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Microsoft Says New Surface Pro is 1.7× Faster Than iPad Pro With 35% More Battery Life

I had an iPad Pro I tried to love; I really did. It is a terrible machine. Awful. Terrible. It's a bit "special". A big phone with a useless OS and gorgeous hardware. It's a bit like a "trophy wife", good to look at, useless at anything interesting. I cannot get anything done with it. And having to reach a screen to use it as when it is a laptop is just terrible. No escape key on the keyboard even. No file system. Dumb, dumb dumb.

I spent about $1100 on the dumb machine. I'm tempted by the Surface Pro (2017), but it is too expensive for me for the specs. We have four older Surfaces at home for the children and they can actually program on them, do Photoshop, and learn skills useful for employment.
 
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Nothing surprising, just a nice spec update. I felt when I had the Surface Pro 3, that it was a fine product. It did everything i wanted it too.
 
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SSD-GUY said:
Lol at the people on here belittling how the Surface is faster than the iPad pro because the iPad runs an ARM processor.

I don't care what the iPad runs, they cost roughly the same yet the Surface can do more, much much more than the iPad Pro.

The ARM processor may be amazing, but let's face it, as Jamesrick posted before, it's crippled by the limitations of running iOS.
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As you're in the UK, you'll appreciate there's definitely one thing the Surface Pro can do that the iPad can't: wait a month while it's being repaired under warranty.

That's the big decider for me. In my experience you can't just judge a product on how it works when it's going right, but what happens when it goes wrong. Leadtimes currently in the UK for any Surface Pro warranty repair past the standard 30 day DOA period is really, really steep. Out of warranty pricing is eye-watering; infinitely more expensive than Apple.

And never mind MS's telephone support or even getting an RMA sorted in the first place. So many hoops to jump through with registering the device etc., making it a pain if you've bought them in bulk through business accounts. It's just not a case of "it's in warranty, check the serial number". Goddamn it's infuriating.

If Microsoft want to tout themselves as a premium brand with premium hardware, they'd better damn well step up with support and step up fast. It's not like the UK is an insignificant market.
 
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Microsoft have a habit of touting those tightly-related specs as if they're unrelated, so what Microsoft should really answer is: what is the battery life while providing that performance? Especially since 3rd party apps are notoriously inefficient. (i.e. The apps that make the Surface a useful device.)

If all you can do to achieve the battery life is use office and browse websites - then what's the point of buying the Surface instead of the cheaper and lighter iPad? (Especially when the iPad has a wider range of optimised and more tightly designed tablet apps.)

In short it didn't deliver when they promised this exact same thing in the last model. (Surprise, surprise a chip used in desktop computers has better raw benchmarks than one solely built for a mobile device.)

You get a similar comparison between Samsung devices and iPhones: yet the actual application performance on the iPhone is significantly faster.
 
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MacRumors said:


Microsoft says the high-end Surface Pro with a Core i7 processor is 2.5× faster than the Surface Pro 3 and 1.7× faster than the iPad Pro with Apple's own A9X chip.
Click to expand...

This is all they said:

"You can leave your charger at home because Surface Pro is packed with up to 13.5 hours of battery life.*** That’s 50% more than Surface Pro 4 and 35% more battery life than an iPad Pro. From home to work and back again, Surface Pro is there for you. This is a powerhouse laptop with 2.5 times more computing performance than the Surface Pro 3 and 1.7 times the compute of iPad Pro."

"***Up to 13.5 hours for video playback. Testing conducted by Microsoft in April 2017 using preproduction Intel Core i5, 256GB, 8 GB RAM device. Testing consisted of full battery discharge during video playback. All settings were default except: Wi-Fi was associated with a network and Auto-Brightness disabled. "

To put it into perspective, the i7 with Iris Plus model is more powerful than the 13" MacBook Pro (non-touch bar). Comparing x86 and ARM is just silly, even for Microsoft.

Anandtech showed the Core M-5Y71 (5th gen) offered slightly higher performance than the A9X (source).

"Finally, going back to Broadwell we have the ASUS Transformer Book T300 Chi, which incorporates a high-end Core M-5Y71 processor. This is still officially a 4.5W TDP processor, and as a result this essentially measures Broadwell Core M’s best case performance. With a maximum CPU clockspeed of 2.9GHz as compared to the slower low-end Skylake and Broadwell CPUs, the T300 Chi unsurprisingly beats the iPad Pro in every single benchmark. At best the two are neck-and-neck with Apple’s best benchmark, 445.gobmk, but otherwise it’s a clear and very significant lead for Intel’s fastest Broadwell Core M processor."

Even the weakest Surface Pro 4 was more powerful than the iPad Pro in compute.
 
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randomplaydo said:
Does it still run Windows? Yeah?

OK, never mind then.
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Well, I dunno... Windows 10 is pretty good, and MS are actually giving their customers what they want - a tablet that runs a full OS. This forum is full of people wishing that the iPad ran a version of macOS.

