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Surface Go Reviews Are All Over the Place (arstechnica.com)
The reviews for Microsoft's Surface Go tablet are in, and they're all over the place. While the press generally agrees that the processor is slow and can only handle light tasks, such as browsing and mail, there are mixed conclusions as to whether or not the 10-inch, $399 tablet is worth buying. Ars Technica's Peter Bright summarizes: So, should you buy one? That's hard to say. Mashable was a fairly unequivocal "no:" for light productivity, a Chromebook or iPad does the job for less money, and the performance is too problematic for anything much beyond that. On the other side of the coin, Windows Central reckoned that "as a mini-PC [Surface Go] is about as good as you can get," and Ed Bott said, "It's the best cheap PC I've ever used." Gizmodo called it the "perfect representation of what laptops at this price should be."
For everyone else, it depends. TechCrunch says that it's worth a look, but there's no shortage of competition around this price point. Acer and Lenovo, among others, offer decent systems that are a bit cheaper. PCWorld concludes that, if you want a tablet, get an honest-to-god tablet (which is to say, an iPad) rather than a system with Windows 10. But if you want something small and light and might just need the full flexibility of a PC, Go is the system to go for. Engadget acknowledged that the Go is "full of compromises" but that, as a "secondary device," the keyboard and software compatibility give it the edge over other tablets. The Verge concludes similarly: it's "probably not the right thing to be your only computer," but it could have a "real place" as a secondary machine. And VentureBeat took a similar line: if you really want the flexibility of a two-in-one, "you're unlikely to find anything better," but if you want either a laptop or a tablet, "you'll find better options for less." As a refresher, the Surface Go features a 10-inch touchscreen display with a 1800x1200 (217 PPI) resolution and 3:2 aspect ratio, an Intel Pentium Gold 4415Y Kaby Lake processor with up to 8GB of RAM and 128GB storage via a SSD (the 64GB eMMC variant features 4GB of RAM), integrated Intel HD Graphics 615, and "up to 9 hours" of battery life. The base model is just $399, compared to the $549 model with 128GB/8GB RAM.
Right at the top of this comment board, for instance
Not when I can get one of these for that price or this if I don't need a good GPU.
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sure people are using it like a laptop but it's a tablet. i bet half the people buying these things never take it off their desk, and only a quarter probably leave their home with it. at this point i wonder why they aren't just buying a pc.
Oh look at that. You can buy a non tablet, without stylus or touchscreen for that price. Please tell us about all those other things that are completely different you can buy for that price.
Best of all, you can install a non-shitty operating system on those. Win10 blows.
A niche product that is very appealing for a specific use case is successful when that use case is common enough to be profitable.
The overall sentiment from the reviews looks like it's good as a secondary/convenience device. It's relatively affordable, and tablets are the clear winner for comfortable casual use on beds, couches, etc.
It should be a good entertainment device which can support basic productivity apps.
I honestly don't know why anyone tried running Photoshop on it; with 8 GB and 16 GB options, it's clearly not intended for serious editing. In combination with eMMC storage, I could tell you that Photoshop would run like crap without wasting time on a benchmark. It's simply not built for that.
If you look at this as a simple tablet to compete with Android primarily for casual/leisure use, it's fairly good. If you compare it to the rest of the Surface products, it's going to be an obvious step down.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
$399 for the tablet, $99 for the pen, $99 for the keyboard
It's marketed as more of a workhorse compared to the iPad pro and then proceeds to include something more restrictive to actual work: Windows 10 S locked down with the complete lack of software that is available from the Windows Store.
It's compared to the rest of the Surface line which is mostly made up higher end and quite capable devices, and like the original abortion of the Surface RT is nothing like it's brethren.
It's pushed towards education at a higher price class than most of the competitors.
It's being compared to laptops which it's not. It's being compared to cheap which it's not.
Honestly, buy a tablet, buy a laptop, or buy a proper Surface Pro, and if you're hell bent on restrictive cheaper devices there's a Chromebook that is right for you.
That 3:2 aspect ratio, RAM is worth paying for. Add Linux in and the user has some real nice computing.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
6 watt Pentium processor, Windows 10... what could possibly go wrong? I think Microsoft is going to sell quite a few of these, to people who want real windows on a real PC that is also a kind of heavy and slow tablet with mediocre battery life. But Windows! Outlook express (is that still a thing?) Microsoft Office, student edition or whatever. The list of compelling reasons why you need this gets really short, but hey, there are a lot of Windows users out there and just by the numbers game a bunch of them will buy in on the principle that it works exactly as badly as the aging laptop they already have, except slower and not upgradaeble. Booyah.
