Microsoft Surface Pro 3
Hardware Overview
- Release date: June 20, 2014
- CPU: 4th-generation Intel i3-4020Y / i5-4300U / i7-4650U
- Chipset: Intel Haswell low-voltage
Screen: 12.0" glossy 2160x1440 3:2 IPS (eDP ClearType)
- Memory size: 4 or 8 GB LPDDR3 1600MHz (soldered, non-upgradeable)
Wireless: Marvell 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac + Bluetooth 4.0 LE (Linux driver: mwifiex_pcie(4), no support in FreeBSD)
External interfaces: one full-size USB 3.0 port, microSD card reader (up to 128GB), and Mini DisplayPort
- Camera: 5.0 MP/1080p (front and rear-facing)
In a nutshell, SP3 makes an interesting product to consider: it is nearly perfect convertible: usable both as a laptop (with its Type Cover detachable full-sized keyboard and 12" IPS screen) and a tablet. It is being pretty light (800 g), having nice metal casing, and bearing full-power Intel x86 CPU (vs. ARM most tablets today carry), yet capable of up to 9 hours of web browsing (per Microsoft). It also has standard DisplayPort instead of proprietary HDMI, a card-reader, and USB port — not something you'd find in a typical tablet.
Basically, it has four two major drawbacks: price, poor reparability, Windows 8.1, Micro$oft.
Notes
Comes with 64-bit version of Windows 8.1 Pro preinstalled. Because dreaded Secure Boot can be disabled in UEFI, it is possible to boot and install alternative operating systems. It was reported that Ubuntu works more or less fine (including things like special keys and suspend/resume), but requires patching and rebuilding kernel. Some useful links:
Booting EFI-ready FreeBSD 10.1-STABLE r277483 USB image allows it to boot; you can see kernel messages start coming, but within seconds boot process halts, leaving no option but to power-cycle the device.
Details
lspci -vx (collected under Linux)