I'm sure he's being serious. I've stopped using other antivirus since Defender came on board. Whenever I buy a new laptop, the first thing I do is uninstall Norton and activate defender.
Both digital illustrators I know work entirely on PC's these days simply because the tooling there is more flexible. I have no doubt they will migrate to this device over time.
iTunes has been completely awful since the last update. For a while it wasn't usable at all if my laptop woke up from Sleep mode, and a patch a couple weeks ago seemed to fix that, but it still happens. It's like the application doesn't have logic anymore to handle reconnecting to networks.
Plus most of the interface feels unnatural to use, at least for Apple Music and the Store.
Well, specifically the issue I mentioned with reconnecting after losing network connections. I've never noticed anything like it before this major iTunes version.
> I would love it if they were really optimizing anything about iTunes.
Indeed. iTunes has become so bad I bit the bullet and signed up for Roon - despite its eye watering price. It's a vastly better (and of course in some other ways inferior) alternative.
One thing which I like about Roon and indeed a lot of 3rd party software from smaller companies is that I can talk to the devs and product managers on the community forums and find out where the product is headed or make suggestions and get feedback.
As far as iTunes goes, I have no idea where in the hell it's going. It went from a music manager to an eBooks platform, an App Store and now a Spotify clone.
Good time to be a software company specialising in catering to the disgruntled user who wants something a little more sophisticated than what Apple's currently selling.
As an Apple (Mac Pro, MacBook Pro, PowerBook, PowerMac G5) user for 15 years, of photo processing & inDesign layout, I agree.
XCode & iOS development is going to keep me on Apple for now, though, but the Linux subsystem for Windows is really appealing. The BSD Unix environment is the whole reason I went with Apple in the first place. OS X is basically a Unix workstation & perfected anything the Linux desktop wanted to be.
Surprised MS went with nVidia 980s instead of 1080s, & Win 10 still a little clunky compared to OS X.
Okay, seriously. The iMac comes with a 395x mobile gpu. It's pretty comparable to the 980m. The 1070m and 1080m don't exist yet. If you guys actually knew more about hardware than nothing, maybe you'd realize that it's not possible to get a 1080m.
iMacs and Macbook Pros (top of the line 15-inch with dGPU) have always used mobile GPUs. Also, illustrators/designers don't need dGPUs. That's why the designers/illustrators at hte tech companies that you work at can use macbook 13 inch laptops and 15-inch laptops without the dGPUs
NVIDIA got rid of the m distinction for the new gen. Razer (and I believe others) have already put a full "desktop" geforce 10xx in some of their laptops.
> the Linux subsystem for Windows is really appealing
In theory. To anyone who feels that way, please try it out for yourself before making a leap. I thought it would let me develop Ruby on Rails under Windows like I could do on Linux or macOS. I discovered a whole bunch of unimplemented features that prevented this. After a couple of months of commenting on bug reports and watching and trying, I gave up. I'll check back later. YMMV.
The biggest issue I have had with their subsystem is that of the file system (NTFS). The fact that I can't have long paths and can't soft link seem ridiculous.
NTFS has a functional equivalent to soft links in the form of reparse points, although I don't know to what degree that feature is exposed in the UI, if at all. Last time I looked into it (admittedly, years ago) they could only be created via the command line. Not sure what you mean by "can't have long paths" though, NTFS allows you to programmatically create paths up to 32,767 code points long:
Windows seems to have a certain hard limit on file path characters (a max of 160) which they seem to have recently removed [0] - So while my point is technically moot it's not enabled by default.
As for soft links, a lot of linux tools create soft links (ln -s from to) and generally that fails on NTFS (I tried installing a bunch of npm modules and all had this specific issue)[1].
It's a max of 260, and it's a Win32 subsystem limitation, not the limitation of NT OS or NTFS file system - and even in Win32 there are escape hatches for it, it's just that you need to know of them and use them explicitly to get such support.
With respect to symlinks - NTFS supports them, but there are subtle semantic differences with POSIX. WSL does actually support symlinks (i.e. you can do ln -s), it's various other behavior around them that breaks, like trying to untar a file that contains symlinks.
The team said that they're working on a custom implementation of symlinks that would provide proper behavior (but wouldn't be seen as a symlink from Win32).
I think the problem here is that Linux NTFS drivers are all a pile of reverse-engineered hacks, so obscure features are overlooked or not fully implemented.
Now, Microsoft should be in a position to put something better into their WSL, but that might entail the risk that someone else will hack that implementation and provide good drivers for everyone, something they clearly don't want (or they would have provided open specs for NTFS support by now).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you should be able to loopback-mount a "proper" file system (e.g. ext4) from a file on NTFS, and then you'll have no limits other than what ext4 imposes. Of course, you then lose easy interop with the filesystem from Windows side, but that is the inherent trade-off here.
WSL doesn't actually run a Linux kernel; it emulates the syscalls and process environment Linux offers and provides a binary loader. It's WINE in reverse.
So there's no ext4 driver, and no concept of loopback mounts.
Ah, indeed (although it's not quite WINE in reverse, since WINE emulates userspace calls, not kernel syscalls).
I see that there's considerable demand for this exact thing in their bug tracker already. If they go for a low-hanging fruit here, it'd be FUSE support - and that should give us ext2, at least.
what you are saying may be true for now, but Microsoft is really trying to achieve 100% userspace compatibility, ( they set the line clear it is about user space programs ).
I couldn't cross compile simple toy kernel (xv6) in OS X (because I needed to have i386-elf-gcc, which need to compile whole binutils , which really cumbersome, and brew doesn't support it -as far as I looked into it ) but in BashOnWindows , it just works, it maybe a little slow (specially file system operations) but it works like charm. I actually tried to compile linux kernel and running it on qemu, It worked, but compilation (which is a lot of file system operation) was so slow it hadn't worth it.
Nadella (MS CEO) aimed perfectly, instead of introducing some limited amount of support for linux apps, his company tries to port whole ubuntu user space. After this project matures enough, rest assured, it will be equivalent of using linux workstation (which is dream of most developers).
I'm a bit of a WSL fanboy, but this is the right advice if you're not a windows user normally.
When it works, it's great, but some things just don't work and you're stuck.
I've found the WSL devs to be fairly responsive, but not to everything.
However, I've found open source projects to be pretty responsive to bug reports of their projects running on WSL; it's far easier for them to support that than support a native windows build.
There are often workarounds for issues, but their coverage is certainly not where we would all like it to be yet.
For the good of the world, I hope no one except Windows has to deal with WSL specific code. When programs start to have to include WSL specific code, the 'extend' part of EEE has begun. While it would be foolish to believe a few programs here and there including support for WSL means doom, it is certainly not the right direction.
Usually it's issues with assumptions about the completeness of the platform; e.g. ZeroMQ assumes that if it's on a UNIX-ey platform it should use UNIX sockets rather than TCP and doesn't check to see if it's actually supported.
I'm not very familiar with OSX, but I'd be surprised if there weren't differences between it and mainline Linux that needed special care and I see this as similar.
To be honest Microsoft has a habit of layering on functionality on top of existing functionality in a piece meal approach so that you end up with a solution which is 75% compatible with the standards but not quite.
Despite being a software company (or because of it), I think innovating on the internals of Windows and its APIs and cleaning house on the software front will be the real challenge for them - making incredibly beautiful hardware might prove to be the easy part!
"OS X is basically a Unix workstation & perfected anything the Linux desktop wanted to be."
Exactly. How do they not know this ? Or, why do they not care ?
There is one big huge reason that "smart people" switched to OSX and the computers that ran it and that institutional knowledge appears to have evaporated at Apple.
When you know your core, core base is here for the UNIX, you don't take away the escape key ... or keep breaking and re-breaking crontab ... or introduce the weird-stuff-I-can't-do-even-as-root.
"Linux subsystem for Windows is really appealing."
Have you actually tried it out?
I thought nobody anymore believed in this after the first versions came out and people actually had a chance to try it in action. There are endless amounts of bugs, unimplemented features, complications between 2 filesystems, permissions, applications etc.
When MS announced this I was pretty hopeful. Not that I would change my dev-computer from way superior macOS to Windows, but that when I'm at home gaming on my Windows PC and I get some cool idea, I could do some small development or create simple prototypes without changing from my desktop to my laptop. After trying it out for real I don't belive anymore this "linux" subsystem thingy is ever going to be anything more than niche PoC.
Most binaries run really well. A lot of the stuff that didn't work in the first preview has since been fixed (like tmux, 24bit colors in bash etc.).
Plus you can now call linux apps from windows with bash -c and call exes from bash which makes cross platform development amazing.
WSL is still in very early beta. It works amazingly well when you consider how early this project is.
Windows NT has done a good job supporting multiple APIs/subsystems in the past. Windows NT for example does a perfectly good job with the Win32 subsystem - software targeting Win32 for '95, '98, etc. still works on Windows 10, perfectly, despite being a totally different kernel.
I run a Windows 10 PC at work with the Linux Subsystem enabled. It has been a godsend. We are historically a C# shop, but have a new front-end web server in NodeJS. I continue to work on a PC because the NodeJS site consumes C# web services. I will sometimes work on the C# service and the node site at the same time and have the Node site point to my local builds of the C# services. Before, I used to use Vagrant, but it was extremely finicky and would break or corrupt randomly. While I know NodeJS runs on native windows, certain dependencies such as Couchbase have given me pain trying to get working. Now I do my NodeJS work running inside the Linux Subsystem. It's been extremely performant, and I always catch case sensitive bugs and other Linux issues that the Mac developers miss due to have a case insensitive file system.
My thought is that it doesn't matter because MS missed the mobile market. People will default to the products that best integrate with their phones, and that will be iPad Pro or .... whatever the android space has to offer.
Do you think a lot of people care about PC/phone integration? I don't see it outside of "contacts and email" which is already fully integrated everywhere thanks to the cloud.
People don't buy Macs because they work well with an iPhone as far as I can tell. They buy Macs for all sorts of other reasons, but that doesn't seem to be one of them.
Every corporate office in the world is running Windows. I'm pretty sure people are going to continue buying whatever they use at work, so unfortunately for HN, Windows is here to stay...(sorry!)
I just installed macOS Sierra and have up-to-date iOS 10.1. I still cannot get handoff working. From reading the reports this is not just me. At least Chrome still syncs.
Similar experience here. I use iPhone, MBP and iPad. Originally thought that having everything under one umbrella would be a huge help, but the reality is the syncing is such a pain that I never do it. Took me many, many months to even get AirDrop working between my own devices. iTunes is very frustrating to use in managing iOS devices.
one of the things that apple didn't pointed out is that there are 2 versions of airdrop. i didn't know this and had an older version of osx that wouldn't sync with my iphone. no error message either.
"Every corporate office in the world is running Windows."
While many companies do use Windows, many others do not, including some very large ones. You think they are using Windows at Apple? That's the world's most valuable company and they have 70000 employees. What about Google? It's another huge company with tens of thousands of employees and you have to beg for permission to run Windows there, and very few do so.
I think Windows has a lock on mid-sized businesses that are large enough to have serious information management challenges, but aren't big enough to solve them. Outside of that zone it is by no means universal.
"Outside of that zone it is by no means universal."
I'd say that outside of your two examples, you'd be hard-pressed to find a Fortune 500 company that doesn't have >90% of its corporate fleet (not servers) being Windows boxes.
I feel like an iPad mini sized device might help break them into that market. Since I really don't make phone calls, when I have my iPad mini with me I don't really use my phone.
Any additional computer purchase is some kind of conscious choice, and people will default to what they are familiar with. I.e. iOS and Android. This is a big hurdle for microsoft to overcome to convince anyone to buy a computer from them. That's my point, and I think it will be very difficult for them to accomplish at scale.
The indie tool market has a much stronger foothold today than they did a few years ago. Adobe, Autodesk, etc. still reign supreme, but that's slowly changing. They are being overtaken by smaller, more niche products. See affinity, sketch, figma, etc. Unless Microsoft can woo these companies into building apps for their platform, I don't see MSFT making a dent with this market.
Now ... I don't know what that's about and I am pretty sure that's an action I will never use, but that's something new and interesting. That's innovation.
[1] 11" macbook air, mac mini HTPC and 2009 mac pro as primary desktop
Presumably you can use the jog dial off-screen and for any number of things, in which case it would be useful to almost everyone for volume control, scrolling through lists, adjusting values in control panels and so on.
Obviously video editors use them, but I know of professional photographers who find them really useful in moving through a catalogue while editing photos too.
> PC market has been stagnant/in decline for some time now. They have to come up with something.
Quick, someone page Apple because Mac sales are declining even faster than the market. Surely they have to do something, that's the only possible motivation /s
As a reminder, Pixelsense means that the whole screen is a short range camera. Put a QR code or similar on it and Windows can read it and react accordingly.
The current use of "Surface" itself is an example of Microsoft watering down a brand in much the same way; it might be careless but it's absolutely consistent with Microsoft's past behavior.
Surface originally was a large windows tablet that doubled as a "table" it also had fancy sensors underneath that allowed you to do a couple of cool things and other way cooler things that never came to fruition.
Seems like it would have died off as a huge blundering $10k per table mess by Microsoft. Or as a badly thought out Windows RT Surface tablet. I would have liked another Surface table (one that actually got better support than a few WPF/Windows widgets) but I'd say now Surface is a huge brand for Microsoft with laptops/desktops.
Sure, it's a broader brand, but one with less coherent meaning; the same that would be the case with moving Pixelsense to a generic label for high-reoslution displaces rather than a specific mark for displays with, among other features, close-range camera-based object recognition.
In fact, there's a fairly close parallel between the broadening of the two brands between the two since Surface was originally the brand for devices incorporating Pixelsense, which was the brand attached to the combination of particular UX technologies, including the camera-based object recognition.
Especially here as you see the Dial incorporated into a Pixelsense environment, it's a very interesting start to convergence between a lot of the things explored and prototyped on the old Surface tables converging into the new brand. A lot of the concepts of the Surface Studio feel very much like more polished concepts "back" from the Surface table. The drafting desk form factor of the Studio very much echoes the tables, only smaller and more convenient.
That is not what a Linux user usually means when they say "If <device xyz> will run Linux". Windows Subsystem for Linux doesn't support (officially, or even cleanly) any graphical Linux apps, for one.
If you run Linux on your desktop, even if it's not your main motivation, I assume you have a basic idea as to why it's likely a bad idea to trust a product from Microsoft. Please don't fund their efforts to lock-down the PC market.
This looks incredible. I'm writing this from Ubuntu 16.10 (so I'm no Microsoft fan) on a Dell laptop and I have to say that I am super envious. The hardware/software combo on offer here looks truly innovative. That Surface Dial, the possibilities are … endless, sorry to sound so clichéd.
Can we please stop with the comparisons in the other comments to Apple please? :) You'd swear they were the only other tech company in existence. Sheesh, it's like living in a bubble.
I wish Microsoft success with this, and I hope they continue to open source their software offerings and keep opening up their hardware technical specifications. We really need Microsoft to remain an innovative and cooperative part of the community.
