If I remember correctly, the XBox was operating at a loss at the beginning. I think it was more than expected that it would take a few years to break into the market.
There's a major difference between operating at a loss while selling 1.3 million units in 3 months (more than the PS2, PS3, Wii) as the XBOX did and having a product that absolutely nobody is buying as the Surface.
I travel on a train for a medium length journey 2-4 times a week. In the last 12 months I've noticed that the transition from never seeing a Surface (Pro) to seeing 5-10% of tablets being a Surface (Pro). The vast majority are iPads still but its interesting that Surface has made such inroads. Based on what I see the main reason is the combination of the keyboard and Outlook.
A lot of people forget that IT departments in medium to large companies need to be able to remotely manage equipment, Macs are "annoying" and iPads are damn near un-manage-able.
So while a lot of middle managers outside of IT think that iPads are "cool" and push for them, they get a lot of push back from IT due to their impracticality and the amount of time/resources it would take to manage.
A Surface Pro has none of these issues. It is a standard Windows 10 PC which can be managed via System Center/AD/GPO/etc, so they're non-effort machines for enterprise/IT.
So that, I suspect, is why you're seeing so many so quickly. Internally non-IT management wants a "tablet" and the IT department is deflecting from iPads onto Surface Pros because it is in their best interests to do so.
There's a major difference between "a product that absolutely nobody is buying" and the revenue reported in the eight most recent quarters: $672MM (Q1-2016), $888MM (Q4-2015), $713MM (Q3-2015), $1100MM (Q2-2015), $908MM (Q1-2015), $409MM (Q4-2014), $500MM (Q3-2014), $893MM (Q2-2014).
(to note, Q2 is their oct-nov-dec quarter)
~$6Billion in revenue means absolutely someone is buying Surface products.
The year (2016) refers to the calendar year in which Microsoft's fiscal year ends (Jun 2016). Many, but not all, companies use a standard fiscal year of Jul-Jun rather than a calendar year of Jan-Dec for financial reporting and tax purposes.
Thus, Q1 2016 means the quarter ending Sep 30, 2015, for Microsoft's fiscal year ending Jun 30, 2016 (which began Jul 1, 2015).
Perseverance is one of the key MS strength, they don't easily give up once they start, considering their history of getting things right by v3, it makes sense. There are exceptions, but still MS is a company mostly for long haul.
First of all, this is a beautiful piece of hardware.
I hate that I have to ask this, but do these ship with locked bootloaders? If they don't, they might be a candidate for beautiful Hackintoshes or Linux laptops. I just can't bring myself to run something that isn't unix under the hood and OSX has been a pretty decent balance of openness/unixness/ecosystem with a pretty nice looking UI and a thriving software market. I haven't tried Windows 10, but I suspect I'd be just as unhappy with it as I was with Windows 9 on a Surface.
I'm still a fan of the MacBook hardware, but a detachable screen is something you just won't see out of the Apple camp. I would love to have a laptop that converts into a tablet for light use/presentation/travel. A Hackintosh would be ideal, but I'd easily consider a Linux distro if it meant I could use something like this.
It didn't ship with USB-C ports (shame), but it sounds like you might be able to buy an upgraded "bottom" and take advantage of that when it ships (that's huge!):
I'm in the same camp as you. I really like this hardware but I don't want to use Windows. I don't think we'll see any good support for all of the modes it can operate in on other operating systems though at least not for a long while and then in very limited capacity.
Me not wanting to use Windows is more about unfamiliarity with what modern windows is like for a non MS centric developer. My previous experience dates back to the XP days where trying to do anything other than MS things was a chore. I _really_ like the surfacebook, maybe it's time to take another look at windows?
I think the biggest barriers to me would be the awesome package ecosystems in unix land (mysql, postgres and mongo are all a single "brew install" away!).
I also would miss working in bash in iTerm and/or Apple's Terminal. Unless they've done a lot of work on the command prompt, it'll be moving back into a world of pain.
Have you taken a look at Chocolatey and OneGet? I've been an avid Windows user as I grew tired of resolving Linux issues daily, and haven't really missed anything. Chocolately + ConEmu + Git for Windows (comes with ssh and most of the unix tools) + PowerShell for more complex scripts.
Windows 10 is quite nice -- actually the UX is better than OS X in my opinion -- but I really do sympathize. On my desktop machine at home, intended primarily for gaming, I sometimes run a Vagrant VM, and I have babun setup for when I want a Unix-like terminal but not a full VM (a preconfigured Cygwin distribution).