This may be the product that convincingly demonstrates the unfixable weakness of Intel Architecture for ultra mobile. Two cores + hyperthreading, 1.6 GHz. 15 watt TDP. Thirsty little bugger for such a low clock rate and core count. OK, it's going to work but the 4+4 core Snapdragon 845 at 2.8 GHz will absolutely kick its tail. Microsoft's problem: ARM Windows is not Real Windows. Ouch.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
...no, of course it doesn't.
Ezekiel 23:20
what a surprise? the natives will lovingly restore the land as their nature based spirit prompts.. then we'll repeat our previous cold blooded acquisitional behaviours again? phewww.
I actually bought one. I've been looking for a while for something that's lighter and has better battery life than my antique Thinkpad.
It wasn't cheap. $550 for the tablet part, $100 for a keyboard, and $100 to upgrade to non-crippleware Windows. You can actually switch to Windows 10 Home for free but it doesn't support Bitlocker. (WTF?)
Despite all the astroturfing I've seen about these online, no one else was looking at them in the store and the staff seemed surprised when I asked to buy it.
https://www.amazon.com/GPD-WIN...
GPD Win 2. Actually a tablet with touchscreen, but also folds out into gaming controls. If I had money to burn I'd do it but I don't have the around $750-850 USD to burn depending on where you get it.
The correct Ars Technica link - https://arstechnica.com/gadget...
Got no use for it if it doesn't run Linux or BSD.
Why are you comparing with laptops that are in an entirely different class? These laptops weigh 3 times more and have 1/2 the battery life.
I have one of these laptops. I don't intend to lug mine around very much. The power brick is heavy and I don't trust it to last my day on battery alone. If I was in the market for a Surface Go, it would be because I need a simple, ergonomic machine that I can carry with me all the time.
If you think this is overpriced, by all means, compare with other 10" Windows devices with high-density screens, touch and pens.
My next job might need me to move around between meetings, read a lot more email, annotate PDFs and does not need me to write any code or at least process any data locally. Surface Go should work well for that. Right now, I have a GPU laptop for deep learning, 3D visualization and some gaming. These are completely different needs.
and a Kindle Fire for $90 (or $45 if I want to wait for prime day, or an off brand with good reviews for that price) and save myself $100 bucks.
Tablets are for consuming quick, cheap content. They're the computer equivalent to potato chips. I don't need a $700 potato chip when a $90 one will do nicely.
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but a bit out of the price range.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
is being brought into the equation. Most folks who want/need that performance are doing work or playing games, and in both cases you're probably near by a power supply.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The problem isn't the hardware, it's worse - it's Windows. Windows users don't seem to notice it, because they haven't seen anything else run on the same hardware. But geeze, once you've used a Chromebook or Linux for a while then load Windows on the same machine, it's infuriating. Particularly on the slower stuff (that still works perfectly well running something else), Windows is like moving through molasses. I've seen it take 10 seconds to response to a click on the start menu. Microsoft has gone to huge lengths to make Windows login screen appear fairly promptly after boot - but the machine remains near unusable for minutes afterwards. Nothing else suffers from this - only Windows. Phones with a 1W power budget and a similar number of pixels to push on the screen run faster.
The article from a day or two ago, making a unfaltering comparison between between Windows and Chromebook's is spot on. Windows is slow, large, insecure and the systems built on it are unreliable. The unreliability is not just a case of shitty WiFi drivers from manufactures dropping out and needing re-installing. Those recent cheapie touch screen machines with 2G of RAM, 32GB SSD are an excellent illustration of the problem. They have so little resources is you just sit them in a corner and don't touch them, they become utterly unusable. I don't mean slow. I mean they run out of disk space, and things stop running - as in literally unusable even though no one has touched them. What's happened is the Windows update cycle takes more SSD than these things have got.
Now I'm sure some people will argue that you can't expect Windows to run on such an underpowered machine. There are two problems with that. Firstly, Chromebooks and Linux running perfectly fine on such machines. And secondly, this hardware was designed by Microsoft! That is why you seen so many near identical variants from Dell, HP, Acer and the like - Microsoft published a off the shelf design (touch screen, SSD, $300) for a machine running Windows that could compete with tablets running iOS and Android.