Microsoft cannot outcompete Linux, not in the long run, it's impossible. I know it may not seem possible right now but I reckon in the future Windows will have maybe 10% of the desktop OS market, Apple will have 10%, and Linux will have 80% split between different flavours: Google, Amazon, Canonical, Samsung, HTC, Xiaomi, whoever wants in basically. When that happens Microsoft needs to have a lot of hardware/software combos on offer, phones, tablets, laptops, all-in-ones, consoles, media boxes, you name it, with tight integration. It's entirely possible given the direction Google is heading that they'll fork Android/ChromeOS. Don't think it is possible? It'll happen. Chromebooks already outsell Macs in some locales: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/23/chromeboo.... I guarantee within five years there'll be a version of Microsoft Office for some flavour of desktop Linux.
Went on a _bit_ of a sidetracked ramble there. Anywho, neato hardware offering Microsoft!
I've been running Ubuntu virtualized in Windows 10 on my Surface Book (VirtualBox) and it's a great way to get around driver issues - everything works great on W10 and it just gets passed through to the VM.
I agree. I got an all in one from dell 5 years ago and the only reason I keep it around is that it has an hdmi in. If I could use the display without booting up the computer, I would.
With its Subsystem for Linux aimed at developers and now this desktop PC for designers, it seems Microsoft is quickly catching up with Apple. Now if they could release a good alternative to the MacBook Pro that would be great.
I have 2010 MBP, 2013 MBP, and Surface Book that I've had since Feb. I never use my MBP anymore. The hardware is great, it looks very sleek (in my opinion) and I am a big fan on Windows 10, which seems to run very well on it (no issues thus far).
edit: if you asked me 5 years ago if I would ever be happy with Microsoft, I would have laughed.
I use Win10 on my MBP as well, and I'd say I use it 95% of the time at this point. Definitely runs snappier than OSX, and now with the Linux subsystem running, I rarely have a need to go back.
I only wish Apple would open source BootCamp and allow others to try and fix the few issues that it still has, namely around battery consumption. Highly unlikely they would ever do that, but one can dream.
Yep I'm talking about leaving it detached - chilling out on the couch using the tablet, without the weight of the bottom part. I'd hoped the Surface Book would replace my iPad but it just replaced my Macbook.
I've had some minor gripes about the reliability of the hinge connection, the behavior of the FN key, and DPI switching on Windows in general.
That said, ever since the Intel firmware fixes addressing the power management issues, the Surface Book has been the perfect general purpose mobile computer for me. Crisp screen, solid keyboard, long battery life, lightweight, and the stylus has been sufficient for replacing good ol' pen and paper when I need to scratch out some math for my occasional graphics programming hobby work. (I have a dedicated GPU model.)
It's the first new computer I've bought in 4 years, so despite paying over $2000 for it, I'm quite happy with the value I've gotten.
I really wanted to like the SB but I didn't like that it doesn't have a full keyboard with End, Home, PgUp, PgDown. It's not that there isn't space to include them. I ended up returning it. For something that I paid $3k for it was a dealbreaker.
Yup, I use them a lot of in Excel. Outside of Excel, End to go to the end of the line and Home to go to the beginning. Ctrl+Home, Ctrl+End to go to the beginning/end of a file.
MS is definitely taking the steps in the hardware department that Apple has been lagging behind on.
But I still feel Windows itself is not a productive OS. I'm big on keyboard shortcuts but MS is very much mouse based. Being required to use my pinky to try and hit CTRL instead of my thumb to hit COMMAND to do simple things like copy and paste is HUGE to me.
I didn't use a Windows machine for 3 years and when I did need to use Windows again it was extremely frustrating. I remember switching from Windows to OSX and it felt more natural.
Anyway, MS is definitely making some cool stuff and I like the direction they're going. But I'm still not ready to go back.
There is a difference between not knowing the key bindings and there not being any. See link below. That's a non comprehensive list of just system shortcuts and doesn't even attempt to enumerate application specific ones.
> I'm big on keyboard shortcuts but MS is very much mouse based.
Incorrect. You can operate the entirety of Windows with just the keyboard.
Please tell me what you cannot do with the keyboard in Windows and I'll straighten you out.
OS X/macOS is definitely worse with regards to keyboard acceleration. For instance, here's a glaring omission on Apple's part: try opening any window from the menu bar (e.g. the BetterSnapTools preferences dialog) then switch away from it with ALT+TAB and you'll be unable to switch back to it.
A slightly different example that infuriates me about macOS. How do I toggle the visibility of hidden files in Finder? To be honest I don't know if there is a shortcut for this in Windows, but what infuriates me is the inconsistency between Finder and the native macOS file browser dialog which allows you to press Cmd+Shift+., why can't the same shortcut be available in Finder?
I came to Mac in 2009 expecting great keyboard shortcuts because of everything I had heard.
IMO they were fewer and less consistent than Windows and Linux shortcuts at the time and a huge disappointment.
(Example: no consistent way of selecting from cursor to end of line - there was no end button and which modifier to use varied with the application you used...! I have joked that the superior touchpad on the Mac is an adaptation to make it usable despite its inconsistent keyboard shorcut handling.)
> no consistent way of selecting from cursor to end of line
cmd+shift+right-arrow. I've once had to use an app in which it didn't work - the developer was using the shortcut for cycling between tabs. But it definitely works in all the apps I use right now.
I still love the keyboard shortcuts on macOS. My favourite is alt+<any function key> to open the respective section in System Preferences. Hard to discover (like most shortcuts) but also really hard to forget about.
You might very well be right now but IIRC between 2009 and 2012 this was hit-and-miss for me. I cannot remember which applications anymore but I was a Java programmer back then as well.
I've seen keyboard issues in JVM based IDEs before, specifically Webstorm.
I've also seen some keyboard shortcuts not mapped properly in Firefox and Chrome. e.g. in the Chrome console the home and end keys don't work as expected under macOS
I always assumed these were cross-platform library issues but I don't know for sure.
Sure, the location of the control key on Windows is bad. But the location of the command key on OSX is worse. At least on Windows you can use the meat of your hand to press the control key as long as you have a decent keyboard. But on both OS's remapping it to caps is even better.
you can't really take your issues with pinky movement and apply it to say windows isn't productive. all it means is you aren't productive with it. i use both windows and mac everyday and there is zero slowdown for me with shortcuts
Really? That's weird - I'm a relatively recent convert to OSX, and find the opposite. E.g. move a window, with alt-spc, M; every dialog box that opens can be addressed by hitting a letter for the option you want; default buttons are bolded so you know what hitting enter will do, etc. I've had to work on Windows boxes with no mouse and found it tough, but possible. Still have to reach for the mouse a lot in OSX. And don't get me started on home and end ;-)
Perhaps it's a question of muscle memory and discoverability? I love spotlight, and installed magnet (http://magnet.crowdcafe.com/), and slowly getting there.
I use Apple keyboards with windows based products.
The issue isn't that the MS shortcuts for things are any better or worse, it's just that you're not used to hitting CTRL. As a developer, my pinky basically rests on the CTRL by default when I'm on a windows system. When I'm on a Mac my thumb rests on the Command key.
I am using company provide rMBP for 2 years and I like to linux like terminal/bash, but otherwise I can't find any reason it is so revered.
Multi monitor support sucks so bad, I have to wiggle mouse few seconds at bottom of monitor before it is taken as active, but boy popup of active window still opens on 2nd monitor.
I minimize Firefox it goes down in Dock, now when I press Cmd+Tab, Firefox is in the applications list but the window doesn't comes back. I have to click on it with mouse to open it.
And maximize screen button now defaults to new full screen Desktop, which looks good if you use trackpad and swipe around, but with keyboard it adds no value, just distracts a lot, and apps like Chrome/Finder if I click option+maximize, they believe I want some sort of horizontal/vertical expansion.
/rant
Edit: Even greater WTF is dialog boxes, I use tab to focus on a button, press enter and viola the default action is taken, ignoring the keyboard focus, so if I don't want to save file, I have to use trackpad :|
tab keys is good, what I meant is if I close unsaved file in textWrangler, it shows `Do you want to save` dialog. I press tab to focus 'Don't Save' button, press enter, but instead of closing file without saving I get 'Save As' dialog since enter key ignores the current focus and always triggers the default action
It's not a bug, just an odd convention, like using Enter to rename files in Finder.
Space = focused button, Enter = default button. When a dialog is shown, the focus is never on the default button, so there are always two choices that you can make (Space/Enter) without using the mouse or the tab key at all.
> But I still feel Windows itself is not a productive OS. I'm big on keyboard shortcuts but MS is very much mouse based.
Maybe you should read the help file instead of going on "feelings". Every UI widget in Windows can be operated from the keyboard.
> Being required to use my pinky to try and hit CTRL instead of my thumb to hit COMMAND to do simple things like copy and paste is HUGE to me.
Oh come on. You're just making up reasons to dislike it at this point. "The shortcut key is a half-inch further away! THIS IS AMAZINGLY IMPORTANT MIND-BLOWING SUPER-FLAW!"
Actually I'm not making stuff up. I use to wear a fitbit charge hr and the first week I had to go back to using Windows you could see when I would get frustrated with Windows by my HR going up in the app.
And that was an example, not an exhaustive list. But honestly, yes the fact that the ctrl is so important to keyboard shortcuts on Windows but is in such a difficult (for me) position to get to is a big deal.
New tab, new window, find in page, open dev tools, and many many more, require using ctrl on Windows.
> I'm big on keyboard shortcuts but MS is very much mouse based.
I think the key you're looking for is the 'Alt' key. You'll find a lot of doors open up for you on Windows when you use it.
edit: just to clarify. If you see a menu or anything with a letter that is underlined, Alt + Letter will choose that target. In addition, pushing down Alt will sometimes show which menus have keyboard options.
>Being required to use my pinky to try and hit CTRL
I use Windows, OSX, and Linux fairly often (mostly Windows, then OSX, Linux here and there). For me, the most frustrating thing about Windows, a minor point but it bugs me, is that you can't remap the CTRL key without having admin rights.
This is a user-controlled preference the OS has in the box, in OSX and Linux distros I've used. On Windows, you need to edit the registry (!!) or use the SysInternals driver, which requires Admin rights. I haven't found another way to do it that doesn't require installing more software and/or admin rights.
I think Microsoft prefers to release somewhat new/unique designs (like the Surface Book).
A regular laptop from Microsoft might be redundant, since you can already buy lots of good MacBook Pro alternatives from other companies. (Dell XPS 13/15, Razer Blade / Blade Stealth, HP Spectre, etc)
Yep, can't wait for them to disrupt the whole bloatware-malware-and-lousy-drivers industry that is and has been Dell, HP, Lenovo etc.
Apologies to any of you who works for any of these, I understand that a number of you are most likely decent people but I am really tired of seeing new crawling slow pcs that becomes fast once you install a fresh Windows without bloatware.
edit: as pointed out below you do get a Surafce Dial with the purchase of the studio. I originally looked at the "what's included" section where the dial was not listed.
I see where you're coming from, but those aren't large screen devices.
Most games and movies are widescreen these days, and I see those as consumery activities. I think a significant amount of consumers would be annoyed by letterboxing in those use cases.
It's not really worth comparing costs until artists weigh in on the drawing capabilities of each piece of hardware. Wacom has had a corner on the market, and a lot of patents for a long time. I know comparisons of Surface Tablet vs. iPad Pro vs. Wacom still have Wacom coming out on top, but a lot of that could be because iPad Pro doesn't have access to the full software artists/designers need to do their job efficiently.
the surface (pro 3 and onwards) has an ever-so-slight delay compared to the cintiq and as i follow gabe it looks like it's something he has made his peace with.
some artists just absolutely cannot get used to it and so moving off to surface is not something they can do yet.
that's just the value prop of cintiq. the display may be crap but the drawing experience is by far and away the best in its class.
Thanks for sharing! I recall reading his Surface reviews previously. I appreciate his honesty, and Microsoft's willingness to tap into him for advice on their products.
I have the Surface Pro 3, and the recent battery issue[1] (that basically require SP3 to be plugged in all the time) still left bad taste in my mouth. If this was an isolated case, I probably wouldn't be too disappointed, but it affects everyone with the same battery model, and as of today, the problem is only half fixed[2]. Surface Pro 2 also starting to have the same problem[3].
Which is really a shame, because I really like the Surface form factor.
I'm not saying who is better, it's just that hardware products are really hard to get right, especially when quality is the metric. :(
Quality? No, this is the one place where Microsoft still falls down. There were a ton of problems with the Surface Book and SP4 (judging from internal Yammer discussions when I was there). Innovation? Yes! Now if Microsoft could just execute better, I wouldn't be so afraid of buying this (because I really want it!).
True, they still have problems. I was close to buying a Surface Pro this winter, but all of the people complaining about battery issues on reddit deterred me.
That's why I said "closing". These machines look like they had much more effort put into their design than what people think of when they think "Windows laptop" (a cheap, glossy, plastic piece of crap).
We're living in an era where Samsung is now grappling with widespread, catastrophic battery issues with their phones. It gets harder to design and ship computers at scale every day.
It was more about the GPU (dynamic switching is a b*tch, especially when coupling a discrete one in the keyboard with an integrated one in the display), and the old power management problems resurfacing again.
I really do want to get a SurfaceBook. Let's hope they've ironed out the bugs.
I just realized you were talking about the sp4, so that doesn't really apply.
I own a Surface Book, have since a month after launch last year. For the first six months it was so unreliable that I couldn't use it for anything. Crashes, docking issues, external monitor issues, trackpad issues, sleep/wake issues, just one damn thing after another. Things got better for a few months starting in June and it became my primary personal device -- just had another bout of frustration with a Windows update that could not complete but kept trying. I love the hardware, the experience has been the worst I can remember. Don't know if I have the patience for round two with a Surface Book 2
This is eerily similar to my experience with Surface Pro 3. I absolutely love the hardware, with the conditional statement that it doesn't work as advertised most of the time. Forced updates broke functionality...and the actual hardware failed: I got a touch dead-zone, but Microsoft gave me a complete replacement after a year (the customer service was exemplary)
My Surface Pro 3 has never felt reliable. I can't count on it working the same way one week to the next, which is unfortunate. I told a colleague this morning that I was surprised that the last two machines I really wanted were both Microsoft hardware (Surface Book and Surface Studio).
But I also won't invest in new Surface hardware until I see lots of user feedback.
It looks great!! But no ethernet port, only 4 USB3. Absolutely not enough for a high-end PC user. It's a bit pricey. Looking forward to see they sell the display apart.
Connections & expansions
4 x USB 3.0 (one high power port)
Full-size SD ™ card reader (SDXC) compatible
Mini DisplayPort
Headset jack
Compatible with Surface Dial on-screen interaction*
1 Gigabit Ethernet port
If you look at the "Compare Surface Models" section below the "Tech Specs" section, you'll see the following listed under Surface Studio in the last group titled Ports:
Four full-size USB 3.0
Ultra-High Speed Full-size SD card reader
Headset jack
Mini Displayport
Ethernet
How's that? I tried an surface pro a while ago and the touch screen worked fine. They had some issues to work around scaling, but iirc those are mostly sorted out.
I'm on a Surface 4 right now. Wife has a surface 3. The 3's never got sorted out (sleep of death, etc). The 4's have gotten better, but still are very buggy, especially if you try and dock with low-dpi monitors.
