Linux does not support hybrid graphics properly. (I've got a Zbook G2, dockable, Nvidia + Intel. I'm developing for Linux, so it'd be great to run Linux on it, but it's not practical at all.)
Don't be. You can just use the intel driver and use the NVIDIA GPU for compute purposes only. All of this can be achieved WITHOUT hybrid graphics on Linux.
At this point, it definitely works, but it depends on the distro and how much tweaking you're willing to do. I've got hybrid graphics working on a Dell XPS 15 with no real problems. Bumblebee works like a charm when set up correctly. The battery life isn't perfect, but it's still much better than just running the nvidia chip.
It works on a per-program basis if you set it up nicely, but (afaik) it's not possible to get the docking station work nicely. The problem is that to drive external displays, you need the discrete GPU (esp. for UHD displays). Therefore whenever you dock it in, it should start driving the external display with dGPU, etc.
I've not seen a single successful attempt on getting this working (this = hybrid graphics + docking).
I run Linux on a VM inside my Surface Pro 2. Best of both worlds. All the touch and pen gestures are handled by Windows and carry over through VirtualBox.
Would love to get a Surface Book as soon as possible.
When I tried this on my Surface Pro 3, I found that running Ubuntu inside a VM was really only viable when the device was plugged into wall power.
(Trying to run Ubuntu natively never worked well either, because of missing driver support for things like WiFi/Bluetooth/Keyboard/Stylus, not to mention Linux's poor support for resource scaling on high-DPI displays.)
Does you version Linux properly support the touch input?
I'm on a Lenovo T440s, and aside from a handful of gestures to manipulate window size, all Ubuntu programs insist that my touchscreen is just another mouse input. It's a bit of a bummer that I can't use proper multi-touch for my own OpenFrameworks sketches.
Does you version Linux properly support the touch input?
I'm on a Lenovo T440s, and aside from a handful of gestures to manipulate window size, all Ubuntu programs insist that my touchscreen is just another mouse input. It's a bit of a bummer that I can't use proper multi-touch for my own OpenFrameworks sketches.
Ooh, this is actually a really attractive option, thanks for the idea. How much is the speed decrease? Is it enough to be noticeable? And how much does the battery life decrease by? Thanks!
With a SSD on the host OS, I really can't tell much of a difference.
Not sure on the battery life, but I've had nothing to complain about as long as I'm careful not to have some random process hogging 100% CPU on either guest or host.
Credit to Panos and everyone who put that together, I didn't see the removable screen coming. That was the kind of "one more thing" moment that rivals Apple at their best showmanship.
Right before he said that I noticed the vents in the top of the screen and thought "huh, that's a weird place to put ventilation" but it didn't click in my mind until I saw it in the video.
Funny, I thought he just did one of the best product launch presentations of the last few years. He gave it more personality, passion, and authenticity than you normally see in these type of things. To each their own I guess.
Authenticity? The guy comes off as a sleazy frustrated 2nd hand car salesman who doesn't even believe the crap he's shoveling. It's not even a matter of taste, telling people they should be excited and their too stupid for not having realized the Surface is the best thing ever made, is plain obnoxious.
The guy demoing Continuum was much more likable, MS needs more him and less panos.
Microsoft doesn't need an cult of personality or any of the shallow smoke and mirrors sales tactics that Apple utilizes. They made it to greatness without that bullshit.
He adopted the style of a preacher. Lots of contrast: fast to slow, loud to quiet, excited to thoughtful. He left long quiet spaces, and implored the audience to ask themselves to believe. It's a deliberate style that one may or may not like.
You can just invert the screen and bend it over the stand. I'm guessing the problem would have been making the hinge solid and rigid enough more than a weight problem.
Well the keyboard is in the stand, part of the battery is probably in the stand, all of the ports are in the stand, the dedicated GPU is in the stand, plus the stand actually lays flat while the screen is mostly upright so in any normal position the stand could only be a fraction of the screen and still not cause it to topple right? I guess the combination of all of that and perhaps a little extra counterweight if necessary makes it work out okay.
A quick comparison, Microsoft cites 1.6 pounds as the weight. I'm assuming it's the screen only as the Surface 4 Pro (the tablet computer) alone is 1.73 pounds, and the Macbook Pro is 3.48 pounds. If the stand held the GPU, a battery pack, keyboard (and possible counterweights) and weighed as much as the screen, it'd be 3.2 pounds and still a fair bit lighter than the MBP.
None of the Surface Pro range has ever been either flimsy or plasticky. At the launch, Sinofsky put wheels on a Surface Pro and used it as a skateboard....
Yes, I've used all the Surface Pro keyboards. However, the keyboard is an optional accessory. You can use just about any USB or Bluetooth keyboard you like. You can probably get something industrial strength, if that's what you need....
However, I suspect we're talking at cross-purposes here. I don't know about the Surface Book keyboard. I watched the webcast but have not had a hands-on....
My thoughts exactly. To me, OS/X's quality has been slipping, but I haven't found any non-Apple hardware that's comparable. If they get the trackpad and keyboard right on it, this will open a lot of interesting doors.
I can't believe how few laptops get the trackpad right. It's the first and primary interaction anyone has with the laptop, how are all of them so terrible! I'd love to get a non-macbook, but the list of laptops with powerful hardware that plays nice with a Unix based OS and has a trackpad that isn't unbearable is shockingly short.
But yeah, it's mindboggling. The internal hardware is largely the same anyway, why are companies throwing away a chance to get ahead of the competition and use the same shoddy keyboards/touchpads everyone hates?
For me it largely depends on the cap. The soft rim cap is really easy on the fingers, while the old IBM and default Lenovo caps only seem to exist to generate callus.
I'm amused to see the 'OS/X' typo still lives on, more than a decade since OS/2's been relevant :)
On topic, I've just upgraded to the latest version of OS X and it really seems rock solid. Fastest, most stable, and most secure version yet. Still a bit of an evolutionary dead end though, in that there have been no moves to add touch support beyond multitouch trackpads. I admire their vision with keeping iOS and OS X separate, but given touch is so ubiquitous elsewhere, I can't imagine it'll be long before Windows users are genuinely surprised and baffled by the lack of touch screens in Apple laptops...
Probably apple's next move is not to add touch to os x but to release an iOS laptop to replace the MacBook air, they could call it an iBook. It's pretty clear OS X is legacy tech and on the roadmap for being phased out.
I'd buy an iPad Pro tomorrow...if only it ran Xcode. But I can't justify $1200 or more if I doesn't help me to get my work done. At that price, and admittedly for my purposes, the iPad Pro is just a very large and very expensive gadget.
The really annoying thing is that these days a late-model iPad probably has most of the horsepower needed to pull it off.
For me it's "I'd buy an iPad Pro tomorrow...if only it ran Xcode [and had a terminal]." It can be heavily sandboxed as far as I care, I just need a proper Unix terminal. The trouble with Xcode is that it just needs so much screen real estate, I just can't see it working very well on iOS.
I assume you mean a terminal for the local machine, not an SSH session to another machine, in which case Panic's Prompt is what you want for SSH.
I'm with you in that I'd like a local terminal, but I could live without if I had Xcode on the box and some sort of full-screen editing mode. Working with storyboards would indeed suck, though.
There are terminal emulators on iOS already, that's not the issue, but not having a local filesystem means it's only useful for remoting, there's nothing a terminal will let you do on the device (unless it's jailbroken)
The MBA is already replaced, that's what the "new Macbook" is, an MBA replacement. The iBook brand was replaced by the Macbook brand and isn't going to come back (the name would collide with ibooks anyway).
