Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsA College Student Perspective: A One Year Honest Review (CS MAJOR)
Reviewed in the United States on September 10, 2023
After selling my MacBook Air, I was in desperate need of a laptop for my studies at a 4-year university. I prefer Windows, and as I stumbled across this laptop, I found that this could possibly replace my need for an iPad while also functioning as a laptop!
My experience: (PLEASE LISTEN CLOSELY!)
I study computer science, and overall, I found this computer to be HIGHLY unreliable throughout my lecture halls. My lectures usually run for an hour or more, and the battery life on this laptop is surreal in the sense that it is EXTREMELY LOW. I mostly just ran google docs on my chrome browser, and found my battery to drain so quickly. It is important to note that I do NOT have external apps running in my background (believe me, I check task manager) and it seems in combination of all the windows services and with chrome running, it is enough for me to only last less than two or three classes a day.
On top of this, the boot times just deteriorate overtime. Yes, I do have storage in my SSD and the only programs I run on my laptop are Visual Studio Code, Git Bash, Spotify, and Chrome. Please do not try to game on this machine, it will utterly enrage you. On top of that, the fans essentially turn rogue even when you're running Chrome, so be aware of that!
Do not use this as an iPad replacement. Do not believe in the hype that the surface pen is superior other pencils, believe me, these levels of smoothness in both of these pencils differ superiorly. The writing experience on the surface is insanely laggy, please do not use OneNote. I found no use in the pencil; however, the detachable keyboard is convenient when I want to watch movies.
The build quality of the external parts of the laptop are great. After a year of use, I had no scratches or significant damage after using it everyday. However, don't consider a surface a laptop, if it won't stay in your lap (literally, the stands are unreliable at times).
Don't take this as a hateful review, but more of a honest one. The surface pro 8 wasn't for me, and I don't expect the 9th to be either. You're better off looking for a laptop with a GPU and an AMD CPU, rather, than sticking with a single i7 and 16 GB of RAM :)