Microsoft’s Surface Go Sounded Interesting

Microsoft’s smaller, cheaper, version of the Surface sounded pretty interesting if you ponied up for something better than the base model. Unfortunately the performance is extremely limited for a device running Windows 10. Mashable’s Raymond Wong titled his review “…Barely better than a netbook” and had this to say about the performance:

This Pentium chip is significantly slower than the Intel Core m3 chip inside of the entry-level Surface Pro. Microsoft touts 33 percent faster graphics than a Intel Core i5-powered Surface Pro 3 and 20 percent faster graphics performance than Core i7-powered Surface Pro 3, but honestly, none of these figures really matter because the Surface Go chokes up fast under even light usage.

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…the slowness is noticeable all throughout Windows 10 on the Surface Go. There’s lag when opening photos. There’s lag when launching apps. There’s even lag when opening up the settings to change the desktop wallpaper. Even on my higher-spec’d Surface Go review unit with 8GB of RAM, the slowdown was too real.

I had briefly considered that the Surface Go might be a good replacement for the iPad Mini I sold recently. Even after reading some more charitable reviews, the Surface Go doesn’t seem like a good choice anymore.

It’s a good thing that Microsoft is still working on devices like this, they were ahead of the tablet game years before Apple’s iPad was released, and even as a failure these Microsoft tablets provide a valuable look at what the future of computing could be. Large touch devices are so damn close to being good laptop replacements.