Actually I just switched from a Surface Book to a Macbook Pro and the mac is a huge improvement, both from a hardware and OS perspective.
Biggest complaints about Surface Book:
- Its battery management is horrible. I don't know if the hardware or the OS are more to blame for this. The worst part: I can pretty much expect that if I close the lid and open it some hours later the thing will be dead. Whereas the MacBook (so far) seems to be at the same percentage each time I close then open the lid.
Other complaints:
- Windows' split brain approach with fullscreen metro apps vs traditional windowed apps continues to annoy me.
- The pencil is a gimmick to me since the apps (like OneNote) are very poorly designed for serious work with a stylus.
- Windows is still considerably behind on multi-desktop workflows.
- WSL still has some serious gaps and isn't as productive as Linux / OSX for *nix-style programming tasks. It's getting better though.
- Windows update continues to be a bad experience. Whereas I actually look forward to macOS updates. (EDIT: My updates are managed by MSFT IT which is more aggressive than normal Windows Update so my experience might not be representative. But I'm not using the Insider or beta builds.)
- For example: My Surface Book just updated and now it's stuck on a Windows 8 looking home screen and I haven't yet figured out how to get back to my "normal" desktop.
- Windows continues to advertise "Bubble Witch 3" and "March of Empires" etc. in the home screen. This is unacceptable to me.
Other observations:
- I haven't noticed many BSODs with the Surface Book, so that's improved.
- So far I actually like the touchbar, large trackpad, and keyboard. But I've long ago remapped my keyboard shortcuts to never depend on the fn keys. Esc is still easy to hit on the touch bar for me, in fact the hit-box is bigger than on the Surface Book. If you need it frequently, remap caps lock.
- For MS hardware, there isn't bloatware unless you count MS software which I generally don't.
(Disclosure: I work for Microsoft in the Azure org.)
Biggest complaints about Surface Book:
- Its battery management is horrible. I don't know if the hardware or the OS are more to blame for this. The worst part: I can pretty much expect that if I close the lid and open it some hours later the thing will be dead. Whereas the MacBook (so far) seems to be at the same percentage each time I close then open the lid.
Other complaints:
- Windows' split brain approach with fullscreen metro apps vs traditional windowed apps continues to annoy me.
- The pencil is a gimmick to me since the apps (like OneNote) are very poorly designed for serious work with a stylus.
- Windows is still considerably behind on multi-desktop workflows.
- WSL still has some serious gaps and isn't as productive as Linux / OSX for *nix-style programming tasks. It's getting better though.
- Windows update continues to be a bad experience. Whereas I actually look forward to macOS updates. (EDIT: My updates are managed by MSFT IT which is more aggressive than normal Windows Update so my experience might not be representative. But I'm not using the Insider or beta builds.)
- For example: My Surface Book just updated and now it's stuck on a Windows 8 looking home screen and I haven't yet figured out how to get back to my "normal" desktop.
- Windows continues to advertise "Bubble Witch 3" and "March of Empires" etc. in the home screen. This is unacceptable to me.
Other observations:
- I haven't noticed many BSODs with the Surface Book, so that's improved.
- So far I actually like the touchbar, large trackpad, and keyboard. But I've long ago remapped my keyboard shortcuts to never depend on the fn keys. Esc is still easy to hit on the touch bar for me, in fact the hit-box is bigger than on the Surface Book. If you need it frequently, remap caps lock.
- For MS hardware, there isn't bloatware unless you count MS software which I generally don't.
(Disclosure: I work for Microsoft in the Azure org.)