Microsoft Surface Book - A designer's thoughts

- Hi, I'm Charli, welcome
back to my channel. Today I'm gonna be doing
something very unlike me and talking about a Windows computer. This video is gonna be a designer's review of the Microsoft Surface Book. I was given this computer to test out and create some tutorials for
the Adobe Students' channel which you can watch, link
down below in the description.

And I just want to tell
you about my experience using it and some of its
more unique features. Now I will preface this by
saying that I am a Mac user, I have been ever since
I started university and Macs were what they used there, so that's just what I got used to and continued to buy. I did use a PC though however,
several years ago now, at my first ever proper design job, we used a desktop PC. But that was a while ago now, so it's been really interesting to try out a more modern Windows computer and see what it has to offer, and what it doesn't have to offer.

Let's get into the review, and first I want to talk about the design. So this is obviously much more advanced than the desktop PC I
used all those years ago. Essentially this is a
laptop with a touchscreen, but you can also remove the screen and use it as a tablet,
so that's pretty cool. And it comes with this pen here as well, that you can use as a
stylus on the touchscreen.

I think this is made of magnesium, but one thing I will say about it, is it's not light. It's probably one of the
thinnest Windows laptops I've ever seen. Like, probably one of
the nicest designed ones, but it's still quite heavy when
comparing it to my Macbooks. I think the reason for this though is that it's got two batteries, one in the base here and then
another in the screen part so that you can take the screen
off and use it as a tablet, but then also connect it if
you need more battery power.

I'm not so sure about this
hinged design, to be honest. I think it's a little bit
odd that when it's closed, you can actually see through it and there's a giant gap there. It's not just the hinge as well, there are a few things with
the design of this laptop that are just ever so slightly off and I don't know, make
the experience not as good as using a Mac for me. An example here is when you open it, see how it like picks up and moves back? Whereas with a Mac, the base
stays secure to the desk, or the table or whatever it is.

Because of this hinge as well, the screen is like, quite floppy. And because it's a
touchscreen, you do like, you're meant to touch it, right? So I think it's a bit odd
that it's been designed to move quite so much. One thing though, that this computer has
over the new Macbook, is that it's got an SD card
slot and two USB ports, as well as a lightning, thunderbolt port, or whatever that's called. I think they call it that on a PC, but it's that shape.

Let's actually turn it on, and talk about the
operating system for a bit. So one thing that I quite like about it is this hello feature. So see if I look at the laptop here, pretty bad ass. When you first set it up,
you teach it your face, and then you just have to
look at it and it opens up which I think is pretty cool.

Anyway, this came running Windows 10, which I'd never used before. When it's working, it seems fine. It's just a case of getting
used to where things are, and how they're different
than it would be on a Mac. However, I say when it works, because I've had a lot
of issues with this thing crashing on me, especially
when I was filming, which was very frustrating, filming those tutorials for Adobe and the computer would suddenly do its blue screen of death thing.

It was also doing this weird thing once with the file explorer crashing, where every time I'd open it, it would just immediately close again, so I couldn't get files off it, which was also very frustrating. Just lots of little things like that, it doesn't seem as stable
as a Mac operating system. But using apps like the Adobe
Suite, it was really good because they work pretty
much exactly the same on a PC. As they do on a Mac, except you just have to
remember to click control instead of command for the short keys.

But my struggles with this, I don't think were just
things being different to on a Mac. You know, that is something
I can get used to. But there was just a lot of cases where things weren't as easy, like screen recording for example. I wanted to record my screen on a Mac, I just open up QuickTime, hit
new screen recording and go.

On this computer, I had
to do a lot of research and try and find an
app to download for it, without downloading a virus, because there is a lot
of viruses for Windows. That was a bit of a
struggle, and it ended up wasting a lot of time because
there's a lot of software out there and it's hard
to know what's good. There's a lot of bad apps, I suppose. Basically, I don't like when technology gets in the way of creating.

And I feel like with this PC, I was having to work against
it to create my tutorials and get my designs done, rather than it working with
me and you know, being easy. Just to quickly touch on
using the hardware though, the keyboard is definitely
the nicest I've ever used on a PC laptop. It's got nice flat keys. The trackpad though, I am not a fan of.

I think again, this is probably
because I'm used to a Mac where you can click
anywhere on the trackpad and it will click the cursor, whereas on a PC, you've got
the right click to think about, so I very often found myself
accidentally right clicking something, when I meant to left click. The trackpad just isn't
as nice and responsive as the one on my Mac is as well. And I found myself just
sticking to this left hand side of it, for drawing and clicking on, because if I draw a
shape and come over here, and then wanted to click down, obviously it's gonna right click. So I found that kind of frustrating, I don't think it's a very good experience for designing on, with a Windows trackpad.

