Microsoft Surface Pro 4: Who wants to buy one?

by philg

I was enthusiastic about buying a Microsoft Surface Pro 4. My 1993 prediction of the death of Microsoft Office, in favor of collaborative browser-based apps, has stubbornly failed to come true. The Surface seems like a good travel companion. I can look at documents that are stored in DropBox and edit them with Office and then email them off to patent litigators (where my carefully crafted prose will ultimately be shredded 🙁 ). My DropBox plan is 1 TB. This seems to hold my current expert witness work plus a year of photos and videos (the rest to be archived on a 6 TB mechanical hard drive on my desktop computer, then backed up via CrashPlan).

One would think that the 1 TB of SSD is the most expensive requirement, with a Crucial driveretailing for $315 (though perhaps Microsoft pays less as a wholesale customer?). How much does the $315 of SSD pump up the price of a $900 Surface Pro 4? It is available only with a Core i7 CPU, which I don’t need, and 16 GB of RAM ($80 at retail?), which I do need, for a total of… $2,700 (to add insult to injury, it is not even available for pre-order in this configuration). This is more than I paid for my monster desktop computer, which includes a 1 TB SDD, a 6 TB mechanical hard drive, and 32 GB of RAM.

Who loves the Surface and wants to tell me that it is worth $2,700? And how is that keyboard? Could one type out the Great American Novel on it?

13 thoughts on “Microsoft Surface Pro 4: Who wants to buy one?”

  1. There is a MSFT store near me and I have gone in to have a look at all of them. The Surface-s (Surfacii plural?) are nice, but really you are paying an extremely high premium for the portability.

    When you think about it, unless you are truly traveling 3x a week continuously, most of the time it will be on your desk or your lap and you will be near a power source… so unless you have other constraints (like you have a medical condition that doesn’t allow you to lift the extra weight), it simply is not worth it.

    Typed on a $315 laptop I bought refurbed, with 15″ 1920×1080 screen and 256GB SSD drive…

  2. How could the price of your desktop have any bearing on it? When I sold the first laptops in Manhattan (the trusty Kaypro 2000), people often said, “What, why is it MORE than the IBM over there, which is bigger?”

    Surely you have learned a little since 1985.

    What does a similarly equipped Apple machine cost?

  3. My 1993 prediction of the death of Microsoft Office, in favor of collaborative browser-based apps, has stubbornly failed to come true.

    Maybe for your generation. Here, every high and middle schooler does all of their writing with Google Docs. I suspect they’ll make it through college without installing Word or Excel. MS Office runs in the browser as well, though I haven’t checked the feature parity with the classic desktop versions.

  4. If you can’t expense $2700 somehow working for lawyers then you are a lot less capable than you appear.

  5. We have the Surface and hate it (use only for work when off-site) when it is intended to replace desk workstation. A “mini” size tablet and full-size desktop seem like the best compromise (OK, and maybe a 5″ Windows Phone, if you like 6-hour upgrades that may brick your phone in no time).

  6. Short of video editing – you’re sure you need 16GB for a secondary machine? The fact that they only bundle that much RAM with a bigger SSD and a GPU – substantially raising the price is slimy- but they’re not alone.

    Why not buy an ultrabook class machine – which you could surely get with your specs in the $1200-$1400 range? The weight/portability delta with the Surface would have to be negligible.

  7. Visited a shop in Frankfurt and I was really surprised how much I liked the Surface Pro 3 keyboard, it’s nice and soft and thin, yet very comfortable to type on. I don’t know if the surface pro 4 is as good to type on. Most disappointing to me was the Macbook 12 keyboard – the thinner butterfly keyboard was a lot of hype, I can’t imagine typing on that for hours. I do like the Retina screen and compact/thin design. Price wise it seems a lot better value than the Surface Pro 4.

  8. I can’t tell you anything about a $2700 new i7 16Gb Surface Pro 4 except to note I am still pleased with a $270 used i5 4Gb Surface Pro (One).

    The screen is a bit small, but all in all a very nice piece of hardware that boots up quickly and runs mostly just fine. (Is the screen small in physical dimension, or do I just hate 1920 x evil 1080? Probably both.)

    It doesn’t replace a tablet for things tablets are good at. (Which are?)
    But it is a very nice small, portable computer.

    It handles Word and Google docs and typical browsing and the usual Windows workflow well.

    The keyboard I use is a Microsoft Wedge Keyboard (BT). It’s a bit cramped for my fingers, but it is a real keyboard, very portable and works well. I haven’t tried any of the Surface Pro Cover keyboards.

    I can’t compare it to Apple products but it is oo better than an Android tablet, better than a Chromebook, and I prefer carrying it around to my much more beasty Dell laptop.

    Still, if you can get 16Gb on an Apple ultraportable thing, why not go for that?

    I do wish:

    + battery lasted longer (about 3 hours!)
    + it could could be powered with a USB battery pack

  9. I picked up a surface 3 last summer and have been very happy with it. Sounds like it doesn’t meet your needs, but the form factor is a win. It is a solid tablet and laptop. (Even my smaller non-pro can run VMware and VirtualBox.)

    I used a MicroSD card to expand available storage. That format seems to top out between 128 and 200 GB depending on the R/W speed needs.

  10. So Apparently Microsoft has copied one thing from Apple that you disliked the most
    which is Price Umbrella.

    Microsoft is pricing their product exactly like Apple prices
    except it is even more than Apple prices if you compare the processors involved.

    Apple will sell you Macbook Pro 15″ (May 2015) refurbished version
    with 16GB RAM and 1 TB SSD for
    $2799.99 (it even has AMD discrete GPU)

    mind you processor in macbook is 45W TDP while Surface Pro is 15W.
    Your millage may vary.

  11. I bought a HP Spectre Ultra book last summer that meets most of your feature needs for $1400. It folds into a 13 inch tablet configuration for use with your fingers and a screen touch keyboard. Unfolded it is a great small computer with a good standard keyboard and touchpad. It has a i7 CPU, 16GB RAM, and 512 GB SSD. Typing is wonderful. The battery last 8+ hours. It has three USB ports, a HDMI port and a micro SD card slot. It boots in about 5 seconds with windows 8.1. It weighs about 2 pounds so it is easy to carry.

    I did a side by side compare at Best Buy of the HP Spectre with a MS Surface Pro and a Apple Macbook and liked the HP the best. Do your own compare. I bet you pick the HP.

  12. $3000 is the new $400. Mortgages are dead, but loans for students & corporate buyouts are free. Students & businesses are now the main consumers, & $3000 is nothing for a startup that just got a $50 billion buyout.

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