This week, I bought a Windows-based computer, my first in 15 years.

I've been a Mac user since 1986 and have long preferred that universe. But this time when I needed a new primary computing device, I willingly left the Apple orchard and went not just for a Windows machine, but one that Microsoft, unusually, developed and sells.

Like many longtime Mac users, I never anticipated making such a choice. But I made it for good reasons: design, innovation and features.

Usually that’s been the hallmark of Apple devices. Smart, sexy design coupled with cool things you could do – easily – that the Win world hadn’t even thought of yet. But this time around, Microsoft’s Surface Book, a hybrid laptop/tablet (a fast-growing product sector), not only had features I wanted, but also, is simply a beautiful piece of hardware in which form marries impressively with function.

Hence I found myself walking through Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, the Silicon Valley city associated not just with technology and innovation but the super-trendy, lugging a great, big, alarmingly untrendy Microsoft-branded carrier bag from the Microsoft Store.

The shame. A minimalist white plastic Apple bag has long been an accoutrement of style. A Microsoft bag, even for the Windows user (and the majority of the world’s computer users run Windows) errs greatly on the side of dorky.

And oh, the Microsoft Store. It has always formed an ironic contrast with the flagship glass box Apple Store about 200 yards away, one of Steve Jobs’s own last big store projects. The Apple Store is always packed. The Microsoft Store, not so much.

The reasons for this are not really the Microsoft Store’s fault. Windows machines are ubiquitous and available from many makers and vendors. So is Windows software. Apple stuff can be found in a more limited number of places but the whole sweep of the range is tastefully showcased in Apple Stores. They have a nice feel (the stores and the hardware).

But there I was in the Microsoft Store.

I was only vaguely aware of the Surface Book until I started looking at Windows machines, to run the preferred version of the voice software from Nuance that I need, due to severe repetitive strain injury.

Writing options

I’d also researched writing options that could help me avoid keyboards, mice and touchpads.

That’s when I discovered the Surface Book, an excellent, top-reviewed flip-top tablet/laptop that has plenty of full Windows power for voice software and has an interactive pen/stylus for controlling the operating system plus other activities like notetaking, marking up documents, drawing and so on.

Write in print or even cursive, and the software will convert it to a word-processed document, or to type in a website form or comments box. In the Apple Store, I asked about doing text conversion with the iPad Pro. “Oh, well, it can’t do that. Yet, anyway,” said a sales assistant.

When it can, I’ll get a new iPad as well, to replace my ageing MacBook Air – I don’t intend to go Windows-only. But an iPad, for me, is still not as useful, nor as attractive in multiple ways, as a hybrid like the Surface Book with a proper, but detachable, keyboard.

And here's the intriguing bit. Before I bought my Surface Book, I had a chat with a friend, an ex-Apple employee and a hardware, software and design junkie who worked closely for years with Steve Jobs. He's seriously impressed with the Surface Book. He thinks it out-designs, out-functions anything Apple has done for a while.

A lot of people must agree, as sales of the Surface Book and its tablet relative, the Surface, have outstripped Microsoft’s initial expectations, pushing sales revenue up 61 per cent and hitting $1.1 billion as of Q3 despite some operation system glitches that now seem to have been addressed with various firmware and operating system updates (I’ve encountered such issues regularly with Apple devices too).

As I was buying my Surface Book, I recalled that some 15 years ago, on a trip to Microsoft headquarters in Washington, I interviewed one of the leading researchers working on a new device called a tablet, on which users could take notes that would be converted to type.

It was the star demo in a keynote by Bill Gates. Now here it is, weighing about half a kilo more that the demo device. So Microsoft didn't rush into production. I wonder where they might go with this surprising success now.

As my ex-Apple friend noted, Microsoft is turning into an interesting company to watch. Thinking different, perhaps.