And despite everything, there are times I really do love using the Surface Go 3. Last year, I said the Surface Go 2 was easy to love and hard to live with. A tiny computer that’s still easy to love but hard to use. Perhaps those aforementioned IT pros wouldn’t be able to run the apps they need on Arm - or perhaps Microsoft simply didn’t want to spend the R&D budget necessary to redesign the Surface Go 3 around a new chip. If it did, I have to imagine it would get the benefits of longer battery life without taking too much of a speed hit (even the Core i3 version can’t be described as “fast”). Perhaps the most baffling part of the Surface Go 3 is that it isn’t using an Arm-based processor, like the Surface Pro X. It’s so flimsy that I often accidentally click the mouse simply by resting my hands on the palm rests when it’s on my lap. The Type Cover still has a nice keyboard but a flimsy keyboard deck. It still works with the older Surface Pen design if you have one of those, but it doesn’t support haptics from the newer pen. The overall physical design is unchanged - a bummer since the Surface Pro 8 got such a big update this year. But it’s possible to get all those Windows benefits without making all the compromises the Go 3 demands. And compared to ChromeOS, it can run many more useful apps (though not yet Android apps). Windows 11 has an advantage over iPadOS in that it actually supports multiple users. Snap Assist for tiling windows is especially useful with this smaller screen, since it’s harder to get windows to the arrangement I’m used to on bigger displays. It has Windows 11 by default - read Tom Warren’s full review here - and though the edges are rough, the interface overall feels really nice and usable on this smaller, 10.5-inch touchscreen. If the battery life were better, my old advice about working within this computer’s limitations would still apply. I’m not sure where Microsoft gets its 11-hour estimate, but it’s far from reality. When I took the Go 3 outside and needed to crank the brightness up, that battery life dropped to three. One of the apps I was running was power hungry (that’d be Slack), but the only other app was the Edge browser with somewhere around a dozen tabs. That’s the longest I was able to keep the Surface Go 3 running in active use. The long and (especially) short of this review is simply this: four and a half hours. Unfortunately, neither of those things have happened this year. But by the third generation, you’d think Microsoft would have found a way to either remove more of those limits or provide better tradeoffs for them. I’ve always said the Surface Go is a fine little computer if you understand its limitations and are willing to work within them. It works with Surface Pens but not haptics.
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