The whole discoveryd fiasco was the final straw for me with regards to having a Mac. Having such serious networking issues in your primary OS and not fixing them for almost a year after release tells me something is rotten in the Kingdom of Apple.
Yes, the issue was eventually fixed, but I'm done with Apple. They have lost my trust.
My girlfriend is still having networking issues on her MBP. I asked about the problems on IRC and was told that it was a regression that should be fixed in El Capitan, after updating to El Capitan the issue still persists.
I was considering buying an MBP myself but after seeing the issues she is having I am changing my mind, especially after this reveal from Microsoft.
I don't understand how anyone can state that, OSX has always had shit-show releases as a rule with a few exceptions (spit and polish cycles like Mountain Lion), and "never buy a v1 of a new design" has been the community's mantra since before I bought my first Apple device 15 years ago, it's one of the first things I was told.
It used to be that your computer was faster with every release of OS X. It hasn't been true for a few releases now. Oh that and my niece's iPhone 5c (not even a year old) was bricked by an iOS update. And the only thing Apple offers is a discount on the purchase of a new one...
Oh, that's exactly the person I'm looking for! (I'm considering a similar setup) Do you know what software they use/where the touchscreen works best? Thanks a ton!
Not quite how I remembered it. Hopefully it's still useful information. In his words:
---
I was using ArchLinux from within an Android setup using a chroot. The X server ran under Android an was called XSDL, which handles keyboard and allows me to simulate rightclick. I was using Awesome. I bound volume keys to right click and Super (my WM controlling key).
The setup wasn't particularly ergonomic. Problems included the clumsiness and limitation of the X server's controls, the keyboard oriented nature of my Awesome setup, And the general lack of benefit from using a TWM. As far as I was concerned, there was limited merit in having multiple windows active at once when screen space was limited, and other WM with touch in mind would probably work better.
---
It was around 10 inch, but the resolution was about 1280 or lower, and touch wasn't that accurate.
(1280x800)
---
Note that this was a while ago, and XSDL has undergone changes.
Hybrids have a very different audience compared to regular laptops (ultrabooks), as they're structurally very different (that is, they are a compromise by definition), so I wouldn't compare them directly.
Don't get me wrong, I have one instead of a regular laptop, but I can see how people used to the latter would feel uncomfortable with them, unless they have a strong motivation to move to the hybrid form factor.
I have a bay trail asus T200 which is a similar, albeit low-end, device.
The problem for me, under Windows 8.1, has been getting the machine to enter a true low power sleep state. If the machine enters the true low power state than it can work like a tablet, and if you use it lightly (say an hour a night) you can get a week's worth of use without recharging.
Unfortunately if any of the hardware components doesn't go to the low power state, the device will likely be dead or close to it if you don't use it for a day. Microsoft has a utility which tells you which component is keeping device from powering down, but doesn't tell you what software is causing this behavior. Windows 10 is supposed to improve this, but you can't turn off windows update so you lose one way to fight the battery drain.
One way you can fight this, besides plugging it in every night, is powering it down when you are finished, which isn't as bad as it seems because the device boots cold in about 5 seconds.
Academic definitions aside, there hybrids have to choose a very serious compromise due to the balance:
if you make the base light (surface pro case), you won't really have a laptop, instead a tablet which sits on your legs.
if you make the base heavy, you're making a relatively heavy laptop.
now, there is of course a spectrum of choice, but practically speaking, even they make a very light tablet part (say, 850 grams), with a "heavy base", you will add 550 grams at least (550 being an odd balance).
I'm absolutely happy to have a 1.4 kg hybrid, but it's not going to compete with the upcoming wave of ultrabooks (note that I'm somewhat skeptical it will be 1.4kg, I bet it will be a little more).
Update: they've just published the spec, and it weighs, as I was suspecting, 1.5kg, which is not bad for a sturdy (I assume it's going to be robustly built) hybrid.
> Hybrids have a very different audience compared to regular laptops (ultrabooks)
Ultrabooks/Subnotebooks are already a compromise. We've made the transition from massive 30-40W CPUs to 15W-CPUs for mainstream notebook over the last 4 years, where net performance for notebooks stagnated at best (and regressed during the first year or two). Going from there to whatever hardware the Surface Book uses won't a big leap any more.
To me it's not a question of CPU power, but form factor and user experience. Hybrids have for me two big drawbacks --- and it's really subjective:
- I like small tablets and larger laptops (13.3 min, 14 prefered). So an hybrid is either a too big tablet or a too little PC, often both;
- hybrids are top-heavy, and I don't like having an hinge. I really want a LAP-top, and a ultrabook is perfect for this. An hybrid, not so much (I've heard about "lapability", not convinced ;).
Both are intrinsic trade-offs of hybrids. So I stick to small tablets + 14" ultrabook, and just don't bother with hybrids. But to each its own.
Absolutely. Lovely to see some innovation from Microsoft that's made it out of labs (the hinge alone looks fantastic). I'd be concerned about duplication of components between the screen and the keyboard though? I can't quite figure out from their website, but it looks like the keyboard part has the dedicated graphics and battery, and the rest (and more battery) is in the screen?
I completely understand why Apple doesn't put touch-sensitive screens in their laptops, but it's such a shame. I'd love to be able to use a pen with a MacBook like this. The iPad Pro would be ideal except it lacks a proper Unix terminal, so that's pretty much out of the question for me (ssh doesn't count).
Yes, would be interesting to know how much battery is in the screen and how long it lasts when its detatched. Perhaps not that long? Maybe thats why they call the screen a clipboard.
The hinge is the only thing that bothers me. Close the book and it seems like you'll have a thin area of metal on metal grinding on itself and end up with a rather thick profile for putting it in a laptop bag.
Also, at one point they showed the internal structure of the hinge and it looked like the Yoga's hinge that's covered with some sort of articulating plastic (god I hope not).
Why? Are you really going to drag an Oculus out to a coffee shop etc. and flail around in a VR world to everyone else's amusement? Not to mention you'll have a heck of a time getting positional tracking setup in a public environment.
No, I wasn't thinking about mobility. I was thinking that this may sell pretty well, the price is adequate for the specs, and it's standardized (just one product, unlike HP or Lenovo with their Z, X, P, T32... variations).
I spent about 1 hour in the Microsoft Store playing with the SP3. I loved toying with it, but I knew that if I wanted to use it for serious software development I would probably dock it with a real keyboard. The Surface Book seems to be the answer. Truly amazing.
Most tablets are content consumption devices only. The SP3 allowed you to be a "little" productive on the go with a type keyboard, and a "lot" productive in the office with a dock and a real keyboard.
If you want to be fully productive on the go, then I'd agree that buying a full laptop (e.g. Thinkpad, MBP) makes a lot of sense, and even then I'd still plug in a real mouse.
The Surface's niche is that it can be a content consumption device, semi-productive device, and a fully productive device when you need it to be (with no cover, type cover, and full keyboard/mouse respectively).
I will say the SP3's four biggest issues in my view:
- Touchpad on the cover is just terrible. Totally unusable.
- The Surface itself is too slippery without the cover.
- Some overheating issues when the GPU is utilised.
- The magnetic power cord fails too often/easily. Replaced it twice already. Look on Amazon for reviews/pictures to see what I mean.
