Earlier this week, I posted about the Surface Pro 3. However, that post having been released was a mistake. After I first wrote it, I abandoned it (which is why it originally went out missing a few things in the last sentence), and re-wrote it as this article. That post was surprisingly well liked, and a large proportion of the readership (one person) mentioned that they wanted me to keep it up, because it said what they think about the Surface Pro 3 very well. The reason I'd abandoned it was because I thought it didn't hit the point quite right, and that it was far too circuitous, but apparently that wasn't the case.
After reviewing each of them, I think each article actually says a slightly different thing about the Surface Pro 3, even though I created them each to be stand-alone posts, so there is some wording I reuse from one article to the next. I wanted to get this post up earlier, but directly after posting on Monday, I got sick and spent much of the week in bed and was by and large, unable to write this new foreword or comprehend the differences between the two articles.
In both posts, I call upon the collective idea that the laptop in and of itself needs replacement. I think this idea is a little bit disingenuous though. It's not that laptops "need" a replacement or even that it's primed for one, but that as we go through a period where computing tasks change, and where the amount of horsepower needed to run the most common computing tasks becomes available in smaller and smaller packages, the most obvious and default notion of what a "computer" is changes.
In 1996, if you asked somebody what a "computer" was, you would probably end up with answers that essentially suggested that the Power Macintosh 6200 or 6400 was the default notion of a "computer," and it was by and large a stand-alone device. There was probably a printer sitting next to it. It was something that lived on your desk, and was too heavy to just move around without a really good reason. If you asked that same question in 2006, you'd probably get the answer that a MacBook is the purest representation of the idea of a "computer," and that network connectivity was non-negotiable. As we edge closer to 2016, a "computer" is quickly becoming something you pull out of your purse/manbag/cargo-pockets and write e-mail on. Here in 2014, mobile broadband is growing in popularity and (hard as it is to believe) is actually becoming more affordable all the time. By 2016, there may well be more tablets with LTE connectivity in service as personal computers than laptops without it.
The question, I think, is whether or not this change is inevitable. In the past, it was a given that a newer and smaller form factor was obviously going to be an improvement for personal needs. The hard part here as a very technical user is to remove myself from my own habits and try to analyze what "normal people" will do with a platform. This is problematic in its own way, however. As I mention in the finished version of the article that was supposed to go up last week, I love the Microsoft Surface RT, because it lets me use a device that is physically a tablet in the way I actually use my desktop and laptop. This is something Android users have been trying to achieve since the platform first launched, and is something Microsoft got very right, if for no other reason than I can pull out my RT and if I'm at a table, start working on my novel or my budget calculations in the desktop versions of Excel and Word. If I'm on a bus or a train or the couch, I can pull out the RT without the keyboard and browse the web or use the excellent PDF Reader and Amazon Kindle applications to read a book. It's the bulk of what I use my iPad, and today, my laptop for.
With the Surface Pro 3, Microsoft is taking another step toward that collective vision of a laptop replacement. The way they've come by it is to make the Surface as much like a laptop as possible, without giving it a heavy base and a stiff hinge with which to support itself, or just building a non-convertible laptop outright. The question Microsoft is asking with the Surface Pro 3 is whether or not you're willing to give up on the particular combination of portability and enhanced battery life you get out of a device like the iPad Mini or the Nexus 7 to coalesce your laptop with your tablet. If you were going to buy an iPad and a MacBook Air anyway, they seem to be coaxing, "why not buy one device that does both things?"
Without further ado I give you, my dear readers, Lapability.
Last week, Microsoft announced the latest generation of its Intel-based tablet that runs full Windows 8.1 Pro. The Surface Pro 3, as it's called, is now available for pre-order, and many tech sites are either crunching away on their reviews, or have published them already. The quick run-down is that it offers the same compute guts as its predecessor, but adds a low-end Core i3 option, and larger, taller 3:2 display at a native resolution of 2160x1440.
