Kudos for asking at the beginning, if you were just tracking all the stuff I did w/o asking, I'd just be frustrated about the network activity. But by asking, you got my consent, which means I don't mind the tracking pixels firing as I scroll.
I don't know much about Microsoft, so having several products that all sound similar, makes it difficult to be confident that I'm looking at the thing I'm looking for. Eg I think there's a desktop surface, and I think there's a laptop surface. I want the laptop, but then there's also a "Surface" and "Surface Book", the latter sounds like a laptop, the former is presumably the desktop, "Surface Pro" is presumably the beefed up version of the "Surface", but when I watch the videos, it looks like a laptop... So, I'm honestly a bit confused right now.
Given how horrible Apple's latest MBPs are, you might have an entire demographic of people like me, searching for a reasonable machine to work on. If your analytics are good enough to identify this demographic, then it would be worth playing up your strengths where Apple is failing (meaning present me with a bunch of things you do well, that you happen to know I'm likely to value, b/c you know Apple is doing them badly -- suggestion: do this without mentioning Apple, at all). In particular: The space key frequently does not register keypresses. There's a whole blog about this, it's a whole thing, when I start hitting it, it just pulls me right out of flow and makes me miserable. One of the videos I watched made it sound like you picked a good and reliable keyboard, so, make me think your keyboard is going to be amazing. Do you have an escape key on your keyborad? I've been using this machine for like 6 months now, and I still haven't adjusted to the escape key they displaced for the touch bar (I've now switched between 3 different ways to try and press escape -- this is probably not a big deal to most, but again, if your analytics are good enough, programmers who use vim press escape fkn constantly). I only ever press the touchbar by accident, and I only realize this because I apparently touched the spot that stops my music, or opens a new tab in the middle of the sentence I'm typing. I can't fix the spacebar b/c of their keys, and b/c the entire insides are soldered together, so 1 grain of sand gets in there, and suddenly I have to replace half the computer, if yours is modular, such that pieces can be fixed in isolation, then that's a huge plus. I've heard good things about your Linux emulation, if the computer ships with a good terminal that I can run a unix shell on, then that addresses the biggest hurdle that I'm likely to have, put that front and center! (no disrespect to Powershell, I've heard great things about it, too, it's just that I'm incredibly competent at *Nix terminals and I love the Fish shell and know how to get things done in *sh). For a long time, I was scared to leave Mac hardware b/c of the trackpad, which was beautiful and intuitive and alway worked the way I wanted. I can't go back to the mouse solutions that I've had before. However, the latest MBP's trackpad got jumbo-sized, which means that now, as I type, I accidentally click the mouse and move it around, which means my windows are refocusing as I'm typing, it's just a mess. What's your trackpad situation? If it's large enough to that I'm not running off the edges, without being so big I'm unintentionally using it when I don't want to, while also having a tight response that makes it a joy to use, then I'm sold. At that point, from a hardware interfae, what else is left? The apple vs Windows keys, probably, but I can either swap them or get used to it... So, anyway, yeah, make me think you've made the computer that I was expecting Apple's new MBP to be (and after 8 years of waiting, too!) Oh, another plus would be an ability to dual boot a Linux (you're selling hardware, and I'm more confident that I can work well in Linux than Windows, so embrace it, and you might make another sale!)
From one of the links I followed, I couldn't figure out how to get back to the main Surface Pro page. I tried deleting the custom-looking stuff at the end of the URL, which put me at "https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/d/surface-pro", but that page didn't exist. I eventually realized I was probably looking for "Devices", but they didn't have "Surface Pro" in there. I realized "Surface" is probably a category, rather than the "non-pro" equivalent. From there, I was able to find a link to the surface pro page. Given the amount of money you presumably spent, buying that Google Ad I clicked, it's probably worth making it really easy for me to get back to that page the ad sent me to. Someone probably spent a lot of time and thought making it exactly what they thing I want (and, evidence to support this: I was trying to get back to it, because I found it useful). But, in retrospect, this wasn't it either, so I went back to Google, searched again, and followed the ad again. It worked, I found the link, but that probably costs you a lot of money, and I could drop out at any point.
From one of the pages, I wanted to look at what I could configure, but couldn't find a link. I clicked "Show deals", which isn't really what I was looking for, but sounded like it would have some options I could choose between. However, the page that popped up was an error (404, not found) https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/d/surface-pro/8nkt9wttrbjk/&activetab=pivot:dealstab#DealsTab
I looked at a specs sheet, but am realizing that they probably aren't the specs for the machine that I am actually interested in.
Of particular importance to me, is power vs battery life. I need something powerful, b/c the environment I work in is very demanding (or, more likely: wasteful of resources). But I also massively value battery life, because otherwise I'm tethered to an outlet. Bad battery life means my computer is an anchor, which changes how mobile I am, which affects how I live my life. So, I'd like to understand the tradeoff between power and battery life, to make sure I find the one with the best balance. Note that weight and size are similar to battery life in this regard.
Okay, looked at a few review sites, found one exclusively about the keyboard (https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2016/06/the-story-behind-microsofts-alcantara-type-cover/), and it looks good! I'm worried about how usable it is on my lap, though, as I often work while sitting on the train. Presumably there's a solution to this, but I haven't seen it alluded to yet.
I eventually figured out where the choice was for computes with different specs, and picked the one that had the description that sounded most like what I want. However, it was pretty confusing to find the tech specs again (I didn't realize the specs shown on the main page change when I add a computer to the cart). Generally, it feels like there's a handful of pages here that are the core of what I've explored and they all have useful bits of info, and do complementary things, but lack cohesion, making it difficult to navigate between them and understand their interplay.
Anyway, there's maybe a 40% probability that I'm going to buy this thing, because after choosing the one with the most RAM and best processor, it still has good weight and battery life. Do note that there's a 2 superscript on "Up to 13.5 hours video playback", which presumably means there are nuances to that statement, but I can't find a definition of what the 2 means. Also, storage has a 4 superscript, which I can't find, either. Usually numbered annotations are sequential, so maybe they mean something else? IDK, I mean, someone added it for some reason, does this machine still have 13.5 hours of batterly life, even though I changed the processor, which looks like it also changes the graphics card?
I found a bug that basically breaks the site. I was not able to reproduce it, but from the product page (I think), I clicked the stars to go to the reviews, and for the review that says "Terrible backlight bleed", I expanded the "Developer comment" and closed it, and after that, was not able to scroll. Clicking other tabs did not resolve it. Eventually, a refresh did fix it. I went through those steps again, and it didn't happen.
Do note that you talk to several sites with SSL certificates that are going to stop working in Chrome, soon (https://security.googleblog.com/2017/09/chromes-plan-to-distrust-symantec.html), and I did see a SPDY error (presumably that means it's an HTTP/2 error). I should have screenshotted it, sry, all I remember is that it was a POST request for some kind of data, and the error said that it had violated the protocol somehow (my interpretation was that it was like a syntax error or something).
Anyway, I'm going to leave it up in a tab and see how I feel about it next week.