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Microsoft Surface Pro 7, what version and is it worth it?

I'm looking at some reviews, like this:

WTF, the pen is very laggy, for the price it is a very bad pen, the one on my NOTE9 works better. :confused:
 
pen: there are still world's between the apple pen and the surface pen due to the technology they use. But like I said: the surface pen is as good as it gets in native windows world without third party tablets.

Sorry, I have to question this. The abilities of the pens themselves are very similar, as is the latency. Whether you prefer the app ecosystem of Windows or iOS is one thing, but... Saying the pen experience is worlds apart is misleading.
 
Sorry, I have to question this. The abilities of the pens themselves are very similar, as is the latency. Whether you prefer the app ecosystem of Windows or iOS is one thing, but... Saying the pen experience is worlds apart is misleading.
Then we agree to disagree. The Apple pencil is still a lot ahead in my opinion.
 
May I ask in what regard? I will say that I'm not an artist, but even so I thought they were about on par with each other.
I am talking about the experience that I and a professional artist have.
At home we have a surface pro 6, an iPad Pro and a Wacom Cintiq.

Me personally, I do not care as much as she does. I use the Surface pen for basic input like drawing in automation or using it instead of the trackpad when I am not at home. I don't draw, I don't edit stuff in Photoshop.

She uses the Cintiq and iPad Pro professionally mostly for drawing, animating, editing. She prefers the iPad Pro over the Cintiq, Surface Pro comes last for her.

I think the best way to describe it is something like: If you rely on the pen simply as a substitute for a mouse, all of them are ok. If you rely on your pen to be capable of expression, the surface pen is simply lacking compared to the apple pencil. Doesn't mean it is bad, just not as good (and that still by a lot).

Of course I did try using all of them for drawing and editing and while I suck at both of those things, it felt way better to work with the apple pencil. And it just feels...different.
Your best bet is probably to check it out in a store for yourself where they have Surface and iPad Pro.
The only problem then is, that's a bad comparison from the get go because Surface only comes with paint and paint 3d which are both very "meh" while the normal notebook-app on the iPad pro lets you do pretty cool stuff already. And when it's a good store, they have Procreate on their iPads and that stuff just rips anything you could install on a Surface a second...USB-A port.

Edit: Like I said, she is a professional. People in her industry generally share her opinion (that includes NA and the EU).
 
I’ll chime in and share my thoughts on the pen for my Surface Pro 6 (i7 with 16GB if RAM)

The pen works well for most day to day tasks. I usually pull it out when I’m using software with lots of crammed buttons or menus that requires that precision. Unfortunately the latency is an issue for me when using it for anything drawing/painting related. Oddly enough the latency is much improved when using Microsoft’s own OneNote app, but every other app I’ve used for painting is laggy and is not a pleasure to use for art.
 
Thanks for taking the time to detail all of that Denkill. My suspicion is you're probably using them in apps that, for whatever reason, are less than optimized. Or perhaps more likely, the graphics abilities on the Intel-based Surface are much weaker than Apple's ARM-based chips (because they are). I say that because my experience has been similar to jason.d. On my Surface Pro 4, the pen works great in OneNote. That's simple notetaking of course, but there's virtually no lag, and my understanding is it's even better on newer Surface Pro devices due to a dedicated processor they introduced. But when I use it in Affinity Designer, the larger the brush, the worse the performance. I suspect this isn't Designer's fault, but has more to do with either the poor integrated graphics performance on the Surface, and/or the fact that on Windows, professional apps like Affinity Designer or Photoshop are not built on modern development platforms. This is all speculation, since I'm neither a graphic artist nor a programmer. But I do wonder if the pen tech itself is what's at fault. Of course, in the end, the results are what ultimately matter, and I'm not trying to be obtuse or misrepresent anything.
 
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