Will Microsoft’s Surface 3 Give The 12-inch MacBook A Run For Your Money? – The ‘Book Mystique

The more I ruminate over the new 12-inch MacBook, the more it occurs that it’s probably going to be more of a cannibalization threat to high-end iPads (including a new 12-inch ‘Pad when/if that materializes) than to its MacBook Air and MacBook Pro siblings. The combination of consolidation of I/O, charging, and video-out in a single USB-C port with the concomitant loss of MagSafe, slower CPU and graphics support chippery, and a significantly high price for a machine with limited capabilities all indicate to me that the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air are on safe ground sales-wise for the near term future at least.

Against the iPad, there is a massive price premium for the littlest MacBook, and even the 11-inch MacBook Air has a significant price/performance edge. The Retina display in the 12-incher is of course much better than the 11-inch Air’s several generations out of date 1,366 x 768 resolution TN LCD screen, but it has a (mostly) full-sized full travel keyboard and is faster — both important considerations for productivity-oriented users.

The new MacBook also just got some stiff new competition from Microsoft on price/performance for value-conscious productivity-focused users in the form of the new Surface 3 tablet PC announced March 31 with consumer availability to begin in May starting at $499 (100 bucks more if you want LTE). The Surface 3 runs full 64-bit Windows 8.1 and will be available with Windows Pro for business customers. A free one-year subscription to Office 365 Personal, including full versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote as well as 1 TB of OneDrive storage are thrown in, plus a free upgrade to Windows 10 when it’s ready. (Photo Courtesy Apple)

Photo Courtesy Microsoft

Add the optional Type Cover 2 keyboard, and the Surface 3 becomes essentially an ultra thin and light laptop. The basic Surface 3 tablet is just 8.7 mm thick (without the TypeCover) and weighs in at 1.37 pounds (622 grams). The new MacBook weighs two pounds and is 13.1 mm thick at its thickest point, 24 percent thinner than the 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Airs which are 17mm thick, tapering to 3mm thick at the narrowest. The MacBook Air weighs 2.96 pounds and the MacBook Air 11 tips the scale at 2.38 pounds. You can also use the $200 Surface 3 Docking Station to plug into a full desktop workstation. And of course the Surface 3 has Microsoft’s trademark built-in kickstand.

Photo Courtesy Microsoft

The Surface 3’s 10.8-inch 1920 x 1280 3:2 aspect ratio display is smaller than the MacBook’s 2304 x 1440 16:10 aspect ratio Retina panel, but it’s a touchscreen, and also works perfectly well in tablet mode. The new MacBook answers with Apple’s new buttonless “Force Touch” trackpad technology with haptic feedback, while the Airs still get along with the hinged glass trackpads that date back to 2008. You can also customize the feel of the new trackpad by changing the amount of pressure needed to register a click,,and a a new gesture called Force Click, a click followed by a deeper press, is for tasks like pulling up the definition of a word, quickly seeing a map or glancing at a preview of a file.

The 12-inch MacBook is powered by a 1.1GHz dual-core Intel Core M processor with Turbo Boost up to 2.4GHz. Surface 3 is powered by Intel’s newest Quad-core Intel Atom x7 Cherry Trail system-on-a-chip, the highest performing Atom processor on the market, which I not saying a lot, one the Atom is not noted for speed. However, it keeps the price down no and ‘offers a combination of burst mode and advanced power management meaning it delivers performance when a given task requires it, but scales back to conserve power whenever possible. Like the Core M CPU in the MacBook, It also like the MacBook doesn’t require a fan for cooling, which allows the device to be thinner and quieter.

Photo Courtesy Apple

The MacBook, even with its relatively light-hitting Core M, will likely have a significant performance advantage over the Atom powered Surface 3, and Microsoft says if you do very demanding work like editing and rendering video or complex 3D modeling, the the power and performance of its Surface Pro 3, which is priced in the MacBook’s ballpark, is your better choice. you. However, they suggest that if the majority of your work is light to medium duty — working in Office, writing, using the Internet, casual games and entertainment, and such, a Surface 3 should delivers everything you need at less than half the price.

Photo Courtesy Apple

However, the MacBook Airs, with the 11-inch model priced about halfway between the Surface 3 and the MacBook/Surface Pro 3’s price ranges, offer substantially greater serious utility and versatility with their two USB 3.0 and one Thunderbolt 2 ports for fast data transfer and /or hooking up the laptop to an external display, plus a dedicated MagSafe charge port. The 13-inch Air also has a SDCard slot for expansion and downloading content of camera cards.

Photo Courtesy Apple

A current 13-inch MacBook Air with 8 GB RAM, 256 GB flash storage and a 1.6 GHz Core i5 CPU will cost the same $1299 as a base MacBook. With the former, you get more ports, more power, a really full-sized keyboard, longer battery life, and MagSafe, while with the MBA you get the Retina display, the new keyboard (jury still out), the Force Touch trackpad, silent fanless running, and more iPad like dimensions. It really boils down to how much you value smallness and silence versus more speed, versatility, and connectivity.

Surface 3 has front (3.5MP) and rear-facing (8MP) cameras that both capture 1080p video. The rear-facing camera also features autofocus – particularly useful for capturing images of documents, barcodes and the like. The MacBook Has only an extremely low-resolution 640480 .3 Megapixel (480p) FaceTime camera for Skyping, video conferencing, and the like — even less impressive than the 720 p FaceTime units in the MacBook Airs.

Claimed battery life is the same 10 hours for both the MacBook and the Surface 3, but the latter has a 13W Micro USB charger, standardizing on the same connector as most mobile phones, while the MacBook sticks you with the kludgy USB-C charge piggybacking the oversubscribed single do-all USB-C port.mSurface 3 also includes a full-size USB 3.0 port, a Mini DisplayPort and a microSD card reader.

Lots of food for thought here. Microsoft may have finally delivered the heretofore elusive value priced machine that can serve as both tablet and laptop for productivity oriented users. Of course it’s not a Mac — a major qualifier — but Windows keeps getting better and better…

As Steve Jobs observed in a 2010 All Things D interview with Walt Mossberg “…things are packages of emphasis. Some things are emphasized in a product, some things are not done as well in product. Some things are chosen not to be done at all in a product. And so different people make different choices.”