[yznlp]

It's been about 10 years since I used my surface pro at uni. The main problems that I remember were

1) top heavy, because all the hardware is on the screen portion, so it's difficult to balance and use it on your lap

2) lack of processing power due to the form factor and thermal limitations

3) lack of touch friendly windows apps that can make it truly useful as a tablet

1 probably can't be helped, but 2 and 3 should definitely be better now especially since Apple silicon and iOS exist, if they choose to make something like this...

[zbrozek]

This reply comes to you via a Surface Pro on my lap as I lay on a couch. #1 is true but not as bad as it might come across to someone who hasn't used one. If they used a friction hinge range than a true flap this would be largely ameliorated, but I don't know if you can pull it off without ruining the form factor.

#2 is subjective and depends on your use-case. I find that for mine (circuit design, PDF markup, email/web, low-requirements mechanical CAD, casual gaming) it's totally fine.

#3 is very real. I don't use the Surface Pro as a pure tablet almost ever. The only exception is if I'm stuck on a plane and there's no room for the keyboard and all I'm doing is reading.

I really wish the keyboard could talk wirelessly back to the tablet so that I could put the keyboard behind the screen and still type on it every now and then when I'm primarily drawing with the computer.

[skydhash]

Not really for 2. I have a MBA and it heats up when I do an OCR of a scanned book. And I don’t want touch friendly app on MacOs, I actually like the dense UI found in IDEs and graphic softwares because, they’re very efficient with the mouse. 13-14 inch is the perfect screen size for me (16 if I wanted to work on the go). But it would be unwieldy as a tablet.