Well, that’s it for this experiment. Once the Surface is done resetting itself I’m taking it back to the Microsoft store.

Ultimately, it was not the tendency to occasionally crash upon waking, or to occasionally wake with the Bluetooth drivers in a state that could only be recovered from by a reset, that made me decide I was done.

It was this.

Apparently this is an issue unique to Illustrator; there is some interaction between it and the drivers for the NTrig stylus Microsoft is using that causes the first half-second or so of a pen stroke to be lost. Pretty much every other art program works fine with it. Except for Flash, which I hear is completely unresponsive to the stylus.

Whose fault this is, I honestly don’t care. The whole point of this exercise was to get the art program I’ve been using for the past sixteen years into a package with the convenience of a tablet.

The problems with the Surface’s default power settings making it wake up in my bag and waste half its charge idling, the crash-on-wake and Bluetooth disconnects that appeared after the firmware update, and all the myriad other little issues of just Being Windows? Those were just distractions. I took it out into the park yesterday and really looked critically at what I was doing on it, and these stylus tracking issues were the real deal-breaker. Especially given that this week saw updates for both the Surface firmware and for Illustrator, with no change to this problem. Will the next update fix it? Who knows? I’m not gonna hold my breath.

I’ll probably be trying out another machine in this class sometime soon. I really liked being able to whip it and a keypad out and draw in much smaller spaces than I can with the Air/Wacom combination. Maybe the Surface 5 or 6 when that happens. Maybe the Asus Transformer 3. Maybe a Cintiq Companion 3 if that ever happens. Maybe something else. Maybe Apple will finally deign to stuff a Mac’s guts behind a portable screen, though I feel like that won’t be until sometime in 2017 or 2018, if ever. I would be such an early adopter of that.

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.

I’ve been working away configuring a numeric keypad to have most of my Illustrator shortcuts crammed into it. I can tell it’s going to be really great for working in compact spaces when I get used to it. And I can do quick doodles without it; on the way to breakfast this morning, Nick joked that if his dad was a My Little Pony, his cutie mark would be a piece of Wonder Bread, and I whipped the Surface out of my bag and drew that while we were waiting in line outside Morsel.

I can carry Illustrator in a sketchbook-sized package, and use it in about the same amount of space I’d need to draw in one. That’s pretty cool!

But I’ve discovered a major fly in the ointment. After breakfast, I left it sitting in my bag, mostly charged. Then I went for a walk in the park, during which I wrote a first draft of a Parallax script in my phone. After about five hours, I took the Surface out, with the intent of sitting in a cafe and writing on its bigger screen.

I think it was around 80% at worst when I put it away for breakfast. After sitting in my bag doing nothing, supposedly hibernating, it was down to 30% power. 20% after I sat at home googling “surface pro 4 battery drain”. Which… has a lot of hits.

I can’t use it if it’s gonna be burning through power like this. The whole idea is that I have Illustrator ready to go within seconds at any moment, without having to carry the bulk of a laptop and a Wacom tablet. I don’t have room in my laptop bag for its bulky power brick, or the desire to constantly seek outlets. If I can’t get it to stop doing this, I think it’s getting returned. I really feel like a super-portable device I spent $ 1600 on should be managing its battery better; I can put my Air in my bag and feel confident it’ll have the same charge when I take it out again in an hour or three.

I’ve tried tweaking it’s advanced power settings, telling it to hibernate when I push the “sleep” button. I’d told it to do that on “lid close” and pushing the “power” button, maybe the button next to the volume buttons is actually “sleep”? We shall see. Supposedly there was an update back in February that claimed to fix this; mine is up to date and it’s still doing this. I’ve had it suggested to set it to power down completely when I hit the button and ugh no, I don’t want to have to wait a few minutes for it to boot every time I want to draw, the whole point is that I can pull it out of my bag and be drawing in Illustrator in like thirty seconds.

I really don’t want to return this Surface. I’ve spent a couple days configuring it. I’m really getting to like it a lot; it feels like it could be a great way to make drawing a lot more casual and fun. But if it’s going to die a few hours after I unplug it, even if it’s been completely dormant, it’s useless to me.

Unless I can get this fixed, my rating of this thing has dropped to like zero out of ten. Gorgeous device, great form factor, battery life is the purest utter trash.

This morning, I took the Surface and the numeric keypad I’m experimenting with for all my hotkeys out to the place I usually get breakfast. Morsel is a crowded little place, where I often end up sitting at the counter with someone next to me enjoying another of their fabulous biscuits.

In the line, I decided what file I wanted to work on. I opened up the Surface and loaded it into Illustrator. Once I sat down, I opened it up again and plopped the keypad down next to it, and got a little bit of progress on the drawing while waiting for my food.

I am delighted by how easy and transparent this was compared to opening up Illustrator on my Air. Honestly, I would never do that there – there’s just not enough space for a computer and a Wacom tablet there, and taking the pen/pen stand/cable out of my bag and setting it all up takes too damn long. But the Surface? Take the keypad from my pocket, turn it on. Open the Surface’s case up and turn it on. Pluck the stylus from its magnetic mount and I’m ready to go; “drawing” is now an option to fill a lot of spaces in my life where I’d normally be scrolling through Twitter or otherwise mindlessly grazing on short-attention-span content. And that feels really good.

A while back I’d heard that Sergio Aragones draws his comics on typing paper, so he can whip out a clipboard and work on them wherever the hell he is, even in an airplane seat, and this has been a goal for me for years. The Surface is not quite there; I have to be out of the sun to use it. But I can just pick it up, slip the numpad in my pocket along with keys and phone, and wander out a short distance almost as easily as I can go out with a sketchbook and a couple of pens. In the case I got for it, it’s got pretty much the same heft as a thick sketchbook would have.

Current support software loadout:

AutoHotkey – to do most of the work for remapping the keypad into my Illustrator Shortcut Pad

Interception – a little program that can remap keys on particular bluetooth keyboards, I’m using this to swap control and Windows on just my external keyboard so the stylus’ eraser button works, and to remap ‘enter’ from only the numeric pad into an unused keycode, for further processing in AutoHotKey. I got it from a post on the AHK forums.

I’d tried to use an AHK library to do the “remap a key on just one keyboard” stuff, but it’s super complicated and I ended up wasting a whole day feeling like I was reimplementing parts of AHK in itself, so I switched to this much simpler to configure second program.

RadialMenus – for creating a custom toolbar with about 50 buttons that contains every single hotkey I regularly press while using Illustrator. Which will probably be cut down somewhat once I really get the keypad configured to my liking.

(Also: MalwareBytes, f.lux, the Adobe installer, Chrome, and T:ME Tile. And of course Illustrator and Evernote.)

I’m ordering a slightly larger numpad, because I feel like I have a few too many shortcuts I want instantly available. I could probably fit things on the little one I got by doing a bunch of AHK stuff to make chords happen, but I feel like a few more keys would make it a lot easier to use.

I’ll probably post all my configuration for these tools in a few days, once I start to feel like they’re usable. Right now the keypad’s only about halfway there, and I have to use onscreen stuff a lot more than I’d like.