Wow. I've used a SP3 hard for about a year now. I charge nightly, throw it in my bag daily, and cart it from meeting to meeting all day long. It's been great. I find the touchpad is excellent, I've not had problems with overheating (I mostly use Chrome and Office applications), and I'm happy with the power cord. My only critique is that the keyboard is a little louder than I'd like, and for that reason I'm considering buying the SP4 keyboard.
Coming from a rMBP 15", I found the SP3 touchpad was too small for me to use comfortably. But it was still usable.
Now that they have increased the size of the touchpad and made the keyboard better, I actually have a bit of a dilemma. You can customize the SP4 preorder with an i7 and 16GB of memory for cheaper than the Surface Book i7 with 8GB memory. I'm not sure how necessary the Nvidia card is for my purposes.
Now that I've used the SP4 for a good 30 minutes, I've changed my opinion. The new SP4 type cover is vastly improved over the old one. I could use it as my primary input device.
In fact, I think it's actually a problem for MS! :) The reason why the Surface Book was so appealing was partly because the keyboard/trackpad just wasn't that great with the SP3. Now that they've improved the type cover so much, the SB seems less necessary.
Good observation and consistent with a person close to me who got an SP3 for use in a college environment as an instructor. Their experience is that the keyboard is fine for typical use, but the trackpad is awful compared to what they experienced after years of MBP use (remedied by an external mouse). They have small hands and very precise fingers though, so I can see how they are potentially an exception.
I had a long discussion a few weeks ago with some friends about how in the short term, Apple messed up with iOS/OS X while Microsoft took the hard, long, correct route and made the OS work in both places.
This was after the launch of the iPad Pro which is xbox-huge. I was imagining a product which was a MacBook "Base" which you could connect an iPad to as the 'screen' - except you'd have two different OSes that you'd have to cover. It's not exactly a product that fits anywhere in Apple's lineup.
This Microsoft thing is exactly what I was envisioning. You have a solid base which can include a GPU and more battery life and a detachable screen that works as a tablet. Brilliant!
Oh how quickly the past is forgotten :) In early 2000s, microsoft, through its partners, tried releasing remote displays powered by windows CE - they were essentially a precursor to the tablet. Several devices were exactly as you describe.
I still have my beta Viewsonic Mira unit, along with a non-branded one. And an unopened first-gen Zune, hah! Mira worked fairly well, and we used it to control what was at that time a Homeseer-based home automation setup, but battery life was awful (battery tech has come a LONG way since then).
This right here. I'm almost afraid it might be too late for them, but Microsoft has been doing it right time and time again with their hardware, and now with their OS (at least after 8.1). I've been a Windows user since 3.11, but I'm always on the verge of switching over to OSX as my main dev/personal machine... Windows 10 & the Surface Pro have been able to at least delay this switch this time around.
Microsoft is the one that is closest to what I think the future should be: only one device you dock and use.
Not sure I'd want a Windows phone either (I'm currently on Android) but I might rethink that in the future as well.
Same here. Been using Windows forever and Android for mobile. If Google releases their apps for Windows Phone I might give it a go.
I believe the idea of Continuum is targeted to light Office users, people who work on basic spreadsheets and word. It has a target market but I am not sure how big it is.
I went from a Galaxy SIII to an Nokia Icon, now running WP 8.1.
IME, the OS and associated MS apps are fantastic, the phone is solid, and I have no complaints. If that's all you cared about I'd say switch today.
But there is definitely an app gap. I was never a huge app user, and most of what I used was there, but I'm pretty sure that's not true for most people. It's pretty hit or miss. You can find Facebook, Teamviewer, Netflix, and Plex, but if you want Snapshat, you're SOL. There aren't even any third party Snapchats around, because Snapchat demanded they be removed from the Windows Store.
There's no first-party Google apps, no doubt a big stumbling block for a lot of people.
Exactly right! The dual operationg system approach was a good short term decision, but I also think that Apple made a mistake, taking a long term view.
I disagree. OS X already has touch support. All Apple has to do is make a touch-sensitive screen for an MBP and add an emulator window for iOS and you have a hardware unit that runs everything.
iOS was originally cut down for performance reasons. Then large parts were locked for security - especially carrier network - security.
Performance isn't an issue, but carrier security is. And I don't think mobile users are going to be happy about having to download a constant stream of unlabelled Windows updates.
Where Apple went wrong was with iTunes, and especially with the horror show involved in getting information into and out of an iDevice. If you have an independent collection of music and books, it's just too clunky.
I bought an Android Galaxy Tab recently, and not only is the screen better than the screen on any iPad, getting books into it is trivially easy.
Either way, I'm glad Cupertino has competition. There's been more than a whiff of complacency from that part of the world in the last year or so, and I hope this makes Cook and Co sit up and stop taking the high end laptop market for granted.
Although gotta say - I'm still amused to see the MS presentation design following the Apple/Jobs presentation style so closely.
Maybe both companies should just merge? That would be interesting...
I don't think apple cares about the laptop market any more. Apple is and wants to be a phone company. Their MacBook Pro line is a legacy product. Also, their desktop OS is converging towards locked down mobile appliance and away from UNIX roots (it seems Apple won't be happy until they kill the file system access for the regular user and lock down OS X so only App Store apps can be run on it). In the end it will be a choice between buying a computer or a Mac.
So, to me Apple are out if the game. It will not be Apple who will give us the mobile workstation quality OS in a pocket device that can hook up to a screen around you and allow you to work like you do today on your desktop.
I disagree as well; not because it is Apple as Google is doing the same thing; 'people' (not people reading HN generally) really don't need to power of OS X or Windows or a fullblown Linux distro. In fact, they are much better off without. Windows / OSX drive a lot of people mad; iOS/Android/Chrome are simple. There is a market for Windows/OSX/Linux obviously but the current use of Windows is very much because of the history; by far most people / most jobs do not require anything like this and are, in fact, better off with a far more limited and more straight forward option. From companies that went to iPad (Android would've worked but it seems less popular) for sales reps and other staff; they say it saves them millions on training, installation, updating etc. Nevermind for non tech savvy consumers where this is even worse. I do not know how good MS Office is on the iPad but if it is good I have no clue why 99% of employees and consumers would not be fine with a tablet + keyboard and a very limited OS.
Edit; that said; bring on the competition. I would buy a Surface Pro just to experiment if it had more battery life. I hoped the 4 would be (a lot) better in that department but it is not. So then I'll just run my MBP with El Capitan instead for now; http://i.glui.me/1GuUc4H
I remember when the iPhone was announced (when the OS was still called "iPhone OS") Apple actually made a point to say it was OSX, and a non-compromise kind of OS. I still remember people drooling over the fact that Apple had managed to put the Macintosh OS on a phone.
The OS was way ahead compared to what else existed out there, and I do think it got some stuff from OSX, but now it's clearly on a very different state rather than merging/
Oddly enough, Microsoft had a dual operating system approach back in the 1990s. It developed Windows CE for small devices like PocketPCs (PDAs like the iPaq) and tablets, and for Windows Mobile smartphones.
I guess it depends on which devs you're talking about. I'm mostly doing web development on a day to day basis; very little VM usage, and I've never really gave my hardware a second thought. Maybe because I've always used a mac? Perhaps I'd be more picky if I had to endure poor hardware.
Having said that though I'm much more concerned with the OS capabilities, user experience, aesthetics, toolchains, etc.
For me it's the software+hardware, and the killer feature is a unixy OS with great battery life and little to no fuss. Is it possible I could get similar results out of Linux on commodity hardware? I'd put it at long odds, but even so I bet I'd have to shut off features (losing convenience) and spend a lot of time tweaking it to make that happen.
