Microsoft Surface Pro 3

I've been test-driving a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 for work lately. It's been pretty good, more of a true laptop than its predecessors.

In fact, the higher-end Surface Pro 3 models meet or exceed the specs for standard ultralight laptops at my company - the Dell Latitude 7240 and Apple Macbook Air 13". In all cases, these are Core i5, 8/256 SSD machines. It' pricier than the Latitude but about the same price as the Macbook Air, unless you add in the cost of Type keyboard and external mouse.

The Surface Pro 3 only has a single USB port, which in my case is occupied by the USB RF adapter used by the mouse. It has a single DisplayPort (or mini-HDMI, I'm not sure) that I have not tested yet. Wireless is built in. It's running Windows 8.

The chief complaints I've read about the Surface have to do with Windows 8. I honestly don't mind it. Perhaps because I have such a strong background in Apple's operating systems, I'm not emotionally invested in Windows pre-8. Getting to the Desktop is easy - it's a tile in what W8 calls the Start menu. Some of the swiping is not intuitive, and it's weird to have Explorer open sometimes in Modern mode, sometimes in Desktop mode, but otherwise - Windows 8 is new enough, to me at least, to be interesting.

Windows 8 and Office 2013 integrate well with Microsoft's cloud services. Since we recently adoped Office 365 as a productivity platform, this works out well. With cloud services, in particular OneDrive for Business and Sharepoint Online, arguably smaller local storage is required - we could probably get by with 64 GB or 128 SSD drives, and slower processors.

With the announcement of Windows 10 for late 2015, and a lack of people knocking hard for Surface Pro at work, I don't see us doing any kind of mass rollout. However, we are piloting for use as an executive, and a small group of sales people.

Surface Pro 3 is a good device. I'd consider it for myself. For the enterprise, the high cost makes it a specialty item. In each case though, it's not a "no". It's a "maybe".