[baconstrp]

Sold my beloved SurfacePro on eBay last week. It is a great piece of hardware, but .. in one word: Windoze8, alas

As a grown up PC fanboy, I found myself work/dev more efficient with less frustration on mac nowadays. Operating system is a productivity tool, and Windows has turn into this emo teen girl I can not recognize or share an easy conversation with anymore.

Picked up a refurbished MBA to keep me coding on the move.

[guardian5x]

What were you productivity issues? What made coding so difficult? I use a Surface Pro 2 daily. Its like a Netbook replacement for me as it is very mobile and still capable and with the docking station at home i have a full keyboard and big screen.

[baconstrp]

It's merely personal opinion based on personal experiences. Since it's a sunny day outside I'd like to expand on this topic here:

[1] Window management/Apple touch pad: UX on window/workspace management, Cupertino did it right. As advanced users we open a lot of windows, not like my mom who would simply freak out when there are more than 2, she only look at one full screen window a time. Win8's metro app is natural for her but optional at best for me. Mac: Four finger up for Expose then pick the Terminal/Sublime/Browser window; Four finger swipe left/right for virtual desktops; I am flying through workspaces over that single 5 inch physical square, much less effort and drama than surface: fiddling through touch keypad/10.6" touch screen swipes/dropping and picking surface pen constantly. One trick on mac is that I usually swipe a little to quickly sneak peak: say inbox list or server dashboard on my right virtual desktop to quickly check up on stuffs.

[2] Local search see comments above

[3] Windows Update A feel of being bullied, simply put. It prolong when you need it start up and do sth quick. It shut down when you dont want it to, and it never tell you what's changed, what is updating and how long it is going to be.

[4] Hibernate/sleep/Power button. Redmond never got this right and never do I see them willing to. Out of my 2 years experience with surface, I would say at least 5 time it crashed while waking up from hibernate. at least one time I remembered vividly because I lost several hundreds lines of arduino code. Many time right after switching off, then I realized I missed something: have to wait at least 5 seconds to switch it on again. Stressing that power button would only make it worse. Surface has sensitive power button to the outside: every other day or two, I found my bag frying hot and surface drained all its battery inside, making it useless for the rest of the day if on the move.

[5] Color tone This maybe picking bone out of eggs. But I would say those Disney like highly saturated UI palette are somewhat distraction (blue bars/amber buttons/red squares), compared to OSX's neutral gray color tone which let you easier focusing on the content working on.

[allegory]

Just a note from me, as I tried one for a week.

Not enough RAM!

My 2011 MBP has 16Gb of RAM and my 2014 HP Z420 has 32Gb of RAM.

I can barely spin up our product on a machine with 8Gb of RAM without killing everything else I'm doing on first. Then SQL Server doesn't give the RAM back inevitably leading to the service being restarted to release it. Granted this is a big product but in this day and age, 8Gb shouldn't be the cap for anything.

Also both the keyboards were shitty and the thing crashed occasionally (blue screen) when I tried plugging it into my desktop monitor - an old 22" Dell TFT.

The big thing for me, is that I actually had a better experience using my Android tablet with a keyboard/mouse plugged in and remote desktop to my workstation in the office. That kills the massively powerful portable computer use case dead for me. Was perfectly usable over a 3G connection as well.

[GFischer]

I wonder what the heck are you developing :) .

Maybe a solution would be to have SQL Server on a virtual machine, or use an Azure SQL instance (in my very limited trial latency was a bit annoying though).

[allegory]

15 years of legacy crap :)

I need a full data volume available as a lot of the stuff requires heavy performance testing.