Microsoft has done a wonderful job of making successive Windows releases backwards compatible. But to do that it's been patch upon patch, adding new layers rather than ripping the stack out and rebuilding it. Now they are arriving at the pointy end of the stick. The mess is getting beyond the ability of their software engineers to maintain it. And I have no doubt given Microsoft's financial strength this isn't because they have bad software engineers - I'm sure they are some of the best on the planet. The problem is there is always a point when the technical debt grows beyond the ability of any one or any thing to repay it. And it looks to me like Windows is nearly at that point.
> tablet with touchscreen
It is more like a phablet (minus the phone stuff) with a controller.
GPD is a very niche product, not anywhere in the same space as the Surface Go.
Go was reviewed to have a good keyboard, for the form factor. I would not do any serious typing or reading with the GPD.
...because the Surface Go is all over the place. The lowest priced model, the from $399 model is not worth the price with its shitty specs running Windows 10. The higher end models with more capable specs fit their price a little better but are then hobbled by their shitty ergonomics and UX. In order to remedy the ergonomics you need to spend more money to add a keyboard and trackpad that doesn't totally destroy the mobility of the device.
At every step you've got a inadequate device. If you want a small Windows system there's much cheaper 10-13" laptops. You can also find Bay Trail/Cherry Trail 7-9" tablets for less than $100. If you want a capable Windows 2-in-1 there's also a lot better options in the higher price ranges.
One of the markets Microsoft talks about with the Surface Go is education but I don't see any place where it's a better option than Chromebooks, iPads, or just cheap Windows laptops. It's not really getting you anything above and beyond those devices.
If there's Win32 software you must run doing so on a tablet is usually a terrible experience at best and simply impossible at worst. Many Win32 apps don't scale well on HiDPI displays so you end up with teeny tiny widgets you can barely use with a stylus. On a small screen the Windows 10 on-screen keyboard eats a lot of real estate and again many Win32 apps don't scale appropriately around the keyboard. So to get a Surface Go to run must-have Windows software pretty much requires the added cost of keyboards and/or styluses.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I'm not a huge fan of these as I had a surface pro with work that was flakey as, but it's $500 including keyboard for the base model, and you've compared a 10" lightweight tablet with two 15" laptops, neither of which have touch or a tablet mode of any sort.
So a search for 2 in 1 with a 10-12" screen, no atom processor, 4+gb ram, 64+gb SSD gives you this:
https://www.newegg.com/Product...
eMMC or flash storage is basically worthless, so ignore any of those.
https://www.newegg.com/Product...
That guy is $150 cheaper than surface go + keyboard, has a nicer keyboard and will be more sturdy. It also has a worse quality screen and is thicker etc. I'd say for an education laptop for primary school it's superior and at a lower price.
Same $500 gets you:
https://www.newegg.com/Product...
Larger SSD, worse processor, better screen, lesser brand. I think this one is a real tossup, I'd likely buy this one for my $500.
So looking at the ACTUAL market of this device it's competitive but not best in class.
I stopped when I saw the Microsoft logo. Some of their hardware is okay, but the Surface has always been an overpriced dog in which I have zero interest.
If it fits someone else's use case, great, but I'd never buy one even with deep, deep discounts.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Did no one click the link for the Arstechnica article?
arstechnica.com/science/2018/08/doctors-cut-out-a-large-chunk-of-a-boys-brain-now-hes-doing-just-fine/
Not sure what that has to do with the Surface Go unless they are planning to do this to the buyers?????
Can't make a great notebook out of mediocre hardware. The Pentium is just slightly better then Celeron line up and by the time you add in a type cover its going to be a really small screen netbook that definitely is attractive but that's not what get's work done. The upgrades just don't fix the problem which is a slow CPU so any added RAM or speedier SSD doesn't really fix the problem. It may help mask it, but load up a but of stuff in that 8 Gb of RAM and see how that CPU handles it? Probably best to buy the base model get the basic type cover for $100 and call it a decent netbook. Its certainly a step up from many Chromebooks. But if your daily driver has any core Intel CPU your going to notice the speed issues. I with Microsoft had at least offered a m3 CPU as a upgrade option.
I work at a company where we deploy Surface Pros as our standard issue Windows portable for employees -- so I'm quite familiar with them. I looked at the new Surface Go the first day they announced it, but I thought it was a little too small and under-powered. The low starting price only gives you a 128GB SSD for storage, too. That's just a non-starter to me for a Windows machine.
And really? The keyboard covers are a pretty big compromise with any Surface... I hate typing on them except for real casual use. In the office, everyone leaves them attached to a dock and uses full-sized keyboards, mice and dual displays with them. In that situation, they work quite well. You forget you're not using a regular desktop PC workstation. But this "Go" would be slow and limited enough so I doubt it'd even pull that off as well as a Surface Pro does.
