I returned two i5 SP4 after trying to go back to MS after over a decade using exclusively Apple. I like Satya Nadella, like the way they are thinking and the products look great in the presentations but I found in practice the MS experience was terrible (save for the excellent in-store customer service). SP4 screens suffered from light bleed, I had random screen freezes, the graphics driver bugs, keyboard attach / detach freezes, BSOD and other unacceptable issues (edit: including woeful battery life - nowhere near as advertised). Kickstand was great in a lot of situations but not too comfortable or stable on the lap as a laptop. The whole keyboard/surface/kickstand arrangement felt a little bit cobbled together, a bit Heath Robinson if you will. I found windows 10 to be a step backwards from OS X - it's a lot better than the windows of old but there are still way to many features which do not work or are half-hearted attempts compared with OS X, in my opinion. Applications would quit, freeze and generally just not work as advertised. When everything worked it was great, I just had no confidence in the product and the safety of my data and felt like I was back to being my own IT support guy when all I wanted was to get on with creating.
As an aside, I tried to switch everything over to MS this month but every single new MS product let me down - Band 2 haptic gave up three days in, second Band 2 screen froze and had to be replaced, Lumia 950 was very disappointing, Xbox Elite controller was popping, creaking and randomly disconnecting from the console (as did its replacement). W10 services didn't work as well or reliably as equivalent OS X ones for me. I even asked the rep in the Microsoft Store if I replaced the SP4 with a Surface Book if my experience would be different - the answer was nope, these have issues too. MS is there superficially for me but in practice it all feels a bit low rent, unfinished and disappointing.
On the other hand, the rMB outperforms it's specs IMHO. I much prefer the keyboard over any other I have tried and the screen is fantastic (I did change the resolution to get more screen real estate). Photoshop and Lightroom fly on this thing for every day tasks. MS Office for Mac works even better than Pages - a 50,000 word document scrolls fast and smooth in Word but gives the occasional checkerboard in Pages when scrolling at the same speed. FCPX and Logic work great for editing. I do see it bogging down when exporting movie projects, generating image previews and suchlike but the Surfaces did that too and I don't have to have these things happen instantly anyway. It still works for those kind of tasks but it just takes longer. I even had a 36 track music project running in Ableton Live with no issues (but a few computationally heavy convolution reverbs in Logic will stump it quickly).
The only second thoughts I get are when I go online and read other people's criticism of it but in practice it's a lot better than it should be. It has done everything I have asked of it and has looked and felt amazing while doing so. I'm by no means impressed by Apple and Tim Cook these days or some of the directions they are taking bu this little notebook rocks. In my opinion and experience. Hope this helps.
