darkbreeze :
Since you're a student, and unless you have deep pockets and don't mind paying double for every device you want to connect to your computer, I'd go with the surface pro 3. Plus, the MacBook air doesn't have a touch screen option or detachable keyboard which can be a nice feature. Battery life is similar and the Surface Pro is cheaper. Case closed.
What a horrible answer. Nobody wants a touch interface shoed-into a desktop OS.
The Surface Pro 3 has some of the worst battery life of any laptop equivalent on the market, as shown
here. The benchmarks show that the Surface has over an hour less batter life than a similarly configured Air.
Sure, the Surface is cheaper if you get the worst mobile i3 Intel offers, 4GB of RAM, and a pitiful 64GB SATA SSD (which is much slower then the PCIe SSD Apple uses), but let's be intellectually honest here. This person most likely needs an i5 with 8GB of RAM, and at least 128GB of storage. To get a Surface Pro 3, you need to spend at least $1169.10 (or $1299 without the education discount), shown
here.
To get an 13-inch Air that satisfies the requirements, you pay $1039 (which include the education discount) for a computer that will
outperform said Surface, or
this 11-inch, which will still outperform the Surface, and also matches the Pro's 256GB drive, while still being $30 cheaper.
And the best part is, you never even have to use Windows.
Case Closed.
But if you want to keep jerking yourself off, you can do that too.