Do actual professionals use the surface book or have I utterly fallen for microsoft's hype marketing?

do actual professionals use the surface book or have I utterly fallen for microsoft's hype marketing?

Depends. Are you referring to professional shills? Then yes.

I've seen the surface line used exactly once in a professional context, and it was an accounting firm I used to work at. Clients all had the usual IBM, Dell, HP, etc...

no apps

can anyone recommend an alternative to surface book laptop/tablet with a pen?
moved to a smaller space with mom to take care of her. now have literally no space enough for laptop/wacom for doing art, so I was thinking of getting a surface book, but it is expensive

any other alternatives that won't break the bank?

They're in executive and business development space, not the software development space.

Handy for people like myself that spend an inordinate amount of time living out of hotel rooms.

I have never seen a surface anything in the wild

can you elaborate? wouldn't any surface model e able to do whatever any other windows machine does?

I'm a uni student at the moment, I've seen more of the things than I expected to around the place.
They're not cheap, but the Surfaces are pretty neato in my experience. I've got a Pro 4 myself to replace both my old laptop and my 2013 Nexus 7. It's filled the role pretty well. Only major complaint is battery life. For a small laptop it's not bad, but it was a rude surprise coming off an Android tablet.

But what can it do that no other windows machine already does?

You'd need apps developed specifically targetting the surface that enables you to be productive in ways not possible to regular Windows Notebook users.

I've seen several with architects/designers most likely due to the stylus and that they have to move around constantly

but i haven't seem them using them in docked mode in a larger screen though

otherwise it's mostly Macs and Thinkpads, with a few Dells and every old HPs

These are 13" to 14" laptops, they fold back, have active stylus and Thunderbolt 3 (which allows you to connect external GPU docks or connect several monitors or enjoy the full speed of external SSDs)

some of them are available, others will arrive in a couple of weeks of months

Thinkpad Yoga X1 2017
Thinkpad Yoga 370
Lenovo Yoga 720
Dell XPS 13 2-in-1
HP spectre x360 2017
HP Elitebook x360 G2 1030

they are all around 3 pounds, pretty light considering they have physical keyboards


there are also 15.6" version, at around 5 pounds with dedicated graphics and slightly better cpu's, though I don't recommend them if you wan to carry them around often

Lenovo Yoga 720 15
HP spectre x360 15

It works great for me

Thinkpad yoga otherwise don't bother

checked with wacom first, holy cow, the mobile pro studio is way more expensive.

seen and tested the hp spectre, way expensive for its specs.

anyway, seems out of all the choices, the yoga 720 is the cheapest, most powerful of all. i hope it is cheap when converted to flipbucks.

>But what can it do that no other windows machine already does?

a detectable keyboard
high pixel density touch screen

surface basically makes tablets useless

Have a list for tablets? I'd rather use a bluetooth keyboard with real keys.

I kind of want a Wacom Mobile Studio pro but can't force myself to pay $2000 for a dual core CPU device.

My mom has one for "work". She's literally never touched it.

A bunch of dbas programmers and stuff I know jumped on it at the latest release. They tend to feel lukewarm about it now.

No, they pretend to be marketed at "professionals" so that normies buy them thinking they're high quality when it's just consumer trash that was marketed at them all along.

You have utterly fallen for Microsoft's hype. I work at a business with 8,000 employees. We are a software partner with Microsoft.

We don't even have SKUs to buy Microsoft hardware products in our ordering system. You either get a Dell 9020 or whatever the latest revision is, a 27in retina iMac, a Dell XPS or a retina Macbook Pro.

I submitted an external purchase order for a surface book last year and had nothing but problems with it. I sent it back after a week. I got a surface 4 about 6 months later to use in our NOC. It is clunky and unintutitve.

I replaced it with a Dell Rugged which actually has a hardware serial port and that's been fantastic in the NOC.

I heard they weren't actually good for doing anything but drawing. The Mobile Studio had to be made because the Wacom Expression had so many bugs. You might not find another tablet with 2048 levels of pen sensitivity, though. I have the SP4 and it has half that, but overall it's been good to me.

They aren't good for drawing. The stylus loses connection frequently and the battery life is awful. I tried one and hated it, back to my Cintiq immediately.

They're useful for people on the go.

NOC life is a lot of desk work, which defeats the purpose of a mobile workstation.
When you're in a server room configuring a router or something, you basically just need a mobile terminal, not a mobile desktop.

I work at a NOC too, we have 350k users, and our desktops are some trash HP AMD Athlon X2 machines.
>kill me

When I first got it, I had to fiddle with the pen sensitivity settings and some other things. I use it with Clip Studio Pro (previously Medibang) and haven't had any issues. Battery lasts me about 3 hours
I prefer to use my Cintiq too but I'm not always home

>When you're in a server room configuring a router or something, you basically just need a mobile terminal, not a mobile desktop.

That's why I bought a Surface. It didn't work for this function. A more traditional laptop was better suited for that kind of task.

I don't understand the use case for the Surface line.

It's for people who don't have a desk, but need desktop like functionality.

Great for students and businesspeople who travel (be it campus or nation), since it's super easy to carry and use anywhere, but fully functional as a computer.

All pharma companies use thinkpads. It's a huge meme for this industry

>It's for people who don't have a desk, but need desktop like functionality.
So a laptop?

my old job did, but we hooked them up to 2 monitors and m+kb

They're alright as long as you don't get the sp3, which has battery-killing firmware issues

Neither of those are useful to professionals though unless you count artists.

>do actual professionals use the surface book or have I utterly fallen for microsoft's hype marketing?
We rolled them out to a couple of our managerial staff a while ago, however we have since stopped because Microsoft's support is utter shit when you try to RMA a device or send it in for warranty replacement.

I have bought 2-3 of them for my organization for this reason.

They are a meme though and the executives use them.

actual professionals probably dont give much of a shit

they do have good money tho so there may be a higher % of surface ownership amongst them, as with other flagships and macshit

why care

In my workplace a 100% of the workers use self owned thinkpads but I'm freelance and work from home so

lots of our professors use various surface models

but they're in humanities so their ideal computer is just something portable that can run office shit and can be attached to projectors (= almost every small laptop works)