It's not even just the OS. I've switched to Safari because losing 1.5-2 hours of battery life to use Chrome or Firefox isn't worth it. I'll just open Chrome when I really need it, use it for a few minutes, and close it.
There's also a "no one got fired for..." factor. OSX refuses to work with the client's projector in a meeting? Apple sucks. Arch Linux refuses to work with the client's projector? You suck.
Yes, it's good great quality hardware -- for a Unix laptop. That was one of the biggest reason why a lot of developers who used to work with Unices on servers switched to PowerBook. Back then, Linux really lagged behind in that regard, even on ThinkPads.
The next big boost was a GUI and market situation that made it possible to create some neat productivity tools (and profit from them).
The early Ruby on Rails community probably was the epitome of that setup: TextMate as a uniquely OS X editor, easy development on your laptop, then deployment to a Linux server. I think Keynote came out right at that time, too, which was really neat for a rather weirdly conference-driven community.
Then the pretty great Unibody systems came out, combining the aircraft destroyer feel of olden Thinkpads with a more sleek design, and the first of the ultrabooks, the Air…
And, of course, you basically have to use a Mac system when doing iOS dev work.
But in the recent years, I feel that Apple lost it a bit. OS X is stagnating (what's the last feature that could compete with e.g. Expose? And still no decent 1st-party package manager). Third party development/productivity software doesn't matter that much these days (it's either webapps or mobile apps; no really shiny single-platform editor anymore).
Some of the Linuxens are pretty good with supported laptop hardware, so that's an option for the Unix hardcore.
And as this article is showing, Windows itself is getting more of an option even if you're not buying into the MS stack: RAM and hard drives are big enough to support virtual machines for your development environment (esp. w/ docker/vagrant/etc.) -- if you even need that, as high-speed internet is ubiquitous enough so that you can do remote development throughout.
So, yeah, while I personally still think that OS X is a more developer/hacker-friendly environment than Windows, the incentives don't appear as big anymore. So if they lose their edge in hardware quality, style and solid driver support, they'll lose a few developers more.
But the idea is that $400 won't get you a machine powerful enough to run OS X flawlessly. I too would like to pay very little to have high computing power.
It seems like Microsoft really did their homework. The Surface Book has a 3:2 display, which was one of the biggest reasons many (me included) were interested in the latest Chromebook Pixel. Complete specs are visible here: https://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/devices/surface-book...
I think they've pulled the rug from under other HW vendors, and that is well-deserved (for the vendors). MS essentially made the ultimate Windows PC (tablet, pen, long battery life, powerful GPU if needed), after waiting for the partners for years.
Yeah, the high-end Windows laptops these days are all mostly Apple knock-offs. No wonder everyone who's serious wants the real thing instead. So Microsoft made a hero laptop that isn't a MacBook knock-off. Now the Windows OEMs will start knocking it off instead.
Not even good Apple knock-offs. The build quaility on machines like things like the ASUS Zenbook is no where near Apple, and business machines are always think/bulky. This thing is amazing.
You can always make that argument. If you want progress, you need to Think Different. Intel and Microsoft have enough muscle to get 100 million PC's shipped in 12 months wth a new standard. Of course, no one said that they only have to ship USB-C.
I guess if you think that walled gardens and locked down platforms are "progress", then you really are thinking differently because you have to basically swallow that pill if you want to enjoy the occasional hardware progress that is seen with fruitier companies.
Of course real progress, to me, means that there is a good standard and everybody uses it. Remember when cell phones all had their own type of charging adapter? I'm so happy now that most manufacturers use micro-usb. Everybody except Apple of course because they're always too busy trying to invent something that will keep you locked in.
Oh no, "melling" thinks my response was pointless and irrelevant - what to do?
Does anyone else find it hilarious that this is coming from a guy who cares about USB-C which is largely pointless and irrelevant in this thread? You got all the responses and downvotes that you deserve.
It is irrelevant this year. Next year it'll ship on tens of millions of PC's. It's certainly not a deal breaker but it would have been a nice to have this year on a small form factor device.
It also doubles the throughput of the older standard.
It's a $1500 device so people who buy it will probably be using it in 4-5 years. I'd rather spend $20 on an adapter cable now and be able to support the better standard next year.
So you'll get it next year then. I don't get why you have to be a prick about it though by saying that Apple or Google are somehow "more progressive" and then turn around and call someone else's response irrelevant and pointless when you just admitted that your entire concern is basically irrelevant right now.
Because no devices require USB-C yet? Regular USB stuff isn't going to just disappear, so it's really not that big a deal. It's like not having a bluray drive or a 3d-tv screen - nobody cares.
Thanks. So is rudely telling someone that they "went off on some pointless irrelevant rant" and introducing pointless flamewar material in the response before that.
Instead of playing back at them, I guess I'll just post the rules next time.
- "Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation. Avoid gratuitous negativity."
- "Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."
And it's always a good argument, especially for a series of standards that have always depended on vendor buy-in to proliferate, rather than solid design. Just because USB-C is the first USB not to absolutely suck, doesn't mean manufacturers ought to fall head over heels to put them in new devices, considering the countless existing devices that use the old, shitty connectors we got stuck with because the standards body couldn't get its act together.
That would have been nice to see, since I expect these will have amazing longevity otherwise. Ideal might have been one USB 3.0 and one USB type-c. (Along with adapters in both directions if we're talking really ideal.)
Suspect you might just be a tad over-negative about this.
First, Microsoft doesn't own any factories so the business is going to a partner (probably Pegatron).
Second, Microsoft partners can sign up to sell and support the Surface Pro range. Dell and HP have already done so. Shipping thousands of Surface Pros into businesses, imaging them, and supporting them on-site and remotely is the part of the PC business with margins, which are rather thin on Windows hardware.
Also, Microsoft isn't competing in the mainstream Windows market, where device prices are typically $200 to $500. In fact, it's mainly competing against Apple, which is arguably a good thing for the rest of the Windows ecosystem....
The bread and butter of other hardware vendors is not laptops starting at 1500 dollars. Microsoft is making the Surface line Windows' flagship. It's directly competing with Apple on hardware quality and features and most importantly ecosystem. Microsoft is building cattle that will make people who want pets happy while making life easy for enterprise's cattle ranchers.
The surface book looks nice. I like the idea of tablet/laptop hybrid, but not a fan of kick stands and keyboard covers. I liked the idea of Asus's transformers but I don't recall seeing one with really good specs. They were either Android(don't need a laptop there) or the Windows ones I remembers seeing were Atom powered.
Even funnier is how Apple used to be mostly for creators, now most of its profits come from iPhone and iPad - devices mostly for consuming. And Microsoft markets their Surfaces quite aggressively to creators.
Unaware of this event, yesterday morning I ordered the first MS Band for a little more than 1/2 the list price of the Band 2. I'd been shopping for fitness trackers for a long time, and settled on the Band as the only tracker meeting my needs that can also act as an Android trusted bluetooth device & keep my phone unlocked.
From what I can tell, the Band 2 adds:
- softer, more flexible strap (soft shell vs hard shell)
- barometer for elevation
- gorilla glass
- better touch sensitivity
Is that it? If so, given the nearly 2x price difference, I think I'm just going to keep the old band and use it.
I've had a Band for most of the year and highly recommend it. Unlike watty, I think it's pretty comfortable. Admittedly it took a couple of days to get used to, but I rarely notice that it's on my wrist. The only exception being that the non-curved display does get in the way when I type on a laptop — which is very rare for me, your mileage may vary.
