A couple of months ago I replaced my Surface Pro 7 with a Surface Pro 8. Hope springs eternal, after all. But it's turned out to be a waste of money:
- As near as I can tell, performance is about the same as the 7.
- The bezel-less screen probably seemed like a good idea to some guy sitting in an office, but in actual use it's a pain in the ass. I have to be super careful to hold the tablet by the edge lest I accidentally click or scroll something.
- Battery life appears to be no better than the 7. Maybe slightly better?
- It comes loaded with Windows 11, which has removed the ability to place the taskbar along the left edge of the screen. You can tell me all day long that I should love having it at the bottom like everyone else, but I want it on the left where it doesn't eat up any screen space that I care about. Windows 10 allowed this, but Windows 11, with its apparent goal of looking just like an iPad, doesn't.
- The whole tablet occasionally freezes. I assume this is some kind of heat issue, with the processor halting when it gets too hot. This never happened to me on the 7.
There's nothing wrong with the Surface 8 if you're buying a new tablet from scratch—aside from the astronomical price tag and the weak battery life, problems it's always had. But if you're replacing an older Surface there's not much to recommend it.
I suppose there must be some upsides to the Surface 8. Maybe it's a better gaming machine? But I really haven't found anything that makes life better for my garden variety mishmash of browsing, reading, Excel-ing, and watching Netflix. Overall, it's been a slight downgrade from the 7.
Re: "The bezel-less screen probably seemed like a good idea to some guy sitting in an office, but in actual use it's a pain in the ass"
I've got a Samsung Tab A (just an Android tablet) which has a thin bezel at the perimeter, and yes, the user has to be careful to *not* touch the screen when handling the device. It is a pain in the ass and I don't understand why they make them that way. Is it to cater to the movie-viewing/gamer set who want the biggest display?.
As long as I'm here, I'd like to say that the U/I continues to get worse with every new tablet or Android release. It's all so precious. Small text, slim fonts, no sharp contrast between text color and background. Can use my older tablets by putting my finger on reasonably-sized icons/controls. But now, a stylus (rubber tip pen) is nearly essential.
I've had arguments with friends over issues like this (especially my Apple-loving friends). My stance: controls should be as easy to identify and use as those on airplanes. Many sharply disagree and consider style more important than function. But then, they are in the arts and I'm an engineer.
My ancient Nexus finally died and, because I am cheap, I tried replacing it with an Amazon Fire. I knew it would be hooked up to Amazon but I didn't think it would be that hooked up! You can't use your own browser, you must use Silk, you can't run an anti-virus program on it, and you can only use Android apps that have been specifically monkeyed with by Amazon for the purpose of keeping them hooked up to Amazon.
By leaping through a lot of hoops you might be able to force it to do some of those things but it would probably all unravel at the first update, and the table is so light it weighs virtually nothing at all, it feels incredibly cheap, insubstantial and plastic, and I kept dropping it.
So I sent it back and now I'm thinking of an iPad for the first time in my life, though, because I am still cheap, and my main purpose is the same as Kevin's, general reading and murking about, I will probably end up springing for the Samsung.
And that is my story.
Ah, the Nexus 7. Now _that_ is a true classic. Why don't they make tablets with that form factor anymore? Don't tell me it's because phablets have taken over that niche; go to any tech forum and you'll find legions of true believers who say the same.
I'd still be using it if the battery lasted longer than ca. 90 minutes.
Between bathroom breaks and wandering around that works out to about 30 minutes of actual use.
I bought a Fire about five years back. Biggest waste of money in my life.
I have the impression I could have blanked it and put in some kind of Linux, but I didn't want to go to that much effort.
I love my Kindle Paperwhite. But it's a dedicated e-reader, not meant to be a tablet computer.
I'm re-reading a book from my collection, and by choice I downloaded it from the local library (actually from the state, but I got there via my local library) so I can read it on Kindle rather than the hardback.
An addendum: You might want to give the iPad mini a shot. I've heard good things about it as a replacement for the Nexus (read: be my beta-tester.) And -- as seems to be more and more the case these days -- you probably want the last iteration but one, the five, I think. The six ... could be better, or so I've been told.
What is that law of nature where all the reviews will say the prior version had some notable advantage which is now absent in favor of an improved prettiness that I can't stop thinking about when I try to get myself to actually buy last year's model?
I got a Fire tablet for my wife and I installed chrome and some non Amazon apps without too much difficulty. It's doable.
"but I want it on the left"
You are history's greatest monster.
I'd like to get back into Windows land but still have yet to find a laptop that compares to my Macbook Pro. I have no use for a tablet of any sort though.
I was a perfectly happy Windows user for the better part of 20 years. What finally drove me back into the arms of Cupertino? Global hardward support. I had a nice ASUS Zenbook (my second, I liked the first one enough to buy again) that was little more than a year old when it had a major meltdown of some sort (I was told a motherboard issue). Brought it to three different establishments here in Beijing—the last of which was an authorized dealer that offered to ship it to their China repair center. And then I was told a week later they didn't have the parts because it had been manufactured for the US market. So I'm SOL.
I just don't have time to go through that BS again. There are multiple Apple stores here in the capital, and I love my humble yet highly functional MacBook Air.
Windows Vista was what drove me into the arms of Apple. I've never looked back. For some years, I actually ran a Windows emulator on my Mac so I could run the programs that were only available (or only good) in Windows: they ran faster on the Mac under a virtual machine than they did on a PC.
