable tool for my needs. Yes, it mostly gets used as an ultra portable laptop but I also like having the touchscreen and stylus. I constantly mix keyboard, trackpad and touchscreen input. And I liked being to add storage space after the fact for about $20 instead of the $100 Apple would have charged.

pmz said:

I don't know of anyone who has bought a Surface Pro (3 or 4) that bought it to use a tablet. They bought it because they thought it was (supposed to be) a slick, ultra portable laptop replacement. A common theme has also been a lot of regret when it turns out to be not what they thought. For a while it was people getting Windows RT and not understanding why nothing was compatible. Now that time has passed, and its more I/O woes, and random quirks this hardware exhibits that other OEM laptops do not.

Source: I work with a lot of people that purchase their own equipment for work.

If those people are complaining about Windows RT, they don't own a Surface 3 or 4. They own just a Surface 2 since RT never existed on a Surface 3, Pro 3 or Pro 4. So it seems you probably don't know a lot of people who own a Surface Pro. I love my Surface Pro 3. It's the best computer experience I've had. I love the combination of touch screen, stylus input and keyboard/trackpad. When I need to print, I plug in the USB cable and print (I could go wireless but I don't). I can install real applications and not settle for inferior app versions (or often nothing at all). And as someone changing careers to marine biology, there are quite a few applications that don't have a Mac version. And since it uses SSD, the OS and applications start up super quick. The only real quirks I've experienced were when I first bought it and hadn't yet installed the available updates. Once that was done, everything has been good.