Microsoft Surface 3 Pro

Discussion in 'Notebooks & Mobile Devices' started by atwl77, May 21, 2014.

  1. Adrian Wong

    Adrian Wong Da Boss Staff Member

    The exchange rate is the killer. Otherwise the Surface Pro 4 is an enticing buy...
     
  2. ZuePhok

    ZuePhok Just Started

    @adrian: buy both :D MBA and Surface Pro are the best compute device of this decade :D
     
  3. zy

    zy zynine.com Staff Member

    Both have very good build quality. Too bad both are almost impossible to upgrade once bought. (Except for MBA's SSD).
     
  4. Chai

    Chai Administrator Staff Member

    I don't have any first hand experience with Surface, but the combination with MBA and OSX is pretty bad from my experience. It is much slower than a similar speced Windows machine, and I'm talking about the MBA 2015 edition. The hardware quality might be superior, but there's no enterprise support in Malaysia.

    There is no way I will pick MBA over the Windows equivalent that I'm using in the office.
     
  5. zy

    zy zynine.com Staff Member

    I can't see enterprise scale companies using OSX. I can see small business using it. :think:

    I still like my Windows setup.
     
  6. Chai

    Chai Administrator Staff Member

    Well, IBM is already using it in enterprise level. :p
     
  7. Adrian Wong

    Adrian Wong Da Boss Staff Member

    MacBook Airs are not really meant for heavy work. For basic office work, it's more than adequate. Its key advantages are its small size, light weight and... BATTERY LIFE! :D

    For serious work, you will need no less than the MacBook Pro. Even though it's running on a dual-core Broadwell CPU, it's much faster than my quad-core Dell laptop in most aspects except for video rendering and gaming. And I no longer have battery life anxiety. It will last an entire day. The only problem really is the high cost and the 16 GB RAM limit... :(
     
  8. ZuePhok

    ZuePhok Just Started

    i think we need to stop using terms like "heavy work" & "basic office work". We do video encoding on mba but the actual process is sub to azure on demand video encoder. When marketing come over and ask for personal purchase advise, how do you tell them? Oh you are doing video encoding and mba is not meant for heavy work? they will say you are bullshitting them because that's what they have been doing in the office all of this time.

    and why do we always use "video rendering" as a criteria to determine what machine to buy (which format btw? quad can't render 4k too)? we make it sounds like it's the first thing we do every morning. renderrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr videos. layerrr manipulationnnnnnn. tell that to the publishing pro, and the first comment might just be "your red is off", you are going to piss your watch client off.

    imo MBA is the best all purpose machine. founders use it to code their entire business up on mba. if that is not "heavy work" then I'm not sure what it is. no office work is ever " basic".

    this is why ppl do find geeks and nerds annoying at times.. LOL
     
  9. peaz

    peaz ARP Webmaster Staff Member

    Word. Zuephok. Word.



    My only complain with the MBA is the non retina screen. Nothing else. It's by far sufficient to run everything I need for work. Even crunching hard core integration flows and message transformation codes I do for a living. But unfortunately I'm used to a retina screen now and find the MBA screen lacking. :(

    The new MacBook is promising as a form factor but I find it too experimental today, only one USB-C port. Too far into the wireless future for me at this point.
     
  10. atwl77

    atwl77 Just Started

    I think when most people mention "basic office work", the impression I get is basic MS Office applications, i.e. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.

    Unfortunately, even so these "basic" applications can be quite power hungry depending on use. My Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro, which is using a Core-M processor, might get labelled as suitable for "basic office work", but when I open a 50K-word document in MS Word, the slowdown is very apparent. And let's not forget some Excel files can easily become processor-hungry with just a bunch of tables and lots of formulas.
     
  11. Chai

    Chai Administrator Staff Member

    I agree with atwl77 completely. Anyone will definitely appreciate the higher specs, regardless of the nature of the usage. Even MS Office can be heavy task intensive work. Imagine working on complicated Excel files with tons of formulas and even the dreaded Macros.

    Even something as simple as Youtube videos can slow down your machine, especially if you are trying to view 4K videos.

    To me, even MBA 2015 is surprisingly slow for general office work. Any tasks that requires 'waiting' time is slow, maybe it is due to FDE. I guess we are all pampered by the responsiveness of smartphones and tablets which are heavily optimised. Unfortunately, this is not the case for both Windows and OSX.
     
  12. Adrian Wong

    Adrian Wong Da Boss Staff Member

    Actually, I was only referring to video rendering and gaming in comparison to my Dell notebook which has a quad-core Intel Core i7 processor + a dedicated GPU. Those are the only aspects in which my old Windows notebook beats the MBP.

    When it comes to "heavy work" vs. "basic office work", I would differentiate them by two metrics - screen resolution and memory.

    I can't stand doing any kind of serious work, whether it's photo editing, video editing, multi-tasking 5-10 apps at the same time on a 1366 x 768 display, or with just 8 GB of RAM.

    The MBA is limited to 1440 x 900 in the 13.3" form factor, and 8 GB of RAM maximum. That's why as much as I like its size and weight, I just cannot do heavy work on it, not even if I pair it with a monitor.

    My MacBook Pro has 16 GB of RAM (maximum available option) but even I find that borderline sufficient. I usually run out of memory to the point memory pressure turns yellow and it starts using a couple of GB of swap.

    But if I'm just going to write books on Word, post articles on WordPress, post on Facebook, etc... yes, a MacBook Air is good enough. In fact, it would be extremely convenient to work on the go with it. That's what "light work" means to me. :)
     

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