I'd recommend that you get a screen protector for your band, though. The weird, soft bezel around this version is extremely prone to scratches doing even the most mundane tasks.
Thanks.. I think I'll give the 1st gen band a try. My 1st gen LG Android watch has gotten me used to wearing a watch again, so I'm hoping for a minimal transition. If it doesn't work out, I've got ~30 days to return it, and get the Band 2.
BTW, I read how easy the thing scratches, and purchased some screen protectors along with it.
The new one specs says max altitude is 1200m/3937 feet. That's unusable in pretty much the entire state of Colorado. The previous version was 12000m or 7.45 miles. It must be something to do with the new barometer, but this is a miss.
Your link appears to be the specifications for the old band - there's no barometer listed in the sensors, and there are dual batteries listed (I believe the new one only has one).
I wish there were a better distinction between the two; this should be called the Band 2, not the "new Band." This is made worse by the fact that your link is reachable by clicking "Support" -> "Hardware" -> "Microsoft Band Specifications." Nothing in that path suggests anything about the old Band.
I may understand their need to differentiate from Apple with the blue background. But why the sliding laptop that made it look like a cheap BestBuy commercial?
It is a bit jarring, but I think that is the point. The show off this beautiful machine. Surely, only Apple could have designed it. Then at the end - BAM - Microsoft.
Agreed. I'm extremely impressed by the quality of that video. Reminds me of the original Surface teaser[1] in that it's surprisingly ambitious and self-confident marketing, for Microsoft.
In closed state, the surface book has a giant gap between screen and keyboard (https://goo.gl/n5B7Te). I think, it can easily happen that things in your backpack slip between screen and keyboard and damage the screen. That is why the old Thinkpads used to have a "click" mechanism.
I would imagine that they're using some pretty strong magnets to hold it closed, although I can see small sharp objects, like keys, sliding in from the sides.
For something that's disposable in a couple of years, yeah, I throw it around with fair abandon. That's a large chunk of the reason I bought a macbook air to run Windows on; I didn't want any moving parts (apart from fans) and I liked the solid aluminium design for strength when mixed with a lot of other random objects in a bag.
I still have an impression of the keyboard on the glossy screen (from compression), but it's perfectly liveable for a device I only use a few weeks of the year.
Not really? My VAIO Z has lived inside a sleeve in my back-pack its entire life. I just slide it in and out of the sleeve at the same time as putting it away.
> I think, it can easily happen that things in your backpack slip between screen and keyboard and damage the screen.
Most laptop-designed backpacks have a padded compartment designed to hold just the laptop; if there aren't other things in that compartment, then that shouldn't be an issue. (If there are, and they aren't the kind of small, loose things that could slip between the screen and keyboard, same thing.)
> That is why the old Thinkpads used to have a "click" mechanism.
I always thought the click-locking mechanism on most older laptops (not just old Thinkpads) was there to reduce the wear on the hinge.
Not sure why people are sticking up for this design. Even in a neoprene sleeve or backpack pouch it looks much easier to damage with downward force on the top or bottom than a normal laptop where the force would be distributed through the entire chassis. Bendgate 2.0?
That was an epic launch. Docking the phone and using desktop apps, and then the removable Surface Book screen, wow. It eclipsed the Surface Pro 4 launch, which is what I expect most people were most hyped about. I have to go back and remind myself what changed there...
The computing power in a modern smartphone is amazing, to allow something like that to actually be usable.
I imagine some companies might think about equipping their mobile employees with Lumias for when they're out of the office, and the dock adapter for when they're back in the office. Sales, insurance agents, car inspectors - any job where they go on site, but return to the office afterwards.
But the thing I don't understand is why they don't make it possible to run a full Windows on phones that already has the Intel Atom quad-core CPU which can run full Windows in tablets with good performance. For example the ASUS Zenfone 2 not only has the Intel CPU but 4GB RAM too. It could be just a question of having Windows drivers for the components like the PowerVR GPU.
I have been skeptical after a lot of Microsoft misses but the Surface Book Pro might just put Microsoft on the high road. Splitting up the hardware breaks new ground. If I understood it correctly, the GPU is in the keyboard which you can attach to get more power. In detached mode the screen itself has an i7 processor that's plenty powerful. So they managed to let you hot-plug the GPU while the OS is running?
I'm curious how this works in practice? I have a laptop with AMD integrated + dedicated graphics, and AMD's implementation with dual-graphics resulted in herky-jerky framerates (it seemed to alternate between the GPUs, so frames rendered with the integrated one took slightly longer than the dedicated one). I ended up telling the driver not to do that and just use the dedicated GPU (and splitting the work didn't really result in observable improvements anyway).
It's a DirectX 12 feature that software developers have to opt-in to, and it is up to the software developer to figure out how they plan to spread the workload across the GPUs, but they can program against any and every GPU on a device regardless of manufacturer now. (The fun thing here will be to see software handle hot drops as GPUs get attached/reattached with the Surface Book.)
> So they managed to let you hot-plug the GPU while the OS is running?
Is that news? I think I've seen similar setup with ExpressCard-based PCIe adapters for desktop graphics cards for a few years now. Thunderbolt also has had hotplug PCIe connections from the beginning. (Less elegant, of course, but the same engineering challenge.)
The seamless part is new, very new once a GPU is initiated it's locked, the fact that they can turn it on and off without a full reboot is quite amazing.
If you run a hypervisor setup with multiple GPU's you need to make sure that the UEFI and the hypervisor/main OS do not initialize them until they are passed through to the guest VM and after that you can't recycle them easily and usually need to reboot the host if you want to pass them through to another guest.
Is that any different from how Windows has restarted the GPU and reloaded the driver whenever a the video driver crashes since Windows 7? I think the new part might just be userland software being able to take advantage.
Even that's not new. I had a circa-2010 HP Envy laptop would switch from discrete to integrated graphics when you unplugged, and had a tray icon to manually switch between them without rebooting.
I'm not saying you're incorrect (I think the Surface Book indeed appears innovative and useful), I just wanted to share the history of at least one product class -- Panda Project's Archistrat workstations and servers - that separates CPU, memory, and I/O into allegedly independent and upgradable subsystems connected by a passive backplane.
BYTE wrote about it, and the Internet Archive luckily saved the interesting preview:
Not sure many would agree but I would have liked to see a kickstand on the back of the Surface Book screen. I can see a desire to stand it up without needing the full keyboard. Other than that I think that may be my next device purchase.
So are there specs for the Book anywhere? If I can replace my notebook + wacom intuos setup with one of those, It'd be wonderful. A helluva lot more travel-friendly.
I'm very curious how well the trackpad on the Surface Book works. I've had MacBooks and the HP Spectre; the Sprectre is awesome but the trackpad...I mean holy shit it's just absolutely awful to the point where I've pretty much stopped using it.
So how good is this trackpad and does it work like a MacBook's where two fingers = right click versus this weird obsession PC vendors seem to have about dividing a single trackpad into invisible click zones?
Yeah it uses the Synaptics drivers but the most you can configure are click zones at the very, very bottom of the track pad itself (so you can't do a real right click anywhere but the bottom right of the pad) and it also does the annoying thing where you can't use the keyboard and trackpad at the same time (so you can't play any FPS with it). I was able to hack up the registry to get them to work at the same time but never got a satisfying right click.
It was so unfortunate too because I really liked that machine. It's just that damn touchpad...and the store models worked the same so it wasn't like I had a weird one or anything.
