I’ve a Surface Pro 4 i5. I know that the fans do turn on when I do “heavy” stuff with it, but I can’t say it’s ever bothered me. I don’t personally mind the sound of computer fans, though, so that could be my lack of caring rather than the machine’s lack of noise.
Despite my making a fairly large game I’ve not often found performance to be an issue. For programming the Surface is great. For working in the Editor it’s great, because rendering speed is rarely my bottleneck there - this will of course vary from game to game. For testing the game… well, it’s fast enough to test most things, but it does not play the game at high frame rates. I’m happy to test stuff at far lower performance thresholds than I’m willing to play it at.
Also keep battery limitations in mind. It’s not Surface specific, but as soon as you start running stuff like a game engine your battery power will rapidly drain. (Game engines pretty much wreck battery saving strategies.)
Overall, I get a fair bit more work done with the Surface than I would have without it. A lot of its benefits could be gained with any half-decent laptop at a significantly lower price point, though, so what about stuff specific to the Surface?
For me, pen input was a big draw. On one hand, I find myself using this far less frequently than I thought I might. On the other hand, it’s great for the stuff I do do with it. I think the main catch for the stylus for me is a lack of good software for my use cases. The bundled “lite” OneNote does the simplest functions only, and try as I might I can’t make it do even a copy-paste! So for things I want to draw freehand it rocks, for stuff like UML diagrams where I want to drag a box here, and arrow there… nothing. (I have access to full OneNote, but it’s far clunkier to use and so I admit to not trying it out too much.) If I can find pen software that suits my needs then I imagine this device far outliving it’s general computing lifespan for my design sketching uses alone.
I know people who use the Surface extensively as a drawing tool, and they say that it’s awesome for that as long as you don’t need features that the pend doesn’t provide, like tilt and such. If you do then as far as I know a Cintiq is still the way to go.
The ultra-portability of the device was another draw for me. I was used to carrying my 17" MacBook Pro everywhere I went in a backpack for years, so getting something tiny I could chuck in a shoulder bag was nice. Again, this is something that other ultra-portables can provide, but the Surface’s form factor is relatively unique. It feels good to use, and it is indeed super versatile. The main catch is that while using it on your lap is quite doable with the kickstand, and I don’t find it uncomfortable thanks to how light it is, it does make using it while on the go… interesting. There’s no rigid hinge to hold the screen up, so if you’re into coding on the bus or train you do have to be super careful, and that might be a turnoff.
Also, lets be real, just add the price of the keyboard onto the purchase price when considering it. It’s not a complete machine without it if you want to actually get anything done with it. On the plus side, the keyboard is quite nice. The only niggle I have is that my spacebar doesn’t reliably pick up presses on its corners. In every other way the keyboard is a pleasure to use, which is impressive considering the tiny and light package they had to work within. The trackpad isn’t up to Apple’s standards, but it’s pretty close. I’ve had occasional minor issues with it taking a moment to pick up initial movement.
The screen and speakers are great. Given the crazy DPI you’ll most likely want to use some scaling, so make sure that the software you plan to use is ok with that. Unity doesn’t have any special handling for scaling, so my Editor is slightly pixelated. I don’t care, some people do. Scaling also means that you don’t get as much pixel real-estate as the screen resolution implies. I fit a bit less on the Surface screen than I do on my 1080p desktop monitors, but as a portable I don’t really care.
I’ve found Microsoft’s sales and support to be a mixed bag. The one genuinely good experience I had was when contacting Surface support.
There was one significant stability issue that seems to have been ironed out. For the first few months, the Surface just would not reliably start up when pressing its power button. The screen would turn on but remain black, the keyboard would light up, but nothing would happen. The solutions seemed to be “wait for at least 30 seconds” and/or “force a power cycle”, both of which are ridiculous solutions to rely on for months for an ultra-portable that’s designed to be always ready. Anyhow, at some point the issue went away and it’s been awesome ever since.
The power adapter is nice and light, which is cool. The Surface-side cable doesn’t seem of amazing quality, it seems to easily develop kinks even though I generally treat it fairly well. On the plus side, it’s certainly never felt a burden to add it to my shoulder bag.
I hope some of that was helpful! Anything specific you wanted to ask about?
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