Microsoft Surface tablets

It depends on the content I am consuming or creating. I have a 16:9 monitor in landscape and one in portrait. They work better for different things.

 

So the New Surface Pro 5 was officially unveiled and it was probably the most boring and uninspiring sidegrade I've seen coming from the Surface team, even more considering the SP4 is almost 2 years old.

It looks almost exactly the same, probably same screen. They also kept the same ports, but apparently there's a surface connector to USB-C adapter in the works. Skylake CPUs were traded for the corresponding Kaby Lake models, which is quite uninspiring by itself.


Only good news is the Core i5 is now fanless like the m3 version was before. This means people can buy fanless devices with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD.
Once again they get the only Core i7 GT3e in town (of 2-in-1s), at least for the time being.

 

50% better battery life sounds significant if true (propably not). SP4 is pretty great hardware, hard to make it better I guess.

 

Double the pen pressure sensitivity with at least halved latency also.
Also now with pen tilt and screen that is compatible with Surface Dial.

 

The i5 being fanless is the best upgrade, I like that.
Not including USB-C is non rational decision, even if I wanted one I'ld go nah I'll wait until it inevitably gets released next time, I think they mentioned 6 months.
Though too expensive for what it is, featuring apple level pricing upgrades

Core m3-7Y304GB 128GB $799
Core i5-7300U 4GB 128GB $999
Core i5-7300U 8GB 256GB $1,299 +$300 for extra 128GB & 4GB!
Core i7-7660U 8GB 256GB $1,599
Core i7-7660U 16GB 512GB $2,199 +$600 for extra 256GB & 8GB!!
Core i7-7660U 16GB 1TB $2,699

 

Yeah the pricing on the higher end is just too darn high!

 

I guess my biggest disappointment was that they didn't go with a Raven Ridge, which was a hope mainly fueled by the model taking so long to update. Of course for that to happen they'd have to launch this later this year.
If they were going with Kaby Lake anyways, why not release this in Q4 2016?

I've been thinking of eventually replacing my SP4 m3, but I guess I won't replace it with another Surface Pro.

But that's with a high-end pen that you must purchase separately for $100, not the one included.
And I don't know if the new pen works with the old SP3 and SP4.

Surface Dial on a 12" screen looks downright silly, to be honest.

Yup, best of all is the fanless model isn't limited to 4GB RAM and 128GB SSD.
That was the main reason for me to go with the m3 version and if I was in the market for a new 2-in-1 today I might have gone with the new i5 8GB.

 

disappointing release imo . Hopefully we get a real upgrade at the backend of the year

 

What disappointed me is how much I have to pay for 8GB RAM. I do not need the it, I do need the 8GB.

 

Doesn't sound like the Intel roadmap the rest of the year will produce anything more interesting. Maybe they can rev it to put in real USB-C ports but with limited storage on the SSD, what kind of USB-C devices would you use with a device meant to be mobile?

 

So, I like most of the updates to the Surface Pro and the updates to the Surface Pen are very good as well. At this point what is there to update on the device itself other than the internals? The design is already great. The screen is already among the best around. The increase in battery life will also be quite welcome.

USB-C would have been nice but you can tell the market the Surface is aimed it (business and professional users) as it retains the standard USB connector to facilitate compatibility with existing USB devices without the need for a converter.

I personally would have liked a model with a larger screen 13-14" but it's completely understandable why they didn't increase screen size.

The one thing that has me hugely disappointed, however, is that the Pen is no longer included. This basically means that the new line is 99 USD more across the board if you need or want the pen. I guess they viewed making the pen optional better for marketing than increasing the price of the Surface Pro compared to past models.

I'm also not sure if I'm a fan of them dropping the version number from the naming scheme. However, this allows them to not be tied to any particular release schedule. For example they could iterate faster or slower without having to worry about naming conventions. However, it'll become problematic in the future to be able to easily tell what model you are getting without looking into the details of the device. IE - in the future I can't just search for Surface Pro 6 in online stores (such as Amazon) when a new one comes out. A search for Surface Pro would turn up every model released and then I'll have to try to determine which is the latest.

Regards,
SB

 

I can't see that being a major issue. You could just look at the model year and if MS releases more than one model a year you'll probably see something like pro 2017.2.

 

I would have liked USBC for the ability to recharge from more power packs. My ideal surface USB setup would be

1 full size USB 3.1 port . 1 USB C port for charging , 1 usb c port for accessories. I'd also like another micro sd or actually a full sd slot. SD cards are cheaper and faster than micro sd cards.

I am also disappointed on the fan side. I don't like that they removed the fan from the I5 edition . While playing games on the surface pro 4 at some point the fan would get very loud and the back of the pro 4 would be very hot. I doubt the new i5s are so efficient that they not only fixed this but were able to remove the fan.

Last note is thunderbolt for support on external GPUs . I'm not a fan of the $500 kits that come with a gpu. However I would love to be able to drop $100 on an enclosure and drop my older GPU into it. For example put my 290 in it when I move to vega or whatever , when I upgrade from that I can drop it into my enclosure and so on and so forth. Yea the cpu will be the big stumbling block but there are a lot of games that will run decently on a dual core i5 /i7 and a 290 or whatever.

I mean I would love for them to go to a quad core zen but who knows they seem to like intel

 

It is going to throttle even more than SP4.

 

that's my point

 

You might want to take a look at the new version of the Spectre X2. It doesn't follow all your demands, but there's two USB-C ports, both are able to charge the device, both are able to drive displayport and HP already bundles a C->A adapter for free.
And not only did HP get access to the Iris Pro version of the Core i7 this time, the screen is now 3000*2000 and the version Core i7 GT3e + 8GB RAM + 256GB NVMe costs $1280. Keyboard and Pen included.
Plus, the spec list says the GPU is the Iris Pro 650, meaning it may be using the 28W version which should throttle a lot less.

Unfortunately there's no TB support in this one, but price wise if you want something a little bit gaming-capable this will probably be the best 2-in1 in the market for a while. It's a GPU capable of 880 GFLOPs FP32 / 1760 GFLOPs FP16 and 64MB eDRAM. It should be able to play pretty much any game at 1280*800, for example.

 

They will need to get crafty in their cooling to run a 28W CPU. That's really the Achilles heel of the Surface 4 Pro. It can't sustain even 15W on the CPU, even with the fan.

 

https://eve.community/t/welcome-new-surface-pro/6819/81

 

Only a few people game on those things probably.

If people are using this a lot in tablet mode, without the keyboard, they're likely surfing or watching videos, not doing anything that pegs the CPU too much.

 

My SP4 i5 throttled like crazy when playing wasteland 2. I don't know what this guy did but it wasn't 3d. Upgrading to kaby lake hardly should increase efficiency.