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

Mainly, from what I can gather, because laptop makers (or trackpad makers) still haven't got their act together about including "precision touchpads". That was meant to sort out the touchpad issues a few years ago!

Mostly they seem not to bother fitting the newer type.

Yeah, pretty much this. If you get macOS to pop out an error that it can't find Finder (especially on 10.11>, which has SIP), you dun pretty goofed. macOS (especially with SIP) is by far the most stable of the big three OSes. Windows its shortcomings are known, but as far as Linux goes (numbering is only for clarity):

1. No default power management. Why isn't TLP installed and activated by default on systems that are known to work with it? Macbooks get 12-13h on macOS vs 5h on Linux. The XPS13 gets 22h on Windows vs 11h(!) on Linux. Ubuntu 16.04 on my MBP 13" 2015 gets 7h with TLP and Powertop configured, so even with those tools there's still a very large discrepancy.

2. Package hell. Yes, shared libraries have advantages. No, they don't outweigh the benefits of containerizing. By now (with 'Snappy Packages' and 'Flatpak' getting bigger) its finally getting fixed, but still.

3. There is no unified repo, and no unified package manager. There's Pacman, RPM, apt, etc. etc. and if you switch distro's you have to re-learn. Now I understand that this is due to each distro being like a micro-country, but imagine this: 3x3 unified repos (free, non-free and community) each with 3 levels (bleeding edge, testing, stable). All distros could(would) tap into these repos, so you combine the efforts of every distro its maintainers. Same for the package manager development. For distro-specific stuff the distros could just use a separate repo

4. UI. There's 2 different UI toolkits (QT and GTK) that both are configured differently, behave slightly differently and thus something (usually the QT apps since GTK is used more often) feels 'off'. This split also gives issues with scaling sometimes. macOS does this perfectly with pretty much everything using Cocoa and having all options on the menubar. Saving is always under 'file', and 'file' is always in the same location. Same for 'Edit', 'View', etc. So far only Ubuntu replicates this, and they do it for a good reason.

And those are only a few of my pet peeves. Here's a full list by someone that has much better knowledge of Linux than me. Quite staggering really.[0]

[0]https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.t...

That makes sense. When you're moving around the house when working then a laptop is a necessity.

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.

I'm glad you're having a good experience with the new MBP.

However, I wouldn't plug a $.70 adapter into a $3000 computer. Maybe you should splurge and spend $10 on the Apple adapter.