I've just finished up with NaNoWriMo!
After using it to write 50,003 words for NaNoWriMo, I have a much better grasp on my notions of the ways in which the Microsoft Surface 3 is a computer with two or more personalities. For the purposes of this article, let's just restrict it to "laptop" usage. Specifically, I'm using Office 2013 on Windows 8.1U1 on this system. I might eventually upgrade to Windows 10, but not right now.
The Surface 3 has a pretty good looking 1920x1280 display. It comes set at a 150% scaling factor, which gives a workspace of approximately 1280x854. You can set the display not to scale at all, giving you a 1920x1280 workspace, which is mostly usable at laptop distances. These two resolutions create two very different experiences on the device.
The first and default experience is of a relatively modest computer. It's faster than your eight-year-old laptop, by a reasonably noticeable margin even, but it won't exactly set the world on fire, and you aren't totally sure that you're getting more display space, but it's got longer battery life and it's really good at doing a few tasks at a time.
The second, non-default experience is to turn off display scaling. When you do that, everything looks small, but if you have good vision or wear corrective lenses, it's pretty much readable. With a 1920x1280 native resolution, the Surface 3 becomes a total multi-tasking powerhouse. You can view multiple documents side-by-side, you can work with professional applications that show a lot of content or have large controls.
These two personalities imply two pretty different usage cases. The first is a highly mobile computer where you expect a long battery life running just one or two apps. The second is a very powerful computer where you can multi-task by running several applications at once. The Surface 3 isn't what I'd call a slow computer, but I have problems really thinking of it as fast, in the context of the Surface Pro family, and UltraBook laptops like the Dell XPS 13 that cost just a little bit more than the Surface 3, but offer a lot more performance.
The primary problem with these two interpretations is that the Surface 3 does its darndest not to live up well to either of them. As a mobile device, it's just powerful enough that tasks which drain its battery quickly don't actually look like they're problematic for the device, creating a situation where you can have a tab open in the background of a web browser sucking down battery life like no tomorrow that has no other impact on usability. This is perhaps the best hidden benefit of the Surface RT(1), whose CPU is so slow that you would simply never leave an errant process in the background for a long time, because you wouldn't be able to do anything else on the device.
As a high-resolution productivity device, if you install power-hungry productivity applications on the Surface 3, you're bound to run into both its 4-gigabyte RAM ceiling (which was generous in 2009 and somewhere between mediocre and merely average, today), its CPU and limited connectivity options may cause problems.
In terms of pure performance, a Surface 3 is about 125% the total performance of my old ThinkPad T400, but the T400 has better connectivity, room for two bigger and faster internal storage devices, and a higher RAM ceiling.
There is a third personality: a tablet. At its core, the hardware of the Surface 3 kind of implies that it happens to be a tablet with a good keyboard. This hardware is in line with the performance of high end tablets of the same size, such as the iPad Air 2 and the Nexus 9, but it happens to run the full Windows operating system.
Windows itself runs well on here, Office does as well, and I'm sure that if your tasks were relatively light (or haven't changed much in several years) you'd have good luck with graphics programs such as Adobe Lightroom, and either Photoshop and Premiere Elements, or even the full Creative Suite. I have problems accepting its long-term viability for this type of work, however. I suppose the best way to phrase it is that I worry that while it will work today, if you don't already have a Surface 3, your money is perhaps better spent elsewhere if you don't want the compromise involved.
A computer like the Dell XPS 13 has much better battery life and with both the 1920x1080 and "UHD" display options, will get you sufficient work space.
The Surface 3 is impressive, it's useful, and I'll almost certainly ultimately move most of my software licensing over to it as the T400 ages and becomes more expensive to repair, or as I need and want to use some of that software on the go.
The Surface 3 makes a good Office box. This is my own hang-up, but I just can't bring myself to try. As NaNoWriMo officially ends, I'll have time, and I'll need to, especially as the computer on which I currently run Lightroom continues to age.
(1) Perhaps it's also the biggest shortcoming of the Surface RT, and the Windows RT platform in general, because the "normal people" for whom the device was intended shouldn't be tasked with figuring out which of their Internet Explorer tabs is sucking down all the CPU cycles and RAM.