It's just enough computer, crammed into just enough space to take everywhere.Īt 10-inches and just 500 grams, the Surface Go is wrapped in the same magnesium that I loved on the Surface Book 2. HardwareĮverything about the Surface Go makes me come back to the same word: cute. The Surface Go certainly isn't an iPad, but it's not a laptop either. The Surface Go fills a new void between ultra-portable tablet and laptop better than any other device I've tried, and the nuance is in how it's able to transition between the two modes without dictating how that future looks.Ĭomparing the iPad and Surface Go directly is complicated, however, and doesn't really work, because they're wildly different devices. My experience with the iPad over multiple purchases is that it's difficult to ever truly replace a laptop at all, because it's confined to not quite being serious enough to do actual work that it gets in the way of itself constantly. That's always been the Apple way, of course: give up everything you're accustomed to, and go all-in with that vision. If the iPad Pro is the future of computing, the future is a half-assed walled garden. There's the walled garden, and you're bound to it. You can't dock an iPad Pro and use a second screen to get more space.

There's no desktop-class applications, like Sketch, Visual Studio Code or Photoshop, so you can't do that either, despite Apple's continued push for desktop-class workloads in the iOS App Store.

The irony, of course, is that Apple thinks laptops shouldn't have touchscreens because of gorilla-arm syndrome, but the iPad Pro induces it as a result of this decision. That trade-off is a familiar story: Apple doesn't see anyone using a mouse in the future, so you can't use one with the iPad Pro. Hack around the rest to make it an almost usable laptop replacement, and it's OK. The reality is somewhere in the middle: run some of your workflow, and get a low-maintenance device that lasts all day. Apple's marketing for the iPad Pro has always loudly touted itself as the 'beyond PC' device, with its site currently proclaiming: 'Everything you want modern computing to be. That makes comparing it to an iPad Pro, Apple's forward-looking computer, all the more tempting. It's small enough to be an iPad, but has enough processing power to run desktop apps if you need to. The Surface Go is a curious device, because it sits somewhere in-between devices like the iPad and actual full-on laptops, like the Surface Book or a MacBook Pro. I've been testing Microsoft's new tiny 10-inch tablet for a few weeks, and it's totally changed my perception of what computers are going to look like in the future. If you take an iPad-sized device, cram a whole computer into it, then blur the boundaries between PC and tablet completely, you get something interesting: the Surface Go.

Computer thinks tablet is a mouse