Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I got the i3 8GB memory 128GB SSD Platinum version, which at the time of this review is the top of the line model sold on Amazon. THE GOOD It's physically beautiful. It's sleek, thin, lightweight. The glass feels great and the back looks amazing. Probably the best looking Microsoft product I've seen. I was very happy to be able to get a very small tablet that ran a real operating system. iPads and Android tablets just don't cut it sometimes when you need to run real desktop software. If you want a small tablet that runs full Windows, this one does it. Windows 11 looks amazing. I'm mostly a Mac guy having left Windows after MS messed around with the start button and tiles with Windows 8. I had tried to come back a couple times here and there, but 8 and 10 seemed so dated after having switched to Mac. Windows 11 changes that for me and makes me open to coming back to Windows. It's beautiful and modern. They've removed a lot of the old Control Panel options that came from XP a long time ago, so that's good. Some are still there I discovered, but for the most part settings is greatly improved.... Windows 11 is great, but not great enough to make this tablet a keeper. THE BAD Really, Microsoft? A goofy proprietary charger? Not sure if the USB-C port just doesn't take a charge or if mine is defective, but I couldn't get a charge with my MacBook Pro USB-C charger/cable or Samsung S21 Ultra charger. Instead, mine only charges with MS's proprietary charger which means now I'm hauling around yet another charger and cable wherever I go instead of just one USB-C charger for all devices. I could almost live with that inconvenience, but what I can't live with is the speed. I understand that there are other Surfaces that have better/faster specs, but they are also bigger. I wanted a small and capable Windows tablet, but alas this one is only small. This may be an unfair comparison, so take this with a grain of salt, but I happened to get a new iPad Mini 6 the same day. I unboxed and fired up both at the same time and was up and running on the iPad in a quarter of the time even with Apple's annoying Apple ID Fort-Knox password verifications. The Surface was slow out of the gate. At first I thought the touch screen didn't work because when prompted for the usual username stuff, the keyboard would not appear..... oh wait, it did.... just 2-3 seconds AFTER taping on the text box. I thought maybe I was doing something wrong since I've never used Windows tablet before, but eventually it became apparent that the tablet was so extremely slow that even typing text would have serious lag. Then there's the usual and annoying Windows updates. Oh well, just part of the ecosystem, but geez! It took 45 minutes from unboxing to being able to even check out the desktop. I downloaded some desktop stock brokerage programs and they took forever to open. So slow. These aren't super resource heavy programs like Photoshop. They are fairly simple, yet they were just too slow to be usable for quick stock market trading. CONCLUSION So beautiful but just too slow for me. The touchscreen seems finicky and programs take forever to load and use. If MS comes out with a supped up version of this, I would definitely take another look. But if this is as fast as it can run, it's a hard pass. I'd hate to see the tablets with lesser processors. Buy if speed isn't a concern. Pass if you value your time.