One import thing with all Surface laptops that most people don't know:
> Support is limited to the country you purchased the device in.
Eg:
- If you buy an Apple laptop, and need a repair, they'll fix it if it's in warranty, regardless of where you are.
- If you buy a Microsoft laptop, and need a warranty repair done in a different country, Microsoft won't help you.
I purchased a Surface Book (which I love) in a Microsoft store in the US. It's been sporadically doing this since a couple of months after I unboxed it:
Microsoft UK won't fix it. Even when I travel to the US I'm not sure I'll be there long enough for Microsoft to do the repairs. I love the hardware, but this policy is really bad. I paid for the top of the range laptop and expect support for it.
Edit: I've raised this with Microsoft Support in the past and they've simply restated the policy and closed the case as resolved. When I attempted to escalate it, they told me to post a complaint to Microsoft's legal department (?!?).
"If you buy an Apple laptop, and need a repair, they'll fix it if it's in warranty, regardless of where you are."
This can be misleading. I bought my Macbook Air in Portugal, had 2y warranty there. Then moved to the UK and the brick stopped working. Went to an Apple Store and since it was after the 1y warranty offered when you buy it in the UK, they rejected replacing it for me. Eventually went to Portugal to visit my family and got a new brick from the same store in 5 minutes. On a curious note, there's no Apple Stores in Portugal yet so in this particular case it was even more interesting to realise how much better help I got from a non-official store.
I bought a MacBook in the UK and some time later when I was in the US they keyboard became faulty.
I walked in to a US Apple store and explained the problem. The Genius person agreed there was a fault and then started tapping away at their computer. He umm'ed and ahh'ed and called over a manager.
At this point I was thinking they were going to reject the warranty repair for some reason, but the manager ended up apologizing that they didn't have any UK-style MacBook replacement keyboards in stock, and they couldn't work out how to order the part in on their US system.
As it happens I had moved to the US, so getting a US keyboard was actually a bonus. I told them I was happy with a US keyboard, and 10 minutes later I was leaving the store with it installed in my MacBook.
Pardon my ignorance but what is the difference in the UK style keyboard vs the US style keyboard? Is the 4/$ replaced with the 4/£ key? Wouldn't this be problematic when programming (for example variable substitution on the shell etc.)?
There are two separate issues that need to be distinguished:
1. Physical keyboard layout (how keys are placed). There are two primary standards: ANSI (mostly US) and ISO (most of Europe). The most notable difference is the shape of the Enter key (L-shaped on an ISO keyboard and straight on an ANSI one). ISO keyboards also have one extra key and a shorter left Shift to make space for it.
2. Logical keyboard layout (how key presses are interpreted). This is what is printed on key caps, but it doesn't have any relation to the actual scan codes being sent. Many languages use their own accented characters (e.g. ąęćłóńżź for Polish) and historical preferences (e.g. QWERTY/QWERTZ/AZERTY), but this is implemented in software.
Logical layout can be easily configured in the operating system, and for touch typists it doesn't really matter what is printed on the keys, but differences in physical layout can take some time to get used to.
PS. I'm Polish, I live in the UK, and I type on a US mechanical keyboard with ANSI layout :)
I'm sitting here staring at my US keyboard and scratching my head. All of the Menu shortcuts align perfectly with the UK keyboard's iconography but not the US keyboard which opts for labels. And why do we have a key labeled both enter and return?
Historically the Macintosh distinguished between Enter and Return. IIRC on the Lisa the Return key was on the main part of the keyboard and the Enter key was on the numeric keypad. In many apps they did the same thing, but I think in LisaCalc the Enter key would enter the contents of the selected cell and leave it selected. Return would do the same and then select the cell below. IIRC the Mac version of Microsoft Multiplan did the same.
On the MBP I'm typing this on, the key is labeled enter in small type and below that return in larger type. I think holding down the fn key and pressing that key does the enter action, while without fn it does the return action. I am pretty sure my full-size Mac keyboard has return on the main keyboard and enter on the numeric keypad. I think the Lisa was the same.
IIRC there was no Enter key on the original (128K) Mac keyboard, but the optional numeric keyboard had the Enter key.
Apple have an old user interface guideline that basically said that the main keyboard was for primarily typing text, while traditional data entry was secondary. Hence the function of the Return key was strictly to insert a carriage return into some text. And so no Enter or Control key on the original keyboard. As a kind of substitute Apple introduced the Command (Swedish campground) key, but it wasn't a direct mapping of Control. And IBM further muddied the waters by introducing CUA. By the time of the Mac II the default keyboard was much more compatible with common computers. It was a time of rapid change.
I noticed that in the US almost all signage uses text instead of symbols. For example, writing "No smoking" on a sign, where in Europe you would have a crossed-out cigarette.
