[angus-prune]

I have an SP3. It is the best device I've bought in years.

I interact with the device in a fundamentally different way. I will sit and read a document with a pen and no keyboard (to proofread, highlight and makes notes). I'd tried this on ipad and it never fit in my workflow well.

I will use it to take notes at a meeting in OneNote. Again, the ipad workflow never worked for me for this.

The benefits definitely aren't for everyone. But it fits me perfectly, and I wouldn't go back from it now. Its probably at least a year before I upgrade (I also have a desktop for heavy lifting). I'm feeling the pinch of the older SP3 cpu a bit on some of the work I do, but not enough to warrant an upgrade yet. If I had money to throw around, I'd get the new one as a drop in upgrade without a second thought.

[volkk]

OOC, can you explain why the iPad workflow has never worked for those things you mentioned? Seems like one of its core intended designs is taking notes/reading documents much like an actual notebook

[angus-prune]

When I tried it might have worked if you'd fully bought into the apple ecosystem, but in a mixed corporate environment it just wouldn't work.

A document had to be somehow transferred into each viewer, and manually saved back out so I could use the reviewed document on the desktop.

With the SP3, live documents are stored in either dropbox or a network share and its seamless.

I do a lot of design work in indesign and photoshop, and even word. Being able to make both simple and substantive changes on the fly is a lot more use than far more limited ipad apps.

The SP4 pen is far more pleasant to write with than any ipad stylus I came across. This is all just a matter of taste, but I found my muscle memory reacts for better to the SP4 stylus.

My ipads were great for many things, but work was never one of them for me.