Holy crap yeah, that looks amazing but it’s well out of my price range!
It sounds like a Surface is the way to go and it’s a matter of figuring out how much I can pump the hardware and keep it halfway sane price-wise.
Surface, all the way.
Menzo I have no idea why this replied to you but I can’t seem to unassociate that.
Well, my college is officially online-mostly for fall, so I guess it’s time to revisit this topic and commit to something. I’ve been considering this one:
but I’m always extra wary when buying a new type of tech for the first time, so I’d be happy for any feedback you all care to give. Basically the goal here is to get something that will let me do chalkboard-style lecture through Blackboard Collaborate (if you’re not familiar, think Zoom), will let me mark up student papers submitted as PDFs, and will be somewhat useful as a work laptop when this is all over. I’d like to keep it under $1000 (hell, I’d like to keep it a lot cheaper than that but you gotta do what you gotta do). I can’t imagine operating with less than 256 GB of memory, although I don’t know how easy portable storage is with these thigns. I’ll need the keyboard and stylus.
Any advice, warnings, or other information is extremely welcome - as I mentioned it always makes me uncomfortable dipping my toe into new tech, even when it’s directly adjacent to tech I know pretty well.
Costco usually has the latest Surface Pro in a bundle for $800. Not at this moment, but it recurs often. The Surface Pro 7 i5 has a slew of internal changes, such as Iris Plus Graphics, USB-C, and studio microphones. It’s a nice improvement from the SP6. The Costco $800 bundle is only 128GB storage, though, but that’s easily mitigated by OneDrive or cloud storage.
Honestly the Surface line are great… with two caveats that may or may not be an issue.
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Funky keyboard. I don’t like typing on a surface that’s floating above the desk, just flat out it feels less than ideal. It’s of course totally doable, and you can of course lay the keyboard flat and not prop it up. Anyway, if at all possible i’d find some way of hammer some Quick Brown Foxes on it to see if you like it or if it’s going to be a dealbreaker.
1a) You can always create a docked setup with Surfaces, using external monitors and keyboards. -
Just make sure you’re happy with the size of the screen.
Surface devices have much better webcams and just happened to be in the right place at the right time. I imagine every single laptop being designed over the next 6 months to a year is going to have vastly improved webcams, probably 3-4x better than they are now. What was a feature afterthought has unexpectedly become a selling point.
Yeah, MS was ahead of the curve on webcams. And those studio mics in the Surface Pro 7 are especially nice for conferences.
I imagine everyone with the Dell XPS 13’s infamous nostril-cam are regretting that right now.
The microphone’s not really a huge priority here as long as it’s functional, and I’ll be honest that I don’t know what “Iris Plus Graphics” are. :) Honestly, my big concerns (perhaps naively) are storage space, RAM, and screen size, not necessarily in that order. If I could bring myself to break $1000 on this I’d go for the Pro 6 with the 16 GB RAM and 512 GB internal storage before I’d go up to a 7, I think. Maybe I’m approaching this wrong, though.
This is a point of concern, yeah. I can’t really go to a store and check it out, either. I figure something roughly the size of a piece of paper should be fine for my purposes, though.
Oh, and I actually like my keyboard propped up so I don’t foresee that being a big issue. Thanks for the feedback!
My wife’s work laptop has one of those. It is not flattering, needless to say.
Have you ever used a Surface? They’ve got a signature 3:2 aspect ratio that is almost unique in the industry. It’s tall and not wide, which makes it great for productivity as well as imitating a piece of A4 when you’re using the stylus.
That sounds like exactly what I need but no, I’ve not used one before.
The Surface Pro, stylus, and OneNote are a match made in heaven for notetakers.
This man, he tells truth.
I got mine for textbooks and notes when I went back to college in 2012. I do not regret it at all, and still use it regularly.
Surfaces are all pretty great. I really enjoy my Book; it’s a fantastic jack-of-all-trades allowing me to change its form to the task at hand. I dabble in a lot of things and I really appreciate the flexibility. In all honesty I thought the hinge would be a total gimmick, but even outside of using it as a tablet, being able to flip the screen round is a godsend if you ever fancy doing ‘simple’ tasks from bed. Downside is the price. If you have the money it’s worth consideration, though.
I’ll be upgrading from a Book 1 to a Book 3 in a week or two.
Good to know.
So, seriously, what IS the distinction between the 6 and 7 in terms of the graphics?
Hell, while I’m being greedy, how viable are these things for light gaming?
It works but there is some weirdness. The resolution is quite high which may be an issue on lesser-specced models (Book is 3000x2000, Pro is 2736x1824 I think) and the aspect ratio non-standard as a result. Depends how well the game in question is programmed - if you can live with some black borders and maybe UI smooshing, it’s fine.
I only really gamed on it when travelling - Diablo 3 and Mechanicus, mostly. It held up though I had to drop the res down a bit since I like things silky smooth. For an old piece of kit it did well, though I splurged at the time on the top-end model.
I have the Surface Laptop 2, whose graphics is the same as the Surface Pro 6.
It can absolutely do some gaming. You can even play Age of Empires 2 DE on it. 2D games, pixel art games, stuff like that. It doesn’t do it well, you know, you’re turning down the resolution in Age 2 DE and stuff, but it absolutely does work as long as the game doesn’t tax the GPU.
That said… it does spin the fans up while you’re doing it, and there are more than a few games that don’t look graphically intensive, but for some programmatic reason, are, and are probably beyond what it can do.
Iris Plus are Intel’s beefed-up integrated graphics. It’s basically twice as powerful as UHD (Intel’s standard integrated graphics). It still won’t qualify as gamer-class by any means, but it’s an improvement.
Don’t forget you need to buy the keyboard and pen separately. They’re $160 and $80 respectively. I would go for the SP7 unless you find a great deal on the 6 or are really price-sensitive.
I have a Surface Pro 1, and play plenty. EU 4 probably being the most taxing. But older games, like old tycoon games? Works great. Played a bunch of Rollercoaster Tycoon on it in the last year.
And games like Mini Metro are great on it.
Noted, thanks for the advice!
That’s very encouraging. I was thinking roguelikes and stuff like Star Traders, being able to run full-blown Paradox games would be a huge win.
Now don’t get me wrong, it is a lot slower than on my PC. But it is playable!