Microsoft: more people are switching from Macs to Surface than ever before

The thing with that though is that you can buy a Surfacebook in a lot of different places. Macbook is mostly the Apple Store, or at least that is the perception. Ever notice how unbusy the Apple section at Best Buy is?

I decided to get a Surface Pro 4 instead of upgrading my Macbook Air for my casual/portable computing device as I thought the combined Keyboard/Tablet mode would be more useful than an Air. My initial impressions after the first few days use:

- The Surface tablet Hardware has a nice build quality, but the Touch Pen doesn't register touches when it touches the screen you need to press down a little (unlike Apple's pencil). The Type Cover keyboard is wobbly when it's folded up so when I'm at a desk/flat surface I leave it completely flat as it's more sturdy. The touchpad is really small but I find myself using the touchscreen more so I don't notice it much. Otherwise the Type cover is usable, not as productive as a laptop keyboard, but more productive than a virtual keyboard.

- It's pretty fast, especially for its small profile

- The display is gorgeous, screen's a little small but it makes the device ultra portable.

- User Account management is atrocious, I bought the Surface Pro as secondary ultra portable for my Wife and so creating a new User Account is one of the first things I tried to do but couldn't at all, it kept failing with the useless generic "Something went wrong" dialog. You're meant to sign in with your Hotmail and I couldn't add another Local or Internet account for my wife for over 36 hours! it kept failing with "Something went wrong". I really hate needing to use an Internet account or requiring an Internet connection to create User Accounts, I'd prefer to completely disable any notion of Internet/hotmail accounts for Windows 10, it "just works" in Chrome OS but is highly infuriating and unstable in Windows 10. It still didn't let me add any Users after a complete reset, I had to wait 36 hours for that luxury.

- They have this "Hello" face recognition where it's able to log you in without entering a password which was a nice surprise and works pretty well.

- You now get annoying ads on your Lock Screen

- You also get nagged trying to keep you using Edge when trying to switch default browser to Chrome

- The AppStore is also unreliable, I couldn't install 2/4 Apps on the App Store Home Page (Halo and Planner 5D). Just failed with "Error, see details" with details being an empty dialog saying "Something went wrong". The Netflix App stopped loading after a 2nd restart (just an empty black screen) even after completely killing/restarting the App multiple times, only a full OS restart could get it working again. This experience falls way short of any of Apple's App Stores which "just work".

- Win 10 Apps aren't that great, the Facebook App is fairly polished but lacks feature parity with Website, Twitter's App is worse than its website, Netflix is the only Win 10 App I'm using over their website

- Win 10 isn't a great OS for touch, the icons are too small, took me a few goes trying to open a folder in VS which VS thought I wanted to move the folder, so you'll try using the touchscreen first than if it fails fallback to using the small touchpad.

- Within 3 hours of a new install I got by first BSOD, I installed VS 2017 beta with Docker + Hyper V. Docker for Windows refused to install the first time and crashes on Startup, I also couldn't run an empty .NET Core + Docker template, hand a number of build errors saying it couldn't find "System" namespace. The empty .NET Core Web App worked. In the end I uninstalled VS2017 beta, I'll try again in the next release.

These software issues happened after installing all Window updates. It was surprisingly buggy, I'd expect a hardware/software controlled device to be rock solid but the Surface was the most unreliable computing device I've owned.

In summary the Surface Pro4 tablet hardware is nice, quite thin for being able to run full Windows but also gets noticeably hot after a while (unlike iPad), has great display, Touch Pen isn't as solid as an Apple Pencil also its unproductive switching between Finger Touch and Touch Pen but the finger registration is good so I'm only using the Touch Pen for drawing apps.

Overall it's not as productive as a Macbook or as useful as a tablet than an iPad, so definitely not a Macbook or iPad killer, but has a useful niche as a secondary portable Windows 10 device. It's software unreliability issues and stupid User account management means I could never recommend it as on option to my parents who love and spend most of their time on their iPads and use iMac + Chrome OS for more heavy duty tasks - which are automatically backed up and have both been virus free for years which we're both happy about.

It's a tricky thing. From my experience, the capacitive sensing chip vendors (e.g. Broadcom, Cypress, Atmel) want to move units but don't want to spend the time working on the necessary physical integration to make the sensing pad work correctly. A trackpad is really nothing more than a phone-class touchscreen without an LCD behind it. There's a lot of sensitivity tuning and noise rejection that needs to be performed to refine the performance.

It's not their field of specialization, and they don't want to manufacture the finished components themselves. Apple obviously has taken the time and care to get it right. A lot of others...it seems like they went with the reference design as being good enough.

Interestingly, the Surface Book does not have USB-C. I excluded it from my search because of that.

Currently, the choice at that price point is either full USB-C or no USB-C.

Apple is losing ground, and this time it's not Steve's fault. I'll be sure to follow Apple when it will fall just so I can see the third coming of Christ. This time Steve will have to revolutionize resurrection; it's been 2000 years since the last innovation in that field.