Let's talk about this pen though, because this is a feature
that I really like. And I'm gonna take this out
and put it in tablet mode. The pen and the touchscreen capabilities are definitely my favorite
part of this laptop. It's so cool to be able
to draw on your computer in actual design software.

I know that iPads and the Apple Pencil are really popular these days, but I do think it's pretty
cool to be able to draw straight into Illustrator. Since I've mostly been using
this after doing the tutorials to draw in Illustrator, I guess I'll talk a bit more about that. It's nice to be able to draw as a vector, rather than in Procreate,
the app that most people tend to use for drawing on an iPad, you're drawing raster graphics, so they're based on
pixels rather than points, whereas here if I draw, I
can then scale this image up, scale it down, change
the color or whatever. I also really like this bit
on the top is an eraser, so you can just remove
parts of your shape too.

I found it difficult to draw
a lot of details though, because if you get smaller
it's harder to line up your start and end points of the pen. But still, it's all round
been pretty good to use. I found myself wishing there was an app that just had really simple,
basic brushes or whatever with an infinite canvas that I
could draw my wire frames on. I found this Sketch Pad app, which comes as part of the
touch tools in the tablet mode.

But it's not ideal because
the canvas is only this big, you can't pick things
up and move them around, and once you save it, that's
it, it's just a flat jpeg file, you can't come in and edit
it again later or whatever. I did try it using it for a bit, because I find that I'm much
neater drawing digitally than I am with an actual pen. I think really for me the downfall of this from a designer's perspective, aside from the fact that
the operating system is just not stable enough for me, is the lack of great apps. I feel like people are
more likely to create apps that are suitable and
really useful for creatives for the Mac because that's what's known as the thing that people most use, like Sketch for example,
is only available on a Mac.

And that's the software that
I use for all of my web design because it's just absolutely ideal for it. I think more Windows compatible software aimed at creatives needs to be built before I could ever think
about switching to using this as a full time device. Now that it's back in laptop mode, I'll say I didn't really find
myself using the touchscreen in laptop mode. It just felt a little bit strange.

I don't know, to be like,
poking at your screen. But again, maybe it's just
'cause I'm not used to having it and I'm used to only
being able to click around on a laptop. That reminds me too, one
thing I really wanted to be able to do with this, is use the pen for video editing, because when I edit, I'm
constantly cutting files and deleting space. So I thought maybe the
pen could be really handy for clicking on the exact place, but it's weird to use
the pen on your screen.

You have to hold your
arm at a weird angle, and it's just not comfortable. And when I used it in tablet mode, I discovered very quickly
that I cannot edit without the use of a keyboard,
I need all of my quick keys to edit quickly, so that was out of the
question, unfortunately, 'cause I was really looking
forward to using it for that. So all in all, as you can probably tell, I do not love this
computer for design work and will be sticking with Mac for now. Remember, this is just
one person's opinion, and I happen to prefer a Mac.

If you happen to prefer a
PC and you're a designer, that's fine too. Really, the tools you use don't matter, as long as you get to the end results, and you have a process that works for you. So please, take all of
this with a grain of salt. I know throughout this video
I've been comparing it to Mac a lot and some of you
might not have liked that, but this computer is not cheap.

Usually I find people go for PCs because you can get something that is much faster
performance or better specs or whatever for a cheaper
price than you could a Mac. But this guy is quite expensive. So they're kind of in
the same price range, and that's why I've been
comparing them so much, because I think really if
you're considering getting this, you could also consider
getting a Mac as well. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed
hearing my perspective on this, and about my experience
with using a Windows laptop for design.

It's been interesting and
I'm glad that I tried it out. I do recommend if you're
interested in this, you try it for yourself
because, like I said, some of the things that
annoyed me about it, and that I found were these little quirks, might not be the same for you, so you might really like it. Now that I have this though,
if there is any PC specific design software or tools or whatever that you want me to
try and do a review of, let me know down below in the comments, because I'm definitely keen to do that. Please give this video a
thumbs up if you enjoyed it, and make sure you hit
that subscribe button if you're new to my channel because I make new videos
about design and technology every single Saturday
and then vlogs of my life here in London every Tuesday.

So hopefully I will see
you for the next one. Thanks for watching, bye. (Gentle funky music).