I like Windows 10 as well. I do wish that Microsoft would make a professional version of 10 with defaults set to whatever is most secure. The way the OS silently and continuously pushes data to the cloud makes it hard to recommend 10 for use where security matters (like in medicine, banking, etc...). It should also be easier to uninstall the Bing bloatware.
> For example, systems powering hospital emergency rooms, air traffic control towers, financial trading systems, factory floors, just to name a few, may need very strict change management policies, for prolonged periods of time. To support Windows 10 devices in these mission critical customer environments we will provide Long Term Servicing branches at the appropriate time intervals. On these branches, customer devices will receive the level of enterprise support expected for the mission critical systems, keeping systems more secure with the latest security and critical updates, while minimizing change by not delivering new features for the duration of mainstream (five years) and extended support (five years). On Long Term Servicing branches, customers will have the flexibility to deliver security updates and fixes via Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) which allows full control over the internal distribution of updates using existing management solutions such as System Center Configuration Manager or to receive these updates automatically via Windows Update.
Actually, the control over updates isn't something I care about (we don't have anything that critical running on Windows). I can certainly understand how that's super important to some users though.
If I could easily (and permanently) remove the Bing apps and disable all the data sharing that was added for Cortana, I would be pretty happy.
No x86 computer ships with locked bootloaders, it's part of the spec that you have to be able to disable SecureBoot in the BIOS.
Having said that, I don't think Linux will be a good fit for this device. People will first have to reverse-engineer the locking mechanism (which is done in software in Windows). That'll probably happen quickly, but then there's the issue of the hybrid graphics, which Linux has never played well with IME. That's assuming Linux drivers will be available for the dGPU at all; it's apparently a custom part from Nvidia and there may not even be a binary blob for them on Linux.
I don't think the release mechanism is in Windows, I think it's firmware. I heard you can't release it if your battery level is too low (a setting that might be changed or change-able) but I myself released the screen on a model unit while it was in a boot sequence.
This really is the problem. The amount of hardware wizardry going on here is going to be nearly impossible to support on GNU/Linux or any POSIX-like OS without support from Microsoft. Unfortunately, they don't "get" this, and they operate in a vacuum where they believe that the software they create is just the best thing for everyone.
I honestly have no idea how they operate under this presumption. Are they unaware of the millions of developers using Macbooks purely for this reason?
For me, it's not about FOSS per se, more about the development environment that comes with it; a parent comment even mentioned a hackintosh. It's just that a Windows environment is so radically different from everything else out there that it makes it pretty impossible to realistically conduct work when all the tools are made for OSX and GNU/Linux.
I'm only addressing Microsoft with my comment because that's the topic of conversation here. Also, because they're specifically positioning themselves to convert Mac users, and IMO a notable portion of these users are developers who need the POSIX-like ecosystem.
Note: Apple license forbids installation of Mac OS on non Apple hardware. If Microsoft did the same, Apple would not have been able to provide the drivers and boot camp.
One other thing. Apple NEEDED to ease the transition for Windows users. Without the above factors their laptop sales would be a fraction of what it is today
> Having said that, I don't think Linux will be a good fit for this device. People will first have to reverse-engineer the locking mechanism (which is done in software in Windows).
The way MS has been acting lately it wouldn't even surprise me if they release Linux code for it, stating: People should use Windows because they want to, not because they have to, -anything else would be considered a failure.
Has anyone used touch screen as a whiteboard during skype call or teleconf, how good it is? Sometimes, a real whiteboard is not good enough with camera.
Sort of. I used to use a cheapo Wacom tablet with a painting app for online WebEx demos a few years ago; I'd flip from whatever thing I was demo'ing to a new desktop with a blank raster file open and draw explanatory diagrams. It was actually pretty decent. Having a pen integrated into the device, with some sort of transparent annotation overlay app would have been pretty exciting for me back then (not least because I wouldn't have to hand write text!).
I would think rarely would a normal on the wall whiteboard work well with a webcam on a teleconference, but then again I've never had a meeting room that worked for much of anything teleconference-related. Always something wasn't right, lighting, space, noise etc.
Not so much a touchscreen but I've used plenty of stylus/digitizer setups for this purpose over the years and they work as well as you'd expect. At one job, we used normal PCs with simple Wacom tablets for annotation of slides during love Adobe Connect sessions and the only complaint was from some users who hadn't yet become comfortable with looking at a monitor while drawing on a surface (sort of like learning to use a mouse or touch-type for the first time).
At my current job, we have Sympodium monitors at lecture podiums so you can draw directly on the screen. These are also not touch screens but make use of an active digitizer like the Surface products and traditional drawing tablets.
