Thanks for your "advice". Rather than rely on expert reviews, I would rather get 1st hand feedback from "real life" users......

I just wish the screen would tilt back more. I realize that the laptop would tip over at some point , but I would prefer having a hinge that allows the screen to fold flat.

another friendly bump to see if anybody has some updated info.... thanks !!

Did you ever buy the Surface Book 2 (your initial question)? Or have you now deferred and waiting on the Surface Book 3?

These are pretty expensive machines, and although I've seen a few other users on the academic circuit, we are outnumbered >20:1 by Mac users...FTers are probably no different. It's possible that a dedicated Windows forum may have more experience to relate. I only ever look those up when I have issues! :)

I do love the _idea_ of the machine, but it's far from perfect. I bought mine for work, so didn't pay for it myself. I don't do Apple, and I think it's a very good PC laptop. But I wouldn't call it good value.

tb

I would not recommend Surface Book 2.

I would say Microsoft Surface is a solidly designed tablet/laptop. However, it is extremely overpriced. Just taking Surface Book 2 as an example, it is almost 50% than the lowest configuration of Lenovo ThinkPad T480. The problem is T480 may have better performance than the Surface Book 2 (the use of tradition Hard Drive may impact T480's performance).

I don't see why a person needs to pay that much for something similar.

Declaimer - I don't own any Surface.

They are not comparable in the slightest. The SB2 has a detachable tablet and can be configured with proper discrete graphics. Any laptop that still offers a traditional HDD belongs in the trash.

I've been delighted with my SB which I've now had for a couple of years. It's by far the best laptop I've owned and will keep it longer than any of the others. Yes, it's more expensive (I've always bought premium laptops, but this is even more premium) but it will last so much longer.

Respectfully disagree on the "traditional HDD." They're very inexpensive, and allow the user to obtain the best performing processor/graphics configuration without paying inflated manufacturer pricing for a high-capacity SSD.

I couldn't get a 2TB SSD as a factory option for my Lenovo notebook, but was able to purchase the HDD version plus a 2TB 3rd party SSD at a significant savings over the largest capacity SSD-equipped model offered.

You are not correct in the slightest.

Microsoft considers SB2 as "a versatile laptop, powerful tablet, and portable studio in one." So in some degrees, SB2 is a laptop, at least to Microsoft.

Also - SB2 with i5 uses integrated graphics.

In that case - the landfill will be filled faster than ever, as most laptops still use traditional HDD...j/k

However, joke aside, the key of SSD v. HDD is how you use it. To make this simple - SSD is simply not economical for most daily usage.

Actually, that is incorrect. HDD has a better lifespan than SSD assuming proper usage and care. So the laptop with a SSD will fail first before HDD.

Most people are cheap and/or don't know better.

Sure they are. Most people don't need all that much storage, and 120-128GB SSDs at this point are as cheap as 500GB hard drives; 250-256GB SSDs are under $100 (and probably cheaper still at manufacturer-volume discount levels.)

SSDs are still not economical for bulk storage (hardly daily use) for average people, but prices have come down slowly. OTOH, most people don't need 2TB+ in their laptop and if you really do need that much space, it's not that bad to have an internal SSD and an external HDD (or while big laptops are anathema on FT, there are plenty of bigger laptops that will take an SSD + a 2.5" HDD)

And for the size-obsessed, SSDs enable making much, much smaller machines. For that matter, if money is no object, it enables a much much higher storage density. 1PB in 1U? Physically impossible with spinning disks. Possible, just absurdly expensive with SSDs.

That totally depends on the workload and whether you're in mobile or stationary use. In practice both of them are going to outlive the useful life of a typical new machine if not abused, but for mobile use the risk of abuse though drops hugely favors SSDs which are shock insensitive. A desktop or laptop from 2009 is obsolete. A second-genertion Intel X25-M SSD from 2009 is still better than a hard drive, and I have a number of them still running that were retired from data center use in 2013 after about 4 years use (and showing 40-50% of their write lifetime left despite a truly abusive workload.) I've also got laptop hard drives that old that probably still run, but why would one bother?

Having worked on the IT side of the house as well as development, and been responsible for a (fairly small) data center with low-hundreds servers with high-hundreds each hard drives and SSDs in workloads MUCH tougher than any normal desktop user, I've never seen an SSD reach the end of its write lifetime, and I've only ever seen two drives fail in ways that would still have a live controller (one of them a 1st-generation Intel 80GB from 2008) -- most SSD failures are controllers dying. I've seen a lot more HDDs fail than SSDs, although that's in data center use running 24/7 -- where the older 5 year warranties were a pretty good guide on when to worry about the failure rate going up a lot -- but if you aren't running 24/7 the power-on hours won't be nearly as big of an issue. I just tested a laptop with 25-year old drive that turned on and booted up, which is great, but a 1993-vintage drive measured in 10s of MB (I don't remember how big it was!) is pretty much a novelty at this point.

SSDs haven't been around long enough to know whether they'll last decades-plural, but given how much storage growth has slowed down, we will probably get to find out whether they do.

This I agree. However, at the same time, some people buying SSDs don't know better as well.

Again - the value of SSD depends on the users.

Well, yeah. Some people don't care about performance at all; the cheapest tier of machines with 2GB of memory and Atom processors wouldn't exist. Although plenty of those machines are sold with 32gb of eMMC storage, which isn't what most people normally think of as SSD (and is horribly slow) but it's even cheaper than the cheapest hard dives, and drop-proof.

That said, for pretty much anyone else who doesn't have a whole ton to store, other than not having enough RAM, it's pretty literally the most noticeable thing about a system's performance. A midrange machine from 2011 or 2012 or not totally bottom-of-the-line modern machine is pretty tolerable speed-wise if it's got enough memory and even a relatively dated SSD. Disk? Not so much, and I've upgraded enough non-technical friends to know that the difference is noticeable even to relatively more tolerant non-technical people.

Great info... thanks to all for your additional input !!

The other advantage of SSDs in a laptop is that there's no need for a fan, which makes it quiet.

That's more a function of the CPU and/or GPU in the machine. There are definitely laptops with SSDs that still have fans.