I don't really understand why this is done, since well-made symbols are also understandable for illiterate people or those not speaking the language.
In Europe you have a lot of languages and nations mixed. People who design signs know and care about that. In US you have a huge country where everyone speaks the same language. People who design signs don't even know it's a problem that needs to be solved.
Explain to me the difference between these three signs: 1. a bicycle on a blue circle, 2. a bicycle on a white circle outlined in red, and 3. a bicycle on a blue square.
On the other hand having to read all that in text while you're riding by isn't very reasonable either. Complex signage is only as good as your knowledge of it, which maybe is why passing a driving test in Europe is so much harder; it requires knowledge we just get from being able to read in the US.
It was a comment for Americans who might not know the signs; not really an argument.
But really, if you're driving then you should have done a driving exam and test in your home country. Then you're ready to drive from Romania to Ireland (with the help of some tunnels and ferries) and be able to manage reading the road signs the whole way. This is possible because of a (mostly) shared iconography. Of course, on a bike you don't need to pass a test but you should do a little bit of studying to make sure you don't get a fine.
The US doesn't need this because it uses English.
This is also completely distinct from keyboards which aren't even QWERTY across Europe. There are also AZERTY (France) and QWERTZ (Germany) and some countries like Belgium have all three in the same office as people have different preferences. And pair programming is as painful as you can imagine.
I agree, some signs need to be learned, and traffic signs are a prime example of that. On the other hand, many signs with fewer fine distinctions can be made with pictograms that require no prior knowledge of conventions.
That being said, traffic signage is a mixture of both, where some meaning is given by convention (e.g., white background and red border means "not allowed"), and then extrapolated by pictograms (bicycles not allowed, trucks not allowed, pedestrians not allowed).
Edit: A certain cultural context is of course always required, to know for example that a crossed out cigarette applies to smoking in general and doesn't mean that you can smoke pipes, cigars, or bongs. Such 'misunderstandings' only happen with QA engineers though. ;)
blue circle: something you MUST do (in this case, indicates a path that can only be taken by bycicles)
white circle with red outline: something that is forbidden (the road is forbidden for bycicles)
the last one indicates a bycicle-only path crossing the road, 150 meters before it you should see a white triangle outlined in red ("danger") with a bycicle inside it
By the way, the Mac I'm using now was bought in Australia and the keyboard has a rectangular Return key and the modifiers labeled using text rather than icons.
The UK keyboard layout still has $ above 4, but it has £ above 3. In order to get #, you have to hit ⌥3. You can also hit ⌥2 to get €. I think a couple of keys like backslash and backtick are moved around as well.
Inclined to disagree - depends on your keymap and software you use. If I were to add keyboard shortcuts to my program I'm sure as hell not gonna use a key that I can't get to on my keyboard.
On German keyboards it's even 'worse' though. Because ;, [ and ] are used for ä, ö and ü, [ and ] are Strg + ⇧ + 8 and Strg + ⇧ + 9. Same for { and }.
(Strg = Ctrl)
So any keyboard shortcut involving those and ⇧ or Ctrl is pretty much impossible.
Having recently (5 months) switched from UK to US layout, I find `/~ location to be more convenient on UK layout.
First, it's somehow easier to type ~ on UK layout (no weird finger twists) - helps quicker to get to your home directory when navigating terminal.
Second, I use cmd+1/2/3 to switch tabs a lot. Cmd + ` rotates windows. You can imagine it's very easy to mix up 1 with ` and instead of having the tab you want, end up with completely different window. Really breaks my flow often.
I do not mind enter key that much. In fact I think US one is better.
> helps quicker to get to your home directory when navigating terminal.
Protip: "cd" with no arguments normally takes you to your home directory. Though if you need to reference something in your homedir using a global path without changing directories, ~ is probably still the fastest way to do it.
I had to take my MacBook in three times durnig its life, for the same issue (wifi/bt issues because of aircard connection to VM)
Every single time I was told to make an appointment. Which take about 3 days to get. They took the laptop and spend a week fixing it (every time!) My experience at Multiple Apple stores in Southren Ontario.
Detail worth knowing: under the EU warranty the first year is covered by the manufacturer, the second by the reseller. If you buy a MacBook outside an Apple Store, after the first year you're supposed to bring it back to the place you bought it. There is even a difference between ordering it online through apple.com and buying it at the brick and mortar Apple Store as those are legally not the same. In practice though I have never had a problem having it fixed on the spot at an Apple Store but this is mostly because Apple cares about their customers.
plain wrong.
there is a 2-year warranty within 6 months the seller needs to actually prove that it worked correct. after that you (buyer) need to prove it.
there is __never__ a warranty (under law, the manufacturer can make a special guarantee like apple care of course) between the manufacturer and the buyer (at least in the eu and might change if seller == manufacturer) the warranty is always between the _seller_ and the _buyer_. if the seller is something like amazon than you give your defective product back to amazon (amazon than of course has the same warranty between his seller/manufacturer).
b2b is the same (but also has some special rules and might be (more) country dependant).
