Surface Pro 3 vs iPad Pro drawing 2020 – is it worth buying?

Surface Pro 3 is in a category of its own. With a stunning 12″ display in a sleek magnesium frame, Surface Pro 3 has all the power and performance of a laptop in an incredibly lightweight, versatile form. It may just be the ultimate device. The razor-sharp clarity of the 12″ Full HD Plus screen combined with a multi-position Kickstand, keyboard*, and multiple ports make Surface Pro 3 an exceptional device for getting work done. The 4th generation Intel Core processor gives you the power to run your favorite desktop software like Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop. The new iPad Pro has been completely redesigned and packed with Apple’s most advanced technology. It will make you rethink what iPad is capable of. Which one is more effective – Surface Pro 3 vs iPad Pro drawing 2020?

Compare Surface Pro 3 vs iPad Pro drawing

Which one is worth buying – Surface Pro 3 vs iPad Pro drawing 2020?

Both the Surface Pro 3 and the Surface Book are marketed as whole computer replacements, and as such, have the capacity for an impressive amount of power—power that rivals MacBook Pro standards. The iPad Pro, in contrast, has an impressive amount of power for a tablet device, but it can’t compete against 16GB of RAM or a Core i7 processor.

When it comes to using either device as a sketchpad/writing platform, however, I don’t really care about 60FPS gaming possibilities: I want long battery life, smooth interaction with the tablet’s stylus of choice, fast brush rendering in artistic apps, and comfort on my lap and in my arms. My ideal tablet should work in tandem with my desktop computer, rather than replace it entirely.

If your goal is to do all your artistic work on your laptop—no desktops allowed—then the Surface is going to be a lot more appealing to you. If you’re looking for something to replace to your laptop and work alongside your desktop powerhouse, the iPad Pro is a much more compelling option.

Drawing Stylus

My initial impression of the pencil was instantly favorable. The 2nd generation Apple Pencil feels incredibly light in the hand. Compared to the Surface Pro Pen the Apple Pencil is thinner, shorter, and lighter weight- making it easier and more intuitive to hold, use, and draw with. Surface Pro Pen weight: .8 oz (including pen grip, which I’ve found necessary to hold to prevent hand cramps). Apple Pencil 2nd Generation weight: .6 oz. The clear winner when comparing the Surface Pro pen to the 2nd generation Apple Pencil is Apple Pencil. Longer, slimmer, and lighter, than the Surface Pro Pen, the new Apple Pencil is light and feels nearly identical to a traditional hardwood #2 Pencil.

Weight

In terms of weight, the iPad Pro comes in at the lightest of the three tablets (unsurprisingly, given its lack of additional chips), at 1.57 pounds (1.59 if you have the Wi-Fi and Cellular model). The Surface Book sans keyboard is a few ounces heavier at 1.6 pounds, though if you attach its keyboard base, be prepared for a whopping 3.34 pound total; the Surface Pro 4’s base model comes in at the heaviest of the three tablets at 1.74 pounds.

Battery

Battery is a big deal here: The Surface Pro 3 and iPad Pro have pretty comparable battery life, packing a 38.2 and 38.5-watt-hour lithium-polymer battery, respectively and promising 9-10 hours of battery life. (Buy a more powerful Surface, however, and expect that battery estimation to go down.) The Surface Book’s a different story altogether: It stores most of its battery in that gigantic keyboard. Detach to use as a tablet, and you’re looking at just 3-4 hours of battery life.

Software differences

No surprises here: Tablets made by Microsoft and a tablet made by Apple are going to run different operating systems, and offer different program compatibility.

The Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book run both Microsoft’s Windows 10 tablet operating system and the full desktop version of Windows 10: This means that you can switch from Microsoft’s touch-designed environment to the full desktop workflow of Windows 10—and all the awkwardness that comes with small touch targets designed for pointers. Despite not-ideal interactivity, this does mean that you can run full desktop applications on the tablets—like Adobe’s Creative Suite.

The iPad Pro, in contrast, is limited to running iOS (though it can also be used very effectively as a second screen for your desktop computer with apps like Astropad and Duet Display. As such, the iPad is primarily limited to programs available in the iOS App Store.

