In hindsight, 2017 has been an excellent year to be alive.
Of course, I could be bummed about the year's political shenanigans but I've come to realize that politics is ALWAYS depressing, no matter the era. Technology wise, however, there were plenty of innovations to get my jimmies all rustled.
Microsoft Surface Pro
In particular the Surface Pro 2017 brought some serious upgrades to Microsoft's Surface Pro family and, by the time of this writing, a $200 price drop to boot! With this newest addition to the Surface family, we got Core i7 processors (unless you want the fanless version, which uses Core i5) and in turn, a faster experience.
Another significant upgrade came in the form of the new Surface Pen which reduces latency from other Wacom pens, so that artists and writers such as myself have a smoother experience using the touch screen in tablet mode. We also received an upgrade in the overall form factor, with the new Surface Pro being slimmer and weighing less than the Surface Pro 3.
If you want to check out the complete list of specs this baby's packing, check out Microsoft's website.
This is all well and good but one thing the Surface Pro 2017 lacks is a Thunderbolt 3 port. You may not know what that is, so I'll give you the short and sweet of it.
It allows you to turn your laptop into a gaming machine.
Now I'm sure some people who are more technical would correct me here, but that's the gist of it. You can extend your laptop's graphics capabilities with external video cards and I think Thunderbolt is useful for efficient Bitcoin mining as well.
That one feature is a potential game changer for me. Lucky enough, I heard about another convertible laptop around the same time that includes a Thunderbolt 3 port.
Eve V
When I first looked at this thing, it kinda came off as the Sonic to Microsoft's Mario. The badass that never gets invited to family functions because he's too cool to be seen with the normies.
Other than a slightly less powerful processor, the Eve V is direct competition for the Surface Pro 2017 - an exceptionally bold stance to take for this crowd-funded project. That's right, the Eve V is the first successful, crowd-sourced convertible laptop. I found that pretty interesting as most of the components it boasts were decided on democratically by funders of the project, giving us an industry standard piece of technology with consumer input on its features.
Along with aThunderbolt 3 port the Eve V has a few other quirky options built-in, such as RGB backlit keyboard, meta af key design, etc. It does come with a pen but the pen is not as "up-to-snuff" as its competition's pen. It's not that big of a difference but I'm sure that I would notice it when trying to draw precisely on a first try sketch.
Conclusion
I like to travel and the portability/versatility of these 2-in-1 laptops is their most alluring feature. I'm leaning toward trying something new with the Eve V (although the wait time might swing me in another direction; it is crowd funded, after all).
I'm sure that whichever one I choose will satisfy me for at least a couple of years.
If you have any suggestions for other convertible laptops I should consider or questions about anything that I've included in the post, let me know in the comment section below!
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