It's just not good enough

I've been buying and trying to use a number of Windows 10 machines. In the past year, I've bought a Yoga 910, ThinkPad T460p, and a Surface Pro 4 i7. I can't live with any of these machines like I live with my iPad or my Mac.

It's mostly the little things.

Wireless

The Windows machines just seem to lose their wireless device. Once every week or two, I'll open the machine and the machine won't be able to find its wireless device. I have to reboot the device. I live in my apps (browser tabs, LastPass, IntelliJ, etc.) for long periods of time. If I have to reboot, I have to re-enter passwords, recreate REPL sessions, etc. It's a real productivity killer.

Power

The Windows machines are less than optimal for power.

First, the machines can't sleep for more than a day. After 3 hours (by default), the machines go into hibernation mode. Hibernation means 20-45 seconds from "open the cover" to "get to work". On the iPad, I open the cover, touch the fingerprint sensor, and I'm working. Even the Mac (which has the same processor, chipsets, memory, etc. as the Windows machines) can sleep for a week before it hibernates.

Further, the iPad is truely an all-day machine. I never run out of power in my iPad.

The Mac can go for 4-6 hours of coding work on a single charge.

None of the Windows machines can survive for more than 3 hours on a charge. That's not coding... that's just doing normal business stuff like browsing and text editing.

I can forgive the ThinkPad this transgression as it's a quad-core i7 and I got it to code on. The Surface Pro should have at least the lifespan of my MacBook Retina... it doesn't.

On top of all this, the amount of crapware processes that run and often run out of control on the Windows boxes is insane. Lenovo has a dozen+ processes running and sucking power at 5%+ CPU usage.

Built-in tools

I downloaded a PDF form this morning. I needed to fill it out and send it back to the 1900s... I mean the DMV.

The Windows box doesn't have a built in PDF viewer that supports form entry on the PDF. Come on!

I downloaded the same form on the Mac, opened the PDF in image view, filled in the form, and printed it.

The Mac and the iPad have lots of nice little touchs that make life easier. Yes, I know I could download some Adobe product that will install all manner of other crap on my system or buy a tool from a smaller, more trustworthy vendor. But PDF form filling is what every computer user does. It should be part of the base OS install.

Verdict

I'm trying moving my non-coding work to an iPad. I'm writing this post on my iPad and using Working Copy to deal with GitHub. I'm also moving to RevealJS for presentations... I should be able to edit these presentations on my iPad.

I'm going to continue to try to do development on Windows and Linux.

And... I have to travel with my MacBook Retina in case there's something where I need a computer (not a tablet) and I need the nice things that OSX brings.

Sigh...