It was Dell that sent me to Apple. I ordered a laptop some years ago and it arrived dead on arrival. Hours on the phone with tech support and I finally convinced them to send a replacement. Weeks later, when that arrived, the hard drive failed when Windows tried to update overnight.
While the Mac hardware is far superior, in my opinion, the OS has gotten less stable since I started with Mountain Lion. Also, the latest updates tend to seem gimmicky and aimed at very casual users. I wish Apple would come out with a business or pro OS version like Windows.
I have the same bezel issues with Kindles-- the readers, not the tablets. I welcomed the Voyager model which has buttons on the edge again to page forward and back. Using the touchscreen for anything with a lot of hyperlinks-- such as the textbooks I keep on it-- would inadvertantly send me off to some reference or footnote or wherever, making me work out how to get back and totally breaking my concentration. Not that my iPad is much better: casually browsing, and opening ads and links because I let my thumb relax a moment. Not a tablet fan, except for my Kindle reader.
You are 100% right about the Kindle. When they had the physical buttons on either side of the tablet that made turning pages so much easier. Touching the screen requires 2 hands, but it was easy to hit the buttons with the same hand that was holding the Kindle. Also they changed out the physical on/off button in recent models. Previously you had to swipe the button to the right to turn it on/off. They changed that to a push button, which is so easily to accidentally press when you are holding or even just transporting the Kindle. So many old man complaints from me . . .
Ebooks, of the e-ink variety, are great for books of the sort that you begin at the beginning and read straight through to the end. In other words, it is excellent for most fiction. The more you move into the sort of book where you might flip back and forth, using fingers stuck between the pages to make this easy, the less satisfactory an ebook is. I am one of those nerds who uses two bookmarks: one for the main text and one for the endnotes. I buy books in both electronic and paper, depending on the book.
I have an 11" iPad Pro from a couple years back, and the magic keyboard. I love that combination, it's going to be my "laptop" for a while.
And the color scheme for your comment box??? Yeah, had to get that in 😉
(but it does seem to keep most trolls away)
The bezel-less displays are a pain. Only useful if you are putting panels together to cover an entire wall.
I truly love the websites that use elegant (i.e. thin) fonts, with a muted grey on soft white (i.e. no contrast) text--it looks great. Impossible to read, but why read when you can admire the beauty.
I don't mind changes if they are for the better. But sometimes it's just change for change sake. Other times, it's just laziness. Or people don't really use that product.
Honestly, I don't much get the whole tablet thing. They make pretty good book/newsreader replacements or movie viewers on an airplane and ... that's about it. Too big to put in your pocket, but too small (and under powered) to do "real work", inefficient to use compared to a keyboard and mouse and if you fix all those deficiencies, you have a laptop.`
Laptops not ideal for reading news while on the toilet though. Basically that's all I use my iPad for.
Yeah. News works. War and Peace was a challenge.
I read War and Peace on an old school black and white screen Kindle. Much easier than trying to flip pages on some enormous door stop paper novel.
Really, I just want some sort of reader that's capable of a little anotation for pdfs. I'd go with a Kobo or some such, but I'm a finicky bitch; I'm waiting for decent colors and right now the whole e-ink thing just ain't cutting it.
As another taskbar-on-the-left personality I think we need to organize, maintain a public presence and raise awareness.
Taskbar-on-the-left pride!
Here, here! Although as of about two to three years ago, there are finally machines coming out with 16:10 screens.
"It comes loaded with Windows 11, which has removed the ability to place the taskbar along the left edge of the screen."
This is a total deal breaker for me. Lord I hope that is not removed from the desktop version of win 11. I put my task bar to the right, not left but it's the same thing. On a non-square monitor, having your task bar at the bottom is just a terrible waste of precious vertical space.
I allowed, in a moment of inattention, my desktop to downgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11. The main difference is that some applications no longer work, and everything runs a bit slower. But on the other hand, the aesthetics are slightly inferior. I'm not a left-edge guy for desktops, so I haven't tried to get it to do that.
For gosh sakes, just finally buy an iPad... before Apple goes 100% "luxury brand" a la Balenciaga ($1000 and up sneakers), Chanel ($1000 backpacks), and Leica ($10,000 digital cameras that do what your iPhone does, almost) 🤣
Actually I think Apple's announcement yesterday of the "Mac Studio" show that the whole luxury brand approach is just one step away...
1. Performance hasn't increased much since CPU speed maxed out at around 4 GHz. Everything since then has been incremental changes in instruction queues and thread counts. But there's only so much that you can do in parallel.
2. The Amazing Disappearing Bezel in both tablets and phones is being forced on you by reviewers needing something to talk about. The first thing they criticize in every review is the huge bezels, followed by the difficulties with one handed operation. These are things users should not care about. Bezels prevent accidental activations, and Nature gave us two hands for a reason. "Designers" no longer care about usability. That started with Steve Jobs, which is strange because Don Norman used to work for Apple. But Jobs has always prized form over function.
The less said about waterfall edges, the better. Certain designers need to be half hanged, drawn and quartered.
Oh, and Microsoft borked the taskbar in a lot of ways with Windows 11. That is just one of them. Drag and drop is gone, text labels are gone, it is nearly impossible to tell if one app has multiple windows open, and good luck finding Task Manager if that is where you are used to looking for it.
Can't wait for your review of Chromebook vs Surface Pro.