Interesting; I haven't tried messing with the drivers since Windows 8.1 but using the default ones didn't support two finger scrolling and just seemed wonky. The two finger tap works on either though; I want the two finger click. Taps don't work well in games :)
As a Surface Pro 3 user, who saves a Macbook Pro for heavy lifting (like video) at home, I can safely say the MB is getting replaced with the Surface Book. Depending on in-person use, it might also replace the Surface Pro 3. I typically watch Apple's and Google's product launches, have to to say this event was concise and unveiled products in a great forward moving momentum. Solid work Msoft marketing team!
For the parts of the industry who run Apple's Final Cut, yes - but Avid Media Composer, Adobe Premiere Pro, etc also exist and are used by many video pros without the same platform restrictions as Final Cut.
The Adobe suite works on both platforms, OSX and Windows. The files can be shared. I have not seen performance or workflow improvements on either. If anything, Photoshop on the Surface hardware is great for sketching and painting.
I meet an increasingly large number who use Windows now. They're often people who used to use Mac Pros and switched to PC towers when that fell behind in price/performance.
The new Mac Pro is very expensive compared to what you can assemble in a PC tower, and the tower gives you a lot more flexibility.
As others have said, there's plenty of video editing software for PCs. The main one that's missing is Apple's Final Cut Pro (which Apple bought from Macromedia, though it's changed a lot since then).
What an amazing event. Every announcement was mindblowing. It's saying a lot when I'm hyped about the Surfacebook and Lumia, and then realise that I forgot about the Hololens devkit being released in 3 months. Amazing.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 386 ms ] threadEdit: I'm not hating on Windows. I just don't prefer it.
I've not seen a single successful attempt on getting this working (this = hybrid graphics + docking).
Would love to get a Surface Book as soon as possible.
When I tried this on my Surface Pro 3, I found that running Ubuntu inside a VM was really only viable when the device was plugged into wall power.
(Trying to run Ubuntu natively never worked well either, because of missing driver support for things like WiFi/Bluetooth/Keyboard/Stylus, not to mention Linux's poor support for resource scaling on high-DPI displays.)
I'm on a Lenovo T440s, and aside from a handful of gestures to manipulate window size, all Ubuntu programs insist that my touchscreen is just another mouse input. It's a bit of a bummer that I can't use proper multi-touch for my own OpenFrameworks sketches.
I'm on a Lenovo T440s, and aside from a handful of gestures to manipulate window size, all Ubuntu programs insist that my touchscreen is just another mouse input. It's a bit of a bummer that I can't use proper multi-touch for my own OpenFrameworks sketches.
Not sure on the battery life, but I've had nothing to complain about as long as I'm careful not to have some random process hogging 100% CPU on either guest or host.
¹: to a given definition of fine.
[1]:http://blog.davidelner.com/dual-booting-ubuntu-14-10-on-the-...
And that the TB3.1 spec is "bullshit free" (unlike DisplayLink).
The guy demoing Continuum was much more likable, MS needs more him and less panos.
It seems this would either double the system weight (due to counterweights) or require an extra stand in the back.
A quick comparison, Microsoft cites 1.6 pounds as the weight. I'm assuming it's the screen only as the Surface 4 Pro (the tablet computer) alone is 1.73 pounds, and the Macbook Pro is 3.48 pounds. If the stand held the GPU, a battery pack, keyboard (and possible counterweights) and weighed as much as the screen, it'd be 3.2 pounds and still a fair bit lighter than the MBP.
Starting at 3.34 pounds (1,516 grams) including keyboard
my big worry with the MS hardware is its flimsy plasticky nature.
However, I suspect we're talking at cross-purposes here. I don't know about the Surface Book keyboard. I watched the webcast but have not had a hands-on....
I like to pull the keyboard off my surface 3 and lean it up against the wall and watch movies on it while still having mouse control from a distance.
What we really need is for every device to have an embedded Logitech controller so I no long need the usb nub dongle
http://www.technobuffalo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Micr...
But yeah, it's mindboggling. The internal hardware is largely the same anyway, why are companies throwing away a chance to get ahead of the competition and use the same shoddy keyboards/touchpads everyone hates?
Thinkpad Ts series? Dell's XPS/Latitude 7000 lines?
I'm amused to see the 'OS/X' typo still lives on, more than a decade since OS/2's been relevant :)
On topic, I've just upgraded to the latest version of OS X and it really seems rock solid. Fastest, most stable, and most secure version yet. Still a bit of an evolutionary dead end though, in that there have been no moves to add touch support beyond multitouch trackpads. I admire their vision with keeping iOS and OS X separate, but given touch is so ubiquitous elsewhere, I can't imagine it'll be long before Windows users are genuinely surprised and baffled by the lack of touch screens in Apple laptops...
The really annoying thing is that these days a late-model iPad probably has most of the horsepower needed to pull it off.
I'm with you in that I'd like a local terminal, but I could live without if I had Xcode on the box and some sort of full-screen editing mode. Working with storyboards would indeed suck, though.
Yes, the issue was eventually fixed, but I'm done with Apple. They have lost my trust.
I was considering buying an MBP myself but after seeing the issues she is having I am changing my mind, especially after this reveal from Microsoft.
I don't understand how anyone can state that, OSX has always had shit-show releases as a rule with a few exceptions (spit and polish cycles like Mountain Lion), and "never buy a v1 of a new design" has been the community's mantra since before I bought my first Apple device 15 years ago, it's one of the first things I was told.
It used to be that your computer was faster with every release of OS X. It hasn't been true for a few releases now. Oh that and my niece's iPhone 5c (not even a year old) was bricked by an iOS update. And the only thing Apple offers is a discount on the purchase of a new one...
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I was using ArchLinux from within an Android setup using a chroot. The X server ran under Android an was called XSDL, which handles keyboard and allows me to simulate rightclick. I was using Awesome. I bound volume keys to right click and Super (my WM controlling key).
The setup wasn't particularly ergonomic. Problems included the clumsiness and limitation of the X server's controls, the keyboard oriented nature of my Awesome setup, And the general lack of benefit from using a TWM. As far as I was concerned, there was limited merit in having multiple windows active at once when screen space was limited, and other WM with touch in mind would probably work better.
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It was around 10 inch, but the resolution was about 1280 or lower, and touch wasn't that accurate. (1280x800)
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Note that this was a while ago, and XSDL has undergone changes.
Don't get me wrong, I have one instead of a regular laptop, but I can see how people used to the latter would feel uncomfortable with them, unless they have a strong motivation to move to the hybrid form factor.
There has to be some trade offs? If they pull this off thou.. I'll line up for one.
The problem for me, under Windows 8.1, has been getting the machine to enter a true low power sleep state. If the machine enters the true low power state than it can work like a tablet, and if you use it lightly (say an hour a night) you can get a week's worth of use without recharging.
Unfortunately if any of the hardware components doesn't go to the low power state, the device will likely be dead or close to it if you don't use it for a day. Microsoft has a utility which tells you which component is keeping device from powering down, but doesn't tell you what software is causing this behavior. Windows 10 is supposed to improve this, but you can't turn off windows update so you lose one way to fight the battery drain.
One way you can fight this, besides plugging it in every night, is powering it down when you are finished, which isn't as bad as it seems because the device boots cold in about 5 seconds.
