iPad Pro vs. Surface Go for Professional Use

Shahin Katebi
5 min readMay 9, 2020

I am using Apple products for more than a decade and Apple products were mostly a better choice for me. But as a software engineer, it wasn’t that easy to get over other portable touch-enabled, light-weight computers such as Microsoft Surface Go (which it’s new version just announced).

I was looking for a light portable device to replace my MacBook Pro when travelling. Here are the main features I was looking for:

  1. I need to be able to connect to my servers using SSH anytime from anywhere. (to maintain our running websites or make some changes)
  2. It’s good to be able to replace my notebook at meetings completely with a touch screen and stylus enabled device.
  3. I need a simple code editor with access to my git repositories and the ability to commit and push.
  4. Supporting keyboard and preferably mouse and trackpad is a must.
  5. I’m not primarily looking for the fastest device with highest performance. It is not going to be my main computer.
  6. And the last but not least, I need a device lighter than a 15-inch MacBook Pro to be easier to carry!

The last iPad I had was the legendary iPad 2 from almost a decade ago. Although it’s huge screen was fantastic those days, but to me it was only, well;

A GIANT iPhone.

That was the main reason that I never convinced to buy any of the new models.

My legendary iPad 2 is working fine as of today! :)

After introducing iPadOS, it started to diverge from being a giant iPhone to a completely new device class between mac and iPhone; which is definitely more interesting. There were some flaws in it such as not natively supporting mouse and trackpad, although you could use a mouse and trackpad by using the touch assistant settings in Accessibility settings on iPad, it wasn’t that user-friendly to be counted.

This all was before the new iPadOS 13.4 update and the new iPad Pro 2020

Surface on the other hand, it’s a nice looking touchscreen device which runs Windows by default, but it supports linux too (which is a very interesting feature). I never own a Microsoft device before and it could be the first one to try. I read a lot about it’s features, benchmarks and reviews to…

Shahin Katebi

SWE @Meta, Working on @Instagram, Founder of @YekaStudio and @BeamitDelivery.