Edit: Well the most important fact of course is that there is no "eu law" there are just policies that the countries than can enforce/make a law out of it (http://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-making-process/overview-law...) well european can than make claims against the country, but sometimes they even fail to do that.
EU directives are in practice no different to national law. Sure, countries can refuse to enforce them but they can refuse to enforce their national law as well. If we are at that stage all bets are off. "Can enforce" sounds like this is optional which it is really not. Courts refer to EU law just like they do to national law.
> "Can enforce" sounds like this is optional which it is really not. Courts refer to EU law just like they do to national law.
In practice it's a mess system. Courts choose and pick however they want to implement the directives, even in countries where courts should be independent the ruling political countries have enough pressure on the courts. Sometimes they even enforce invalidated directives which is unlawful but then again if a country has enough money they could just pay the fines. Therefore there is so much unhappiness about the EU in the general populace, local politicians blame the EU laws, EU politicians blame the local laws and no one is accountable, it really sucks and isn't what a democracy is supposed to be.
Of course there can be a manufacturer warranty, there just isn't a legal requirement for one (and it can have rules like "talk to the dealer if you bought it recently, we cover you only when you can't go through them anymore")
Precisely. Most of the time electronic device manufacturers set the commercial warranty[1] to one year, but that's purely their prerogative. That's why you can go the Apple Store with your MacBook during the first year[2] even if you bought it from FNAC or Amazon or whatever. Apple Care extends that duration to three years, and possibly sets additional coverage terms like with Apple Care +.
On top of that, as merb said, following the EU directive, local law (in France, that's the Hamon bill) says the legal warranty of compliance[0] covers for the whole two years. So Apple can tell me to buzz off past the first year if I bought their hardware from Amazon, but so that I can go through them directly instead of going the roundabout way through the seller during the first year. The seller can never tell you to buzz of (as long as you duly prove the defect past 6 months as merb said), even during the time a possible commercial warranty applies, but it can be more efficient to go through the manufacturer directly, as is the case with Apple Stores, but I've been using this for other brands where the wait list was months long through the seller whereas the manufacturer fixed it in less than a week and even footed the bill for the postage.
It is perfectly clear to me, in the very link you have posted:
"This 2-year guarantee is your minimum right. National rules in your country may give you extra protection: however, any deviation from EU rules must always be in the consumer's best interest." (which is the case of UK law).
From your reply I understand you didn't notice the second link, probably due to my bad formatting. Compare your analysis of the first link with what Apple states in the second. I don't understand how they can say it.
I saw the link, but I thought your issue was with the 2/6 year thing.
I still don't see any problem. Apple states that you get 1 year of "Apple" warranty, which allows you to get your product serviced by Apple, at no cost, independently of where you bought it.
Beyond that date UK law will apply, but since it applies to the seller, and not the manufacturer, they say to contact the seller (as I said in another post, a bit cheekily, since they will be also the seller in many cases).
Unless of course you buy Apple Care, that will allow the same level of service as the 1 year warranty...
The legislation doesn't have a fixed period, it provides a vague 'reasonable use for a reasonable period of time' type clause. This was a £1700 laptop, so I had a right to expect it to last longer than 3 years, which was supported by claims on Apple's website.
Therefore, Apple either has to say "our laptops are only good for three years", or say that particular laptop was defective and fix it.
It is possible that it could be three years old but they had purchased it new and owned it less than 2 years. Just means that particular one sat in inventory for awhile.
For a long time. Note that there is a difference between the manufacturer's warranty (voluntary) and the seller's warranty (two years mandatory, "Gewährleistung" in German). When Apple talks about their warranty they mean the former.
> If you buy an Apple laptop, and need a repair, they'll fix it if it's in warranty, regardless of where you are.
The reason I wrote that is because I've purchased multiple MacBook Airs in the US and Apple UK has always serviced them. Obviously your experiences are different.
Counter experience (but it was 2009). I bought a used white macbook from craigslist in 2008. I'm from the US, and live in the US.
Was traveling in UK, and laptop keyboard cracked - big hole in the side of the keyboard. Took it to Apple store in London - forget which one - replaced at no cost in about 3 hours.
EDIT: per goatforce5's comment, I had a bit of 'umm' and 'ahh' when I was in London. I thought it would be "out of warranty", but it was the same thing - "not sure we have any parts to fit the US keyboard". They did find one, but that was the potential hold up.
> Was traveling in UK, and laptop keyboard cracked - big hole in the side of the keyboard. Took it to Apple store in London - forget which one - replaced at no cost in about 3 hours.
