I'm not sure if I've told this story before, but back in 2015 I got a Surface 3 for drawing. Unfortunately, after barely more than a year after it started falling apart. There was a huge cluster of dead pixels on the screen, and if I left it on for too long there was a burn line on the side of the screen. Even the pen cracked where the battery compartment was, so I couldn't even get the battery out to replace it if it ever went out. Now I know it sounds like I used the things as footballs, but the worst I ever did was carry it around, usually in a tote bag. So if that's what did this thing in, I really would have thought Microsoft would think to make their portable merchandise more... Well, portable.

Anyway, flash forward to today. Tax season is upon us, so I decided to plunk down $450 ($200 less than the Surface with the pen) of that on a new Chromebook Plus. This thing includes an S pen, which is a way better pen than the old Surface one (no batteries, and almost a tenth of the price to replace if I lose it, plus it came with the hardware where the Surface pen did not.). The screen is larger, too.

The big drawback is that the software is a lot more unstable. It tends to go bonkers and crash a lot more than I'd like. This has yet to result in lost data, fortunately, but it's still pretty annoying to deal with. LayerPaint (currently my favorite Android drawing app) doesn't work perfectly with it either, since palm rejection doesn't work. This is more on account of the fact that the developer never updates the software so it's likely just compatibility issues with newer Android OSes, though; every other paint program I've used so far works fine.

TL;DR: it's cheaper than the Surface, but so far the hardware's been far superior as a drawing tablet. Software is screwy, but that problem at least carries the hope that it can be fixed at a later date, and the problems are annoying, but not crippling. I guess time will tell how the hardware itself holds up.