Surface, two and a half weeks in.

So. Mac girl gets a Surface 4 Pro because she wants to run Adobe Illustrator on a tablet. How’s that working out?

Pros: Gorgeous device, powerful. It’s really great to be able to pull it out of my bag and be in Illustrator within seconds, on a print-res screen. I can draw in a single seat on the train with no worries about taking up a ton of space and packing a lot of stuff back into my bag for my stop; I could do the same on a plane. I’ve drawn at the counter of the crowded breakfast joint just down the block. It is super nice, I really feel like I have something that makes drawing as casual and easy an act as when I carried around a sketchbook all the time.

When it works.

Cons: Wakes from sleep in my bag far too easily and burns through its limited battery on the stock sleep settings. Sometimes when I take it out it works for about five seconds, then completely freezes and needs a hard restart (so far this hasn’t lost any work but it’s just a matter of time); sometimes when it wakes up it refuses to reconnect to my Bluetooth keyboard or keypad, and needs to be rebooted. The first half second or so of a stroke of the stylus gets ignored by Illustrator; short quick strokes get totally dropped. The stylus’ side button is too high up for my thumb to easily click it like I do on a Wacom stylus, and takes a lot of pressure to click. And the stylus in general feels a little… loose… in Illustrator.

I was able to solve the “wakes up in my bag” problem by setting it to always hibernate instead of sleep. That’s an acceptable compromise, I can live with it taking about 4s to wake up instead of 1. But the “freezes sometimes on wake and needs a hard restart” and “won’t talk to my external keyboard sometimes without a reboot”? These are starting to feel more and more like dealbreakers.

As is the “Illustrator drops the beginning of a stroke” problem. I don’t know if that’s an Adobe problem, a Microsoft problem, or both – apparently this only happens in AI, other art programs do fine. Which would be fine if I was willing to switch art programs, but honestly if I was willing to do that I’d just be using Procreate on an iPad Pro instead of subjecting myself to Windows – the whole reason I got this thing was to have a Magic Sketchbook that runs the same program I’ve spent the last fourteen years mastering.

(Also the screen is incredibly reflective. I was able to easily solve this by adding a matte screen protector. Out of the box, it’s absurdly shiny and pretty hard to use when sitting out under a tree.)

I get “freezes on wake” or “won’t reconnect to keyboards on wake” about once every day, now that I’ve gotten it configured to the point where I can take it out and use it without wrestling with an unfamiliar OS. “Won’t reconnect to keyboards” is a daily occurrence; “freezes on wake” has been more like every other day or so since the latest system update.

People have told me that this kind of hibernation/sleep behavior is business as usual for Windows devices, and usually cite the fact that Windows has to work with a zillion different hardware configurations with drivers of variable quality. Apple’s devices can sleep with no problems because they control the system from top to bottom. Great, sure, I might accept that for a no-name Chinese device I paid $400 for. But this is a premium $1600 device that Microsoft is building itself as a showcase for their OS. They designed this from the ground up and it still does this. There’s no excuse, not when I’ve had my cheaper Mac Airs seamlessly waking from sleep and reconnecting to bluetooth keyboards for the past four or five years. Not when this is the fourth iteration of the Surface.

I want to love this thing. I really, really want to love this thing. But “sometimes it shits the bed when I wake it up and I have to wait for the whole OS to restart, and for Illustrator to relaunch, before I can draw” is maddening. And I’m torn between “I’m returning this trash” and “maybe if I keep it around just a little longer I’ll find a workaround, or get used to it”. Which starts to sound like an abusive relationship and makes me want to return it right now. But instead I’m googling around and trying ONE MORE DAMNED THING to try and fix this shit.

Would I recommend this thing? If you’re used to having to reboot your Windows laptop at least once a day when it fails to wake from sleep properly, and if you’re not using Illustrator, then go for it, I guess. For me it’s been an endless source of hassle, though.

I would eagerly give a couple thousand bucks to Apple for their version of this. I really hope that’s sitting in their labs, getting the kinks shaken out for a release in a year or two. Because “using Illustrator in an airplane seat” has been a bit of a Holy Grail for me for years.