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It’s Hard To Love My Microsoft Surface

Bobby Gill | March 8, 2013

Love isn’t easy, love takes work and patience; especially when it’s a Microsoft Surface tablet that you are trying to love. She is my lurid temptress, an evil seductress that teases me with her sleek envelope- shaped body and detachable keyboard-cover only to smack me across the face just when I had thought I’d finally found the post-PC PC for me.

 

She puts me through hell, but for some sick reason, I keep coming back for more. My pshrink says she’s no good for me, says I should find another ARM based tablet to love. I’ve tried, oh I’ve tried. I even bought an iPad Mini hoping that it would break the curse my Surface has over me. But what chance did a over-sized iPhone have against the sultry allure of the Surface?

They (I am not sure who) say the first step to breaking free of an abusive relationship is to list all the things you hate about them. So today, I’m making a step towards freedom and listing out all the ways my Surface tablet hurts me:

1. Your Wi-Fi Tease

Remember that time I wanted to connect a WiFi network, and you wouldn’t connect? Oh wait, that happens every time I try to connect to a new WiFi network! You tease me by listing the network ID in your little charm bar, only to spin your circle of lies before telling me that you can only get “limited connectivity”.  I am a man god dammit! I shouldn’t have to reboot you just to get a little WiFi!

2.) Your molasses-as-an-app Mail client

Sometimes when I am with you, all I want to do is read and write some emails, just like a regular cafe loitering hipster. Yet,  you find a way to make email unbearable with your Mail App that makes scrolling through an inbox of emails feel like hauling a ton of bricks in a Yugo.

3.) Your insatiable thirst for reboots

It feels like we can’t go 5 days without you demanding to rebooted just so you can update yourself! It’s 2013! Why can’t you install a patch without forcing a reboot?!

4.) Your Hanging Internet Explorer

I am a fool for thinking that your Internet Explorer would be good to me. I hate the way you dangle the IE loading screen in front of me for 45 seconds, giving me hope that it might fact open up a browser window, only for it to crash and you to boot me back to your “charm” screen.

5.) Your Never-ending Skype Notifications

Woman I am not asking you to videoconference, I just want to have Skype open to receive IM’s!  But in your jealousy of other computers I use Skype on, you torture me by displaying a pop-up notification for every single damn IM I have already read!

6.) Your so-called “Touch” Keyboard

 

Your so called “touch” keyboard has all the sensitivity of the Westboro Baptist Church. Typing anything with the Surface’s touch keyboard feels like trying to run away from a monster in a dream.

7.) Your non-functional Evernote

I hate how you give me an Evernote app but then refuse to sync any notes I write to the cloud. That’s just mean!

8.) Your crashing Twitter and Facebook integration

 

You isolate me from the world. You have no usable Twitter client, and your Facebook-integrated People hub crashes with the frequency of a Soviet airliner. It’s like you want me to be alone.

 

You know how I know you’re no good for me? I look at my neglected iPad Mini and ask myself: when was the last time it ever asked me for a reboot?

My iPad Mini is like a homely girlfriend, it does everything well without being a diva. Yet, for everything she does for me, all it takes is one glint of light reflected off the Surface’s beautiful screen for me to toss my iPad to the side and hop back on the roller-coaster romance with my Surface. One day I’ll break free, but not today, I can’t resist the way the home screen tiles sweetly glide across my Surface tablet. I am weak, I know, like Tina with Ike, I’ll only be free when my Surface dies on me.

Bobby Gill
Co-Founder & Chief Architect at BlueLabel | + posts

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