Surface Pro (2017) Discussion Thread

I've been reading this forum since the first surface pro! This is the first place I go whenever a new one is released. I have a few questions for people who have access to an sp5.

I'm a statistics PhD student and I only use the surface pro to take notes. So, mostly I have Onenote open and maybe a browser or PDFAnnotator. Currently, I have an i5 sp3 with an sp4 pen. My current setup is not ideal. I have the following problems:

1. It can get hot and a little uncomfortable
2. The fan gets noisy and is distracting for me and other people
3. The pen is okay but not as nice or natural as taking notes with pencil or a nice pen.
4. My note set is huge and sometimes my tablet seems to get bogged down processing it.

Is it worth upgrading? And am I correct in assuming that an i3 sp5 will be cooler than an i5 sp5 or i7 sp5? Is tilt supported in Onenote? Is an i3 with 4GB enough horse power for my use case?

Also any weird bugs I should be aware of. My degree program is somewhere between intense and insane in terms of workload and I can't afford too many crashes that leave me scrambling during lectures.

Thanks again for this amazing community. I look forward to hearing your responses!

 

I'm thinking costantly to ask for a replacemnt already for the screen poor quality anyway.
Actuall why I like it, I'm also thinking the i5 was a too rashed choice: I'm fairly certain the i7 will stay much cooler.

Which leads me to...

The pen experience will be far better than that of the sp3 i5 and the performance it's not even comparable between the two.
The only problem is that this thing gets hot. Not as hot as my old sp3 i5, but hot enough to be a bit uncomfortable in the long run.

 

I've been visiting with the fanless I5 nSP at the local BB. I am amazed at the power. It would be a difficult choice between a cool 4.5w M3 or a warm 15w I5. The I5 feels so snappy.

The nSP is not offered in an I3 configuration. It is offered with an M3 Y Series CPU instead. That is significantly less powerful than the 15w I5 but will probably run cool, given its thermal limitation to 4.5w TDP (or is it SDP?).

The only thing that would give me pause about recommending an M3 is that I haven't had the chance to try one yet and your habit of keeping large OneNote files. They can eat up the MHz's.

 

After returning the m3 nSP that exhibited the screen flickering, I picked up an i7/8/256 from Worst Buy yesterday. Quick impressions: Fan is remarkably quiet, speed bump is noticeable over my 'old' i7/16/512 SP4, and battery life is a little concerning (Chrome disclaimer applied). Not rushing to judgment on the latter. After time with the m3, i5, and i7, it's no surprise the i5 is the perceived performance sweet spot, as reviewers have commented. If I didn't need the Iris bump for photo editing, would go the i5 route.

 

How's the i7 temperature on the screen? Does it stay cold?

 

@dstrauss you are now officially outgunned.

 

Update after a short time with the nSP i5/8G/256G

The pen experience for me has been wonderful. I had the SP4 for about a month and it was OK, but this seems so much more natural and fluid. I'm primarily just using it for note taking, but also did some sketches and such and I'm totally satisfied this will serve me well.

I don't really think it feels any lighter to me at all vs. the SP4. It is, however, much more comfortable to hold in tablet mode. I found the SP4 to feel like it was cutting into my hands, and don't get that feeling here.

I have the new keyboard and the typing itself is good... don't remember it being much different than the other. I've typed on it in my lap and on a desk and seems to work quite well. I have been having some trouble getting the trackpad to work consistently. I'll give it some more time to see if its just me getting used to its feel; or something is wrong with it. I've had several times when it didn't seem to respond to my selection; and I don't remember having any of this with the SP4.

The Hello function on the nSP has been a problem for me. I've retrained it now 4 times and it fails about 90% of the time. With the SP4, the only time I remember it not working was when the lighting was really dark. Again, will give it some more time to see if this clears.

Performance has been good... no complaints. It also seems to be running cooler than the SP4 did. The most intense thing I've done so far was installing Office and Lightroom and syncing a lot of stuff via OneDrive. It definitely got a little warm, but not uncomfortably so, and I recall the SP4 getting warmer. Might be I've not done things to cause that yet... but so far so good.

Battery life seems a lot better, but tomorrow I can give it a better test using it for the work day.

I'm getting what seems like some odd brightness changes that I've not figure out yet. I notice in tablet mode when I hit Start and then select All Programs, the screen immediately dims for some reason. And its not smooth... like some state is changing or something. Just a cosmetic thing that seems odd.

Overall I'm very happy with it so far and will keep exploring. The only big problem I've had is that One Drive and One Drive for Business seem to be having some issues because I'm not getting the overlay icons as I should; and doesn't seem like the sync completed correctly. May delete those and try again.

 

<<...The Hello function on the nSP has been a problem for me...With the SP4, the only time I remember it not working was when the lighting was really dark...>>

...So far, this is my only complaint about my nSP (relative to my SP4). In my case, Windows Hello is batting about 0.5. Like you, my SP4 never seemed to fail, and it was also wicked fast. Perhaps the nSP is trying to be too discerning...???

 

Is your pen too working better than this?

 

My nSP i5 256Gb 8Gb has noticeable light bleed across the bottom of the screen where the taskbar is.

It is only noticeable in portrait mode colors look washed out in that area.

I was just curious if others are experiencing this before I make an exchange.

Everything else is great on the nSP much improved over my SP4.