It's a shame because the performance and screen are stellar.
Microsoft has a bad track record with computers. There is no way to whitewash this or to think any other first generation hardware won't be fraught with problems.
I'm an avid surface user, which doesn't make sense because 90% of my tweet history is me yelling at Microsoft that a windows update is preventing me from giving a presentation, again.
So, as much as I love the platform, the issues for me are
1. Windows 10 updates are not sane. They do not schedule properly, and do not try to tell me otherwise because I have invested probably 40 hours total at this point trying to sanely schedule them. If you disable them, your build of Windows will go out of date and your machine will reset randomly until you turn them back on. Also, on a surface pro, updates take ~30 minutes to 6 hours. I joke not. So result: I'll roll into work at 8, have a presentation at 9, pop open the machine, and see "windows is configuring your update.... 39%" and know that I won't be working on that machine until after lunch. Maybe.
2. Random, impossible to track, unrelated bugs. Plugging in a second monitor causes all sorts of weirdness. It gets stuck in tablet mode. It'll refuse to go into tablet mode. The task bar will refuse to go away in fullscreen mode for some apps until a reset. It'll forget my office app credentials. Onenote will crash a hundred times. It'll soft-eject the microSD card randomly, but usually in the middle of a file transfer. Keyboard won't be recognized. Pen tip will fall out and they'll charge you 12 bucks for a replacement pack with 3 inside, 2 of which you'll instantly use.
I love the surface because it perfectly fits my needs, but damn do I also hate it.
Scaling for huge mainstream things are great. My biggest pains come from various Eclipse family IDEs and IDEs in general that do not scale icons at all so they're all incredibly tiny. That's not in Microsoft's hands though so I can't really blame them for it. It looks like Eclipse proper might finally have a fix so sometime in the next year or so maybe it'll come down to the various ones based on Eclipse.
You didn't try the Surface Pro long enough. I have Pro 4 i5 and it's been quite buggy (while it's awesome enough when it works so I don't mind since it seems to work most of the time).
The biggest issue for me is the battery. After filling it with juice it's down to bare minimum in couple of hours.
The second biggest issue for me is the windows update policy - I put the machine to hibernation, and when I come back the windows update has rebooted the machine and shut down my development environment.
The video at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-stud... is a bit more informative and shows the Surface Dial in action. I looks like the graphics from an old Blackberry this is the future video[1]. Very cool, since Microsoft's version makes sense and Blackberry's was confusing.
That dial is bizarre. I have two hands, why would I replace one amazing hand with a heavy, large screen obscuring piece of machined aluminum to do something that my hand could already do?
Haptic feedback. The implication in the videos is that people are often manipulating the Dials with their off-hands without needing to look to back at the Dial. It's like a well worn knob in your car you don't even have to glance at while you are driving.
Also the videos show it both on and off the screen as users have different needs to work with it.
I wasn't sold on it with the colour changing demos, that seemed a gimmick at best. The haptic feedback basically just makes it an on-screen mouse which is within easy reach, which is cool, you don't have to search for e.g. ctrl+z or a button off to the side to undo.
But what really got my attention was the ruler. That opens up a natural way of drawing lines which just work, as compared to either using an actual ruler on your tablet (which hopefully works), or selecting a line tool and guesstimating the line you want (which you then adjust afterwards) etc.
I'm looking forward to see what other uses for it they can come up with.
Nvidia GTX 9xxM - from what I understand 10xx cards offer the biggest difference in performance generation-to-generation seen in a while on the mobile side - the 10xx mobile versions are basically identical to desktop versions, 9xx are not even close - so why put last gen mobile tech in to a high end professional desktop product ? Especially considering the likelihood of VR proliferation in content creation - I couldn't justify buying this just because of that considering the price tag.
I was also wondering about that. They probably had to do a lot of customizations on the board to fit it in such a tiny place and cool it effectively. Designing such things can take quite some time. It is a shame, though
I imagine the protracted development time is at fault. The guy from Penny Arcade wrote a blog post where he said that he tried a prototype a year ago, so presumably this has been in development for at least a year and a half. Probably the 9xx was the best they had at the time and when the 10xx was released they were too far along in development to swap it out. The next one should have it though.
Surface Dial looks very, very cool. Innovation in the HCI space is greatly welcome. Could not find any info on whether you can use 2 at the same time. That could have some incredible applications!
I'm not sure why you need the world's thinnest LCD for a desktop, it's not like you'll be mounting it on a wall or something.
By the way, that presenter is a pretty good actor, but he was trying way too hard in a way that was distracting. The way he called out someone in the audience at one point made it seem like he has standup comedy experience and was trying to connect with the audience but it made no sense.
When he started introducing the Studio, he said a lot of words and by the end my first thought was he was just spouting buzz words and it didn't feel at all coherent or have anything to do with the product. It felt like he was just repeating words over and over again as a stall tactic to increase suspense.
Aka every Apple presentation ever. Those are filled to the brim with hyperbole ('magical', 'courageous', etc.) yet everyone somehow considers them the golden standard.
They're the least cringey maybe, I don't think anyone considers them to be high art or anything though (certainly not in the last 5 years). Large PR events for the mass media are always going to be at least a little cringey, no matter who's giving them. 'Courageous' is going to be used sarcastically for the next decade, no matter what computers people prefer.
I've seen lots of presentations from Android, HTC, Samsung, Apple and Microsoft and the cringe factor in these kind of presentations is always off the charts. It's like there's some weird corporate/cultish vibe they can't help but exude. Look at Terry Myers in the beginning of the presentation for example.
In contrast I've been very impressed with Panos, It's not Jobs level of being a natural but he's getting there. To me he comes off as authentic, passionate and knowledgable... though I agree the part of the presentation you mentioned felt a bit like pandering :) maybe he should dial it back just a tad
The two things that Macbooks have had over Windows laptops, in my opinion, is high resolution screens and a fantastic trackpad.
Windows laptops, even on the high end, still tend to screens no better than 1080p and crappy touchpads. My wife hates the touchpad so much she always uses a mouse and has the trackpad disabled.
I just got an HP Elite x2, which is basically a Surface Pro and I really like the pen and touch input. Apple pioneered touch on the iPhone, but continues to refuse to add it to <del>OS X</del> macOS.
So I've not tried enough windows touchpads to comment on that, but from what I've seen there's quite a few Windows laptops with higher res screens than 1080p
I didn't mean to imply that there are none. I meant that they are incredibly rare if you consider the number of Windows laptop models available. The vast majority have either 1366x768 (low end laptops) or 1920x1080.
sure, it's just that you said that even "high end" windows laptops didn't usually have better screens when from what I've seen pretty much all the top Windows laptop brands have high-end models with better screens.
A couple of years ago, sure Windows laptops tended to have terrible screens, but that problem seems (to me) to have largely been resolved these days, for high-end devices anyway.
> Windows laptops, even on the high end, still tend to screens no better than 1080p and crappy touchpads.
Touchpads is true since most manufacturers don't use precision touchpad.
But the screen issue is definitely not true in the high end. Too many touch-enabled 4k displays when you max out a high-end config from dell/hp/lenovo.
There are a lot of subpar Windows laptops out there, but there are at least some good ones to choose from.
Last year around Christmas, I picked up an Asus Zenbook for under $700CDN on sale. 3200x1800 touch screen, 8GB RAM, and a trackpad that works as well (to me, at least) as the one on my MacBook Air.
I was a little concerned that the Skylake Core m3 would be underpowered, but it hasn't felt slow during any of the dev tasks I've thrown at it. Benchmarks aren't always accurate, I know, but the ones I have run on both the Zenbook and my MBA show them to be about equal. It's not as fast as my 8 core, 32GB RAM desktop machine, but I don't expect it to be.
The HP Elite looks pretty neat. I'll have to try one next time I'm at the MS Store if they have one on display.
I can't but feel sad that Microsoft somehow is dropping the ball on mobile despite them having been, briefly, in a prime position to succeed. They've executed well with their "One platform"-strategy. UWP is great and with the new composition API their finally moving into being able to compete in the modern software arena. Meanwhile on the hardware side Panos is basically doing what Apple should have been doing if they had any creative leadership left... but it doesn't matter, for some reason they've seemed to abandoned mobile despite having all the pieces in place.
Their mistreatment, lack of support and quality assurance of the mobile side of the platform has been dismal. It's very weird, obviously they can do hardware, they have the ecosystem to back them up and the API teams have been doing some great stuff when it comes to w10, yet they've seemed to given up on mobile.
I must say I don't understand it, how can such a big player as Microsoft abandon such a strategic area of their ecosystem? I understand that it's hard to be a profitable in the harsh reality of consumer electronics and that the money is in business... but yet, if you're not in mobile you're leaving a gaping hole in your ecosystem that leaves the other parts vulnerable. I don't understand why they don't simple pour resources into mobile with the same enthusiasm as tablets/laptops and gaming.
Something must be off with the leadership or I'm missing something
They were in mobile from the beginning with Windows CE. Balmer thought the iPhone was a joke and they so they didn't try to adapt. By the time they did, Android and iOS had hundreds of thousands of apps. So they are in a catch-22, they can't gain marketshare because they don't have enough apps and no one will write apps for it because they don't have any marketshare.
I think their strategy so far is good. Get Windows working well on various form factors, move from Desktops to Laptops to full PC tablets. With those in place, they'll see developers writing UWP apps that will work not only on big screens, but can be scaled to smaller screens, giving them the apps they need to move down into the small tablet and phone spaces.
I so wanted it but waited and waited for a waterproof Nokia and then ended with a Sony Z series and later a Samsung something waterproof flagship.
Others waited for instasnapsomething but I almost can't care less I think as long as the platdorm has a couple of good alternatives for notes and calendar + Whatsapp and Telegram.
Now I almost feel bad for not supporting them. Who would have thunk for someone who used to despise all their products until some 4 years ago :-/ (since early 2000s).
This was very interesting back when the initial concept was shown. Turns out it was killed by MS because it didn't fit in with their Windows/Office strategy:
Developers won't optimize UX of their apps for phones, unless they'll see valuable target audience there. And this isn't going to happen without selection of new devices of market (their current best one is so inferior to iPhone 7, that the only excuse to buy it is the price). So what we'll get is a lot of ugly apps that barely work on small screens.
Don't forget though that these apps need to support split screen view and other things.
When you get down to it, at the more extreme ratios, split screen is just like a really, really tall phone, and developers are used to dealing with tall UIs on short screens (scrolling).
Microsoft were late to the smartphone OS market, but they were making headway. In 2013 they were back into double digit market share in many countries, and the numbers were heading in the right direction. Then Ballmer left, Nadella took over, and they just... gave up.
OK, so they still had a long way to go before they displaced Android. But iOS only has ~30% of the market, and nobody is suggesting Apple give up on mobile because they're not the dominant player.
In the 90s, Microsoft were notorious for entering existing markets, usually with a substandard product, then grinding their way to a leading position. Even if it took years, even if they lost a lot of money at first, and even it took a few product cycles for them to become competitive, they stuck at it, and it eventually paid off.
This strategy worked for web browsers, office software, and console gaming. Would it have worked for smartphones? Maybe, maybe not. But I'd argue the signs were positive, and that they gave up before we really got a chance to see for sure. I mean, they've kept Bing alive for years, despite only having made minor headway against Google, and web search being a far less existentially vital market to them than operating systems.
Now, the problem with Microsoft's current strategy is that consumer IT is heading towards smartphones being the only device most people ever own or use. Desktops, laptops and tablets are becoming niche devices in comparison. It doesn't matter how great your UWP apps are if 90% the market doesn't own or use a device that can run them.
>I mean, they've kept Bing alive for years, despite only having made minor headway against Google, and web search being a far less existentially vital market to them than operating systems.
Bing is necessary for their AI efforts. They need the knowledge graph to back up everything their AI touches (Cortana, Office, probably LinkedIn soon).
I had a Palm Treo - loved it but was happy the iPhone did everything my Treo did except (and I still miss this) the Palm feature of having a "home" area code - ie, when dialing, it tacked on my home area code on all 7-digit numbers (e.g. "415"). I even got bookworm game a year after I bought my iPhone.
I don't buy that, despite how much I hear it. there are a few situations I'd agree that if you don't have the first-to-market advantage you're basically fucked (social networking being a prime one, any system where network effect dominates). And while people cite apps as being the "network-effect-esque" factor in this case, I'm not sure I buy that. Looking at data of how many people NEVER use a single app, how many domains/specialties could use a "professional" phone without a broad app base, how many niches are untapped (constant laments from myself and others about how there are no small, robust, non-feature-obsessed "working mans smartphone") I truly believe there are ways into the market that are just fine to grow a sufficiently profitable business if you're simply OK with not trying to be the next iPhone RIGHT NOW. Maybe this ties back into the whole "vc doesn't want companies that _just work_, they want growth" mindset, but I fundamentally reject that as a philosophy so perhaps I'll never see eye to eye with the decision makers in this case.
(to clarify something for responders, all of the above is aligned as well with the implicit statement that you can't let investment slack; because then you lose your grassroots/what little mindshare you could have had to grow, take the above as "why I think a company should continue investment even in the current scenario")
I think the main thing holding MS back is that people are doubting their commitment to mobile. It's so weird, they finally clawed their way to a position where there most of the "must have" apps finally are on the platform (snapchat being the exeption) and then Microsoft went into a kind of "wait-and-see"-pattern where they didn't seem to want to over invest or put too much into it. The reality might be one thing but the perception of Microsoft right now in mobile is horrible.
I can kinda understand them wanting to stay silent until they have something substantial to announce after the Nokia transition... but they've been too slow and have almost lost all the momentum they had. And again, I see now reason why they should be acting like this except for short term gain over long term strategic benefits.
The problem with that philosophy is Microsoft already tried that path for years. Windows Phone 7, 7.5, 8, and 8.1 were all about "not everyone needs lots of apps" and "let's be awesome in ways uniquely different than iPhone". Microsoft's Lumia 640 was your "working mans smartphone", a small, robust, non-feature-obsessed phone that was silly cheap (roughly $100 US) and felt better designed and outperformed Android phones at the $300+
But the market didn't seem to care -- at least, not enough to justify Microsoft's spending. Perhaps now is different than 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015. But it sure feels like Microsoft already did exactly what your asking for, for many years before giving up.
Disclaimer: not a Microsoft employee, but owned and used a LG Quantum, Dell Venue Pro, HTC 8X, Lumia 900, and a Lumia 640.
You make a fair point; I don't make my observation from any internal knowledge, but from a perception of how the win-phone stood as an option during the time period you cite, namely that it didn't fit the needs I described. The lumia 640 was still larger, missing a removable battery, and very tied to the MS ecosystem; in that time period some of the early droids had these functionalities + the sliding keyboard + smaller form factor at a comparable price point. Now, that last point re: non-MS ecosystem may shoot my thesis in the foot from a pragmatic standpoint, but again, I'm talking "pipe dream getting foot into market" here.
I would emphasize my point re: less viable competition for the niche I'm describing though, since as you say "perhaps now is different"; I'm certainly having a much harder time finding my next phone upgrade that fits my criteria now than I felt like I had in 2009~ and in 2012~.
I dunno. Microsoft's problem is that they kind of seem to give up on a technology and let it wither away.
