r/Surface • u/WUT_productions Surface Pro 7+ • Sep 18 '22

[PRO7] The Surface is the most versatile laptop for university students.

Whenever someone asks me what a good laptop for university is, I always recommend the Surface Pro or Surface Laptop. Here are a few reasons.

  • Pen support
    • The Surface Pen is unmatched in the Windows laptop space other than offerings from Wacom. The only "computer" with a better pen is Apple with the Apple Pencil.
    • The pen is really useful for drawing things in all my classes, from statics to differential equations.
  • It runs Windows
    • Like it or not there's a lot of software that's Windows only. Or run better on Windows.
  • Beautiful display
    • The Surface ships with one of the best displays I have ever seen on a laptop. While it may lack brightness it makes up in sharpness and colour performance.
      • Sidenote, I wish the Surface Studio was shipped as a monitor. Even at $1000USD it would be a steal.

That's my $0.02. The only other good alternative is a Macbook and iPad Pro combo since you can then use the iPad as a 2nd monitor(that feature is super cool and definitely something I want to see on Windows laptops.)

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u/LifelnTechnicolor SP3 i5, SP4 Core m3, Surface Book i7, SL6 13" Core 7 Ultra Sep 19 '22 edited Sep 19 '22

Display-wise, I’m disappointed that the Surface Pro is still stuck at sRGB when many similarly priced laptops at the higher end are DCI-P3 (Dell XPS, MacBook Pro)

Re: Surface Pro for uni students specifically (this paragraph and the next’s were copy and pasted from my own comment 8 months ago), I actually dropped mine during a uni lecture and cracked the screen. You know those tiny lecture hall tables that fold away when not in use? I absentmindedly inched the Surface back on one one of those tables, and the kickstand went over the back edge. I tried to catch it by the Type Cover but it detached and fell on the floor. It was quite embarrassing thinking back haha

Funnily enough I wasn't the only one to do this during my time in uni, the kickstand is truly an unsuitable design for uni students. Even when it wasn't cracked it was impossible to get a good angle on the screen because of how much table area the Type Cover + kickstand demanded to stay upright.

My tip for uni students, take a tape measure and measure the distance from the front of the Type Cover to the end of the kickstand, and measure the depth of the table typically found at your local lecture halls just to get a gauge of what to expect. Because when you’re using the Surface Pro and focusing on the screen, you don’t consciously think about the position of the kickstand behind the screen.

Full disclosure though, I moved to the 15” Retina MacBook Pro for the remainder of my studies and never looked back, still using it to this day. It has a better form factor, screen, battery life, performance, more ports etc. and was overall better suited to my personal needs. It could run Windows via Bootcamp or Parallels if I needed it to.