Well... I did it

Welcome to the family! The SP4 is a mediocre laptop and an abysmal tablet. If the Pro does everything you need it to do for what you bought it for it is a fantastic device.

 

Congrats! Hope you will find it does exactly what you need it to do! I agree that the Pro is impressive.

 

Similar situation here ...

Last Tuesday, I went to Best Buy to pick up a Surface 3... it was incredibly appealing for $500. Quad core Atom, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD. I was looking for a Microsoft Office tablet.

After spending about 6 hours installing patches, firmware updates, etc. I was able to get Office installed and really start to use it.

I was pretty excited at first, especially for what I paid... it seemed like a pretty capable device. My experiences with it declined at an expoential rate and it was returned two days later on Thursday.

Lessons learned:

1. Windows 10 still doesn't know what it is. Using it strictly as a tablet OS with no keyboard or mouse (only a stylus) is still very painful and unintuitive in many areas. It's clunky and inconsistent. I think Microsoft did a commendable job improving over Windows 8, but mostly for desktop users.
2. Palm rejection, even when switched to "left handed" mode, sucks. My palm was marking, panning, etc. making my writing/drawing experience incredibly frustrating.
3. The Surface 3 was released on May 5th, 2015. Even with all of the updates installed, it was still incredibly buggy, had driver issues causing blue screens, and also randomly "black-screened" - requiring a 5-10 second power button press to force power-off. It crashed on me three times (blue screen with some sort of power state driver error) and black-screened on me twice. In 24 hours. Google searching and forum reading indicate the issues were common with no known fixes yet.

That was enough for me... I had no more patience left to discover all of the other issues I'm sure I was destined to have with it.

I bought a silver iPad Pro 128GB Wi-Fi, Apple Smart Keyboard, Apple Pencil and Apple white silicon case. I couldn't be happier. Everything just works. I was a little worried about the Apple Smart Keyboard, specifically when it comes to stability on various surfaces like my lap. I'm typing this with the keyboard on my lap right now with no issues. First impressions are fantastic, though I will admit I am probably duped a bit by "The Contrast Effect" right now based on my experience with that joke of a whatever it thinks it is Surface 3.

 

I know Apple haters love to destroy this line but this is 110% accurate for every single Apple item I have ever owned. Prior to buying my first Apple computer I thought the way Windows PCs needed to be updated so often was the norm, they were known to eventually slow down and thats normal, and the fluidity was expected.

I was wrong ever since switching almost every tech device to an Apple product and I will not go back barring the occasional dip into the Android phone world as they usually have fantastic hardware but terrible software.

Either way, welcome to the Pro and I am a new owner as well and it is already been one of the best experiences I have had on a device with the flexibility, power, and battery usage I have ever owned.

 

Enjoy

Had mine for a few weeks and loving it.

 

You didn't miss anything. I just purchased a SP4 i5 8GB last week and it's boxed up and going back. The SP4 is a descent laptop but a mediocre tablet. In terms of quality it was solid, 7-8 hour battery life and no issues with hardware or software. The built in keyboard leaves something to be desired and I really despised Edge. Chrome worked much better.
After a few days I realized how much I was giving up, messages, FaceTime, find my phone, contacts, bookmarks syncing.
I was bashing the IPP last week and now I'm typing on one and I like it, a lot!
I purchased an XPS 13 for my wife last week and it's so much better and easier to use than the SP4.

 

I honestly have been back and forth myself between surface and iPad. I currently have a ipp and a surface book. I returned 2 sp4's due to irritating problems and poor battery life. The surface book has good battery life but when you just want to use the tablet the battery life is an issue with between 2.5 to 3 hours. The iPad battery lasts like it has its own nuclear power plant on board. I need Windows for some work programming so I thought the surface would be great for note taking and for Windows. It was all too frustrating with the surface. I will now keep the iPad, return the surface book, and also keep the open box deal I got on a yoga 3 pro just for my small amount of programming. I will now use 2 devices instead of 1 but the iPad will be the primary for about 90% of what I need to do. I spent some time drawing and writing between the surface and iPad pro. The apple pencil is far more precise. One test was to write numbers 1 through 10 and then try and redraw the same numbers over the top. The surface pen couldn't do it but the apple pencil was right on the money. The surface pencil is good enough for notes and crude sketches but that is it.

 

I love my iPad Pro. It's a great tablet, but a so-so laptop, even with the Apple keyboard. It's fine for typing on, of course, but when it comes to "mousing" or selecting text etc, it drive me INSANE. So darn slow to do so, and just generally irritating. The iPad Pro really needs to be able to support peripherals to be a "proper" laptop alternative.

 

You're delusional. Do you even own a SP4? I own them both and ipp cannot even come close to the sp4.

 

I also took the plunge and purchased an iPad Pro..... I was deciding between the Macbook and the MBA. Since I already have MBP I decided I needed to diversify just a bit.

 

great news. mine is more valuable to me now than my ipad2 ever was!

 

You are correct. The iPad Pro cannot even come close to how poorly the SP4 works as a tablet.