People were excited about it, it was making forward/upward progress for a few years. Microsoft bought Nokia, and people got even more excited.
Then what happened? Years passed with no flagship phone, literally no reason from me to move on from my Nokia 1020 because there was no hardware to move to. Then they announce that older models weren't getting the Windows 10 update, which was another nail in the coffin (not to mention a big "fuck you" to the fans that have stuck with Windows Phone this long). Now we're hearing basically... nothing at all about anything.
I loved Windows Phone 7 on my HTC Titan II, and I love Windows Phone 8 on my Nokia 1020. But unless a really killer new phone is in stores before January 1st, there's basically no way I can stick with Windows Phone for my next phone.
Arguably true. But the real problem is simpler: consumers don't trust MS.
You've inflicted too many false starts, bad products, update nightmares, u-turns, and unplanned obsolescences on the consumer market.
MS as a consumer brand has mostly negative/indifferent associations. You could build the best product in the world, but unless you can sell it in reasonable quantities and prove you're committed to supporting consumers no one - literally - will be buying it.
My experience of MS is that MS products are always broken in major ways. This has been true from MS-DOS onwards.
The most recent example: I've been using Office 365 on the Mac for more than a year, and there hasn't been a single release that doesn't have at least a couple of obvious problems.
Right now I'm looking at a handful of Word windows that are supposed be that corporate MS gray-blue, but which have random bright red corruption in the title bar.
I mean - how do you even do that? How do you, as a multibillion dollar company, have such amateurish QA that you can't produce a flagship business and consumer product without these kinds of spectacularly stupid bugs?
I have so many things to say in response to this (mostly not negative, actually, and I'm surprised this was so aggressively downvoted, likely because similar problems exist at most large companies?) but to try and both be concise and not overstep what I can say given my position:
Very simply, incentives are not aligned to produce the results you seek. There is some writing that explains the dynamic far better than I can (would heavily recommend Dan Luu's writing, especially normalization of deviance) if you want a window into some of the pathologies.
I can promise that engineers are "fighting the good fight", and I would encourage you to keep calling out when shit is broken despite the negative reception. This is one of the few paths I see to getting the needed alignment of goals to actually start internally prioritizing the stuff you call out.
(Aptly to this topic, I really loved the "errorsazurethrows" blog, it was a moment of brilliant vindication for someone who has both liked the underlying platform but railed against its often esoteric error/failure cases after years of having to use it as a primary tool)
I must say I've long abandoned any illusions of personality and values of big tech companies like Apple/Google/Microsoft, are any one of them better or worse than the other, more moral or less? It's all big companies, shareholders and bottom line, with perhaps the current leadership making a little difference how the company is run.
But companies are not people and we can't trust them as such, the larger the company the more that's the case. It's naive, unfortunately , to think differently.
I would still rate Microsoft QA above both Google and Apple. Google doesn't believe in QA, they trust automated testing implicitly, and have no preview cycle. The whole fast ring, slow ring, release preview cycle is fantastic as a thing, and knowing my Windows Mobile device is getting day one direct updates from Microsoft, despite being on Verizon's network, is key.
Microsoft has taken some of the wrong lessons from Google though, between forcing cumulative updates and collecting telemetry data. I really hope they figure out that they're losing out there. Being able to claim how many million minutes people were using Edge isn't worth losing so much customer trust.
Well, Microsoft is actively chasing consumers away. Proof: reneging on OneDrive offer to Lumia phone buyers, current lineup of two phones nearing end of production.
They want to be Oracle in place of ORCL, milking those big fat enterprise cows, and the stock market is nodding approvingly.
Good luck, godspeed, and thanks for the nice phones. Didn't last long, but was OK while it did. Designers never got any props, too.
"...there are a few situations I'd agree that if you don't have the first-to-market advantage you're basically fucked (social networking being a prime one..."
10 years ago there where a number of articles about how MySpace won the social media war. The current king of that particular hill did not have first to market advantage. Your argument is invalid.
I think you're reading too much into my argument. I never said you win _forever_ but that it's not worth trying to win market share iteratively when an incumbent with heavy network effects is already well serving your niche.
I'd argue myspace is a perfect example of this, largely due to when you look at when it was finally dethroned, it was VERY sudden, and came after years of the platform languishing from a user point of view. It took a hell of a lot of pain to push myspace past the point where the network effect could be overcome.
I love my Lumia 929, but Microsoft has essentially abandoned Verizon, so even I'm having a hard time staying here. (The idea that Microsoft is targeting professional users in the US without Verizon is COMICAL, since Verizon is the number one carrier for enterprise use. Selling to non-Verizon enterprises in the US is basically selling to a non-existent market.)
Windows 10 Mobile currently does have all the apps I need, but it seems very few people are willing to give up Google's apps (particularly Gmail and YouTube) to switch, and Google refuses to allow another competitor into the mobile space. As long as Google's monopoly persists, they'll decide who has a successful mobile platform.
The problem is that for a lot of us, some apps have become necessary for day-to-day life.
For example, I cannot get around without using Uber and Lyft. I need to carry a phone on me with these apps at all times. Windows doesn't support either of them, so I can't use a Windows phone until it does.
I'd love to use Windows on a phone -- I'm actually starting to fall in love with the new MS -- but I simply can't.
Uber's official app is available on my Windows 10 Mobile device. Just checked for you.
And it's not "Windows doesn't support either". It's "They don't support Windows". The platform does not have to do anything to support them, they need to choose to make apps for the platform. ;)
Huh, that must be a pretty recent thing. I remember checking a year or so ago and being disappointed that neither of them run on Windows. Thanks for letting me know it's changed.
Never say never. Apple was not in position to succeed in mobile (they were even not on the market at all, when there were Nokia and others). But now they have pretty big share. Despite the iPhone, Samsung was able to become the top smartphone maker. Chinese manufacturers like Xiaomi are the rock stars of today. There are always opportunities if you are ready to innovate.
Isn't the Surface "mobile"? I know you mean smartphones and tablets, but if they're capable of making a portable tactile device with a fully functional OS they should be able to one day easily port that to a screen with smaller dimensions.
Since the moment they started investing in hardware, they have always been capable of doing great smartphones. It's not the hardware part that is an obstacle. Probably it's the lack of determination to win.
As it stands right now, I can fire up Visual Studio and write a UWP app that'll run on phone, tablet, and desktop.
The problem is that hardly anyone is using Windows Phones, and the smartphone market is one that MS hasn't had much luck with. Maybe the rumored Surface Phone will help if it ever materializes, but I'm skeptical.
I was looking around for netbooks on the 300 € price range, on the shops around me they are all tablets with detachable keyboards running Windows 10.
Besides the Apple section with the iPad Pro, there were almost no hybrid notebooks with Android on sale besides a few Samsung models, all the other ones have been wiped out by such Windows 10 devices.
Out of curiosity, what's the use case for cheap win10 netbooks nowadays?
When I think of something that has a web browser and a keyboard, the low end of the market seems to be the current crop of Chromebooks, and schools seem to agree - they've been phenomenally popular in education.
Typical Win10 netbooks don't have a lot of CPU+GPU grunt, so it doesn't seem to me (maybe you'll correct me) like they'd be very good for running most Windows apps.
People that want a computer with a real OS instead of a browser window juggler.
I keep seeing references how the low end is using Chromebooks, but that seems to be an US phenomenon.
Here in Europe on the area where I live, I only ever seen Chromebooks on sale on a specific chain, and they are seldom there.
When they are, they always follow the pattern of being on sale with the usual Google price, people play with it, never being thrilled by it, the price slowly goes down every few weeks, it goes into shop "product of the day" offers, until eventually they get sold.
The market is the one of anyone that wants to use a tablet with keyboard, with a desktop experience when they need to.
Basically anyone that a few years ago would buy a netbook.
I know that this is definitely the case in Canada. In the US, I've been told that Chromebooks are everywhere in schools. From working with my local school board here (I'm in Canada), no one thinks deploying Chromebooks or using Google services in general is legally viable because we would be putting student data on US servers where it wouldn't be protected by Canadian privacy laws.
We don't use Chromebooks, but we don't end up using win10 netbooks either - it ends up being a combination of ipads and windows desktop PCs in classrooms.
Here in Germany I've never seen them particularly cheap. Which is too bad, since I was looking into throwing Linux on one and use it as a "lighter and a lot less expensive to loose" web machine.
Good to know, if I end up in one of their stores for some reason I'll keep an eye out just in case. At least with a Chromebook you know that there are drivers somehow, not so sure with ultra-cheap Win10 devices.
The market is the one of anyone that wants to use a tablet with keyboard, with a desktop experience when they need to.
I guess that makes sense, although I think we have a very different idea of what a "desktop experience" is.
Basically anyone that a few years ago would buy a netbook.
The conventional narrative is that tablets killed the eeepc/netbook. I didn't even know that this market still existed - I knew about Surface, but those start around the $900 mark.
My wife works at a small bridal shop. They are currently using HP stream 10 netbooks* to take orders while setting at a table with the bride/groom and family. The orders are stored on a desktop PC's hard drive where they are aggregated and sent to the vendors. I think that there are a lot of edge cases where you don't need a lot of processing power that netbooks excel at.
* I don't think they call the netbooks anymore, but effectively that is what I consider the HP stream devices. 32GB of non-upgradable solid state storage is all they have, and near half that is the OS install.
Windows 10 is a superset of ChromeOS and that makes it a great conservative choice for casual users.
They might need iTunes/Office/tax software/... in the future and Windows will have them covered, without buying another machine in the next 5-10 years. It's like a Swiss army knife for computing.
I just wish MS would either ease up on some of the restrictions on their UWP apps, or bring out a UWP adapted file explorer.
Right now you need to drop back to the "old" desktop file explorer (though ribbon seems to take some pain out of it once you bump the font size a bit), complete with all its UX gotchas thanks to the mouse assumptions.
This because UWP apps can only manipulate certain folders by default, and you have to authorize others (via the age old file picker dialog no less) manually. On top of that you can't launch a exe or similar from inside a UWP app.
I strongly agree with your sentiment. As a Surface Book and Lumia 950 user, I have watched the Surface product line receive good attention and necessary quality improvements. Meanwhile, the phone space is all but ignored, with a curious caveat: for whatever reason, Windows 10 Mobile continues to see gradual updates and improvements. The core applications (email, music player, browser, calendar) continue to improve. So I remain a Lumia 950 user because, frankly, it does everything I need a mobile device to do.
But I am an edge case and broadly speaking, people want much more glamour from their mobile phones. At some point a few years ago, I think Windows Phone was up to about 5% share but it seemed Microsoft's work on mobile was put into slow motion. It's no wonder share has decreased since.
Continuum is a very good idea, but the progress on making it solid, reliable, and high-performance is astonishingly slow. I don't know the technical realities of the Broxton cancellation, but that really put a big kink in the notion of a real, solid Continuum experience. For the time being, it seems Microsoft is just hoping that HP can explore Continuum innovation with devices like the Elite x3. Virtually no one has even heard of an Elite x3.
Windows phone fans have been absolutely clamoring for an ultra-high spec glamorous phone. I think this is an artifact of everyone knowing one of the key drivers of phone adoption: make devices that catch other peoples' eyes and force them to ask, "What is that?" Word of mouth is a key part of adoption. I know when I purchased one of the first Lumia 920s (you might remember them as the very colorful Windows Phones from a few years back), many people would ask me about it. The 920 was hardly a success compared to iOS and Android, but it was probably the most successful Windows 8 phone, and I think that's in large part to it being something that people noticed.
Evangelists of the Windows platform have been eagerly awaiting a Surface Phone because they know it would be such a device. It would be a conversation starter. And frankly, despite it being a hard hill to climb, Microsoft hasn't been trying on mobile for years. They're not even interested in starting the conversation.
And that's a bit boggling and frustrating. I know several people bored of iOS, uninspired by the iPhone 7, and similarly disenchanted with Android devices. These people aren't vocalizing the words as such, but they are open to something new. If by some magic you could drop a Surface Phone onto the market with a rock solid Continuum experience, and put serious marketing effort into it, I think you could earn back that 5% share, and then work to grow from there.
Yeah that's exactly the thing. There's always been something missing. In the beginning there wasn't any apps and hardware was lackluster, but at least Microsoft was putting everything into the platform. Then Nokia shined in knowing how to market a consumer device and make a brand out of Lumia... but still the critical apps were missing and Microsoft's many turns with OS'reboots created an platform that was always trying to catch up with themselves.
Now W10/W10m is basically everything we want it to be, I mean there's some amazing stuff in the new API's and composition API stuff but no one is using them. Continuum in theory could be a game changer. The concept with tiles despite being several years old now is still something that feels fresh and ahead of the curve compared to iphone and android. but Microsoft can't launch and market a flagship phone that pulls everything together.
Just make one gret flagship phone that says "We're in it to win it" and a budget phone that'll mop up the budget/mid-tier. We'll see, maybe that's what they're working on but time is running out
«for whatever reason, Windows 10 Mobile continues to see gradual updates and improvements.»
Well the big obvious thing is that this shows how the efforts put into making the UWP truly Universal seem to be playing out. Certainly a lot updates and improvements benefit every device and the low overhead benefits a "low usage" platform like mobile.
That said, I'm still kind of weirdly optimistic and I think this quiet, continual improvement really is a good sign. I know some criticism existed that Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 and Windows 10 Mobile were "half-baked" early/at launch, and there's an interesting question about how much Microsoft just wants the platform to "catch up" and "feel solid" before a bigger marketing push.
For instance, one thing that I think has unfortunately been under-cooked has been Windows 10's efforts in the People hub, especially given where Windows 8.1 eventually built up to before some of it getting broken up in 10. The new "My People" functionalities shown at today's event seems to prove that a lot has been going on that space and is due for the Creators Update. I was hoping they'd at least give us a small glimpse of the mobile experience for it, but I realize the gee whiz factor of showing it off on a desktop taskbar.
There was a definite signal in Microsoft only using an HP mobile device on stage. Could be Microsoft is confident in deeper OEM support for Windows mobile devices.
Because mobile operators in the US rule their kingdom. Unless you are willing to kowtow you get nothing. Apple lucked out that Jobs managed to get control from AT&T out of the gate, but they are the exception, not the rule.
Without the mobile operators pushing the platform in their stores, MS won't get any traction. And they aren't going to do that unless MS both fills the phone with bloatware, and makes the changes they demand.
As for their being a gaping hole in their ecosystem? How so? Their focus is on their cloud, they don't need to own the mobile device for their cloud to succeed. I would imagine 90%+ of the fortune 500 have iphones and droids happily grabbing email from office365 all day long.
What is going to set Microsoft apart in mobile at this point? The fact that you probably can't answer that is why Microsoft is still at the drawing board. One day they will return to the mobile world, probably next spring; but for now launching a good smart phone, even a great smart phone, that lacks the eco-system of Apple and Google is DOA unless it has something else appealing about it.
I suspect the "Surface Phone" will be announced next spring, and I'm sure Panay and his hardware team will knock it out of the park, but without Windows 10 Mobile catching up there's no point in releasing it even if it's the greatest phone hardware ever created.
Once the proper software that can set Microsoft apart is in place, it will strike. The smartphone market is so saturated right now they could catch everyone off guard and make a dent.
