New Surface products, built for Windows 11

Indeed, is it really so difficult to give me a 15 inch tablet that can attach to a keyboard? The iPad is so close, ARM based performance, battery life, cooling, even as many complained about the Book being unable to be powerful because it's so thin. Well, that never stopped Apple. However, iPadOS is a deal breaker, I need to run whatever I need on the hardware, not what a higher power deigns it so.

I brought a Surface Go 2, and returned it within 3 days. The device was brilliant, but I couldn't get over its operating system, especially not on a mobile device.

I hoped for a tablet I can do light dev work on, but I got a mediocre laptop without a keyboard.

The open/edit/save process is good for desktop, but not for mobile. On mobile operating systems you open and close apps without thinking. On windows you first need to tackle the unsaved change dialogs, find where you save your files, etc. You don't open recent drawings from a gallery, but from your filesystem. It sucks all the joy out of sketching, for example. It becomes work.

The lack if drawing apps was critical. There were Photoshop-like desktop apps, and half-baked mobile one. They were either really complex, or buggy beyond repair. Each handled the pencil in a different way, but never smoothly.

Even media playback sucked. I had to mess with environment variables to make VLC usable with fingers. Windows Media Player was not better.

Then there's Windows Update. My tablet was unusable for a big chunk of the first evening while it installed Bing news in my task bar and messed with my theme.

I heard that these tablets have tons of hardware and software problems, but I didn't get to that.

Long story short, it's really hard to get excited about Surface products when they are crippled by a poor OS and serious reliability issues.

It's out for people on the Windows Insiders program. I happen to be on it and got stranded because they enrolled me for Win11 despite my machine not meeting the specs and now they've decided to no longer provide updates to that cohort an downgrading requires a full wipe.

That said, from what I've been seeing Win11 is mostly just Win10 with some minor incremental changes, some good, some bad. The default centering of the task bar is certainly a thing but you can set it to align left as normal although I miss having the task bar moved to the top. Only thing I find a bit tedious is the new right click menu in the file explorer, which I can understand the reasoning behind but still don't think was the right move.

I think the new widgets thing is a misstep like the charms bar but it's just another icon you can ignore. The built-in MS Teams chat feature is interesting but just adds to the redundancy of having to have separate Microsoft and Microsoft 365 accounts, which is getting silly.

There is a good tag line "Microsoft - redefining infinity"

It really depends on the use case.

If the use case is tablet-like functionality, any convertible design simply doesn't work. Using a 700g tablet is already barely comfortable for long usage; a 1.2+ kg one is essentially unusable. In my opinion, it's a great marketing success (in other words, a scam).

For other use cases, I really have no idea what's the user base. I definitely recognize the (relative) innovation of the new functionality, but I have the suspicious that very few users actively use it. The convertible idea itself has been around for a long time, and based on my experience, it doesn't work in practice (in other words, it's a very