Academic definitions aside, there hybrids have to choose a very serious compromise due to the balance:
if you make the base light (surface pro case), you won't really have a laptop, instead a tablet which sits on your legs.
if you make the base heavy, you're making a relatively heavy laptop.
now, there is of course a spectrum of choice, but practically speaking, even they make a very light tablet part (say, 850 grams), with a "heavy base", you will add 550 grams at least (550 being an odd balance).
I'm absolutely happy to have a 1.4 kg hybrid, but it's not going to compete with the upcoming wave of ultrabooks (note that I'm somewhat skeptical it will be 1.4kg, I bet it will be a little more).
Ultrabooks/Subnotebooks are already a compromise. We've made the transition from massive 30-40W CPUs to 15W-CPUs for mainstream notebook over the last 4 years, where net performance for notebooks stagnated at best (and regressed during the first year or two). Going from there to whatever hardware the Surface Book uses won't a big leap any more.
- I like small tablets and larger laptops (13.3 min, 14 prefered). So an hybrid is either a too big tablet or a too little PC, often both;
- hybrids are top-heavy, and I don't like having an hinge. I really want a LAP-top, and a ultrabook is perfect for this. An hybrid, not so much (I've heard about "lapability", not convinced ;).
Both are intrinsic trade-offs of hybrids. So I stick to small tablets + 14" ultrabook, and just don't bother with hybrids. But to each its own.
I completely understand why Apple doesn't put touch-sensitive screens in their laptops, but it's such a shame. I'd love to be able to use a pen with a MacBook like this. The iPad Pro would be ideal except it lacks a proper Unix terminal, so that's pretty much out of the question for me (ssh doesn't count).
The hinge is the only thing that bothers me. Close the book and it seems like you'll have a thin area of metal on metal grinding on itself and end up with a rather thick profile for putting it in a laptop bag.
Also, at one point they showed the internal structure of the hinge and it looked like the Yoga's hinge that's covered with some sort of articulating plastic (god I hope not).
I'm impressed with everything else though.
Most tablets are content consumption devices only. The SP3 allowed you to be a "little" productive on the go with a type keyboard, and a "lot" productive in the office with a dock and a real keyboard.
If you want to be fully productive on the go, then I'd agree that buying a full laptop (e.g. Thinkpad, MBP) makes a lot of sense, and even then I'd still plug in a real mouse.
The Surface's niche is that it can be a content consumption device, semi-productive device, and a fully productive device when you need it to be (with no cover, type cover, and full keyboard/mouse respectively).
I will say the SP3's four biggest issues in my view:
- Touchpad on the cover is just terrible. Totally unusable.
- The Surface itself is too slippery without the cover.
- Some overheating issues when the GPU is utilised.
- The magnetic power cord fails too often/easily. Replaced it twice already. Look on Amazon for reviews/pictures to see what I mean.
Now that they have increased the size of the touchpad and made the keyboard better, I actually have a bit of a dilemma. You can customize the SP4 preorder with an i7 and 16GB of memory for cheaper than the Surface Book i7 with 8GB memory. I'm not sure how necessary the Nvidia card is for my purposes.
In fact, I think it's actually a problem for MS! :) The reason why the Surface Book was so appealing was partly because the keyboard/trackpad just wasn't that great with the SP3. Now that they've improved the type cover so much, the SB seems less necessary.
This was after the launch of the iPad Pro which is xbox-huge. I was imagining a product which was a MacBook "Base" which you could connect an iPad to as the 'screen' - except you'd have two different OSes that you'd have to cover. It's not exactly a product that fits anywhere in Apple's lineup.
This Microsoft thing is exactly what I was envisioning. You have a solid base which can include a GPU and more battery life and a detachable screen that works as a tablet. Brilliant!
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/50755EA6-A75...
Im surprised it took over a decade to get a device that doesn't suck in that form factor, but im glad it happened.
Will be preordering one tomorrow! edit: this post was written on an MBP :)
A family heirloom!
It was actually a pretty good standalone MP3 player, for its day. (Just forget about the fairly useless sharing functions, and the marketing.)
Microsoft is the one that is closest to what I think the future should be: only one device you dock and use.
Not sure I'd want a Windows phone either (I'm currently on Android) but I might rethink that in the future as well.
I believe the idea of Continuum is targeted to light Office users, people who work on basic spreadsheets and word. It has a target market but I am not sure how big it is.
IME, the OS and associated MS apps are fantastic, the phone is solid, and I have no complaints. If that's all you cared about I'd say switch today.
But there is definitely an app gap. I was never a huge app user, and most of what I used was there, but I'm pretty sure that's not true for most people. It's pretty hit or miss. You can find Facebook, Teamviewer, Netflix, and Plex, but if you want Snapshat, you're SOL. There aren't even any third party Snapchats around, because Snapchat demanded they be removed from the Windows Store.
There's no first-party Google apps, no doubt a big stumbling block for a lot of people.
iOS was originally cut down for performance reasons. Then large parts were locked for security - especially carrier network - security.
Performance isn't an issue, but carrier security is. And I don't think mobile users are going to be happy about having to download a constant stream of unlabelled Windows updates.
Where Apple went wrong was with iTunes, and especially with the horror show involved in getting information into and out of an iDevice. If you have an independent collection of music and books, it's just too clunky.
I bought an Android Galaxy Tab recently, and not only is the screen better than the screen on any iPad, getting books into it is trivially easy.
Either way, I'm glad Cupertino has competition. There's been more than a whiff of complacency from that part of the world in the last year or so, and I hope this makes Cook and Co sit up and stop taking the high end laptop market for granted.
Although gotta say - I'm still amused to see the MS presentation design following the Apple/Jobs presentation style so closely.
Maybe both companies should just merge? That would be interesting...
So, to me Apple are out if the game. It will not be Apple who will give us the mobile workstation quality OS in a pocket device that can hook up to a screen around you and allow you to work like you do today on your desktop.
Edit; that said; bring on the competition. I would buy a Surface Pro just to experiment if it had more battery life. I hoped the 4 would be (a lot) better in that department but it is not. So then I'll just run my MBP with El Capitan instead for now; http://i.glui.me/1GuUc4H
The OS was way ahead compared to what else existed out there, and I do think it got some stuff from OSX, but now it's clearly on a very different state rather than merging/
CE was also the base for Windows Automotive.
Having said that though I'm much more concerned with the OS capabilities, user experience, aesthetics, toolchains, etc.
It's not even just the OS. I've switched to Safari because losing 1.5-2 hours of battery life to use Chrome or Firefox isn't worth it. I'll just open Chrome when I really need it, use it for a few minutes, and close it.
There's also a "no one got fired for..." factor. OSX refuses to work with the client's projector in a meeting? Apple sucks. Arch Linux refuses to work with the client's projector? You suck.
I'm using a Sony VAIO Pro 13 with Ubuntu and EVERYTHING, yes everything, works perfect. Touchpad, standby, brightness, wifi, ...
Also a friend of mine is running the Dell XPS 13 with Linux and also has no problems AFAIK.
The next big boost was a GUI and market situation that made it possible to create some neat productivity tools (and profit from them).
The early Ruby on Rails community probably was the epitome of that setup: TextMate as a uniquely OS X editor, easy development on your laptop, then deployment to a Linux server. I think Keynote came out right at that time, too, which was really neat for a rather weirdly conference-driven community.
Then the pretty great Unibody systems came out, combining the aircraft destroyer feel of olden Thinkpads with a more sleek design, and the first of the ultrabooks, the Air… And, of course, you basically have to use a Mac system when doing iOS dev work.
