For me it was a few things:

  1. Small size (easy to carry around)
  2. Keyboard that's even smaller, super light, and optional (easy to carry around)
  3. Fantastic pen (better usability)
  4. Full OS Capability (better usability)

So, they focused on portability and usability, and did really well with both. And when compared with Apple tablets, they have better non-trivial usability, and when compared with Apple laptops, they have better portability.

My wife has an SP3. Not only does it work fine on a lap, but it has a very nice stylus. It runs Adobe Indesign just fine. It runs Steam just fine, along with many slightly older games. The builtin speakers are good, as is the keyboard cover. It's quite portable and has a battery life of several hours when running Word + browser.

The Surface RT on the other hand remains kind of pointless.

The branding of the surface has been pretty successful with the removable keyboard and especially the pen. The pen makes it really easy to take notes on lecture slides so you do not have to have mess/organize/maintain physical paper.

New SP4 owner (never had a surface). It's well on your lap. The back angle is infinitly adjustable, so that's not an issue and the key type cover is solid so typing isn't an issue even if on your lap - I read flex in the previous covers made this tricky.

> being subject to a wall of glowing bitten apples staring at you

Remarkable imagery.

It actually works perfectly well when on your lap!

Having a computer that wasn't super expensive to take handwritten notes with was a dream for my undergrad. And now the surface offers that. I think that is a more unique benefit for students than in other cases.

There are actually multiple lap modes that both work great.

1) Like a regular laptop.

2) Fold the keyboard back and open the stand so it makes a right angle. Place the right angle so that the keyboard is parallel with your stomach and the Surface is perpendicular. Now the Surface is floating above your lap near the bottom of your chest where it's easy to read and write on.

3) Completely remove the keyboard.

I feel sorry for people who are using products from Apple's sterile and completely un-innovative product lines that are all moving closer and closer to the locked-down anti-consumer, anti-developer iOS business model.

I feel like all the people responding to you here have never actually used one on their laps. Particularly not to type for very long. It really doesn't work well for that.

Honestly I think the product is pretty poorly designed, its just marketed well. Thats why the product hasn't turned much of a profit. Microsoft spent 400 million alone for the NFL to use them.

Now with all the problems surfacing(kek) they don't appear to be well built either.

My sister does the exact same thing with the Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga. She bought a separate stylus for it, but the combination has worked well for her.

hey I’m not trying to troll you or anything, sincere question: Exactly how do you work? On a sofa? Airplanes?

(irony zone, shortly after posting this, I realized that I’m typing from a lounge chair with my laptop squarely on my legs… but this is an unusual circumstance for me)

Wait, where did you get Apple Watch numbers? Apple hasn't released those.

Since when does anyone on HN care about actual profits?

Funny, my wife and I had a 2014 Macbook Pro with retina display and the backlight on the screen went out. We also have a SurfacePro 3 and have had no issues whatsoever. We brought the Macbook to the apple-store (with extended warranty) and they initially tried to tell me that screens were not covered (as they are almost always broken due to accidental damage). I had to come back with a flashlight and show them that you can still see the image, it's just the back light went out and you cant really break just the back light. I was really starting to move away from Apple anyway but this really sealed the deal for me. However, I know that my experience is anecdotal, and it's plural is not data so take my experience for what it's worth.....

I believe most SP3's should still have hardware warranty, I purchased mine at a few months out of launch and still has it. I would ping customer support or take it a Microsoft Store.

It's really excellent harware. But sadly it's not very usable in Linux yet [1]. I'd love to use a fanless Surface with a tiling window manager as my daily driver.

But it comes nowhere close to my MBA 2012 (used by Linus for sometime) in terms of Linux compatibility. Almost perfect with a stock kernel except for really minor problems (no battery ACPI ticks when it discharges).

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/surfacelinux

They all count differently depend on the news they are trying to sell.

It's more comparable to at least a MacBook Air laptop.

So managing to sell 20% of a competitors revenue, in a category where you were present 5+ years before said competitor, and after 5 years after the competitor redefined the category and created a huge multi-billion market for it (which it never had before) that they totally dominated, is impressive?

IMO, tablets are consuming devices. And as a tablet, my Surface Pro 4 is not very good - it is a bit too heavy and has a too short battery life.

As a portable laptop with a pen and screen with an excellent sRGB colorspace support - and with a nice keyboard - it's awesome.

It's a bit subjective since one company had huge market share out of the gate and invented the category, while the other keeps releasing 'new' products, years later. So yes, there's growth for now. For Wall Street, growth is pretty much key.

They are comparable IMO, but it really only goes to show that software largely matters more than hardware.

After some early missteps it looks like MSFT has finally gotten the "tablet as productivity device" right, along with "tablet as true laptop replacement".

Much of this is because of Windows as a platform rather than necessarily the hardware itself (though the fact that the hardware doesn't suck like your typical Dell or HP shitbox definitely helps a lot).

Which is to say, the declining fortunes of iPad is IMO largely a symptom of iOS's limitations rather than any larger rejection of the tablet form factor.

Not claiming that this is actually how things have worked out or how customers think, but in terms of strategy it's still interesting. The iPad sought to target usage cases where a "full" laptop or desktop wasn't ideal. In doing so, it also left out several laptop/desktop capabilities that people might want to keep and missed.

After the mobile-grade tablet market was established by iPad and, later, other brands of devices, the Surface seems intended to offer the things people liked about tablets versus laptops or desktops (extreme portability, multitouch, etc) and has at least attempted to add back the things many people might have missed when using those mobile-class tablets such as greater flexibility in file management, the ability to install software from multiple sources, choose your own defaults, and run more capable software packages.

It's certainly had its tradeoffs and the greater power and flexibility meant it couldn't be quite as portable as a tablet or work quite as well in certain cases as a traditional laptop but it's been interesting to see how these companies seem to target audiences that aren't happy with certain aspects of dominant products.

The end result (for me at least) is that I've learned there's no "perfect" device or form factor that has all the pros and none of the cons in all situations. That said, more options certainly does make it easier to find something closer to what you're looking for. I enjoyed the portability of my iPad but chafed under restrictions that required jailbreaking to work around.

The Surface line still is not the perfect device for me but whenever my Asus laptop dies, I'll seriously be considering one as a secondary computer after using one at work (primary will probably remain a desktop for the foreseeable future).