Likewise, I've got a Gen 1 Surface Pro which works just as well for the same sort of thing. Basically, as long as framerate doesn't need to be as high as video, it's fine. Usually the "slides" portion of those conferences (whether web-based or using VTC appliances) is set to use a lower framerate for bandwidth purposes while the "camera" portion will attempt to hit more video-like framerates. But otherwise, it's pretty useful and something of a standard in the educational live conferences I've worked on.
For Surface Books, the price point seems to be off. It's priced higher than Macbook pro, and thus I have to justify the need for SB's exceptional portability. A MBP with i5/128GB typically sells for $1299 (but often cheaper from non-Apple online stores) , while the similar spec SB costs $1499. A MBP i7 costs $2000 while SB costs $2700+.
I'd also want it to be Unixy, so my thought is to just run VM and use the Windows 10 only as a VM host, but nothing else. However, that'd be kind of a waste for such a machine.
The macbook is absurdly light. The Surface book weighs a little bit less than the 13 in macbook pro. The surface book competes with the macbook pro 13 more directly in terms of performance and price.
It also weighs more than an iPhone, but that's not what it's competing against. One is a "pro" geared laptop with a discrete GPU, the other runs on a 4.5W Core M. Of course it's lighter! Microsoft has positioned the Surface Book against the Macbook _Pro_ pretty explicitly.
EDIT: For the relevant size comparison:
Surface Book 3.34 lbs
Macbook Pro (13") 3.48 lbs
I'd say MS did a great job in the weight department. Especially considering that their screen is bigger (0.44" taller, 0.04" narrower) and has 1.5x the pixel count (6 million vs 4.1 million).
Oh, so in a discussion specifically about the Macbook Pro Vs. Surface Pro, they randomly decided to drop the Macbook into the discussion which is smaller, and less powerful, just to show, what? That things exist which weigh less in general? They could have used an iPad for that example. Would have been less confusing/misleading.
The 12-inch Macbook you're referring to has a Core M-5Y31 processor, with a normal clock rate of 1.1GHz and up to 2.4GHz turbo (but it won't stay at 2.4GHz long.) It also has no discrete GPU, and the integrated GPU is also significantly slower to maintain thermal and power limits. The highest end Macbook has a slightly higher clock (1.2GHz, 2.6GHz turbo).
The Surface Book competes with the Macbook Pro, and the Core i5-6300U in the base model it has a normal clock rate of 2.4GHz, equal to the turbo of the base model Macbook. The thermal power limit is about three times as much, and the integrated GPU is newer, supports 4K displays, and has a higher clock rate than the turbo of the Macbook.
In no way is the Surface Book trying to compete with the Macbook.
Don't forget the touch screen and pen computing for those who care.
One thing I'm not happy with though is the push for higher resolution screens at the expense of battery life. At a lower resolution, would the clipboard last 5-7 hours?
Would the Sp4 last more than 10 hours?
Or am I a minority who cares more about battery life than screen resolution?
IIRC, they were able to increase the pixel density because of the screen they are using, which uses less power than the SP3, so it would probably be about equal.
I was blown away by the Surface Book presentation and my first reaction was "I want one".
But if you think about it, the product makes no sense. The bottom part holds all the battery, so you want to have it attached. But the top part has 3 hours of portability, so you don't want to have it attached. But the bottom part has a dGPU, so you might need that, some times. But the top part runs very well without the dGPU, so you don't need that.
It's just weird to me. It just wants to be everything I don't need. I'll take my SP4 with a dock and a keyboard and be just as happy.
>It's just weird to me. It just wants to be everything I don't need.
With a dock both the book and surface 4 can replace your desktop.
The question is, when you're not in desktop mode, do you want an awesome laptop experience with a lesser tablet experience or an awesome tablet experience with a lesser laptop experience?
My wife's Surface comes today, but I got the i7, so the wait is on. ;)
It makes no sense because it doesn't fit your needs. If you want a tablet you can hold all day long and switch to a "laptop" for a few hours, SP4 makes sense.
If you want a laptop but for a few hours a day, you'd want a light tablet to read or do research on, Surface Book makes more sense and the clipboard is much lighter than the SP4 as well. In addition, you can rotate it around while attached to the base to use it as a drawing surface as needed.
SB/SP4 strikes a difference balance for different people. For me, I use my tablet as a content consumption device all day long and rarely type, so SP4 makes more sense than SB for me.
2 points: Panay's presentation was the best presentation from MS I have ever seen. It was about 100 times better than any MS presentation I have seen so far. Second, this is a nice write-up, and it is a promo, but for some of its honesty I'm surprised it makes out the SB as such a miracle. It is not particular thin and that might matter more than a lack of a kickstand.
