Is the Surface Pro 11 Good or Not?
I'm serious folks - are they good or not?
In my 40 plus years of using personal computers (mostly laptops, and recently an Apple convert), I've never seen such divergent opinions about the same hardware. Sure, there have been religious wars between platforms - Windows sucks, no Apple sucks, foget Linux, or all three are the best thing since sliced bread per their respective advocates.
But how do reviewers (particularly Surface Pro 11 Elite which I'm studying - AGAIN) attract diametrically opposed reviews:
Best 2-in-1 ever - a piece of crap
OLED is great (except screen door effect of white backgrounds) - middling quality OLED at best
Prism works very well - Prism stutters and shutterss
Performance is outstanding (near Apple M3 quality) - no real improvement even over Intel alternatives
Battery life great (10+ hours) - battery life still sucks (5-6 hours at best)
Cool and quiet (very little fan use) - fan runs and overheats doing intense chores (video editing, etc.)
I could go on and on. Some of this I attribute to fanboyism - Rubino types for praise, MacOS vets like Laporte for hate - but overall I see folks in the same general camp, like Ed Bott, doing cartwheels for SP11, but Chrispher Null almost full stop. And EVERYONE is revieiwng identical SKU's (almost always the X Elite, OLED, 16gb/512gb model). How can so many reviewers, running the smae software and benchmarks, come up with opposite answers?
There have been a few reviews online about the "Performance" settings on these first batch of Snapdragon devices being set to "Best Performance", and that unless you set performance to lower settings (like "Recommended") your battery performance is not much better than Intel based laptops (Recommended you get these 10-12 hour figures). My poiint is that these are set, and tested, at Best Performance to trounce M series performance, so a SPX thin device will require throttling performance somewhat to get thermals under control. I realize the X is 2mm thinner and 1/4# lighter, but I just don't think we'll be seeing a reduction anytime soon. Perhaps not until they decide (if they do) to do an 11' screen version, and if they do that, where will the pen go?