I will say this, however: The traditional version of Photoshop may not exist, but don’t discount non-Adobe apps. There are a ton of great photography and graphics applications hiding away that can do just as much as what you might use Photoshop and Illustrator for, if not more. On the sketching side, apps like Paper make for the best unlimited sketchpad you could want; more pro-level apps like Procreate, Pixelmator, Sketch Club, uMake, and others provide high-quality canvases, layers, vector tools, 3D modeling, and export to Adobe-compatible formats like PSD.

I doubt an iPad fits in every creative professional’s software workflow right now, but it’s worth an investigation. Do you really need the full power that Photoshop or Illustrator offers, or do you mainly use brushes, vectors, layers, and repair tools?

If you do want that pressure-sensitive sketching experience in Photshop, you can turn your iPad Pro into a pressure-sensitive second screen for your desktop Mac—with or without wires!—using Astropad. Astropad currently supports the Pro and Pencil in beta, offering pressure-sensitive drawing with almost no latency between iPad and Mac, thanks to smart refresh tricks from the developers.

The Pen and Pencil

Both tablets have their own distinctive stylus: for the Surface, it’s the black, blue, or silver Pen; for the iPad, it’s the white-and-silver Pencil.

Unlike the Pencil, the Surface ships with the Pen—you don’t have to buy one separately, though you can upgrade your older Surface tablet’s pen for $60. Microsoft acquired N-Trig and its active pen technology last year, and used it to upgrade the Pen significantly for the Pro 3 and Surface Book. For those not in the know, N-Trig’s secret sauce is much like Wacom’s—a combination of pen input with an integrated digitizer and controller built into the tablet.

The Pen now sports 1024 levels of pressure—similar to an entry-level Wacom tablet—and offers multiple pen tips to draw with. (In my tests, those tips seemed to be based solely around artist drawing comfort, rather than changing the line style or width of the Pen.) It connects to the Surface Pro 4 via Bluetooth, is powered by a sole AAAA battery, and attaches to the tablet with magnets for easy (ish) storage. Oh, and there’s a small slender button and an eraser, though I didn’t take much advantage of either while drawing.

Apple’s Pencil contrasts in a number of different ways. It ships separately from the iPad, for $99. It uses a very different technology than either Wacom or N-Trig, relying on the iPad’s refresh rates, special software, and internal chips within the Pencil to get the most accurate line. Apple hasn’t stated any official pressure levels for the Pencil, nor has it even made an indication that it wants to use that metric to compare the Pencil with the Surface or Wacom pen technology.

There’s just one tip currently shipping with the Pencil—a hard rubber pencil-like nib—though you get a spare in the box, and there’s no digital eraser, pen clip, magnetic storage, or extra buttons to be found. And the Pencil needs no batteries: Instead, it charges using a built-in Lightning Connector.

Given the Pencil’s extra cost and lack of extra bells and whistles, it’s easy to write it off and declare the Surface Pen the better tool on looks and outward function alone. But 90 percent of a stylus’s job is drawing and writing, and this is where the Pencil dominates.

The Surface Pen feels like pretty much every Wacom or N-Trig pen before it has felt: plastic and click-click-clicky. It’s a motion artists have gotten used to over years of digital drawing, but it doesn’t come close to the natural drawing experience on paper. The Pencil, while still not a true replacement for the texture of paper and pen, is much more solid in your hand—its weight, length, and balance feels right for this sort of tool. It doesn’t eliminate the “drawing on glass” feeling, but the nib is much more muted on the glass surface, and pressing into the screen feels much more natural than it does with the Surface Pen.

Did I notice not having an eraser and extra buttons? Honestly, no. Like Rene, I haven’t worked with a built-in eraser for drawing or writing since grade school—and even on my Wacom, the eraser was clunky. It also encourages me to use actual art techniques when I do digital pencil drawings—shading with lighter greys and whites to remove strokes rather than using a blunt (and, honestly, very digital in its execution) eraser.

Similarly, buttons remind me that I’m drawing digitally: I’d much rather physically touch or swipe on the surface to undo. Gestures make undoing a stroke feel like brushing away charcoal fragments; pen button clicks are much harsher—and worse, easier to trigger accidentally.

I didn’t miss the eraser on the Pencil. But I quickly missed the Pencil’s tilt-to-shade technology when drawing on the Surface. It, above all else, makes the Pencil feel natural in a way the Surface Pen does not. Digital artists have become accustomed to relying on the same tiny nib for all tools, whether we’re using inks, pencils, big brushes or little. With tilt-to-shade, the Pencil isn’t just a dumb-but-pressure-sensitive tool: It reacts to your movements on the digital paper in the way styluses of old just can’t. It’s a glimpse of the future.

