Microsoft made light of this foible at the Surface Pro 3 announcement today, taking care to highlight how many of the assembled press and analysts were using MacBook Airs to do their liveblogs and take their notes. I was one of those people, so a substantial portion of the announcement was aimed specifically at me (and my kind). Here's a Surface tablet you can use on your lap, as you would a laptop.
Challenge accepted, Microsoft! When Panos Panay and the other Microsoft execs left the stage, I stowed my MacBook Air in my bag, grabbed my Surface review unit from the cart, and found a couch. This entire hands-on post was written with the Surface Pro 3 in my lap, and I kind of liked it.
Going lap-on
The Type Cover now has a magnetic strip running across the top that you fold flat to the front of the tablet. Before you fold it, the Type Cover is usable but uncomfortable and wobbly. After folding it, it's still not as rock-solid as a non-removable aluminum base, but it's a much more laptop-like typing experience.
The keyboard is more stable, but the new kickstand comes into play here, too. The original Surface Pro supported one kickstand angle (22 degrees) while the Surface Pro 2 supported two (24 and 40 degrees). The Surface Pro 3 is more like a laptop in that its kickstand is pretty stable at any angle, so when you have the thing on your lap, you can point the screen at your face basically however you want. Looking at it from the front, it's easy to forget that you're not using a laptop.
It's not quite the same as using a laptop, though. For one thing, the unfolded kickstand and the keyboard cover combined expand to take up a wide swath of one's lap—the whole apparatus extends nearly to my knees, and I'm not a short person. Those with less expansive laps may need to do a little maneuvering to fit the whole thing. You're also going to have to keep your lap mostly level. If one of your legs is raised higher than the other, the kickstand and keyboard become more wobbly again.
The worst part, at least relative to the MacBook Air and the best Ultrabooks, is the Type Cover itself. It's a relatively shallow chiclet keyboard with mostly full-size keys, though the up and down arrow keys and some on the left and right of the keyboard are a little squeezed to conserve space. The backlight is nice, and I was quickly typing at my usual speeds, but the key travel is too shallow to be as satisfying or responsive as a normal keyboard. It's merely good, not great.
For what it's worth, the trackpad in the Type Cover actually seems reasonably good. Usually when I review a Windows laptop, the first thing I do is update the trackpad driver and tweak the sensitivity settings until they feel reasonable, but I didn't have any problems with palm rejection or accuracy while I was typing this article. My only complaint is that it's a little small—on older laptops with smaller trackpads, I've seen some users have trouble because it's too easy to accidentally invoke the Windows 8 trackpad gestures, but that's not an issue I ran into. If one of your key complaints about previous Surfaces was that they were insufficient laptop replacements, the Surface Pro 3 hits much nearer the mark.
The rest of the system
We'll be able to go a little more in-depth with the system (including the pen input) when we publish our full review, but for now we'll run through some of the important specs so you know more about what you're getting if you preorder one of these today.
Let's start with the specs. Though we speculated that Microsoft would have to use one of the ultra-low-voltage Y-series Haswell CPUs to make the system thin and light enough, our review loaner has the same Core i5-4300U used in the revised last-generation Surface Pro (Core i3 and Core i7 options will also be available). Performance isn't going to go up much, and the Intel HD 4400 integrated GPU means this thing won't be much of a gamer, but we're impressed that Microsoft was able to make the tablet thinner and lighter without sacrificing speed,
The tablet also has an 802.11ac adapter from Marvell, an upgrade from the 802.11n adapter in the Surface Pro 2. Our review loaner includes 8GB of DDR3 RAM and a 256GB solid-state drive from Samsung on a SATA III interface. With its i5 processor, this configuration costs $1,299.
The body of the tablet is lighter than the Surface Pro 2 (800g versus 903g), though it remains considerably heavier than something like Apple's iPad Air (469g) or even the older fourth-generation Retina iPads (652g). It's not going to break your arms, but it's definitely more similar to a laptop in its weight than most other tablets.
The 12-inch, 2160×1440 display compensates for the added weight. It's a reasonably bright, sharp 216 PPI display, which puts it within striking distance of the 15- and 13-inch Retina MacBook Pros(220 and 227 PPI, respectively). Its 3:2 aspect ratio will please those who prefer taller monitors to wider ones, though using the tablet in portrait mode isn't really any more comfortable than with any other large widescreen tablet—it's just a little too large to be as comfortable as the paper notepad that Panay compared it to.
We've seen in other high-PPI Windows laptop reviews that this relatively high pixel density can cause problems with applications on the Windows desktop, though the Surface 3 Pro seems to strike a decent balance. By default, it's set to display onscreen elements at 150 percent their normal size, which shouldn't cause quite as many obvious UI problems as higher scaling settings. While using Chrome, an app that doesn't support Windows' high-PPI scaling modes properly, text and images was noticeably blurrier compared to Internet Explorer, but not so blurry that it was unusable or even immediately noticeable if you didn't know what you were looking for.
Finally, the build quality is as good as we've come to expect from the Surface lineup. The magnesium chassis is nice-looking and solid-feeling, and the hinge was perfectly stable as long as I kept my lap level. The system gets a little warm to the touch, and Microsoft's demo booth was too loud for me to put Microsoft's ultra-quiet fan assembly to the test, but the fan vent along the edges of the tablet is unobtrusive, and you can't feel any hot air coming out of it.
We'll be giving the pen, the battery life, and the performance a more thorough look in our full review. Based on our hour of usage, though, we're comfortable saying that the Surface Pro 3 is at least a little bit closer to being a suitable laptop replacement than the older versions. It might not be exactly what you're looking for in a tablet, but if you were on the fence about the Surface Pro 2, this is probably the device you needed to knock you over.