This. I think this is why they are pushing UWP and convincing more people to build apps for Windows 10 using it. If this strategy succeeds, they'd have everything in place for a relaunch. It would be so seamless for developers to support Windows 10 Mobile, they'd just do it.
Actually I strongly beleive the Linux subsystem in Windows 10 will be used on The next Windows Surface/Phone to accommodate Android apps and the android market. Then UWP will demonstrate its performance and Graphic API advantage. Hell Microsoft could even import android projects into UWP projects through the flexibility of CLI if they really wanted to.
Your suspicion is somewhat backwards: the Linux subsystem was built to accommodate Android apps. However, the decisions were made not to, excuse the pun, "Black-bury" the platform by directly supporting Android apps after all.
That's a pretty silly belief. MS failed at running Android apps. They also failed with their attempts to port iOS apps to their platform. In fact, all of those "bridges" have been burnt to the ground.
One more thing, Microsoft will never be able to use the Google Play store unless they make an Android device that passes all of Google's requirements.
That's a good question, and the mobile market is cutthroat when even companies like HTC/Samsung/Lenovo etc is struggling to survive.
However I think Microsoft has a lot of synergy good both on the gaming side with Xbox and on the business side with Office/Sharepoint/Outlook etc, not to mention that Windows still is the most popular OS.
Now I tend to agree with Nadella's "be everywhere"-strategy but that doesn't mean they can put everything into Microsoft services and software being the best on their own devices. I think the fact they're doing xbox games that are free to use on PC's is a good example of such synergy.
In the end selling hardware is never going to be what they earn money on, but rather they need to be a hardware actor so that they profit off their app store/software/services.
Is it possible that Microsoft ships an Android-based phone with Microsoft services plugged in? If it could run existing Android apps yet plug into Microsoft developer tools API for the future, that might work?
I don't think so, making hardware is not something you do for profit these days IMO. Only Apple has been able to do that and I think the days of their margins is coming to and end. The new way is simply being their in hardware to feed people into your ecosystem of software, services and app store... and there is no need for Microsoft to do that on Android.
That's some pretty optimistic thinking. Unfortunately, you just don't come back into a market after getting beaten badly and exiting with your tail between your legs. They have no developer support and UWP has, for the most part, been a failure if you judge its lack of adoption as a metric - where exactly are all of the UWP apps?
As for Microsoft "striking" when they get the software right - I couldn't tell if you were joking or not. There's nothing that Microsoft could ever announce that would ever make them relevant in mobile.
They can "do" mobile. For development purposes, I have equivalent priced 2016 devices ios / android and a 2015 Lumia 950. The 950 is by far the one I use for personal use (no it doesn't have pokemon go, no I do not care). I have a lengthy comparison of the three platforms typed into a txt file that I was thinking about sharing.
Whether they can successfully get mind / market share for mobile is probably another matter entirely, and I have no idea how that works.
Sure: (warning not really edited, and I don't expect everyone to completely agree on my ratings here, but yeah it is 'my' experiences)
Some random thoughts- for recent software development stuff, I have use of a iphone se / sony xcompact, and then I have my personal phone (lumia 950), so I think I can give a good cross-platform comparison for recent models of ios/android/windows.
1. Security / privacy: Lumia feels best for security then ios, don't feel that great about the android one, just based on reading the news. But you know, I guess the point of android is that you can root it and do crazy things if you are that kind of person - I personally used to enjoy this, but just prefer security recently. (Note that the fingerprint scanners on Sony / iphone are way more convenient than the iris scanner). See also point 4 w'r't' flashtool I had to use for android.
2. Ease of use: lumia is the easiest organization-wise, with the tiles, and I have trouble finding things on the other two- (screen size may play a factor)
3. Search: android (with homescreen search bar)/ lumia (cortana button) are about tied, se requires navigating to that left hand screen to search which takes a few more taps / swipes.
4. Configurability: for me this is somewhat backwards, although android is way more hackable / configurable, I actually like the Lumia's defaults, and the fact that I don't have to fiddle with them to get good results (e.g. it took me a while to find a good keyboard on android, including lots of installing / etc, and then find the right launcher, not to mention the incredible pain of installing UK firmware to get the fingerprint scanner working, which included downloading some sketchy flash program to my computer which I would normally never do). Ios also ok defaults, though I did spend a while trying to find a good keyboard (settled on wordflow lol).
5. Camera: megapixels actually matter- I can take a picture of mount Hood on both the Sony and Lumia and take one from the SE from the same location where it's completely impossible to see the mountain. Sony / Lumia about equivalent- I would say the sony has a 'tiny' bit more bright pictures, but I also have dropped the lumia in a river and the camera lense was all fogged at one point, so who knows if that had an effect.
6. Developers: Honestly I mainly use vs.code (react-native) for all of them and the experience is about equivalent. Maybe android gets a point since android studio works on both (edit: windows) / osx if I for some reason need to use it.
7. Maps: windows is a tiny bit more glitchy than the other two, but speed alerts make me prefer it (maybe there is a way in google/apple maps that I just need to fiddle around in some menus)
8. Apps: I'm not the best person to ask as I prefer browser for all things other than maybe enpass / skype / shazam / instagram / spotify which seem to be about equivalent on all- actually spotify is a bit smoother on android than the other two. There is one fitness app the iphone has that the other two don't have a good equivalent.
9. VPN (not sure if counts as apps or system function) but android / ios have apps for the VPN's I use while lumia does not (and I've only been able to get l2p working for these)- this surprises me, given that this is a business function.
10. Battery: (in use) xcompact + battery saver definitely wins here, iphone / lumia about tied. (Off battery saver, the xcompact is tied). However, the iphone definitely loses less battery overnight. I must note though, I've used the lumia battery far longer and more intensively at this point, and it is also replaceable compared to the other two.
11. Build quality: iphone obviously feels very premium with whatever material they use for the case. Lumia with plastic back feels more durable (indeed it has survived some abuse), also screen is beautiful. sony usb-c port already loose, but did...
I'm kind of sad that the top comment on HN is about a part of Microsoft that has nothing to do with this new and frankly exciting piece of technology =(
As for the "how can they", the answer is remarkably simple: it's hurting their bottom line and there's no indication that a better strategy exists in the markets they're active in. If you don't understand why they don't just pour resources into mobile: resources are finite, and Microsoft is not the powerhouse it once was. Budget is allocated based on return of investment, why invest in a segment that you can see failing year over year. The best call is to wind it down and make new and exciting things that people didn't even know they wanted instead.
This new Surface Studio is a remarkably good step in that direction.
I see your point, I think it comes down to if you believe a major actor like Apple/Google/Microsoft can afford to ignore mobile... I think it's too integral with their ecosystem, being present in mobile will bring more business to their other devices... but I can see the other POV as well.
Anyways, I'm really glad where they're headed with the Surface Books/Studio. It's been a little slow getting the next generation of windows apps/store going and this is a step in the right direction
> I think it comes down to if you believe a major actor like Apple/Google/Microsoft can afford to ignore mobile
I think it's important to note the distinction that they are seemingly ignoring this generation of mobile. Windows Phone has been a disaster and not for lack of trying on their part. The phones themselves have been mostly solid but it's hard to overcome the ecosystem problem. That said with the moves Microsoft has made over the last few years they are well positioned to be a major player in whatever the next iteration of mobile is. We've seen companies become major players and then all but disappear in the 10 years since the first iPhone kicked off the smartphone revolution. It's not to think that crazy that Microsoft might leverage some of their new input device knowledge to craft some new device that allows them to be major players in Mobile 2.0 or whatever you want to call it. If you believe that the current state of mobile HCI is the zenith then yes you are right to be concerned. But if you think we are going to keep pushing pass the status quo then Microsoft is probably is good shape.
Well, what are you thinking will replace it? We can all imagine glasses/brain plugs/löksoppa but even in our fast-paced world it feels like a paradigm shift away from the mobile factor is 4-5 years away... and an eco system/fan base isn't exactly something you easily kick start from scratch but rather migrate over from previous technology.
I think Windows Phone has been a disaster in many parts, but the actual ideas and UI has actually been one of the bright spots, especially considering iOs is still stuck in an icon springboard paradigm.
For sure it's a bloody fight but I don't think it's a battleground MS can surrender until the next thing comes around
I think they just try to capitalize on the fact that Apple is abandoning the desktop/productivity market and that might let them emerge as the high end reference, this time controlling the end-to-end user experience.
UWP is mostly a validation that Microsoft employs brilliant engineers. They took all the knowledge of their platforms over the years and condensed it into a unified story. For that, UWP works.
However, the same problem that plagues the Mac App Store, UWP code is sandboxed in weird ways that make it hard to just recompile your existing IP into the new environment. Plus Microsoft developer relations pushed C# as the defacto way to write apps targeting the platform, something that doesn't scale when you also need to support Android and iOS.
As far as mobile's concerned, it was continuously mismanaged, release after release.
* First they paid Seattle contractors to rewrite top-tier iOS apps for the original Silverlight C# version of WP and then dumped the resulting code onto the companies hoping they would continue the effort. I took a look at that code at the startup I was at at the time, and it was a mess, full of proprietary dlls that we couldn't even inspect.
* Second, they moved the kernel to Windows NT-lite from CE, meaning all the early adopters essentially got fucked over and it crushed early momentum.
* Third, Microsoft would go a year before announcing relatively inconsequential updates. (Oh that's nice that the same software will run on 512mb devices, is that what you spent the entire year working on?)
* Fourth, updates never seemed to hit devices, and the only way to get updates was with actual firmware. Android solved this problem by moving most of the interesting bits to the Play store.
Ultimately for a platform in 3rd place, Microsoft never gave the impression they were busting their butts to catch up. Everything seemed to move at a glacial pace and felt like run by a tiny greenfield team.
> Microsoft developer relations pushed C# as the defacto way to write apps targeting the platform, something that doesn't scale when you also need to support Android and iOS.
Actually, our company has an Android and iOS App written in C# with a 80-90% shared Codebase using Xamarin. It has been pretty awesome so far.
Yeah I wish more people realized that C# + Xamarin tools (that Microsoft now owns & is totally free with Visual Studio Community) making C# something that can take you cross-platform in the mobile space.
Also .NET Core now runs on Mac and Linux for the server OS code written in C#.
Then if you add Unity supporting C# on top of that for game/dev and I really can say that we're in a cross-platform world now :). But I am a bit biased since I work on these teams.
You make some good points, and some I didn't quite agree with. The notion that you could just recompile old win32 apps, while nice in theory is not practical IMO. Software has gone from being heavily GUI oriented (windows, dialogs, buttons) etc to converge into something between web and UI. I'd rather they make a clean cut with that past than incorporating it into the future. Also lots of new stuff like notifications, roaming notifications/settings etc are things that simply did not exist with traditional software. I do agree however that I miss some deep level win32/OS integration possibilities in the current UWP world, on the other hand there's lots of new cool stuff like App services, notification listeners etc.
I agree completely that a big problem was the constant reboots between Zune/silverlight/NT/Win10. They ended up where they needed to be but it certainly made things difficult for both developers and consumers, and lost them a lot of momentum
Supporting 512 mb devices was one of the biggest mistakes they ever made, the impact on that the development side was just devastating, for what, saving a couple of bucks in RAM memory?
I think it's hard to generalize the speed and pace of Windows Mobile overall, they put a lot of money and effort in it, and still is, but something definitively changed with the Nokia acquisition and/or Nadella taking over from Ballmer
As for updates I always got frequent updates (europe), the problem was more that their QA seemed substandard. Might be an american problem with providers like Verizon. They had an interesting strategy with their insider updates... which is nice in theory but it sometimes felt like they fired their QA team and put the burden of testing on their consumers, resulting in major bugs frequently getting through
Literally nobody bought the mobile side of their Windows platform. You have to kill your darlings, and Microsoft did it. They are now putting apps on other people's mobile devices, without having to compete in that space. It's a good move.
Microsoft was never in a prime position to succeed in Mobile. I'm not sure why you think this, but it's probably related to their European market share numbers that placed them close to iOS market share numbers in certain markets. What people, that use these insignificant metrics, fail to realize is that these market share numbers were composed of cheap devices that had very little, if any, margin. In fact, Microsoft was probably losing money by selling all of those cheap devices for less than what it cost to make them.
Microsoft lost Billions in mobile and never were able to gain any traction with their platform. There comes a time when you need to stop the bleeding and move on. Only a fool would continue pumping resources and money into a venture which has never returned a profit or market share.
Though we'll never know for sure, there's some conjecture that that Intel's cancellation of the Broxton smartphone chip in May torpedoed MS's plans for an x86 Windows Phone this year.
5/3/2016 - "Late on Friday night, Intel snuck out the news that it’s bailing on the smartphone market. Despite being the world’s best known processor maker, Intel was only a bit player in the mobile space dominated by Qualcomm, Apple, and Samsung, and it finally chose to cut its losses and cancel its next planned chip, Broxton."
As a side note, it's amazing to see that despite everyone ragging on apple and claiming superiority to them, they all copy their advertising style.
The copy on the google pixel site and this site are both very obviously apple-ish.
edit: down vote away, doesn't change the fact that these websites scream "we want to be apple". Though I will say, the tides are changing for apple judging by the amount of people hurt by this comment.
Even Apple's biggest detractors frequently, publicly give credit to Apple's marketing proficiency (heck, the most common thing for the biggest detractors to say is that Apple is all marketing.)
you mean the CGI flybys of the unit being virtually constructed? Yeah APple pioneered that idea, I actually didn't like that part of the surface PC promo.. Like who cares what the internal hinges look like!? They need to stop doing close flybys of irrelevant subjects
The usability portions of the video were awesome though
Exploded views are not something Apple invented or pioneered, they surely polished them to new marketing levels, yes. They are a staple for product designers, so Apple's Jony might have pushed for their repeated use.
I guess you are talking about the website? Because the product couldn't possible be more different than the iMac, if any the product feels like an iteration over the Dell XPS 27 line
yeah. I haven't used and won't probably use this device but marketing wise, it's exactly same as what Apple does. that makes sense to get downvotes though since 99% of this thread's audiences are Microsoft zombies :)
I am writing this on a MacBook Pro so I don't describe myself as a Microsoft zombie (I didn't downvote you either) and I find this machine way more appealing than an iMac.
I have a marketing filter in my mind so I couldn't care less about the design of the website.
true, a friend of mine is using Surface 4 and he's really happy. as I said, I'm not sure how good or bad this device is but at least marketing wise, they are doing exactly same as Apple.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 334 ms ] threadIt protects from toolbars, addons and other bundlewares of free software.
It is no longer the platform of choice for creative content creation.
Plus most of the interface feels unnatural to use, at least for Apple Music and the Store.
Indeed. iTunes has become so bad I bit the bullet and signed up for Roon - despite its eye watering price. It's a vastly better (and of course in some other ways inferior) alternative.
One thing which I like about Roon and indeed a lot of 3rd party software from smaller companies is that I can talk to the devs and product managers on the community forums and find out where the product is headed or make suggestions and get feedback.
As far as iTunes goes, I have no idea where in the hell it's going. It went from a music manager to an eBooks platform, an App Store and now a Spotify clone.