During the presentation, Microsoft focused almost exclusively on the fact that this is the tablet that can replace your laptop. Microsoft and the tech blog industry have collectively been very excited about this possibility for several years, so it's understandable that the Surface Pro 3 has gotten a lot of attention. On the laptop side of things, the changes that Microsoft cites are the larger screen with a more "work oriented" 3:2 aspect ratio (the previous generations have 16:9 displays at 1920x1080, perfect for movie-watching, but not so hot for Word and Excel), a new hinge that is much more flexible and opens much further than the previous generations, and a new keyboard cover (in part to match the new physical size of the tablet) that has additional magnets to stabilize the unit on a lap.
On the tablet side of things, it's still very much a Microsoft Surface. The new larger display enables up to three different New Interface applications to be run at once, or two and the desktop, and during the presentation, there was a really heavy focus on the new nTrig digitizer, with its dedicated OneNote button.
The "lapability" (Microsoft's word) of the new Surface Pro 3 was most of what prompted them to spend most of the presentation comparing the Surface Pro 3 to the 13-inch MacBook Air, which is arguably the single most popular laptop on the market today. They've correctly identified the fiercest competition the Surface has, and even for the Surface RT, it's possible to think of reasons why somebody might own both Microsoft's tablet, and Apple's tablet or Apple's laptop. In fact, Microsoft suggests that up to 96% of iPad users are also laptop users. (Which is possibly the subject of its own post.)
The Surface Pro and MacBook Air have been best enemies since the Surface Pro first launched. They have long been at similar price points (although, Microsoft has been aggressively lowering the price of the Surface line since its original release in October, 2012,) and the Surface Pro and MacBook Air have also quite recently converged at a very similar performance point. Even before the Surface Pro was released, comparisons between it and the MacBook Air started, with many tech sites noting that the main differences between the two were the physical form factor.
Form factor is the name of the game again, as both the MacBook Air and the Surface Pro use nearly the same processors, have the same amount of memory, have extremely similar storage subsystems, and have the distinction of being the flagship systems of their respective operating systems. What Microsoft is asking customers and reviewers to do when considering the Surface Pro 3 is to think about whether or not the traditional laptop form factor is strictly necessary.
During the presentation, Microsoft specifically suggested to a room full of tech journalists sporting MacBook Airs on their laps that they'd like the Surface Pro 3 better than the MacBook Air for their typing-heavy work. Panos Panay, VP of Surface, went so far as to specifically hand a Surface Pro 3 to Joanna Stern (who earned a reputation at The Verge by mentioning in every single review of any PC laptop that you could be spending your money on a MacBook Air, the best laptop on the market), complete with her own MacBook Air on her lap.
The main problem with this, of course, is that any given journalist is almost certainly going to be fairly well set in their own ways, especially after most of the reviewers have already either used or owned one, or reviewed one or both previous versions. In fact, the "lapability" of the Surface Pro 3 became the focal point of many reviews, and after Microsoft specifically invited it, reviews were based not just on the Surface Pro 3's merits in and of itself, but on its merits compared to a MacBook Air. Most of the reviews came to approximately the same conclusion: when you need a laptop, there is no substitute for a laptop, and because Microsoft was already talking about it, the MacBook Air is still the best laptop you can buy.
This isn't to say the Surface Pro 3 is without merit, but I do think Microsoft spent far too little time focusing on some of the more unique aspects of the system, such as the new more flexible kickstand, which might improve lapability of it as a tablet, or the new stylus pen, which makes it into the best legal pad that $930 (the base price of the system is $800, you basically must buy the keyboard) can buy.
The Surface Pro 3 has some competition from places other than Apple, however. Today's most obvious killer app for the device is Microsoft's own flagship application software, Office. The most economical, portable, and useful way to get Office is to buy a Surface RT or Surface 2, which are a third and half the price of the base Surface Pro 3 model, and each include the core components of Office: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote (desktop), and Outlook. In addition, the Surface 2 has more covers available, such as the inexpensive Touch Cover, and the glorious Surface Power Cover.
