Recently got a 2018 Microsoft Surface Go and a 2019 iPad Air. Both are pretty great physical devices. Tried getting work done on both, and you hit some limitations. The iPad really hurts for a lack of memory, switching between an email client, a browser, and Slac,k and you’re hit with reloads all the time.

Meanwhile, the Go is absolutely betrayed by the dinky Intel Pentium Gold processor. It’s got 8GB of RAM, plenty for browser-based work, but you constantly feel it chugging when trying to do two things at the same time. It’s a capable monotasker. And I actually like it as a hardware platform much more. The hinge is great, the hardware feels solid. The screen has some heavy bezels, but it looks good, and the Type Cover is excellent. Plus, it plugs into my USB-C dock to make it easy to swap in.

Makes me wish Microsoft hadn’t waited and been so tepid with Windows on ARM for so many years. Apple clearly showed that the architecture was desktop-ready for years before they made the switch. A Surface Go with an iPad Pro processor from that time would have ripped.