Good time to be a software company specialising in catering to the disgruntled user who wants something a little more sophisticated than what Apple's currently selling.
Not sure if anyone listened to Satya's closing comments but they sounds eerily similar to something Jobs would say.
Either way, good for Microsoft on putting out a product for the high end creative segment.
XCode & iOS development is going to keep me on Apple for now, though, but the Linux subsystem for Windows is really appealing. The BSD Unix environment is the whole reason I went with Apple in the first place. OS X is basically a Unix workstation & perfected anything the Linux desktop wanted to be.
Surprised MS went with nVidia 980s instead of 1080s, & Win 10 still a little clunky compared to OS X.
It's not even 980, its 980m which is significantly slower than 980, nevermind 1080. And the 980m only comes in the $4199 option, that's ridiculous...
iMacs and Macbook Pros (top of the line 15-inch with dGPU) have always used mobile GPUs. Also, illustrators/designers don't need dGPUs. That's why the designers/illustrators at hte tech companies that you work at can use macbook 13 inch laptops and 15-inch laptops without the dGPUs
In theory. To anyone who feels that way, please try it out for yourself before making a leap. I thought it would let me develop Ruby on Rails under Windows like I could do on Linux or macOS. I discovered a whole bunch of unimplemented features that prevented this. After a couple of months of commenting on bug reports and watching and trying, I gave up. I'll check back later. YMMV.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247.aspx
As for soft links, a lot of linux tools create soft links (ln -s from to) and generally that fails on NTFS (I tried installing a bunch of npm modules and all had this specific issue)[1].
[0] - https://mspoweruser.com/ntfs-260-character-windows-10/
[1] - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8232778/nodejs-npm-insta...
With respect to symlinks - NTFS supports them, but there are subtle semantic differences with POSIX. WSL does actually support symlinks (i.e. you can do ln -s), it's various other behavior around them that breaks, like trying to untar a file that contains symlinks.
The team said that they're working on a custom implementation of symlinks that would provide proper behavior (but wouldn't be seen as a symlink from Win32).
Now, Microsoft should be in a position to put something better into their WSL, but that might entail the risk that someone else will hack that implementation and provide good drivers for everyone, something they clearly don't want (or they would have provided open specs for NTFS support by now).
So there's no ext4 driver, and no concept of loopback mounts.
I see that there's considerable demand for this exact thing in their bug tracker already. If they go for a low-hanging fruit here, it'd be FUSE support - and that should give us ext2, at least.
I'd be very interested in a blog post about your problems and I don't think I'm alone.
I couldn't cross compile simple toy kernel (xv6) in OS X (because I needed to have i386-elf-gcc, which need to compile whole binutils , which really cumbersome, and brew doesn't support it -as far as I looked into it ) but in BashOnWindows , it just works, it maybe a little slow (specially file system operations) but it works like charm. I actually tried to compile linux kernel and running it on qemu, It worked, but compilation (which is a lot of file system operation) was so slow it hadn't worth it.
Nadella (MS CEO) aimed perfectly, instead of introducing some limited amount of support for linux apps, his company tries to port whole ubuntu user space. After this project matures enough, rest assured, it will be equivalent of using linux workstation (which is dream of most developers).
> After this project matures enough, rest assured, it will be equivalent of using linux workstation
Didn't Microsoft say WSL wouldn't support graphical apps? That's a big portion of userspace; and without that, it simply can't be a linux workstation
When it works, it's great, but some things just don't work and you're stuck.
I've found the WSL devs to be fairly responsive, but not to everything.
However, I've found open source projects to be pretty responsive to bug reports of their projects running on WSL; it's far easier for them to support that than support a native windows build.
There are often workarounds for issues, but their coverage is certainly not where we would all like it to be yet.
I'm not very familiar with OSX, but I'd be surprised if there weren't differences between it and mainline Linux that needed special care and I see this as similar.
Despite being a software company (or because of it), I think innovating on the internals of Windows and its APIs and cleaning house on the software front will be the real challenge for them - making incredibly beautiful hardware might prove to be the easy part!
Exactly. How do they not know this ? Or, why do they not care ?
There is one big huge reason that "smart people" switched to OSX and the computers that ran it and that institutional knowledge appears to have evaporated at Apple.
When you know your core, core base is here for the UNIX, you don't take away the escape key ... or keep breaking and re-breaking crontab ... or introduce the weird-stuff-I-can't-do-even-as-root.
I thought nobody anymore believed in this after the first versions came out and people actually had a chance to try it in action. There are endless amounts of bugs, unimplemented features, complications between 2 filesystems, permissions, applications etc.
When MS announced this I was pretty hopeful. Not that I would change my dev-computer from way superior macOS to Windows, but that when I'm at home gaming on my Windows PC and I get some cool idea, I could do some small development or create simple prototypes without changing from my desktop to my laptop. After trying it out for real I don't belive anymore this "linux" subsystem thingy is ever going to be anything more than niche PoC.
Unless you need to pass a directory path.
Windows NT has done a good job supporting multiple APIs/subsystems in the past. Windows NT for example does a perfectly good job with the Win32 subsystem - software targeting Win32 for '95, '98, etc. still works on Windows 10, perfectly, despite being a totally different kernel.
People don't buy Macs because they work well with an iPhone as far as I can tell. They buy Macs for all sorts of other reasons, but that doesn't seem to be one of them.
Every corporate office in the world is running Windows. I'm pretty sure people are going to continue buying whatever they use at work, so unfortunately for HN, Windows is here to stay...(sorry!)
While many companies do use Windows, many others do not, including some very large ones. You think they are using Windows at Apple? That's the world's most valuable company and they have 70000 employees. What about Google? It's another huge company with tens of thousands of employees and you have to beg for permission to run Windows there, and very few do so.
I think Windows has a lock on mid-sized businesses that are large enough to have serious information management challenges, but aren't big enough to solve them. Outside of that zone it is by no means universal.
I'd say that outside of your two examples, you'd be hard-pressed to find a Fortune 500 company that doesn't have >90% of its corporate fleet (not servers) being Windows boxes.
See: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/7/8/capitulation http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/11/7/mobile-ecosyste...
Any additional computer purchase is some kind of conscious choice, and people will default to what they are familiar with. I.e. iOS and Android. This is a big hurdle for microsoft to overcome to convince anyone to buy a computer from them. That's my point, and I think it will be very difficult for them to accomplish at scale.
1: https://affinity.serif.com/fr/windows/ 2: https://www.figma.com/downloads
That is what I came here to say (as a mac user who uses only apple computers, currently[1]).
See this animated gif from the article:
https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/kFQXkfWYVYCRnSfXpAhRBTVXH4M...
Now ... I don't know what that's about and I am pretty sure that's an action I will never use, but that's something new and interesting. That's innovation.
[1] 11" macbook air, mac mini HTPC and 2009 mac pro as primary desktop
Obviously video editors use them, but I know of professional photographers who find them really useful in moving through a catalogue while editing photos too.
Quick, someone page Apple because Mac sales are declining even faster than the market. Surely they have to do something, that's the only possible motivation /s
Seems like it would have died off as a huge blundering $10k per table mess by Microsoft. Or as a badly thought out Windows RT Surface tablet. I would have liked another Surface table (one that actually got better support than a few WPF/Windows widgets) but I'd say now Surface is a huge brand for Microsoft with laptops/desktops.
In fact, there's a fairly close parallel between the broadening of the two brands between the two since Surface was originally the brand for devices incorporating Pixelsense, which was the brand attached to the combination of particular UX technologies, including the camera-based object recognition.
Can we please stop with the comparisons in the other comments to Apple please? :) You'd swear they were the only other tech company in existence. Sheesh, it's like living in a bubble.
I wish Microsoft success with this, and I hope they continue to open source their software offerings and keep opening up their hardware technical specifications. We really need Microsoft to remain an innovative and cooperative part of the community.
Microsoft cannot outcompete Linux, not in the long run, it's impossible. I know it may not seem possible right now but I reckon in the future Windows will have maybe 10% of the desktop OS market, Apple will have 10%, and Linux will have 80% split between different flavours: Google, Amazon, Canonical, Samsung, HTC, Xiaomi, whoever wants in basically. When that happens Microsoft needs to have a lot of hardware/software combos on offer, phones, tablets, laptops, all-in-ones, consoles, media boxes, you name it, with tight integration. It's entirely possible given the direction Google is heading that they'll fork Android/ChromeOS. Don't think it is possible? It'll happen. Chromebooks already outsell Macs in some locales: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/23/chromeboo.... I guarantee within five years there'll be a version of Microsoft Office for some flavour of desktop Linux.
Went on a _bit_ of a sidetracked ramble there. Anywho, neato hardware offering Microsoft!
edit: if you asked me 5 years ago if I would ever be happy with Microsoft, I would have laughed.
This is highly subjective, but my experience running Windows on Mac hardware was that they felt snappier than OSX on the same machine.
I only wish Apple would open source BootCamp and allow others to try and fix the few issues that it still has, namely around battery consumption. Highly unlikely they would ever do that, but one can dream.
That said, ever since the Intel firmware fixes addressing the power management issues, the Surface Book has been the perfect general purpose mobile computer for me. Crisp screen, solid keyboard, long battery life, lightweight, and the stylus has been sufficient for replacing good ol' pen and paper when I need to scratch out some math for my occasional graphics programming hobby work. (I have a dedicated GPU model.)
It's the first new computer I've bought in 4 years, so despite paying over $2000 for it, I'm quite happy with the value I've gotten.
DPI oddness (moving between low DPI external monitor and high DPI internal one triggered it) seems much less now.
But I still feel Windows itself is not a productive OS. I'm big on keyboard shortcuts but MS is very much mouse based. Being required to use my pinky to try and hit CTRL instead of my thumb to hit COMMAND to do simple things like copy and paste is HUGE to me.
I didn't use a Windows machine for 3 years and when I did need to use Windows again it was extremely frustrating. I remember switching from Windows to OSX and it felt more natural.
Anyway, MS is definitely making some cool stuff and I like the direction they're going. But I'm still not ready to go back.
I rarely use the mouse on windows, I think it's just a matter of familiarization on both OSes.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/126449
Incorrect. You can operate the entirety of Windows with just the keyboard.
Please tell me what you cannot do with the keyboard in Windows and I'll straighten you out.
OS X/macOS is definitely worse with regards to keyboard acceleration. For instance, here's a glaring omission on Apple's part: try opening any window from the menu bar (e.g. the BetterSnapTools preferences dialog) then switch away from it with ALT+TAB and you'll be unable to switch back to it.
FYI, I'd never heard of this shortcut before but just tried it in the Finder and it worked just fine (to toggle visibility of invisible files).
IMO they were fewer and less consistent than Windows and Linux shortcuts at the time and a huge disappointment.
(Example: no consistent way of selecting from cursor to end of line - there was no end button and which modifier to use varied with the application you used...! I have joked that the superior touchpad on the Mac is an adaptation to make it usable despite its inconsistent keyboard shorcut handling.)
cmd+shift+right-arrow. I've once had to use an app in which it didn't work - the developer was using the shortcut for cycling between tabs. But it definitely works in all the apps I use right now.
I still love the keyboard shortcuts on macOS. My favourite is alt+<any function key> to open the respective section in System Preferences. Hard to discover (like most shortcuts) but also really hard to forget about.
Cmd-shift-right arrow. There are others, but that's the one I use and I don't recall it ever not working.
I've also seen some keyboard shortcuts not mapped properly in Firefox and Chrome. e.g. in the Chrome console the home and end keys don't work as expected under macOS
I always assumed these were cross-platform library issues but I don't know for sure.
Perhaps it's a question of muscle memory and discoverability? I love spotlight, and installed magnet (http://magnet.crowdcafe.com/), and slowly getting there.
The issue isn't that the MS shortcuts for things are any better or worse, it's just that you're not used to hitting CTRL. As a developer, my pinky basically rests on the CTRL by default when I'm on a windows system. When I'm on a Mac my thumb rests on the Command key.
I've tried it.
Multi monitor support sucks so bad, I have to wiggle mouse few seconds at bottom of monitor before it is taken as active, but boy popup of active window still opens on 2nd monitor.
I minimize Firefox it goes down in Dock, now when I press Cmd+Tab, Firefox is in the applications list but the window doesn't comes back. I have to click on it with mouse to open it.
And maximize screen button now defaults to new full screen Desktop, which looks good if you use trackpad and swipe around, but with keyboard it adds no value, just distracts a lot, and apps like Chrome/Finder if I click option+maximize, they believe I want some sort of horizontal/vertical expansion.
/rant
Edit: Even greater WTF is dialog boxes, I use tab to focus on a button, press enter and viola the default action is taken, ignoring the keyboard focus, so if I don't want to save file, I have to use trackpad :|
http://osxdaily.com/2010/02/26/use-the-tab-key-to-switch-bet...
Space = focused button, Enter = default button. When a dialog is shown, the focus is never on the default button, so there are always two choices that you can make (Space/Enter) without using the mouse or the tab key at all.
Maybe you should read the help file instead of going on "feelings". Every UI widget in Windows can be operated from the keyboard.
> Being required to use my pinky to try and hit CTRL instead of my thumb to hit COMMAND to do simple things like copy and paste is HUGE to me.
Oh come on. You're just making up reasons to dislike it at this point. "The shortcut key is a half-inch further away! THIS IS AMAZINGLY IMPORTANT MIND-BLOWING SUPER-FLAW!"
And that was an example, not an exhaustive list. But honestly, yes the fact that the ctrl is so important to keyboard shortcuts on Windows but is in such a difficult (for me) position to get to is a big deal.
New tab, new window, find in page, open dev tools, and many many more, require using ctrl on Windows.
I think the key you're looking for is the 'Alt' key. You'll find a lot of doors open up for you on Windows when you use it.
edit: just to clarify. If you see a menu or anything with a letter that is underlined, Alt + Letter will choose that target. In addition, pushing down Alt will sometimes show which menus have keyboard options.
I use Windows, OSX, and Linux fairly often (mostly Windows, then OSX, Linux here and there). For me, the most frustrating thing about Windows, a minor point but it bugs me, is that you can't remap the CTRL key without having admin rights.
This is a user-controlled preference the OS has in the box, in OSX and Linux distros I've used. On Windows, you need to edit the registry (!!) or use the SysInternals driver, which requires Admin rights. I haven't found another way to do it that doesn't require installing more software and/or admin rights.
A regular laptop from Microsoft might be redundant, since you can already buy lots of good MacBook Pro alternatives from other companies. (Dell XPS 13/15, Razer Blade / Blade Stealth, HP Spectre, etc)
Apologies to any of you who works for any of these, I understand that a number of you are most likely decent people but I am really tired of seeing new crawling slow pcs that becomes fast once you install a fresh Windows without bloatware.
Product Page: https://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/Surface...
*Surface Dial included
edit: as pointed out below you do get a Surafce Dial with the purchase of the studio. I originally looked at the "what's included" section where the dial was not listed.
This really just shows you what a bargain the 5K iMac is.
Microsoft has plenty of partners to compete with the iMac. Now those partners can look into the Surface Studio as something to aspire to.
Not refuting your implication necessarily, but worth knowing their flagship (standard and high-end) devices have been 3:2.