The solution to that, I think, is that Microsoft needs to accentuate what makes the Surface Pro 3 unique compared to the MacBook Air, the iPad, and its own Surface RT and 2. I would certainly start with the stylus. Microsoft did everything in their power to improve the stylus experience, and the reviews agree that it shows. The dedicated OneNote button is the thing that makes the Surface Pro 3 the computer I wanted my entire time studying at the university, and between document annotation, hand-drawing diagrams to make a PowerPoint that much better, and adding hand-written annotations or hand drawings/diagrams to class notes in OneNote. During the presentation, Panos Panay showed off the stylus when editing a movie script in Final Draft, and while entering answers on the New York Times' crossword puzzle application, and I think they need to show more like that. I was legitimately surprised that he didn't show the creation of a detailed diagram (such as the Krebs cycle) in OneNote or adding some commentary to a paper in Microsoft Word.
Students are probably the best target for the Surface family of computers, particularly the Surface Pro 3. For starters, I never had a class at the university where I didn't have access to a table. There are tables and desks and standing height countertops everywhere at universities. The long battery life of the Surface Pro 3 (coupled with a power adapter that's positively tiny anyway, and has a USB port for charging a cell phone or other tablet) makes it ideal for a full day of classes, and the fact that it's full Windows and has that beautifully huge display means that whatever things you need to do, be it Word, Visio, Visual Studio, Photoshop, Publisher, or just OneNote and a web browser, will all be visible and usable at once. The up to date WiFi standards mean it should work on any wireless network, and a USB port adds flexibility to something as portable as a tablet. At home, a student would likely have a USB hub for a big disk or Ethernet, but students are also a group likely to just use wifi everywhere, and store as much of their data as they can in a service such as Skydrive or Dropbox, something often made reasonably possible by the high availability and speed of campus networks.
After that, the next group of users I would likely target are desktop owners. In 2009, when I bought my ThinkPad T400, it was because I needed a very powerful computer I could realistically take with me everywhere. There were more powerful computers, but the ThinkPad T400 was a good mix of powerful and portable. Today, my tentative plan is to build and use a very powerful desktop computer as the successor to my ThinkPad T400. The Surface Pro 3 makes sense to me as a new portable/sidekick computer to replace the Surface RT. It is faster than my T400 is, it's not much larger than the Surface RT, and because the RT works in all of my portable computing situations, I can be reasonably sure of how well I'd do with the Surface Pro 3. In addition, it would save me personally the hassle of Mac OS X on the go, both from a data formats, applications, and file transfer perspective, and from a workflow perspective. (I like Mac OS X, but I'll be honest, I'm using some exceedingly specific functionality in the Windows version of Word.)
Will the Surface Pro 3 have any success in the larger commercial market? I hope so. It'll be very interesting to see how things play out with the Surface Pro 3 and the MacBook Air. The Surface Pro 3 is also technically a tablet, but I don't know if that's necessarily the most productive way to think about it. Even on my Surface RT, I rarely look at it and use it the same way I use a mobile-first tablet, such as the iPad, or a smaller tablet such as the Dell Venue 8 Pro. Those tablets, to me, have become all about content consumption and browsing things. Pages on the iPad is a really good word processor, but the speed and convenience of mapping my network folder as a drive on the Surface and using a wireless mouse to navigate to a particular part of a Word document simply can't be beat.
I think it's with that kind of attitude, that the Surface family isn't necessarily an iPad killer or a laptop killer, but a new idea about integrating keyboard, mouse, touch, and pen into a single computing device that works well in a variety of situations.
As a great example, the Surface Pro 3 may not be as good as the MacBook Air when you're sitting on a couch trying to use a keyboard, but it's literally impossible to use the MacBook Air for anything when you're standing in the vestibule of an Øresundståg train, trying to look at a map or remember your itinerary. Similarly, it'll probably work just about as well on a table as the already well-known Surface family, and even though the Surface Pro 3 is physically huge, I imagine that anything you can do with a hand-held Surface RT/2 or Pro/Pro 2 will work just as well on the 3.
Ultimately, I don't even know if my usage of the Surface RT is typical, or what Microsoft's plan for the RT platform are. As I alluded to above, I use mine as an insanely portable desktop-experience computer. When the Surface RT launched in 2012, there was nothing else with the 8+ hour battery life and low weight that the RT boasts. Developments on Intel's part mean that Core i5 based PCs now get as much run time as the iPad and the original Surface RT, which is just a really impressive technical achievement.