Why Surface tablets still kinda suck

Surface tablets have been around for a long time now. It’s fair to say the lineup has seen a lot of ups and downs, to put it mildly. The original Surface RT was nothing short of a disaster. Though things have managed to improve since then. Well, until they stopped improving.

With Surface, Microsoft managed to carve out a nice niche by focusing more on the upscale professional market. Something Apple only started to take seriously fairly recently. Redmond certainly had a good head start before the lads in Cupertino tossed out the iPad Pro. But Surface still largely gets glossed over by consumers. With good reason. Surface tablets are still a wee bit shite. Well, maybe that’s a bit harsh. They’re not terrible. In fact, they’re some of the best designed tablets I’ve ever come across. They’re, dare I say, almost great. And that’s the entire problem.

Now, I don’t think you can really talk about Surface without talking about Apple’s iPad. General purpose tablet computers weren’t anything new by 2010. Heck, even their own Newton technically qualifies for the title. But Apple were the ones who brought it into the modern era. Using mobile based hardware rather than trying to cobble a touch screen onto existing laptops. It was basically a ‘Merica sized iPod Touch, running the same OS and largely the same apps, just tweaked to take advantage of the bigger screen real estate. And, well, it showed. Though over time, the ecosystem and UI improved to become something of its own. But iPads are still devices that are primarily intended for content consumption. Easy to use, with an interface designed specifically for touch, and a closed ecosystem to help keep the tech illiterate from getting into trouble. Something meant strictly for casual computing. This has even carried over to the iPad Pro, which packs mighty guts that iPadOS cannot take advantage of. While they can be used for media creation and productivity tasks, they’re still far from ideal when compared to traditional platforms.

Meanwhile, the Surface line has the opposite problem of that. Apple’s walled garden really limits the sort of software and tools available for the platform. Rather than take the closed route, Microsoft has bundled all Surface tablets with bog standard Windows 10. Meaning the software they’re capable of running is only limited by the capabilities of the hardware. Which includes all full desktop apps. There’s no artificial roadblocks here. The iPad cannot do serious work. At least, not as well as the Surface Pro or Surface Book can. Those devices can run full fat versions of programs like Creative Cloud or Blackmagic Resolve. Maybe not well, depending on the model. But you’re not stuck with software that’s tooled specifically for, and limited by, mobile or touch interfaces. Or the whims of the manufacturer.

But what if you want to use the Surface as a tablet? Well, what you’ll find is a rather lacklustre tablet mode baked into Windows 10, along with a poor selection of touch focused apps. Basically forcing you to muddle your way through mouse emulation and the unresponsive on-screen keyboard, while using Win32 software that was never designed to be poked at.

Now, this wouldn’t be a big problem if Surface wasn’t a tablet. Indeed, Microsoft markets them as 2-in-1 laptop. A case they could have made at one point. But here’s the thing. Prior to the Surface Pro 2017, every Surface device came bundled with the detachable keyboard and a drawing pen. Now, only the Surface Book does. For every other model, all you get in the box is the tablet portion and an AC adapter. Which means that the vanilla Surface experience is going to be a tablet for most customers. So either Microsoft is selling you half a laptop with a $200 microtransaction to make it usable, or its just a really crappy tablet.

The second issue with Surface is pricing. These are really under-powered and overpriced for what you get. For example, the base Surface Go 2, they cheapest Surface, runs $529 CAD. Which nets you a 10.5” 1920×1200 display with an Intel Pentium Gold 4425Y, 4GB of RAM, and just 64GB of storage. Which is the bare minimum needed to get Windows 10 running. Where as for just $20 more, you can get the 2020 iPad with twice the storage and a higher res display. Sure, it only has 3GB of RAM, but its now dated A12 Bionic SoC absolutely smokes the Pentium Gold. The Apple Silicon is about 2.4-2.6 times faster for both single and multi-core tasks even against the most optimistic of Geekbench results. Or to put it into perspective, the brand new Surface Go 2 is only about as powerful as the now 7 year old iPad Air 2, while costing the same as the brand new 2020 iPad.

Things don’t get much better as you go up the line, with Apple’s tablets consistently offering better performance and specs, often at substantially cheaper prices. It’s actually more cost effective to buy a fully kitted iPad Pro, with both the Pencil and ludicrously expensive Magic Keyboard, than it is to buy a fully spec’d Surface Pro 7+, without any accessories. Remember, this is Apple we’re talking about. A company notorious for selling overpriced and under-powered products. Heck, even similarly spec’d PC laptops can be found for far cheaper. Often with better I/O support, like Thunderbolt and USB-C charging. And let’s not even bring up the sad and expensive joke that is the ARM powered Surface Pro X.

The fact that the Surface line seems to be perpetually on sale, while still costing more than competing products, I think speaks volumes. Sure, these are really nice, well built tablets. But they all come out of the same factory in China.

Now, it’s important to point out that the iPad is far from perfect. We’ve gone over its issues extensively in a previous article. But, these issues are mostly easy fixes. Heck, enabling app sideloading on the iPad Pro would be as simple as flipping a Switch. Everything else can be patched in through future iPadOS updates. With the Surface, the Windows tablet mode interface is incredibly dated and needs a complete overhaul. Which might happen with Windows 11. But it doesn’t solve the fact that the app ecosystem is still garbage. Nor does it fix the high prices and mediocre hardware specs. None of which can be fixed overnight.

I really want to like the Surface line. I really do. I bought my Surface Pro 2017 because I was tired of all the artificial limitations Apple was placing on their devices. Having to jailbreak, having no storage expansion, having basically no I/O whatsoever. And, the Surface Pro has actually served me fairly well for the last few years as a daily driver. It didn’t have anywhere close to top end specs, and the 4GB of RAM is becoming very limiting. But it still works great for web browsing, media consumption, and light productivity. I’ve even used it to tweak some small video files via Resolve. But since it can’t be used strictly as a tablet, then it goes without saying that I could do all the same things with a much cheaper subnotebook. Like Microsoft’s own Surface Laptop.

Again, the Surface tablet line aren’t terrible computers. But they’re not great tablets, and they’re certainly not competitive, at all, anymore.

Image via Microsoft