In a perfect world, with perfect systems documentation you'd be right. Unfortunately few of us have the pleasure of working in such an environment :)

I had an SP1 and now own a Dell Venue 11 Pro (competitor to the Surface/Pro 3). What exactly is the problem with it? I realize it depends a lot on the applications you run, but that is true of any device. For example, if you're using it to run Putty... then no, the SP or its competitors are going to suck. However, if you're using it as a content consumption device, which let's be honest is exactly what a tablet is made for and good at... it's awesome. Now, that comes with the caveat that you're either using apps or the touch browser... desktop side is different.

But on that desktop side, you can run Putty... you can run PowerShell... and you can run any one of a number of desktop browsers and applications, but of course then you have the OPTIONAL keyboard that you can use to operate said applications.

The beauty of the SP3 and its ilk is that it is exactly what you need when you need it. No, none of them are going to be incredible gaming rigs but they're awesome at being productivity tools as well as content consumption devices. If you need solely or primiarly a productivity tool then no the SP and its ilk are probably a bad match. However, if you want a tool that can do both jobs equally well then you really have no choice but to go with one of these Windows 8 devices. But that's not a bad thing, either.

For $500 you can get a laptop that's built like a Soviet tank, or has atrocious battery life, or has a really slow SSD, or has 2GB of RAM... you get the idea. For someone who wants performance, portability, storage and being useful there aren't a lot of "magical $500 laptops" that really fit the bill. I know; I went shopping recently for new computers (yes, plural).

I ended up with a Venue 11 Pro and an Alienware 15. Yeah, both Dell but they fit my needs perfectly. The AW is my gaming rig and is awesome (runs AC:Unity in Ultra and looks gorgeous) while the VP11 is my computer of choice when I'm on the road (I am extremely mobile at work, traveling sometimes hundreds of miles in a day). Both of them are attached to the same Microsoft account, have Evernote, OneDrive and DropBox installed. As a result, the same files are always available and my workflow benefits greatly from it. As files fall into disuse I migrate them off to the "archive" which is my Linux-based server at home... which is still accessible via an OpenVPN that I have installed on all of my computers if I happen to be on the road.

But you know what? Neither of them will do "all the things" perfectly. They both run the same OS and the same applications, but serve completely different purposes. I would never sit in front of a customer with my AW in part because the battery life is horrendous (it's a gaming laptop, what do you expect?) and is just not really all that portable. Similarly I would never consider playing AC:Unity on my VP11 because... well, it would suck quite frankly. Could I? Yes... but just because we can do a thing does not follow that we should.

So why did I buy two laptops instead of a desktop gaming rig? Well, that was so that when I am traveling for several days (have a trip to Chicago coming up in a few weeks for example) I can still bring my gaming rig with me so I can play in a hotel room. Sure, it rarely leaves my desk but when it does I want to have that powerhouse on-hand.

Well, I don't have a Surface 3 as I upgraded my Surface Pro 1 to a Dell Venue 11 Pro (7140; late '14 model). The same Geekbench test turns up a number of 4364. That's running the Core M 5Y71. I'd expect the Surface 3 to be similar in performance. The x7 is slightly faster than this Core M but doesn't support dynamic frequency scaling. Not sure what ultimate difference this would make to battery life.

Having said all this, I have no complaints about my Venue. It works exactly as advertised, is reasonably fast, and has an absolutely crazy-good battery life.

Wow, you're hilarious.

I know exactly what GCD is, and have worked with it. I just am under this strange belief that there's no magic in software and that computers still succumb to the laws of physics. Better power management comes primarily from hardware... and while GCD is a very good framework for controlling that hardware it's not a magical route to better battery life. Software can help with coordination but you still need the hardware.

While I won't argue the concept and implementation of this framework are good, most of the magical gains you'll hear about because of GCD are marketing numbers and not real-world.

Yet other laptops running Windows get just fine battery life with the same or smaller battery. Simply put; Apple develops their own EFI to manage fans and power states and when the driver doesn't exist or is non-optimal, the hardware runs "hot". Grand Central Dispatch is a nice technology but does NOT magically increase your battery life despite what Apple wants to claim. It merely provides a common framework for addressing the EFI and power management customizations in a way that is pretty nice, but not a magic bullet. As Scotty was fond of saying, "You cannae change the laws of physics, Captain".

The level of ignorance and bias you display are unfortunately all too common. I get it; you're an Apple fan. Just because you read an article on a nice API doesn't mean you know diddly about hardware and power management. I don't claim to be an expert, but after doing embedded systems development for a while in my youth I think I might have some more knowledge of which I speak.

So... during a 2 hour flight (30 minutes of which is spent climbing and descending) there wasn't one person or flight attendant who noticed the guy pushing the person next to him out of their seat to squeeze down in the pitiful space between coach seats to fiddle with the SEB? I'm sorry, I don't buy it. Doesn't matter how familiar you are with the hardware... in order to tamper with it to the extent that you can then plug your laptop into it you can't do that by touch, or quickly. Given all the paranoia about security I imagine he wouldn't have been able to do any of this without someone screaming "Terrorist!!" on the flight... then we'd be reading a very different story.

So what you're saying is that Windows implements logical and useful locking mechanisms whereas OSX implements something bound to break eventually? Wow... what a crime. I've used Mac OS, Windows, Linux, BSD and more flavours of UNIX than you can shake a stick at... I think Windows' file locking semantics are just fine the way they are. Anything else can lead to confusion, corruption and lost files.