Most games and movies are widescreen these days, and I see those as consumery activities. I think a significant amount of consumers would be annoyed by letterboxing in those use cases.
All the creative people I know said Cintiq set the bar, looks like MS is making a square aim at that market.
some artists just absolutely cannot get used to it and so moving off to surface is not something they can do yet.
that's just the value prop of cintiq. the display may be crap but the drawing experience is by far and away the best in its class.
I have the Surface Pro 3, and the recent battery issue[1] (that basically require SP3 to be plugged in all the time) still left bad taste in my mouth. If this was an isolated case, I probably wouldn't be too disappointed, but it affects everyone with the same battery model, and as of today, the problem is only half fixed[2]. Surface Pro 2 also starting to have the same problem[3].
Which is really a shame, because I really like the Surface form factor.
I'm not saying who is better, it's just that hardware products are really hard to get right, especially when quality is the metric. :(
[1]: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/forum/surfpro3-s...
[2]: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/forum/surfpro3-s...
[3]: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/forum/surfpro2-s...
That's why I said "closing". These machines look like they had much more effort put into their design than what people think of when they think "Windows laptop" (a cheap, glossy, plastic piece of crap).
I really do want to get a SurfaceBook. Let's hope they've ironed out the bugs.
I just realized you were talking about the sp4, so that doesn't really apply.
My Surface Pro 3 has never felt reliable. I can't count on it working the same way one week to the next, which is unfortunate. I told a colleague this morning that I was surprised that the last two machines I really wanted were both Microsoft hardware (Surface Book and Surface Studio).
But I also won't invest in new Surface hardware until I see lots of user feedback.
http://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/10/26/13380462/m... http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/microsoft-announces-s...
I wonder how well VST synth modules work on it? I like my iPad synth toys, but they are not compatible with Mac.
Frankly it looks amazing.
It's a shame because the performance and screen are stellar.
Microsoft has a bad track record with computers. There is no way to whitewash this or to think any other first generation hardware won't be fraught with problems.
My advise is wait.
So, as much as I love the platform, the issues for me are
1. Windows 10 updates are not sane. They do not schedule properly, and do not try to tell me otherwise because I have invested probably 40 hours total at this point trying to sanely schedule them. If you disable them, your build of Windows will go out of date and your machine will reset randomly until you turn them back on. Also, on a surface pro, updates take ~30 minutes to 6 hours. I joke not. So result: I'll roll into work at 8, have a presentation at 9, pop open the machine, and see "windows is configuring your update.... 39%" and know that I won't be working on that machine until after lunch. Maybe.
2. Random, impossible to track, unrelated bugs. Plugging in a second monitor causes all sorts of weirdness. It gets stuck in tablet mode. It'll refuse to go into tablet mode. The task bar will refuse to go away in fullscreen mode for some apps until a reset. It'll forget my office app credentials. Onenote will crash a hundred times. It'll soft-eject the microSD card randomly, but usually in the middle of a file transfer. Keyboard won't be recognized. Pen tip will fall out and they'll charge you 12 bucks for a replacement pack with 3 inside, 2 of which you'll instantly use.
I love the surface because it perfectly fits my needs, but damn do I also hate it.
The biggest issue for me is the battery. After filling it with juice it's down to bare minimum in couple of hours.
The second biggest issue for me is the windows update policy - I put the machine to hibernation, and when I come back the windows update has rebooted the machine and shut down my development environment.
1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1KLm4SErdQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzMLA8YIgG0
Looks amazing.
Edit: See also:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMklcdzcNcU
Also the videos show it both on and off the screen as users have different needs to work with it.
But what really got my attention was the ruler. That opens up a natural way of drawing lines which just work, as compared to either using an actual ruler on your tablet (which hopefully works), or selecting a line tool and guesstimating the line you want (which you then adjust afterwards) etc.
I'm looking forward to see what other uses for it they can come up with.
Yea for me this is a skip until they update the hardware - it's just too expensive to have to replace in a year.
https://griffintechnology.com/us/powermate
By the way, that presenter is a pretty good actor, but he was trying way too hard in a way that was distracting. The way he called out someone in the audience at one point made it seem like he has standup comedy experience and was trying to connect with the audience but it made no sense.
The presentation was a ton of fluff.
In contrast I've been very impressed with Panos, It's not Jobs level of being a natural but he's getting there. To me he comes off as authentic, passionate and knowledgable... though I agree the part of the presentation you mentioned felt a bit like pandering :) maybe he should dial it back just a tad
That's not an actor by the way. It's Panos Panay, who leads Microsoft's devices team.
Acting != make believe. The dude was hamming it up to the point that he seemed like a caricature of a product announcement.
Windows laptops, even on the high end, still tend to screens no better than 1080p and crappy touchpads. My wife hates the touchpad so much she always uses a mouse and has the trackpad disabled.
I just got an HP Elite x2, which is basically a Surface Pro and I really like the pen and touch input. Apple pioneered touch on the iPhone, but continues to refuse to add it to <del>OS X</del> macOS.
e.g.
Dell XPS 13 - can have a 3200x1800 screen
Lenovo Carbon X1 - can have a 2560x1440 screen
HP Elitebook G3 - Can have a 2560x1440 screen
Microsoft surface book - 3000x2000 screen
Microsoft Surface Pro 4 - 2736 x 1824 screen
A couple of years ago, sure Windows laptops tended to have terrible screens, but that problem seems (to me) to have largely been resolved these days, for high-end devices anyway.
Touchpads is true since most manufacturers don't use precision touchpad.
But the screen issue is definitely not true in the high end. Too many touch-enabled 4k displays when you max out a high-end config from dell/hp/lenovo.
Last year around Christmas, I picked up an Asus Zenbook for under $700CDN on sale. 3200x1800 touch screen, 8GB RAM, and a trackpad that works as well (to me, at least) as the one on my MacBook Air.
I was a little concerned that the Skylake Core m3 would be underpowered, but it hasn't felt slow during any of the dev tasks I've thrown at it. Benchmarks aren't always accurate, I know, but the ones I have run on both the Zenbook and my MBA show them to be about equal. It's not as fast as my 8 core, 32GB RAM desktop machine, but I don't expect it to be.
The HP Elite looks pretty neat. I'll have to try one next time I'm at the MS Store if they have one on display.
Their mistreatment, lack of support and quality assurance of the mobile side of the platform has been dismal. It's very weird, obviously they can do hardware, they have the ecosystem to back them up and the API teams have been doing some great stuff when it comes to w10, yet they've seemed to given up on mobile.
I must say I don't understand it, how can such a big player as Microsoft abandon such a strategic area of their ecosystem? I understand that it's hard to be a profitable in the harsh reality of consumer electronics and that the money is in business... but yet, if you're not in mobile you're leaving a gaping hole in your ecosystem that leaves the other parts vulnerable. I don't understand why they don't simple pour resources into mobile with the same enthusiasm as tablets/laptops and gaming.
Something must be off with the leadership or I'm missing something
I think their strategy so far is good. Get Windows working well on various form factors, move from Desktops to Laptops to full PC tablets. With those in place, they'll see developers writing UWP apps that will work not only on big screens, but can be scaled to smaller screens, giving them the apps they need to move down into the small tablet and phone spaces.
I so wanted it but waited and waited for a waterproof Nokia and then ended with a Sony Z series and later a Samsung something waterproof flagship.
Others waited for instasnapsomething but I almost can't care less I think as long as the platdorm has a couple of good alternatives for notes and calendar + Whatsapp and Telegram.
Now I almost feel bad for not supporting them. Who would have thunk for someone who used to despise all their products until some 4 years ago :-/ (since early 2000s).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlpftPSuXe4
If they had managed to get something like that out that would have helped them a lot.
https://www.cnet.com/news/the-inside-story-of-how-microsoft-...
When you get down to it, at the more extreme ratios, split screen is just like a really, really tall phone, and developers are used to dealing with tall UIs on short screens (scrolling).
OK, so they still had a long way to go before they displaced Android. But iOS only has ~30% of the market, and nobody is suggesting Apple give up on mobile because they're not the dominant player.
In the 90s, Microsoft were notorious for entering existing markets, usually with a substandard product, then grinding their way to a leading position. Even if it took years, even if they lost a lot of money at first, and even it took a few product cycles for them to become competitive, they stuck at it, and it eventually paid off.
This strategy worked for web browsers, office software, and console gaming. Would it have worked for smartphones? Maybe, maybe not. But I'd argue the signs were positive, and that they gave up before we really got a chance to see for sure. I mean, they've kept Bing alive for years, despite only having made minor headway against Google, and web search being a far less existentially vital market to them than operating systems.
Now, the problem with Microsoft's current strategy is that consumer IT is heading towards smartphones being the only device most people ever own or use. Desktops, laptops and tablets are becoming niche devices in comparison. It doesn't matter how great your UWP apps are if 90% the market doesn't own or use a device that can run them.
Bing is necessary for their AI efforts. They need the knowledge graph to back up everything their AI touches (Cortana, Office, probably LinkedIn soon).
Late? They were among the first. I also remember Danger OS. Oh - and the Palm Treo.
I don't buy that, despite how much I hear it. there are a few situations I'd agree that if you don't have the first-to-market advantage you're basically fucked (social networking being a prime one, any system where network effect dominates). And while people cite apps as being the "network-effect-esque" factor in this case, I'm not sure I buy that. Looking at data of how many people NEVER use a single app, how many domains/specialties could use a "professional" phone without a broad app base, how many niches are untapped (constant laments from myself and others about how there are no small, robust, non-feature-obsessed "working mans smartphone") I truly believe there are ways into the market that are just fine to grow a sufficiently profitable business if you're simply OK with not trying to be the next iPhone RIGHT NOW. Maybe this ties back into the whole "vc doesn't want companies that _just work_, they want growth" mindset, but I fundamentally reject that as a philosophy so perhaps I'll never see eye to eye with the decision makers in this case.
(to clarify something for responders, all of the above is aligned as well with the implicit statement that you can't let investment slack; because then you lose your grassroots/what little mindshare you could have had to grow, take the above as "why I think a company should continue investment even in the current scenario")
I can kinda understand them wanting to stay silent until they have something substantial to announce after the Nokia transition... but they've been too slow and have almost lost all the momentum they had. And again, I see now reason why they should be acting like this except for short term gain over long term strategic benefits.
But the market didn't seem to care -- at least, not enough to justify Microsoft's spending. Perhaps now is different than 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015. But it sure feels like Microsoft already did exactly what your asking for, for many years before giving up.
Disclaimer: not a Microsoft employee, but owned and used a LG Quantum, Dell Venue Pro, HTC 8X, Lumia 900, and a Lumia 640.
I would emphasize my point re: less viable competition for the niche I'm describing though, since as you say "perhaps now is different"; I'm certainly having a much harder time finding my next phone upgrade that fits my criteria now than I felt like I had in 2009~ and in 2012~.
People were excited about it, it was making forward/upward progress for a few years. Microsoft bought Nokia, and people got even more excited.
Then what happened? Years passed with no flagship phone, literally no reason from me to move on from my Nokia 1020 because there was no hardware to move to. Then they announce that older models weren't getting the Windows 10 update, which was another nail in the coffin (not to mention a big "fuck you" to the fans that have stuck with Windows Phone this long). Now we're hearing basically... nothing at all about anything.
I loved Windows Phone 7 on my HTC Titan II, and I love Windows Phone 8 on my Nokia 1020. But unless a really killer new phone is in stores before January 1st, there's basically no way I can stick with Windows Phone for my next phone.
You've inflicted too many false starts, bad products, update nightmares, u-turns, and unplanned obsolescences on the consumer market.
MS as a consumer brand has mostly negative/indifferent associations. You could build the best product in the world, but unless you can sell it in reasonable quantities and prove you're committed to supporting consumers no one - literally - will be buying it.
My experience of MS is that MS products are always broken in major ways. This has been true from MS-DOS onwards.
The most recent example: I've been using Office 365 on the Mac for more than a year, and there hasn't been a single release that doesn't have at least a couple of obvious problems.
Right now I'm looking at a handful of Word windows that are supposed be that corporate MS gray-blue, but which have random bright red corruption in the title bar.
I mean - how do you even do that? How do you, as a multibillion dollar company, have such amateurish QA that you can't produce a flagship business and consumer product without these kinds of spectacularly stupid bugs?
Very simply, incentives are not aligned to produce the results you seek. There is some writing that explains the dynamic far better than I can (would heavily recommend Dan Luu's writing, especially normalization of deviance) if you want a window into some of the pathologies.
I can promise that engineers are "fighting the good fight", and I would encourage you to keep calling out when shit is broken despite the negative reception. This is one of the few paths I see to getting the needed alignment of goals to actually start internally prioritizing the stuff you call out.
(Aptly to this topic, I really loved the "errorsazurethrows" blog, it was a moment of brilliant vindication for someone who has both liked the underlying platform but railed against its often esoteric error/failure cases after years of having to use it as a primary tool)
But companies are not people and we can't trust them as such, the larger the company the more that's the case. It's naive, unfortunately , to think differently.
Microsoft has taken some of the wrong lessons from Google though, between forcing cumulative updates and collecting telemetry data. I really hope they figure out that they're losing out there. Being able to claim how many million minutes people were using Edge isn't worth losing so much customer trust.
Well, Microsoft is actively chasing consumers away. Proof: reneging on OneDrive offer to Lumia phone buyers, current lineup of two phones nearing end of production.
They want to be Oracle in place of ORCL, milking those big fat enterprise cows, and the stock market is nodding approvingly.
Good luck, godspeed, and thanks for the nice phones. Didn't last long, but was OK while it did. Designers never got any props, too.
10 years ago there where a number of articles about how MySpace won the social media war. The current king of that particular hill did not have first to market advantage. Your argument is invalid.
http://www.devlounge.net/webapps/why-myspace-won-the-social-...
I'd argue myspace is a perfect example of this, largely due to when you look at when it was finally dethroned, it was VERY sudden, and came after years of the platform languishing from a user point of view. It took a hell of a lot of pain to push myspace past the point where the network effect could be overcome.
Windows 10 Mobile currently does have all the apps I need, but it seems very few people are willing to give up Google's apps (particularly Gmail and YouTube) to switch, and Google refuses to allow another competitor into the mobile space. As long as Google's monopoly persists, they'll decide who has a successful mobile platform.
For example, I cannot get around without using Uber and Lyft. I need to carry a phone on me with these apps at all times. Windows doesn't support either of them, so I can't use a Windows phone until it does.
I'd love to use Windows on a phone -- I'm actually starting to fall in love with the new MS -- but I simply can't.
And it's not "Windows doesn't support either". It's "They don't support Windows". The platform does not have to do anything to support them, they need to choose to make apps for the platform. ;)
As it stands right now, I can fire up Visual Studio and write a UWP app that'll run on phone, tablet, and desktop.
The problem is that hardly anyone is using Windows Phones, and the smartphone market is one that MS hasn't had much luck with. Maybe the rumored Surface Phone will help if it ever materializes, but I'm skeptical.
I was looking around for netbooks on the 300 € price range, on the shops around me they are all tablets with detachable keyboards running Windows 10.
Besides the Apple section with the iPad Pro, there were almost no hybrid notebooks with Android on sale besides a few Samsung models, all the other ones have been wiped out by such Windows 10 devices.