Is the Pencil more expensive and more limited? Absolutely. But to me, both of those were the right calls: The Pencil is the best digital stylus I’ve ever used by a mile. Apple’s unique take on pressure-sensitive drawing makes it feel different and more comfortable than the Surface Pen or a Wacom stylus, and tilt-to-shade is a very comfortable way to color and enhance drawings. And while Lightning port charging looks odd, I vastly prefer not having to stress out looking for a AAAA battery if my stylus runs out of power while on the road.

Transform

The ability to replay and better organization are great, but what really convinced me to switch to digital drawing on the iPad is the ability to select areas of the drawing and transform that area – cutting, pasting, stretching, resizing, etc. this feature, critical in every digital media I can think of is for some reason missing from Sketchable. Although it can possibly be remedied through an export and reimport – often layers and detail are lost through this process.

The writing and drawing experience

During my tests, I used a few different programs on the Surface and iPad Pro. I wanted to compare the company’s entry-level drawing apps, so my initial round of tests were done in Fresh Paint on the Surface, and Notes on the iPad Pro.

I also took a look at the Adobe experience on both platforms: On the Surface Book, that meant Photoshop Express; on the iPad Pro, I tried both Adobe Sketch and Astropad while running Adobe Photoshop on a MacBook Pro

You can see my full tests below. If I were to do these again today, I’d probably have added OneNote, as well, since the app is available on both platforms.

But if you care just as much about process as results, the Surface may let you down. The tablet’s insistence on hovering cursors (a default holdover from the mouse-based Windows environment) in many of its apps is frustrating—it doesn’t feel nearly as natural as working directly on the screen. I don’t want to see where the pointer is, because I should trust that both pens are going to be precise and mark where I’m pressing. While you can disable this setting, it’s still odd that Microsoft makes it the default when it has a pretty precise engine in place.

As I mentioned in the stylus section above, Microsoft’s tablet reminds me a lot of digital drawing experiences past. It feels like a Cintiq—which is awesome for those looking for that Cintiq experience—but again, that’s a continuation of the old guard. Not a reinvention for the better.

In contrast, the iPad Pro and Pencil is a step forward in drawing technology. There are no pressure ratings, because the stylus just works the way you want it to. It’s more comfortable to draw with: There’s no faux pointer showing where your pen’s cursor is because you just don’t need it. And when it comes to default apps, Notes just smokes Fresh Paint. Even with a more limited color palette and tools, the app looks so much more natural.

If you need to work in the full version of Photoshop or Illustrator on your tablet and you’re used to the Cintiq-style experience, the Surface is going to win out. Adobe’s apps are scattered to the winds on the iPad, and their tools, while great, are limited. But the iPad Pro is a great excuse to step forward and embrace digital drawing both on the go and at your desk, especially if you work in tandem with a more powerful desktop computer. (Unlike iOS’s Astropad, the Surface Pen won’t work with pressure sensitivity if you run a second monitor app on your Surface Pro or Surface Book.)

Surface Pro vs iPad Pro for drawing – which one is better?

I have been using my surface pro for well over 2 years for drawing and recently have purchased an iPad Pro to mainly draw as my primary device. I love both equally

What I love about it:

• Great battery life, 3 hours using a high power drawing program only uses ~30%
• Does not heat up like the Surface Pro
• Has a really good refresh rate(120Hz)
• Pen pressure is much greater (can sketch and line while pressing the pen with lightly)

Should you replace your Surface pro for it? No. But if you are going to only draw then its a Yes.

Both devices are really great and I can achieve the same level of art on both of them with only the iPad having a much greater depth in pressure levels. Hopefully for us Surface brothers, Microsoft will release a new pen with more pressure levels.

iPad has two real applications for drawing, Procreate and Artstation, while on a surface you have much more freedom to use things like Krita, GIMP, Blender, ZBrush, Sai and basically every other piece of art software. The high refresh rate and better implementation of the pen protocol still makes the iPad a better option for artists overall.

Yep there are some apps on Surface Pro that do a pretty good job. Autodesk Sketchbook,Concepts,Leonardo being the newest more focus on tablet use. But overall Win10 is sorely lacking in Tablet UI department. And still ongoing issues of lag,jitter,etc… from time to time. Lack of improving and fixing tablet issues that been hanging around for years.

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