Does anyone have a source or any numbers on how Microsoft's revenue is split among its departments? I'd be curious to see how much of their revenue is from their hardware vs. software now.
They don't break it down per-product, but the whole segment was $9.1B revenue out of $20.4B for the quarter. And the only hint we get about this product specifically is:
"Devices revenue decreased $1.8 billion or 49%, mainly due to lower revenue from phones, driven by the shift in strategy for the phone business, as well as lower Surface revenue. Phones revenue decreased $1.5 billion or 58%, as we sold 5.8 million Lumia phones and 25.5 million other non-Lumia phones in the first quarter of fiscal year 2016, compared with 9.3 million and 42.9 million sold, respectively, in the prior year. Surface revenue decreased $236 million or 26%, primarily driven by the release of Surface Pro 3 in June 2014."
56 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadGoodness. That probably means there was much more than 9 figures of losses in total. The trust MSFT places in Panay and his team must be gargantuan.
I really wonder what MSFT's upper-limit of tolerable losses was for the Surface program.
A lot of people forget that IT departments in medium to large companies need to be able to remotely manage equipment, Macs are "annoying" and iPads are damn near un-manage-able.
So while a lot of middle managers outside of IT think that iPads are "cool" and push for them, they get a lot of push back from IT due to their impracticality and the amount of time/resources it would take to manage.
A Surface Pro has none of these issues. It is a standard Windows 10 PC which can be managed via System Center/AD/GPO/etc, so they're non-effort machines for enterprise/IT.
So that, I suspect, is why you're seeing so many so quickly. Internally non-IT management wants a "tablet" and the IT department is deflecting from iPads onto Surface Pros because it is in their best interests to do so.
(to note, Q2 is their oct-nov-dec quarter)
~$6Billion in revenue means absolutely someone is buying Surface products.
Are you from the future?
And for comparison, the original XBox sold $300M.
In the first 3 weeks.
In case you weren't aware, Microsoft released their 2016-Q1 earnings recently.
Thus, Q1 2016 means the quarter ending Sep 30, 2015, for Microsoft's fiscal year ending Jun 30, 2016 (which began Jul 1, 2015).
I hate that I have to ask this, but do these ship with locked bootloaders? If they don't, they might be a candidate for beautiful Hackintoshes or Linux laptops. I just can't bring myself to run something that isn't unix under the hood and OSX has been a pretty decent balance of openness/unixness/ecosystem with a pretty nice looking UI and a thriving software market. I haven't tried Windows 10, but I suspect I'd be just as unhappy with it as I was with Windows 9 on a Surface.
I'm still a fan of the MacBook hardware, but a detachable screen is something you just won't see out of the Apple camp. I would love to have a laptop that converts into a tablet for light use/presentation/travel. A Hackintosh would be ideal, but I'd easily consider a Linux distro if it meant I could use something like this.
It didn't ship with USB-C ports (shame), but it sounds like you might be able to buy an upgraded "bottom" and take advantage of that when it ships (that's huge!):
http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2015/10/23/surface-book-user...
Me not wanting to use Windows is more about unfamiliarity with what modern windows is like for a non MS centric developer. My previous experience dates back to the XP days where trying to do anything other than MS things was a chore. I _really_ like the surfacebook, maybe it's time to take another look at windows?
I also would miss working in bash in iTerm and/or Apple's Terminal. Unless they've done a lot of work on the command prompt, it'll be moving back into a world of pain.
http://blogs.windows.com/business/2015/01/30/windows-10-for-...
> For example, systems powering hospital emergency rooms, air traffic control towers, financial trading systems, factory floors, just to name a few, may need very strict change management policies, for prolonged periods of time. To support Windows 10 devices in these mission critical customer environments we will provide Long Term Servicing branches at the appropriate time intervals. On these branches, customer devices will receive the level of enterprise support expected for the mission critical systems, keeping systems more secure with the latest security and critical updates, while minimizing change by not delivering new features for the duration of mainstream (five years) and extended support (five years). On Long Term Servicing branches, customers will have the flexibility to deliver security updates and fixes via Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) which allows full control over the internal distribution of updates using existing management solutions such as System Center Configuration Manager or to receive these updates automatically via Windows Update.
If I could easily (and permanently) remove the Bing apps and disable all the data sharing that was added for Cortana, I would be pretty happy.
Having said that, I don't think Linux will be a good fit for this device. People will first have to reverse-engineer the locking mechanism (which is done in software in Windows). That'll probably happen quickly, but then there's the issue of the hybrid graphics, which Linux has never played well with IME. That's assuming Linux drivers will be available for the dGPU at all; it's apparently a custom part from Nvidia and there may not even be a binary blob for them on Linux.