Personally, I stopped using my Surface Pro 4 I was originally issued and switched to a Surface laptop instead. It's the same as a Surface Pro except with a normal laptop lid and keyboard. (You can still use the pencil on the touchscreen if you wish, with it.)
Spent a bit less than 399 to get a used Core i5 ThinkPad X230 in decent condition with 12GB RAM and 250GB MSata SSD, and a spare 9 cell battery. Granted there's no touchscreen and pen, but the keyboard is to die for
That 3:2 aspect ratio, RAM is worth paying for. Add Linux in and the user has some real nice computing.
Which distro would you use the get the most out of touchscreen and stylus?
I was checking out the ASUS laptop you linked. I think the SSD is SATA rather than NVMe.
Is getting a SATA SSD a good idea? I thought SATA doesn't allow you to use the full potential of SSD.
Keyboard and mouse?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
BS. You do not need NVME. SATA is more than enough
You sound like a dumb carpenter who bought all light tools because they were easier to carry. Small hammers, tiny saws, oh wait, kind of stupid huh. How much time do you spend carrying it around versus how much time do you spend using it versus how much it slows you down when you are trying to use.
M$ you get the review you pay for, surprise, surprise, surprise. M$ is left with nothing but it's desktop monopoly and it is killing that as we speak, due to insatiable greed, and that greed being pretty darned arrogantly stupid.
They watched the phone business die as a result of people being pissed off with Windows 10 privacy invasions and M$ demand that they be able to install what ever the fuck software they want on your computer when ever the fuck they wanted to and crash you machine to reboot to force it.
For portable computing I would not touch an M$ box, they are WOFTAM now, waste for fucking time and money. I only use M$ for fucking gaming, seriously, just for computer games and internet fun stuff, beyond that they are simply an unreliable crap supplier that can not be trusted. How much trust do you need to a toy operating system to play computer games and browse the web.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Reviews all over the place have obvious causes. Microsoft Zune didn't review that badly.
The day Microsoft does not drive a product into the ground is the day they start boring. Damn, Musk has taken that punch line. The day Microsoft creates a product that doesn't suck is when they start selling vacuum cleaners.
I have one, it really isn't all that great performace-wise even though I think that is mostly due to the eMMC storage. The screen is very nice, and touch works well.
It works surprisingly well for a tablet though, and the (outdated) Android is smooth as silk. Windows 10 less so, but I'm not certain whether that's due to the tablet or the clunkiness of Windows in tablet mode. It works well enough for casual surfing and the keyboard is good enough for the occasional longer email.
Is it as good as a Surface? Hell, fuck no! But at that price, you can buy two and have spare change. (At the time of writing the linked Chuwi Hi10 Plus - with keyboard, was €147.05 "on sale" with keyboard. Never mind that everything is always on sale in Chinese web shops and you need to monitor the prices. Mine cost ~€10 more when I got it. There is a stylus add-on, which I got but I didn't find it as useful as I thought it would be)
The biggest drawback is that it seems that the USB-C slot is about a millimetre too deep, which makes finding a suitable USB-C cable for charging rather hard (the included one obviously works)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Nope, still not comparable as it's only a multi-touch touchscreen, not the pressure-sensitive-capable type the Surface has.
The Surface Go is really targeting content creators that have an existing investment in permanently-licensed Windows art software and don't have the $2k+ to shell out for a Wacom Companion, or that are sick and tired of fighting with Wacom drivers.
It's also decent for photo editing/proofing, again if you have hundreds of dollars of existing licensed software you've collected over the years and want something more portable for use in the field.
- WolfWings, too lazy to login to /. in way too long.
Keyboard and mouse?
Might as well buy a decent laptop with built in keyboard then
You mean the ones that used to get red rings of death?
Both of those are 15.6" laptops...
To be fair, you don't have to buy the official keyboard. You could always get a regular portable bluetooth keyboard for $20-$30. They also sell third party Surface keyboard replicas for under $50 if you really want a trackpad.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Brad Sams mentioned that it can play a 4K video without issue (of course the screen is not 4K) sounds like the perfect device to take with you on trips for watching Blu-ray backups. The biggest benefit being that since it runs Windows it can run any codec you can download software for where as Chromebooks and iOS devices are at the mercy of what their parent companies will permit in their respective locked down marketplaces.
> only handle light tasks, such as browsing Did I blink? Has browsing now become a light task? Videos, hundreds of simultaneous connections to 3rd-parties, JS overload, multiple tabs, browser extensions, browser bloat and built-in spyware...