I love the Surface 3. I don't love it quite as much as, say, the ThinkPad T400, but it's one of my favorite mobile computers. The Surface 3 is an exercise in "just enough." It wasn't cheap for its specs, but for its price, it is fast and mostly well built. The display is gorgeous, it plays World of Warcraft sufficiently, and the wireless networking has been improved a lot over the Surface RT I used to use.
That said, when something you carry with you and use every day has problems, those problems become massive to you. For me, those problems the Surface 3 has really revolve around power. Not computing power, where it is sufficient, but around electrical power, where a poorly designed Micro USB connection means that cables often fall loose and the system fails to charge. In addition to this, you generally can't trust that the system is actually charging when you use the included charger and cable, which features a light that should show the system is charging. Instead, the light shines when the system has an electrical connection, even if that electric connection isn't good or complete enough to actually put electricity back into the battery.
In addition, because regular Micro USB cables and charges are really only capable of so much, even before the problem of the system's port not sufficiently holding cables started happening, third party USB cables (especially long ones which I like because I want to be able to use the Surface 3 at a table while it is plugged in) generally don't have good enough wiring to carry enough voltage to the system to both charge and run it at once. In fact, for a long time, I was unable to figure out why my outboard battery packs (each of which claims to output 2.4A) wouldn't run the Surface.
It turns out that the problem is often the cord, and I had to start looking for different USB cables. The ultimate answer has been to use either the shortest possible cables that can be found, or use the cable that came with the Surface. I have another Microsoft Micro USB cable, but having another does not help my need for a longer cable, nor does it help when the new main problem is really that my Surface's micro USB port does not hold cables in well, even Microsoft's own.
All of this leads to some other problems. For example, I recently started looking into whether or not it might be possible to make the Surface 3 do the work that my T400 had previously done. The Surface 3 can already do all of the gaming and generic desktop productivity that the T400 was doing, but organizing my photos with Adobe Lightroom requires a little more storage. I have a 1TB spinning hard disk in the UltraBay module on the ThinkPad T400, and in a desktop I could just install a big internal disk. For the Surface 3, I had been planning on using a 2.5-inch "portable" hard disk connected to the Surface 3's peripheral USB port. Unfortunately, it's difficult if not impossible to both use the external hard disk and the Surface 3 at the same time. To make matters worse, a big part of using Adobe Lightroom is connecting a second USB device so that you can transfer data from your camera's memory card to your Lightroom library.
With all of that in mind, I present my Microsoft Surface 4 wish list:
- Replace the Micro USB port, USB 3.0 port, and DisplayPort port with three USB Type C ports.
- Include a power adapter that provides 20 or more watts to the system.
Literally nothing else is actually important for creating a compelling enough system, at least for me. Three Type C ports (especially if one's on the opposite side) is enough for a large variety of systems, including (but not limited to) running a Lightroom library while having a big SD or CF card attached to a reader, while charging the system, or using a Type C docking display or television, or using a big external hard disk that provides power to a Type C system, along with one or two other peripherals such as a card reader and a network adapter or an external display.
Of course, I also wish that somebody would go ahead and build an external hard disk drive that had a card reader built in. It sounds like a toaster fridge kind of situation, but I think it could be a very good solution for people with mobile computers that have low numbers of ports. Another solution is a powered USB hub, which I have (although, only a USB 2.0 hub) but that is both a big point of performance bottlenecking, and it almost completely negates the small form factor of the Surface tablet.
Intel has recently decimated funding of research and development of new Atom platforms, so the N3700 and the x7-Z8700 are going to be the top dogs in the Atom family for a while. One suggestion for another upgrade to the "Surface" product line has been to add a Core M processor to it. Using even the lowest end chip, perhaps even cTDP-downing it or preventing it from using turbo boost. You'd end up with something still appreciably slower than the Surface Pro 4, but the smaller size and other cost-saving moves (perhaps not using Thunderbolt on the Surface 4, while giving it to future Surface Pro models, as well as eMMC on the Surface 4 and SATA or PCIe on the Surface Pro) should help keep them differentiated as products.
I'm sure there are other improvements, but while it initially felt like a revelation, micro USB charging has ultimately proven to be more trouble than its worth, and it's leading to situations where I can't use the machine in ways I want to or for things it should do well.