Having said that, I do wish Windows would implement a "Can't do this because file is open in (blah).exe" error message instead of "Access denied", which is really dumb.

Actually, PowerShell is really good. I wasn't a believer the first time I used it but once you got the semantics and ideas down in your head it becomes an incredibly powerful tool for systems administration. At my last job I had a folder full of .ps scripts that I used daily to simplify my job, run reporting and generally make myself stand out among my GUI-focused peers on the Windows networks. That standing out helped me get a job where I no longer need them, but that's cool because I like my new job even better. And I still have them if I need them again.

And on Windows you can install Cygwin. I have MobaXTerm installed on all my Windows machines and it's really good; fully functional Cygwin and X-Server environment with a single click of the mouse... compatibility with a lot of my Linux scripts. Awesome.

So what you're saying is that a 14 year old operating system performs better in a suboptimal virtual environment where the programmers have specifically targeted the performance profiles of said OS for about 10 of those years? Stop the freaking presses, mate.

Seriously? Windows 10 isn't final, and QEMU-KVM optimization for Win10 will probably lag at least 6 months to a year after release. Let me know then how it performs given your adjustments. I'm not a Microsoft fanboy but even I can tell you that your test is even more horrendously flawed than the article poster's.

Why? Seriously?

First tool I install on my Windows boxes is MobaXTerm which contains a fully configured and set up cygwin including X Server. Works like a champ for me managing my Linux boxes, and all I had to do was install it. SSH works, remoted X works, and I can run bash scripts even referencing /proc entries from my Linux box and most of them work with no modifications.

What you're seeing here really is driver issues. Apple doesn't put the resources into developing the Boot Camp drivers properly for Windows... they're good enough so they're shipped. Apple doesn't want you to run Windows, or Linux or anything else. They want their beautiful machines running their beautiful OS, to hell with what the end user actually needs. A good set of power management drivers would go a long way to fix Windows on Mac hardware but they're not going to put the time and energy into it.

This philosophy of Apple's is part of the reason I've abandoned them as a platform for my own use.

I will preface this by saying that I was a Mac user and developer for over a decade until very recently...

Sorry, will have to call this one out. At the time that classical MacOS was around, most users were either running Windows 98 or Windows 2000. Few people ran ME... I worked in the industry and I think at the time for every 10 Win2K boxes I saw, I saw maybe one ME and 15 Windows 98. Noone saw a compelling need for ME so they didn't upgrade. And early versions of OSX up to Jaguar (10.2) were horrendous messes under the hood. The interface was gorgeous but some of the APIs were kludged together wrecks.

Now, I'm not saying that Windows was much better, at least on the 98/ME track... but the Windows 2000 API cleanup actually produced some really nice results. This was at the same time (roughly) as Mac OS9 which was one of the most awful kludges of an OS I think I've ever had the displeasure to work on. It was obvious that OS9 was created in a place where OSX was getting all the attention, but even OSX wasn't really properly clean until 10.2... and even then it was slow. Have you ever used 10.0 or 10.1 on hardware of the time? It was horrifyingly slow to do anything and the only thing it really had going for it was the interface.

Speaking of the interface... seriously... Finder is significantly worse than Explorer in terms of threading, resource utilization and stability. You want to see a kludged mess, check out Finder circa... well... any version of OSX actually. Of course, I've recently abandoned the Mac platform for Windows 8 for various reasons so I can't speak to Yosemite... but every time I work on a machine running Yosemite I just feel like the entire OS is going in a direction I don't appreciate.

Vista and Windows 8 both had huge improvements under the hood. Windows 8 in particular has gotten a bad rep simply because it has a UI that people find really polarizing... but it's seriously a fast and efficient OS that really takes advantage of the underlying hardware. It actually is a better operating system than the much-vaunted Windows 7 (which was itself an improvement over Vista) but most people never get to see it because they get hung up on the UI.

I have played with Windows 10, and I like it. I run 8.1 on my computers today but will switch to 10 when it comes out. That's not to say it's a fundamentally "better" operating system than OSX... but for my needs the priorities are all screwed up in OSX. They're both modern, stable and secure operating systems... and if that's all you need then great. However, running the same applications on both platforms does show the weaknesses of OSX; memory management is of questionable value in OSX and the storage management is kludgy at best.

Windows has been faster than OSX on the same hardware since Windows 7. I know; I've always had a Windows Boot Camp installation on my Macs. My last Mac is still a good one (2012 15" MBP) but has now been surpassed significantly. It used to be that Macs had a 5 year lifespan whereas Windows had a 3... that's one reason I liked Macs. Nowadays, not so much... and it's not changing workloads that are killing it but rather the overly heavy APIs and core problems with OSX that just don't scale quite so well... so new versions get heavier and slower on the same hardware.

I hate to say this, but if you honestly believe that Apple isn't above double-dipping here then you're sorely mistaken. A very quick Google search turns up plenty of reports of data being reported back to "the mothership" on iOS just as much or maybe more than Windows or Android. Yes, Apple makes money on the hardware but they're also a publicly traded company with a mandate to basically print money for their shareholders. Said shareholders (and the board) would have a fit if Apple were leaving that much obvious money on the table.

Wyse is also Dell FYI. But yeah, the statement "4 or 5 PC manufacturers" is blatantly false.

In a laptop?