MS is leading with hardware at the moment, and Windows is continuing to improve.
 
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Hattig said:
Indeed. Also they release a wide range of devices, and then claim 'up to' times faster/better/cheaper.
The i7 version may be faster, but it's likely not cheaper, and the battery life?
The m3 version may be cheaper and have better battery life, but is it faster? No.

Choice is good, of course, but sometimes you just need a solid base platform to build up from.

Let's see what the 10nm A10X brings in the iPad refresh eh? I hope it's an A10X anyway...
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iPad Pro is a great device itself, but it doesn't matter how fast the damn thing is if it can't run the applications. Especially when the consumer is paying close to a $1000.
 
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TechZeke said:
iPad Pro is a great device itself, but it doesn't how fast the damn thing is if it can't run the applications. Especially when the consumer is paying close to a $1000.
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Correct, I had both Ipad pros and you will instantly know how limited you are once you try to make it into a laptop replacement. A Keyboard without a trackpad and a Pen doesn't solve those iOS limitations. I wanted to throw that device off my roof at times....
 
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I'm... really surprised that there are still people--even here--who think of the iPad as "a big iPhone". I thought (hoped, I guess) that that particularly misinformed meme had died. Ah well. Like everything on the internet, it will never die, because the internet doesn't know how to let anything die.
 
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Microsoft blew it not giving the option of the larger 13.5" display found on Surface Laptop and still only 4GB instead of 8GB DRAM on base model. Still much better and more useful than iPod Pro that can't even do basic media consumpting as well as it lacks 4K h265 HEVC HDR and VP9 hardware decoding.
 
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Oh...
If, I say if, the 1.7x and 35% is achieved under Windows 10 S, Microsoft this time would hit him hard.
If not, then... well, just another premium price underpowered machine. Not too bad though.
Seen some surface machines around my school. Not too many though.
 
Centris 650 said:
So they are basing these claims on an iPad that's over a year old? Ok. Let's see what happens when the new iPads are released.
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And what exactly will a new and faster processor contribute to iPad pro? Let's be honest, Ipads are only good for playing Angry birds, watching Youtube, and occasionally drawing dickbuts with the Apple pen. Ipad pro, in comparison to Surface pro, is a joke. Almost dark humor kind of joke.
 
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keysofanxiety said:
As you're in the UK, you'll appreciate there's definitely one thing the Surface Pro can do that the iPad can't: wait a month while it's being repaired under warranty.

That's the big decider for me. In my experience you can't just judge a product on how it works when it's going right, but what happens when it goes wrong. Leadtimes currently in the UK for any Surface Pro warranty repair past the standard 30 day DOA period is really, really steep. Out of warranty pricing is eye-watering; infinitely more expensive than Apple.

And never mind MS's telephone support or even getting an RMA sorted in the first place. So many hoops to jump through with registering the device etc., making it a pain if you've bought them in bulk through business accounts. It's just not a case of "it's in warranty, check the serial number". Goddamn it's infuriating.

If Microsoft want to tout themselves as a premium brand with premium hardware, they'd better damn well step up with support and step up fast. It's not like the UK is an insignificant market.
Click to expand...

Wasn't aware of the current Surface repair times. I owned a Surface 2 a few years ago and I thought Microsoft had a 'replace' option instead of repair, like Apple do with iPhones. I had my Surface back to me within a week, albeit a new one.
 
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maflynn said:
Nothing surprising, just a nice spec update. I felt when I had the Surface Pro 3, that it was a fine product. It did everything i wanted it too.
Click to expand...
The new pen tech is probably one of the bigger updates. It indicates the switch to Gen 13.
87PEs3d.png
 
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BrettArchibald said:
I'm not tempted by this for the sole reason that it has Windows on it.
But what Microsoft is doing right is not just slapping a phone OS onto a tablet and expecting us to fall for it.
Are you paying attention Apple?
Click to expand...

And what some people like myself like about the iPad is precisely that Apple didn't just slap a desktop OS onto a tablet and call it a day.
 
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SSD-GUY said:
Wasn't aware of the current Surface repair times. I owned a Surface 2 a few years ago and I thought Microsoft had a 'replace' option instead of repair, like Apple do with iPhones. I had my Surface back to me within a week, albeit a new one.
Click to expand...

Yeah they don't tend to service them if the problem is excessive, like relating to the touchscreen; you need to send it off for 'warranty repair' and more often than not they'll chuck a new device back to you.

Good to hear you got yours back in a week, though honestly I'd say that's a rare exception to the rule. Just in my experience of course.
 
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Mrumors said:
The new pen tech is probably one of the bigger updates. It indicates the switch to Gen 13.
87PEs3d.png
Click to expand...

Not that innovative or a significant update when Samsung's latest S pen has those features and its included in the box with Galaxy book 12 and 10...samsung includes the Keyboard too...full package so I probably would recommend the galaxy book over the surface pro
 
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