@Dellaster I see you’re selling yours, what finally did it?
M1 Mac Mini on its way along with M1 iPad Pro 11 already in hand for past two weeks. Luna Display also on its way. I like drawing on the iPP better so the Studio part of the SLS isn’t getting used. Yadda yadda. New shinies. I had the M1 Mini last December, liked it, but couldn’t get my games to work well. This time I’ll get a handheld with Ryzen 6800U to take care of that. Yada yada. Geek lust.
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Sounds like fun! BTW one surprise in the listing (not that I’m buying, happy with my i5 model) is the status of the battery. Seven cycles, and yet 8% less capacity than the design spec! Maybe just miscalibrated? 
Edit: looks like I lucked out on mine:
Oh, and I forget, did yours have the dGPU or the integrated GPU? If the former, maybe add that to the listing.
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Not sure about the current capacity, might just be a fluctuation. I’ve seen that happen before.
Oops! I was kind of assuming the people knew about the i7 always having the RTX 3050Ti dGPU. I’ll add that in.
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Turns out people are forgetful :vb-grin:
Has anyone else discovered the really annoying ability of the slim pen 2 to motion sense?
Like if I set it down for a little to go work on an excel sheet or something, jostling it seems to trigger some kind of windows integration, which switches the excel or word menu to the Draw tab.
Can this be turned off? It’s frankly incredibly annoying
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It wasn’t calibration, it was that silly Surface Smart Charging (which I will NOT miss). I turned it off (paused) in order to charge to 100% prior to doing a recalibration, and after it sat at 100% a couple hours plugged in to cool the battery off, as recommended, I generated a battery report just for the heck of it and saw clearly that I didn’t need to do a calibration. Though it would probably improve the numbers if I did.
I changed the image in the listing.
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Another argument for Wacom EMR — pen can’t interfere if pen is far enough away from screen to not have power.
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FWIW, based on our own experience I’d take these numbers with a huge grain of salt as there are a zillion factors that affect the numbers both positively and negatively.
and BTW; Samsung doesn’t actually measure that per se with their reported numbers, but instead derives a number based on the overall age of the battery (eg. the first time it’s powered on) the total number of charge/discharge cycles and how frequently they occur. Apple hasn’t confirmed it but we think they are doing similar.
One of our customers got concerned about some of their Apple devices and did some actual tests of battery capacity using their real world workloads and found that despite the stated “capacity” by far the better predictor was simply the age of the battery/device combined with total number of charge/discharge cycles.
And FWIW there are a HUGE number of additional factors especially with lithium based batteries such as chemical purity of the lithium , temperature range experienced during charging especially (in other words better venting and cooling helps and why for instance smartphones are esepcially challenging for batteries) Average ambient temp while using the device matters too. eg. a battery is going to last longer used frequently at about 70 degrees F and less so at 55 degrees F or 82 degrees F.
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PS: One of our engineers, EX Dell said that their guidance of a 3 year expected useful lifespan of their latitude business systems was derived in significant part from the battery lifecycle
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@Desertlap - good info, thanks! I didn’t think the actual battery capacity/life changed just because I paused the smart charging and filled the battery to 100%, of course. For better or worse these battery reports have become important when selling a device so it’s a problem if you get a “bad” report.
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Yeah I’ve heard that from a couple of family members when they tried to sell their older iPads on places like Swappa or eBay that potential buyers were obsessed with those reports.
FWIW, in my own experience the overall condition of the device is the best predictor , in other words, a device that looks heavily used/abused probably won’t have the best battery and likewise one that looks nearly new probably will have a good battery.
That’s also a consequence of the much better charging management on systems in the last 3-4 years.
Apple took a lot of flack (and IMHO explained it really poorly I initially ), but the efforts toward smart charging really do prolong the useful life of the device.
I think MS has gotten the religion so to speak with the more recent surface devices, but perhaps are suffering from a lack of experience.
also @Dellaster I think you’ve said before that you work for the park service, and or spend a lot of time there? In your case, the worst things you can do for your battery is let it sit overnight in sub freezing temps, or conversely spend 8 hours in the desert sunshine.
A couple of years ago we made some devices for USGS that were deployed in the Grand Canyon and both battery and display design concerns were exceptionally challenging .
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I’m currently a volunteer campground host for the NPS. I have done Grand Canyon NP, North Rim and the past few years it’s been Great Basin NP. I have a motorhome with a furnace (propane kindly supplied by the NPS) so nothing freezes and I don’t expose devices to hot sunshine for long.
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My daughter and I are envious, the Grand Canyon is one of our most favorite places to visit and we’ve done the rim to rim hike multiple times as well staying on both south and north rim, with the north being by far our favorite.
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The Win11 battery icon is really pretty bad. I’ve seen others complain about this too. Eyeballing the icon, what charge level do you think it represents?
The answer may surprise you
67%. I mean that’s ridiculous right?
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wait what does the heart mean?
The battery loves being charged. I think. 
Seriously though, it means it’s going to stop charging at 80% for battery longevity. You can overrule it in the surface app. Lots of discussion on this upthread.
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Huh I don’t think I have that option on the Surface app on my SP7+.
It wouldn’t be a problem if they hadn’t failed to put toolbar support into their new taskbar.
But no, instead we get third-party widgets soon™️.
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Funny edge case, last night I had used my SLS at minimum brightness. This morning I connected it to a dock with only the external screen active, everything fine. After lunch I took it off the dock and tried to use it outside, and I came very close to doing a forced reboot. I was convinced that the system wasn’t responding, turns out it’s just incredibly dim on the minimum brightness setting. You can easily mistake the screen for being off. So on the one hand: impressive and great, but on the other: it can be a little disorienting!
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