But in the recent years, I feel that Apple lost it a bit. OS X is stagnating (what's the last feature that could compete with e.g. Expose? And still no decent 1st-party package manager). Third party development/productivity software doesn't matter that much these days (it's either webapps or mobile apps; no really shiny single-platform editor anymore). Some of the Linuxens are pretty good with supported laptop hardware, so that's an option for the Unix hardcore.
And as this article is showing, Windows itself is getting more of an option even if you're not buying into the MS stack: RAM and hard drives are big enough to support virtual machines for your development environment (esp. w/ docker/vagrant/etc.) -- if you even need that, as high-speed internet is ubiquitous enough so that you can do remote development throughout.
So, yeah, while I personally still think that OS X is a more developer/hacker-friendly environment than Windows, the incentives don't appear as big anymore. So if they lose their edge in hardware quality, style and solid driver support, they'll lose a few developers more.
Nothing beats having the ability run Unix command line tools.
MS really needs to add these to their base OS.
- 256GB/i5/8GB/dGPU: $1899
OneNote with pen is just amazing. Coupled with the detachable high quality screen, this thing is all I can dream off at the moment.
Of course real progress, to me, means that there is a good standard and everybody uses it. Remember when cell phones all had their own type of charging adapter? I'm so happy now that most manufacturers use micro-usb. Everybody except Apple of course because they're always too busy trying to invent something that will keep you locked in.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2478157,00.asp
http://www.androidcentral.com/google-says-look-out-more-usb-...
USB-C is an open standard that is not controlled by Apple.
Does anyone else find it hilarious that this is coming from a guy who cares about USB-C which is largely pointless and irrelevant in this thread? You got all the responses and downvotes that you deserve.
It also doubles the throughput of the older standard. It's a $1500 device so people who buy it will probably be using it in 4-5 years. I'd rather spend $20 on an adapter cable now and be able to support the better standard next year.
http://www.techinsider.io/microsoft-usb-c-2015-10
I'm sure Surface 5 devices will have USB-C in 12-16 months when people actually start caring about USB-C.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
Instead of playing back at them, I guess I'll just post the rules next time.
- "Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation. Avoid gratuitous negativity."
- "Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."
The Nexus devices were often also available straight from their vendor at the time in the same form or a slightly different model.
And most importantly the Nexuses were always sourced from on of their partners, here MSFT is directly competing against their partners.
First, Microsoft doesn't own any factories so the business is going to a partner (probably Pegatron).
Second, Microsoft partners can sign up to sell and support the Surface Pro range. Dell and HP have already done so. Shipping thousands of Surface Pros into businesses, imaging them, and supporting them on-site and remotely is the part of the PC business with margins, which are rather thin on Windows hardware.
Also, Microsoft isn't competing in the mainstream Windows market, where device prices are typically $200 to $500. In fact, it's mainly competing against Apple, which is arguably a good thing for the rest of the Windows ecosystem....
There was speculation of a Surface Phone, but with the Lumia 950XL being pen compatible and still keeping the Lumia name, it's very unlikely.
Unaware of this event, yesterday morning I ordered the first MS Band for a little more than 1/2 the list price of the Band 2. I'd been shopping for fitness trackers for a long time, and settled on the Band as the only tracker meeting my needs that can also act as an Android trusted bluetooth device & keep my phone unlocked.
From what I can tell, the Band 2 adds: - softer, more flexible strap (soft shell vs hard shell) - barometer for elevation - gorilla glass - better touch sensitivity
Is that it? If so, given the nearly 2x price difference, I think I'm just going to keep the old band and use it.
I'd recommend that you get a screen protector for your band, though. The weird, soft bezel around this version is extremely prone to scratches doing even the most mundane tasks.
BTW, I read how easy the thing scratches, and purchased some screen protectors along with it.
I wish there were a better distinction between the two; this should be called the Band 2, not the "new Band." This is made worse by the fact that your link is reachable by clicking "Support" -> "Hardware" -> "Microsoft Band Specifications." Nothing in that path suggests anything about the old Band.
The specs for the new Band are at https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-band/en-us/features - you have to click on "tech specs." This supports the -300 to +4877 meters number.
Worth watching.
[1] https://youtu.be/XVfOe5mFbAE?t=90
[1] https://youtu.be/dpzu3HM2CIo
I still have an impression of the keyboard on the glossy screen (from compression), but it's perfectly liveable for a device I only use a few weeks of the year.
Most laptop-designed backpacks have a padded compartment designed to hold just the laptop; if there aren't other things in that compartment, then that shouldn't be an issue. (If there are, and they aren't the kind of small, loose things that could slip between the screen and keyboard, same thing.)
> That is why the old Thinkpads used to have a "click" mechanism.
I always thought the click-locking mechanism on most older laptops (not just old Thinkpads) was there to reduce the wear on the hinge.
I imagine some companies might think about equipping their mobile employees with Lumias for when they're out of the office, and the dock adapter for when they're back in the office. Sales, insurance agents, car inspectors - any job where they go on site, but return to the office afterwards.
Yes. And I think they said that with DirectX 12 it'll split the load between GPUs when both are connected.
Is that news? I think I've seen similar setup with ExpressCard-based PCIe adapters for desktop graphics cards for a few years now. Thunderbolt also has had hotplug PCIe connections from the beginning. (Less elegant, of course, but the same engineering challenge.)
If you run a hypervisor setup with multiple GPU's you need to make sure that the UEFI and the hypervisor/main OS do not initialize them until they are passed through to the guest VM and after that you can't recycle them easily and usually need to reboot the host if you want to pass them through to another guest.
http://i.imgur.com/47z9U46.png
You have had that feature for quite a while, but it's not the same as reinitating the GPU completely from scratch.
The Surface 3 and Surface Pro 3 weren't misses. They were extremely well received and fairly successful products.
I'm not saying you're incorrect (I think the Surface Book indeed appears innovative and useful), I just wanted to share the history of at least one product class -- Panda Project's Archistrat workstations and servers - that separates CPU, memory, and I/O into allegedly independent and upgradable subsystems connected by a passive backplane.
BYTE wrote about it, and the Internet Archive luckily saved the interesting preview:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080907024539/http://www.byte.c...
As I searched for this article, I happened across Panda Project's patent for their backplane, published almost 17 years to the day:
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5822551.html
It's probably just coincidence (I'm guessing MS wasn't waiting for this patent to expire before releasing the Surface Book), but it was a fun find.
Edit: "Pics or it didn't happen", courtesy Infoworld via Google Books:
https://books.google.com/books?id=qj4EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA59-IA3&...
* 256GB / Core Intel i5 - 8GB ($1699)
* 256GB / Core Intel i5 - 8GB / dGPU ($1899)
* 256GB / Core Intel i7 - 8GB / dGPU ($2099)
* 512GB / Core Intel i7 - 16GB / dGPU ($2699)
Assuming they haven't somehow locked the hardware.
So how good is this trackpad and does it work like a MacBook's where two fingers = right click versus this weird obsession PC vendors seem to have about dividing a single trackpad into invisible click zones?
It was so unfortunate too because I really liked that machine. It's just that damn touchpad...and the store models worked the same so it wasn't like I had a weird one or anything.
The new Mac Pro is very expensive compared to what you can assemble in a PC tower, and the tower gives you a lot more flexibility.
As others have said, there's plenty of video editing software for PCs. The main one that's missing is Apple's Final Cut Pro (which Apple bought from Macromedia, though it's changed a lot since then).
See http://ppbm7.com/index.php/tweakers-page/87-what-pc-to-use/9...