Not for Windows 10 it's not!
I honestly have no idea how they operate under this presumption. Are they unaware of the millions of developers using Macbooks purely for this reason?
I'm only addressing Microsoft with my comment because that's the topic of conversation here. Also, because they're specifically positioning themselves to convert Mac users, and IMO a notable portion of these users are developers who need the POSIX-like ecosystem.
One other thing. Apple NEEDED to ease the transition for Windows users. Without the above factors their laptop sales would be a fraction of what it is today
The way MS has been acting lately it wouldn't even surprise me if they release Linux code for it, stating: People should use Windows because they want to, not because they have to, -anything else would be considered a failure.
I can dream... : )
- There is SecureBoot configuration, and it can be reconfigured and disabled.
- There are USB and PXE boot options available, so running Linux from those shouldn't be too difficult
- It looks like the 'MuscleWire' is controlled by firmware, not windows, as I was able to detach the device in BIOS outside the OS.
So give it a few months, I am sure someone will get debian on this thing!
At my current job, we have Sympodium monitors at lecture podiums so you can draw directly on the screen. These are also not touch screens but make use of an active digitizer like the Surface products and traditional drawing tablets.
Likewise, I've got a Gen 1 Surface Pro which works just as well for the same sort of thing. Basically, as long as framerate doesn't need to be as high as video, it's fine. Usually the "slides" portion of those conferences (whether web-based or using VTC appliances) is set to use a lower framerate for bandwidth purposes while the "camera" portion will attempt to hit more video-like framerates. But otherwise, it's pretty useful and something of a standard in the educational live conferences I've worked on.
I'd also want it to be Unixy, so my thought is to just run VM and use the Windows 10 only as a VM host, but nothing else. However, that'd be kind of a waste for such a machine.
EDIT: For the relevant size comparison:
I'd say MS did a great job in the weight department. Especially considering that their screen is bigger (0.44" taller, 0.04" narrower) and has 1.5x the pixel count (6 million vs 4.1 million).http://www.apple.com/macbook/specs/
So the Surface Book is 65% heavier, not quite twice as heavy but starting to get into that ballpark.
The Surface Book competes with the Macbook Pro, and the Core i5-6300U in the base model it has a normal clock rate of 2.4GHz, equal to the turbo of the base model Macbook. The thermal power limit is about three times as much, and the integrated GPU is newer, supports 4K displays, and has a higher clock rate than the turbo of the Macbook.
In no way is the Surface Book trying to compete with the Macbook.
One thing I'm not happy with though is the push for higher resolution screens at the expense of battery life. At a lower resolution, would the clipboard last 5-7 hours?
Would the Sp4 last more than 10 hours?
Or am I a minority who cares more about battery life than screen resolution?
I was blown away by the Surface Book presentation and my first reaction was "I want one".
But if you think about it, the product makes no sense. The bottom part holds all the battery, so you want to have it attached. But the top part has 3 hours of portability, so you don't want to have it attached. But the bottom part has a dGPU, so you might need that, some times. But the top part runs very well without the dGPU, so you don't need that.
It's just weird to me. It just wants to be everything I don't need. I'll take my SP4 with a dock and a keyboard and be just as happy.
With a dock both the book and surface 4 can replace your desktop.
The question is, when you're not in desktop mode, do you want an awesome laptop experience with a lesser tablet experience or an awesome tablet experience with a lesser laptop experience?
My wife's Surface comes today, but I got the i7, so the wait is on. ;)
If you want a laptop but for a few hours a day, you'd want a light tablet to read or do research on, Surface Book makes more sense and the clipboard is much lighter than the SP4 as well. In addition, you can rotate it around while attached to the base to use it as a drawing surface as needed.
SB/SP4 strikes a difference balance for different people. For me, I use my tablet as a content consumption device all day long and rarely type, so SP4 makes more sense than SB for me.
They don't break it down per-product, but the whole segment was $9.1B revenue out of $20.4B for the quarter. And the only hint we get about this product specifically is:
"Devices revenue decreased $1.8 billion or 49%, mainly due to lower revenue from phones, driven by the shift in strategy for the phone business, as well as lower Surface revenue. Phones revenue decreased $1.5 billion or 58%, as we sold 5.8 million Lumia phones and 25.5 million other non-Lumia phones in the first quarter of fiscal year 2016, compared with 9.3 million and 42.9 million sold, respectively, in the prior year. Surface revenue decreased $236 million or 26%, primarily driven by the release of Surface Pro 3 in June 2014."