This is about the Surface Book, not the Pro. They are very different beasts.
I purchased a Book -- the revised model, though they're very hard to tell apart -- late last year. I'm technically on my third model, and trying to return it to Microsoft right now. It's a solid system, just not worth the high price tag.
On the whole, there's almost nothing about it that is irritating. Everything works really well together, and you get a system with no bloatware -- but you can find that in other Signature Edition systems. There's little about this system that is particularly good, it's mostly that everything just works really well together. I don't use the removable screen much, but when I do, it's surprisingly easy to do, and actually verges into "delightful" territory. I especially like that I technically have all my data on my "tablet", so to speak.
There is one particularly nice thing that I'd like to see more manufacturers tackle: there's a USB port on the AC/DC converter. So I can charge my laptop and a phone at the same time, without using one of the two USB ports. (It also has an SD card slot, which I happen to like, but they're falling out of favour.)
So why am I looking to return it?
The hinge is a mild irritant. The way the power cord is run means it gets caught under the hinge frequently, and the hinge itself leads to a fair bit of wobble in the position of the screen; it can be difficult finding the right angle. As well, that hinge means that the screen only tilts back so far, which makes the system somewhat difficult to use when you're standing up.
But what really gets me is that of the three units I've had, one had memory issues, and two have a fairly loud buzzing sound when using headphones -- as in, it's actively distracting whenever listening to something. When gaming, it makes it sound like there's something big happening; when listening to music, it's just a constant distraction. Curiously, this buzzing happens no matter what type of headphones I use, even Bluetooth, so the problem is deeper in the system, not in the wiring of the jack.
Because it's been longer than 30 days, I'm strictly speaking not eligible to return the device, so my hopes aren't high that I can return it. And if the system were not $4k, I could deal with this by using a USB-connected audio device. But for the price tag associated with this thing, I have much higher expectations.
The Surface Pro 4 looks much more reasonable in terms of price. I know a few people who have them, and they all love them -- none of them have complained about any hardware issues. At this point, however, I'd probably wait for the Pro 5; even as a hardware refresh, it's worth waiting the few months it should take for it to hit market.
The study did a good job breaking down the different IPv6 connectivity types, but didn't discuss different IPv4 connections. GP is comparing native IPv6 to IPv4 CGNAT, but the study seems to be comparing differing forms of IPv6 to native IPv4.
I honestly don't understand why RequestPolicy doesn't get more love from the pro-privacy crowd. It does exactly what they want: prevents sites from issuing HTTP requests to other sites.
I once used a rather ambitious collection of addons, and I've since reduced it to just NoScript and RequestPolicy. And NoScript actually allows Javascript everywhere; it just has the XSS filter enabled. As a result, the vast majority of websites (with a categorical exception, below) work without any fiddling, and I don't see any third-party content at all: advertisements, share/like/+1 buttons, etc.
My only complaint about RequestPolicy is its lack of wildcard domain matching. I'd love to allow access from all sites to 'x.cloudfront.net', but that's not possible in the current version. (Rumour is that this is being fixed, and while I can confirm that wildcards are supported in the alpha version, it's definitely not ready for real-world usage yet.) Unfortunately, this means that some sites just don't work right; eg. 'x.blogspot.ca' always renders oddly, because they all pull from 'blogblog.com' and 'blogger.com'.
I asked the very same question about #1 on the Play store, and the developers did respond quite quickly: the network access is required to download new language packs. This makes perfect sense to me, as much as I'd like to see something like keyboards split off into two apps: the keyboard, with no/minimal permissions; and the 'helper' app, for settings, dictionary building/importing, downloading language packs, etc.
As far as reading my social information, I have no idea why it requests that. However, upon checking XPrivacy, I can see that it has never even attempted to access accounts, contacts, SMS/MMS, etc. Which would lead me to speculate that this is either a mechanism for recommendations, or used to build up dictionaries. (Edit: I never have the keyboard build up dictionaries, so I never told Minuum to try to do anything along those lines.)
If you're looking for a user-friendly desktop-install of FreeBSD, you probably want to check out http://www.pcbsd.org/ instead. They have a 10.0-RC2 available for download already, and will probably have a 10.0 released a few weeks after FreeBSD.
I purchased a Book -- the revised model, though they're very hard to tell apart -- late last year. I'm technically on my third model, and trying to return it to Microsoft right now. It's a solid system, just not worth the high price tag.
On the whole, there's almost nothing about it that is irritating. Everything works really well together, and you get a system with no bloatware -- but you can find that in other Signature Edition systems. There's little about this system that is particularly good, it's mostly that everything just works really well together. I don't use the removable screen much, but when I do, it's surprisingly easy to do, and actually verges into "delightful" territory. I especially like that I technically have all my data on my "tablet", so to speak.
There is one particularly nice thing that I'd like to see more manufacturers tackle: there's a USB port on the AC/DC converter. So I can charge my laptop and a phone at the same time, without using one of the two USB ports. (It also has an SD card slot, which I happen to like, but they're falling out of favour.)
So why am I looking to return it?
The hinge is a mild irritant. The way the power cord is run means it gets caught under the hinge frequently, and the hinge itself leads to a fair bit of wobble in the position of the screen; it can be difficult finding the right angle. As well, that hinge means that the screen only tilts back so far, which makes the system somewhat difficult to use when you're standing up.
But what really gets me is that of the three units I've had, one had memory issues, and two have a fairly loud buzzing sound when using headphones -- as in, it's actively distracting whenever listening to something. When gaming, it makes it sound like there's something big happening; when listening to music, it's just a constant distraction. Curiously, this buzzing happens no matter what type of headphones I use, even Bluetooth, so the problem is deeper in the system, not in the wiring of the jack.
Because it's been longer than 30 days, I'm strictly speaking not eligible to return the device, so my hopes aren't high that I can return it. And if the system were not $4k, I could deal with this by using a USB-connected audio device. But for the price tag associated with this thing, I have much higher expectations.
The Surface Pro 4 looks much more reasonable in terms of price. I know a few people who have them, and they all love them -- none of them have complained about any hardware issues. At this point, however, I'd probably wait for the Pro 5; even as a hardware refresh, it's worth waiting the few months it should take for it to hit market.