What has it been like using Surface Pro 7 for coding & development - Review after 9 months
I’ve been using Surface Pro 7 as my personal computer for coding (learning web development), sketching as a hobby and watching movies. It has been more than 9 months now and this is what my experience has been like.
Overall I like the concept of Surface Pro devices from Microsoft. I’ve always wanted to own one and I got a Surface Pro 7 last October (2020). The first few weeks have been great until I started to notice the flaws. Wi-Fi issues, overheating, Windows Hello issues, Screen freezing randomly and a few more. This is not a fundamentally bad device, it still works for me to do all my tasks and I’m typing this article on my Surface Pro 7 now. It’s just that without these issues this would be a great device for my workflow.
My Surface Pro 7 Specs:
8GB + 128GB
Quad-Core 10th Gen Core i5
Silver Color
Apps I run on my Surface Pro 7
VS Code
IntelliJ Idea Community Edition
Brave Browser
Telegram Desktop
Github for Desktop
Bitwarden
Autodesk Sketchbook
I also have some WebApp shortcuts I added from Brave browser:
Notion
Google Sheets
Spotify
YouTube Music
Gmail
Google Calendar
Snapdrop
Google Keep
I’ll start off with the cons and then share the pros.
Surface Pro 7 Cons
It gets hot really fast and performance dips a bit
This is one of the major issues for me. Particularly when the charger is plugged in to the device, it gets hot quickly. From what I read online, this is because Surface Pro 7 uses fast charging and also the device has some thermal throttling issues. The device usually stays cool when using without the charger plugged in.
Another issue related to this, a few weeks back after an update, the device was getting hot when put in sleep mode. I leave the device in sleep mode at the end of the day after I finish my work. I observed the device being hot when touched in the morning. This was happening every time I left the device in sleep mode, and this isn’t due to any program I left running. This issue finally got fixed in the last update.
Windows hello works 7/10 times and sometimes the camera stays on even after logging in
I don’t know whether anyone else experienced this but sometimes the Windows Hello service doesn’t recognize my face and it just keeps on scanning even after I enter my pin to login. The camera light stays on like that unless I restart.
Wi-Fi issues
It takes at least 3 min to connect to Wi-Fi after powering up. This is one of the widely recognized issues for this model. And this is due to the Intel hardware used for the Wi-Fi adapter. What happens is when the device enters sleep mode, the Wi-Fi adapter enters into a low power mode but when the device comes back on, the Wi-Fi adapter doesn’t, at least not until a few minutes later. This has gotten better with updates but the issue still exists.
It doesn’t matter if you use Edge/Chrome
From my observation, both the browsers consume RAM and using Edge didn’t necessarily improve my battery life. I used Edge for a while and then switched back to using Brave. The reason is, Edge doesn’t always remember your browser tabs when accidentally closed. I faced this multiple times when restarting my device or accidentally closing the browser, when I open it back, it doesn’t show me the group of tabs, it only shows the individual pages.
White Pixels started to appear on my screen
This might be just isolated to the device I’m using but I’m surprised that white pixels started appearing less than a year into owning the device.
Some other general cons
- Speakers are not great. They sound fine for general media consumption but if you are looing for a rich experience, this doesn’t provide it.
- Not comfortable to use on lap. This is a generally accepted thing with this design type but if you’ve never owned a Surface Pro, then consider this before buying.
- Trackpad is hard to get used to. Coming from a bigger trackpad on my work laptop, this took some time for me to get used to. You can definitely use it, and it’s smooth as well but you don’t have a large area to do gestures or scrolling.
- Battery life is pretty average. I get around 3 to 4 hours depending on the work I do. And when the device drops down to less than 20%, the performance gets to point that you cannot use the device. I can’t seem to find any Windows setting to change that. So you can assume that it’s usable for 80% of full battery charge.
Okay, now getting on to the pros.
Pros
Good for portability
Compact and lightweight to carry around. I like small devices that can help me do a lot of work. And this is without a doubt is a really good productivity device. I can run full Windows on this, that means desktop class browsing, coding for some small projects, a great file management system, actual cursor and full keyboard support. These are some of the reasons I chose this over an iPad.
Good for reading something on the web
When you are not working and want to read some article on the web, this is a great device for that. Tablets in general are good for reading articles and this being a hybrid device, can be used as a tablet when you need to.
Connect to a 4K screen
Using the device alone you can do a lot of work but when you connect this to an external monitor your productivity doubles. Here are some ways I use this device with an external monitor;
- I use the Surface Pro to view tutorials for development and use the external monitor for writing code.
- Updating data on excel sheets is much easier with two screens.
- When editing my WordPress site, I use the monitor for viewing and the device for making changes.
Add extra storage using Micro SD
If you don’t know this, you can add extra storage to your Surface Pro 7 using a MicroSD card. There is a slot for MicroSD on the back of the device (See picture below).
A really good webcam
I never thought of this particularly but I think as many of you might know, webcams have become an important component of our daily lives now. Comparing the webcam on my work laptop to this, it’s miles better than you can get on a standard laptop. The picture is clear and the sound is clear too.
Conclusion
Surface Pro 7 is good for coding and development when used for smaller projects. But if you want to do big web/app development projects, juggling between various tabs on your browser and apps on windows, this is not a good device for you. I’d suggest going for Surface Laptop 4 with a minimum 16 gig configuration. Surface Pro 7 is a nice portable device for you to carry around and get some work done. An iPad would do most of the things Surface Pro does and somethings much better. But where the Surface Pro 7 excels is when you need to view more than one site on the browser and juggle between a few tabs, or when you need to multi-task and do some actual coding for small projects. There are some workarounds for this on iPad but the productivity offered by Surface Pro 7 can’t be ignored.