 

Come close in terms of what?

If you need to run desktop software, sure, the iPP cannot do that.

If you want to hook up external drives and peripherals, sure, the iPP is terrible with those.

But I think the iPP is a much better tablet than a Surface Pro. It's more comfortable to hold, has better battery life, has more tablet apps written for it.

It all depends on what you are looking for in a device.

 

You're in a pretty rare group if you had no issues (sleep, power drain, etc.) and your battery life was consistently 7-8 hours. I still browse /r/surface now and again, and these issues still plague a lot of folks, yours truly included until I returned mine.

My iPP serves as my sole portable computer; it's a great experience.

--- Post Merged, Feb 8, 2016 ---

Experiences vary; I found the SP4 to be a pretty poor tablet and the entire idea for me was to have a tablet that I could use in lieu of my laptop (in this case, my rMBP). Better battery life (by far), more secure, lighter, note-taking abilities...it works great. The SP4 worked better as an out-and-out laptop, but if that's what I wanted I would have just kept using my far superior rMBP.

In any case, to each their own. It's great that your SP4 works for you.

 

I did for about 7 days and it was a terrible, frustrating experience in a hybrid device that didn't excel at Anythjng.

But I am delusional it seems so disregard.

 

Nope - not delusional.
I have a Surface Pro 3 and with Windows 10 the statement is 100% accurate. Windows 10 is a desktop OS - it like to think it can cosplay as a Tablet OS, but it fails pretty hard and is just a "Touchscreen laptop". Windows 8 was on the right track, but needed more development.

I loved my Surface Pro 3 with Windows 8, but couldn't keep using Windows 8. I did return it twice - Once because the screen had rough spots (which played havoc with the stylus), and once because the glass was popping up from the case.

If you're a Windows fan and you love the Desktop OS, then the Surface is probably pretty great. For me, I just can't use Windows 10 as a tablet OS.

 

Just went there. Hmm....that was an interesting experience. When a bunch of posts are people showing a picture of their surface docked to monitors and using as a "work station", you know the kind of demographic you're looking at for it.

And btw...if you're gonna dock your laptop to monitors and dongles the whole time, why don't you just use a desktop? That's what I use. That's what most IT professionals and programmers use. My current workflow is Mac mini hooked up to monitors for extended use and if I happen to be away and need something that isn't in the cloud, I remote into it with splash top. Otherwise...

The iPad pro excels at what it does perfectly. When I need to be mobile, I don't need a desktop OS anyway. If I was gonna do any kind of real work for a long period of time, I would want to do it on a 27inch screen anyway. Not a tablet

 

Yup, I tend to think the same way. My desktops (1 Work, 1 Home) simply provide much more working area than I could get with a laptop. And the level of work I do while mobile just isn't in the same realm, either. It tends to be in support of what the desktops are doing. Would it be nice to do a bit of code from something like the IPP? Yeah, but it hasn't really stopped me from doing design work and thinking about the code I need to write while I'm away from my desk. The fact that I use my iPad as the whiteboard to explore ideas before I code, and record observations while debugging for later, makes it valuable as something that takes almost no thought to bring along to a meeting room or elsewhere.

 

Because those rare times where you DO need your desktop to be mobile can far outweigh any advantages a desk-bound-only computer can have. At work I have a laptop - it spends most of it's time tied to two external monitors. I've pulled a lot of my work to my iPad pro, but I still occasionally need to pick up my laptop and work outside of my cube. It's often enough that it just makes sense for me to have a laptop.

My Retina MacBook at home is in the same situation. I rarely remove it from it's dock, but when I do, I'm glad I have a laptop. For now, the MacBook is powerful enough, but when it's ready to be retired, I'll do (and have been doing) some serious thinking - It would be nice to have a powerful, "home base" computer, but is that just out-moded thinking? I've had laptops as my main computer since I started buying computers (though I have owned an iMac [one of the first aluminum models] and I loved it).

 

I think that's why I bought my last few notebooks, because they were mostly used at a desk, but I thought it'd be nice to be able to take them with me when I needed to. Well, since I got my first iPad, my laptop hasn't budged from the desktop in years. In all the years since I got my iPad, have yet to find myself needing to do something away from my desk that can't be done with an iPad -- it can either be done on the iPad, or it can wait until I get back to my desk. I've come to the conclusion that for me, I don't need another laptop. Desktop + iPad is going to be my device combination for the forseeable future.

 

It's true. MS always has issues or missing features. Constantly in beta. Never used an Apple product, hardware or software, and thought "ok next update will solve this". It's not that it 'just works' but it 'works as expected'. That is a more accurate line. lol

 

Well, Apple products often has missing features (remember how the first iPhone had no cooy and paste!), but the features that are there work well. Microsoft would never ship a phone without copy and paste, but it would be glitchy and need an update before it stopped crashing. Not that Apple is perfect -- there was the MobileMe and Maps debacle, but those are services. In general, Apple hardware is solid.

 

Siri came out with the iPhone 4s over 4 years ago and is still in beta. Just sayin'....