When I think of something that has a web browser and a keyboard, the low end of the market seems to be the current crop of Chromebooks, and schools seem to agree - they've been phenomenally popular in education.
Typical Win10 netbooks don't have a lot of CPU+GPU grunt, so it doesn't seem to me (maybe you'll correct me) like they'd be very good for running most Windows apps.
Is this a big market?
I keep seeing references how the low end is using Chromebooks, but that seems to be an US phenomenon.
Here in Europe on the area where I live, I only ever seen Chromebooks on sale on a specific chain, and they are seldom there.
When they are, they always follow the pattern of being on sale with the usual Google price, people play with it, never being thrilled by it, the price slowly goes down every few weeks, it goes into shop "product of the day" offers, until eventually they get sold.
The market is the one of anyone that wants to use a tablet with keyboard, with a desktop experience when they need to.
Basically anyone that a few years ago would buy a netbook.
We don't use Chromebooks, but we don't end up using win10 netbooks either - it ends up being a combination of ipads and windows desktop PCs in classrooms.
I only saw them there, until they eventually get sold out on those campaigns where they put products on the containers at very discounted prices.
But I only saw this happening a couple of times.
I guess that makes sense, although I think we have a very different idea of what a "desktop experience" is.
Basically anyone that a few years ago would buy a netbook.
The conventional narrative is that tablets killed the eeepc/netbook. I didn't even know that this market still existed - I knew about Surface, but those start around the $900 mark.
* I don't think they call the netbooks anymore, but effectively that is what I consider the HP stream devices. 32GB of non-upgradable solid state storage is all they have, and near half that is the OS install.
They might need iTunes/Office/tax software/... in the future and Windows will have them covered, without buying another machine in the next 5-10 years. It's like a Swiss army knife for computing.
Right now you need to drop back to the "old" desktop file explorer (though ribbon seems to take some pain out of it once you bump the font size a bit), complete with all its UX gotchas thanks to the mouse assumptions.
This because UWP apps can only manipulate certain folders by default, and you have to authorize others (via the age old file picker dialog no less) manually. On top of that you can't launch a exe or similar from inside a UWP app.
But I am an edge case and broadly speaking, people want much more glamour from their mobile phones. At some point a few years ago, I think Windows Phone was up to about 5% share but it seemed Microsoft's work on mobile was put into slow motion. It's no wonder share has decreased since.
Continuum is a very good idea, but the progress on making it solid, reliable, and high-performance is astonishingly slow. I don't know the technical realities of the Broxton cancellation, but that really put a big kink in the notion of a real, solid Continuum experience. For the time being, it seems Microsoft is just hoping that HP can explore Continuum innovation with devices like the Elite x3. Virtually no one has even heard of an Elite x3.
Windows phone fans have been absolutely clamoring for an ultra-high spec glamorous phone. I think this is an artifact of everyone knowing one of the key drivers of phone adoption: make devices that catch other peoples' eyes and force them to ask, "What is that?" Word of mouth is a key part of adoption. I know when I purchased one of the first Lumia 920s (you might remember them as the very colorful Windows Phones from a few years back), many people would ask me about it. The 920 was hardly a success compared to iOS and Android, but it was probably the most successful Windows 8 phone, and I think that's in large part to it being something that people noticed.
Evangelists of the Windows platform have been eagerly awaiting a Surface Phone because they know it would be such a device. It would be a conversation starter. And frankly, despite it being a hard hill to climb, Microsoft hasn't been trying on mobile for years. They're not even interested in starting the conversation.
And that's a bit boggling and frustrating. I know several people bored of iOS, uninspired by the iPhone 7, and similarly disenchanted with Android devices. These people aren't vocalizing the words as such, but they are open to something new. If by some magic you could drop a Surface Phone onto the market with a rock solid Continuum experience, and put serious marketing effort into it, I think you could earn back that 5% share, and then work to grow from there.
Now W10/W10m is basically everything we want it to be, I mean there's some amazing stuff in the new API's and composition API stuff but no one is using them. Continuum in theory could be a game changer. The concept with tiles despite being several years old now is still something that feels fresh and ahead of the curve compared to iphone and android. but Microsoft can't launch and market a flagship phone that pulls everything together.
Just make one gret flagship phone that says "We're in it to win it" and a budget phone that'll mop up the budget/mid-tier. We'll see, maybe that's what they're working on but time is running out
Well the big obvious thing is that this shows how the efforts put into making the UWP truly Universal seem to be playing out. Certainly a lot updates and improvements benefit every device and the low overhead benefits a "low usage" platform like mobile.
That said, I'm still kind of weirdly optimistic and I think this quiet, continual improvement really is a good sign. I know some criticism existed that Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 and Windows 10 Mobile were "half-baked" early/at launch, and there's an interesting question about how much Microsoft just wants the platform to "catch up" and "feel solid" before a bigger marketing push.
For instance, one thing that I think has unfortunately been under-cooked has been Windows 10's efforts in the People hub, especially given where Windows 8.1 eventually built up to before some of it getting broken up in 10. The new "My People" functionalities shown at today's event seems to prove that a lot has been going on that space and is due for the Creators Update. I was hoping they'd at least give us a small glimpse of the mobile experience for it, but I realize the gee whiz factor of showing it off on a desktop taskbar.
There was a definite signal in Microsoft only using an HP mobile device on stage. Could be Microsoft is confident in deeper OEM support for Windows mobile devices.
Without the mobile operators pushing the platform in their stores, MS won't get any traction. And they aren't going to do that unless MS both fills the phone with bloatware, and makes the changes they demand.
As for their being a gaping hole in their ecosystem? How so? Their focus is on their cloud, they don't need to own the mobile device for their cloud to succeed. I would imagine 90%+ of the fortune 500 have iphones and droids happily grabbing email from office365 all day long.
I suspect the "Surface Phone" will be announced next spring, and I'm sure Panay and his hardware team will knock it out of the park, but without Windows 10 Mobile catching up there's no point in releasing it even if it's the greatest phone hardware ever created.
Once the proper software that can set Microsoft apart is in place, it will strike. The smartphone market is so saturated right now they could catch everyone off guard and make a dent.
One more thing, Microsoft will never be able to use the Google Play store unless they make an Android device that passes all of Google's requirements.
Other than games, what's the last interesting consumer-focused Windows application that's generated buzz and revenue for anybody but Microsoft?
Microsoft feels like they are headed out to the same (incredibly lucrative) pasture that IBM and Oracle inhabit.
However I think Microsoft has a lot of synergy good both on the gaming side with Xbox and on the business side with Office/Sharepoint/Outlook etc, not to mention that Windows still is the most popular OS.
Now I tend to agree with Nadella's "be everywhere"-strategy but that doesn't mean they can put everything into Microsoft services and software being the best on their own devices. I think the fact they're doing xbox games that are free to use on PC's is a good example of such synergy.
In the end selling hardware is never going to be what they earn money on, but rather they need to be a hardware actor so that they profit off their app store/software/services.
As for Microsoft "striking" when they get the software right - I couldn't tell if you were joking or not. There's nothing that Microsoft could ever announce that would ever make them relevant in mobile.
Whether they can successfully get mind / market share for mobile is probably another matter entirely, and I have no idea how that works.
Some random thoughts- for recent software development stuff, I have use of a iphone se / sony xcompact, and then I have my personal phone (lumia 950), so I think I can give a good cross-platform comparison for recent models of ios/android/windows.
1. Security / privacy: Lumia feels best for security then ios, don't feel that great about the android one, just based on reading the news. But you know, I guess the point of android is that you can root it and do crazy things if you are that kind of person - I personally used to enjoy this, but just prefer security recently. (Note that the fingerprint scanners on Sony / iphone are way more convenient than the iris scanner). See also point 4 w'r't' flashtool I had to use for android.
2. Ease of use: lumia is the easiest organization-wise, with the tiles, and I have trouble finding things on the other two- (screen size may play a factor)
3. Search: android (with homescreen search bar)/ lumia (cortana button) are about tied, se requires navigating to that left hand screen to search which takes a few more taps / swipes.
4. Configurability: for me this is somewhat backwards, although android is way more hackable / configurable, I actually like the Lumia's defaults, and the fact that I don't have to fiddle with them to get good results (e.g. it took me a while to find a good keyboard on android, including lots of installing / etc, and then find the right launcher, not to mention the incredible pain of installing UK firmware to get the fingerprint scanner working, which included downloading some sketchy flash program to my computer which I would normally never do). Ios also ok defaults, though I did spend a while trying to find a good keyboard (settled on wordflow lol).
5. Camera: megapixels actually matter- I can take a picture of mount Hood on both the Sony and Lumia and take one from the SE from the same location where it's completely impossible to see the mountain. Sony / Lumia about equivalent- I would say the sony has a 'tiny' bit more bright pictures, but I also have dropped the lumia in a river and the camera lense was all fogged at one point, so who knows if that had an effect.
6. Developers: Honestly I mainly use vs.code (react-native) for all of them and the experience is about equivalent. Maybe android gets a point since android studio works on both (edit: windows) / osx if I for some reason need to use it.
7. Maps: windows is a tiny bit more glitchy than the other two, but speed alerts make me prefer it (maybe there is a way in google/apple maps that I just need to fiddle around in some menus)
8. Apps: I'm not the best person to ask as I prefer browser for all things other than maybe enpass / skype / shazam / instagram / spotify which seem to be about equivalent on all- actually spotify is a bit smoother on android than the other two. There is one fitness app the iphone has that the other two don't have a good equivalent.
9. VPN (not sure if counts as apps or system function) but android / ios have apps for the VPN's I use while lumia does not (and I've only been able to get l2p working for these)- this surprises me, given that this is a business function.
10. Battery: (in use) xcompact + battery saver definitely wins here, iphone / lumia about tied. (Off battery saver, the xcompact is tied). However, the iphone definitely loses less battery overnight. I must note though, I've used the lumia battery far longer and more intensively at this point, and it is also replaceable compared to the other two.
11. Build quality: iphone obviously feels very premium with whatever material they use for the case. Lumia with plastic back feels more durable (indeed it has survived some abuse), also screen is beautiful. sony usb-c port already loose, but did...
As for the "how can they", the answer is remarkably simple: it's hurting their bottom line and there's no indication that a better strategy exists in the markets they're active in. If you don't understand why they don't just pour resources into mobile: resources are finite, and Microsoft is not the powerhouse it once was. Budget is allocated based on return of investment, why invest in a segment that you can see failing year over year. The best call is to wind it down and make new and exciting things that people didn't even know they wanted instead.
This new Surface Studio is a remarkably good step in that direction.
Anyways, I'm really glad where they're headed with the Surface Books/Studio. It's been a little slow getting the next generation of windows apps/store going and this is a step in the right direction
I think it's important to note the distinction that they are seemingly ignoring this generation of mobile. Windows Phone has been a disaster and not for lack of trying on their part. The phones themselves have been mostly solid but it's hard to overcome the ecosystem problem. That said with the moves Microsoft has made over the last few years they are well positioned to be a major player in whatever the next iteration of mobile is. We've seen companies become major players and then all but disappear in the 10 years since the first iPhone kicked off the smartphone revolution. It's not to think that crazy that Microsoft might leverage some of their new input device knowledge to craft some new device that allows them to be major players in Mobile 2.0 or whatever you want to call it. If you believe that the current state of mobile HCI is the zenith then yes you are right to be concerned. But if you think we are going to keep pushing pass the status quo then Microsoft is probably is good shape.
I think Windows Phone has been a disaster in many parts, but the actual ideas and UI has actually been one of the bright spots, especially considering iOs is still stuck in an icon springboard paradigm.
For sure it's a bloody fight but I don't think it's a battleground MS can surrender until the next thing comes around
However, the same problem that plagues the Mac App Store, UWP code is sandboxed in weird ways that make it hard to just recompile your existing IP into the new environment. Plus Microsoft developer relations pushed C# as the defacto way to write apps targeting the platform, something that doesn't scale when you also need to support Android and iOS.
As far as mobile's concerned, it was continuously mismanaged, release after release.
* First they paid Seattle contractors to rewrite top-tier iOS apps for the original Silverlight C# version of WP and then dumped the resulting code onto the companies hoping they would continue the effort. I took a look at that code at the startup I was at at the time, and it was a mess, full of proprietary dlls that we couldn't even inspect.
* Second, they moved the kernel to Windows NT-lite from CE, meaning all the early adopters essentially got fucked over and it crushed early momentum.
* Third, Microsoft would go a year before announcing relatively inconsequential updates. (Oh that's nice that the same software will run on 512mb devices, is that what you spent the entire year working on?)
* Fourth, updates never seemed to hit devices, and the only way to get updates was with actual firmware. Android solved this problem by moving most of the interesting bits to the Play store.
Ultimately for a platform in 3rd place, Microsoft never gave the impression they were busting their butts to catch up. Everything seemed to move at a glacial pace and felt like run by a tiny greenfield team.
Actually, our company has an Android and iOS App written in C# with a 80-90% shared Codebase using Xamarin. It has been pretty awesome so far.
https://www.xamarin.com/
Also .NET Core now runs on Mac and Linux for the server OS code written in C#.
Then if you add Unity supporting C# on top of that for game/dev and I really can say that we're in a cross-platform world now :). But I am a bit biased since I work on these teams.
I agree completely that a big problem was the constant reboots between Zune/silverlight/NT/Win10. They ended up where they needed to be but it certainly made things difficult for both developers and consumers, and lost them a lot of momentum
Supporting 512 mb devices was one of the biggest mistakes they ever made, the impact on that the development side was just devastating, for what, saving a couple of bucks in RAM memory?
I think it's hard to generalize the speed and pace of Windows Mobile overall, they put a lot of money and effort in it, and still is, but something definitively changed with the Nokia acquisition and/or Nadella taking over from Ballmer
As for updates I always got frequent updates (europe), the problem was more that their QA seemed substandard. Might be an american problem with providers like Verizon. They had an interesting strategy with their insider updates... which is nice in theory but it sometimes felt like they fired their QA team and put the burden of testing on their consumers, resulting in major bugs frequently getting through
Microsoft lost Billions in mobile and never were able to gain any traction with their platform. There comes a time when you need to stop the bleeding and move on. Only a fool would continue pumping resources and money into a venture which has never returned a profit or market share.
Though we'll never know for sure, there's some conjecture that that Intel's cancellation of the Broxton smartphone chip in May torpedoed MS's plans for an x86 Windows Phone this year.
5/3/2016 - "Late on Friday night, Intel snuck out the news that it’s bailing on the smartphone market. Despite being the world’s best known processor maker, Intel was only a bit player in the mobile space dominated by Qualcomm, Apple, and Samsung, and it finally chose to cut its losses and cancel its next planned chip, Broxton."
http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/3/11576216/intel-atom-smartph...
The copy on the google pixel site and this site are both very obviously apple-ish.
edit: down vote away, doesn't change the fact that these websites scream "we want to be apple". Though I will say, the tides are changing for apple judging by the amount of people hurt by this comment.
The usability portions of the video were awesome though
also there was this 2002 art installation http://www.influx.co.uk/blog/damian-ortegas-cosmic-thing/
I have a marketing filter in my mind so I couldn't care less about the design of the website.