Same thing happened to me (white Macbook, cracks on the keyboard). AFAIK it is a known defect from this series and Apple accredited repair shops were instructed to replace the keyboard for free no matter if the warranty was still valid or not.
It's still a good thing though, I know no other brand that would do that for free 4 years after the warranty expired (in my case).
I've gotten 4 or 5 replacements, for free. I always have spares (instead of carrying them with me). So always claim "Dude, weird, I just bought this a few months ago."
Given the past drama, I think Apple just swaps them, to avoid any further bad PR.
And, frankly, these adapters should last forever. For comparison, I don't think I've ever replaced an HP or Dell adapter.
I never replaced those either, but HP adapter did melt the plastic cover on one of my laptops and I started to see the naked wiring (on the DC side). I bandaged it with some tape.
> in this particular case it was even more interesting to realise how much better help I got from a non-official store.
I don't think that's an outlier. In my experience, going to an Apple Store is always more frustrating, time-consuming, and expensive (if you are buying upgrades) than going to an authorised reseller.
So, how does the reverse work? If I buy a laptop in UK with 1 year, can I go to Portugal and get service between year 1 and year 2 because they offer 2 year warranty? There may be a chance I suppose...?
Good to know. I'm about to buy an MBA in Portugal.
IIRC, there's an authorized retailer in Lisbon (Chiado). Warranty-wise, I wonder how buying one there factors in vs. getting one from anywhere that sells them new (like FNAC).
This was a HUGE issue for me. I purchased a surface 3 for my daughter before she when to China for a year of study.
Halfway through the school year it started having phantom touch issues. Which can be frustrating to the point of tears... you are writing a paper, and suddenly the cursor is somewhere else magically and the input is going to the wrong paragraph or even worse, the wrong app.
I was so impressed at first at the technical support, they seemed very responsive. But the first support persons promise of help with-in days never materialized. And the number they gave us to get back in touch with them no longer worked. The second support person promised to exchange the surface. But the exchange location was in Shanghai not Beijing. A trip not possible for a teenager in a foreign country.
Time and time again they made promises which were never fulfilled. I swore MS off forever at one point. I finally figured out how to disable the touch screen so that the surface was at least usable as a laptop.
To give some MS credit they did promise to exchange the surface for a new one when she returned home. Even though it was technically out of warranty by a week at that point. By then there were strong yellow lines on the screen for some reason. Their exchange turned out to just be a repair for the touch screen (after waiting two weeks). But it was obviously the same machine because the lines where still there. Finally some strong but nice words with the manager of the MS store got them to exchange the surface that day.
The fact they they were willi to repair an issue which cropped up and was reported under warranty is in no way special. They are only fulfilling an obligation.
My employer is in New Jersey, I'm in Canada. They purchased me a Surface Pro 3 at my request, and I've never had a problem getting support directly from Microsoft, including 2 48-hour replacements.
This used to be called "gray market" (grey?) items. Items that are imported not through official channels (for example camera lenses that are often for sale from the bigger dealers in NYC).
There is no warranty, but the lenses are cheaper (due to currency values and the price the companies set it can be a little cheaper, but sometimes a lot cheaper). In the old days the prices in magazines for equipment where in 2 columns, US and imp (imported by us).
In your case you bought the computer overseas an brought it in yourself.
Some places that sell gray market lenses will cover the warranty for you in place of the manufacturer (probably a good bet, the if the items are well made and they have an in house repair)
Reading that page is just weird - how are US lenses different than other countries? Are other lenses made to substandard specs? In which case, what the fuck?
In this case, I just hope they want to squeeze every last dollar out of their buyers, like Hollywood does with movies.
Otherwise, regional/country-locked sales/warranties make little sense.
In some cases, they are different products. During times, when Airport cards were separate products, I got mine in the US. That was a mistake - I had to live with one channel less. Today, the Samsung Galaxy S-series phones are different in US and the rest of the world. There are many other examples.
In other cases, it is about squeezing every last dollar out of the buyers. Mostly those in UK and EU.
My US-bought MacBook has been fixed under warranty in the US, Canada, Thailand, and Singapore.
There are some country-specific restrictions- here in Mexico, they are unable to fix Apple products from other countries sometimes due to government restrictions; e.g., they were unable to replace my girlfriend's iPad screen at any price at the Apple Store since it was bought in the US.
my macbook that I bought in US was repaired 1 week before the end of the warranty in Italy. Not sure if it's policy or I just got lucky tho (dead monitor, and immediately after that webcam not starting -> logic board replaced, also under warranty even if the time was technically up)
I've had my USA purchased MacBook Air repaired (many, many times - I use my laptops out in the field in very rough conditions) -in both Canada and Singapore. I don't know about other countries, but those two countries honor USA warranties on the MacBook Air.
> Apple reserves the right to change the method by which Apple may provide repair or replacement service to you, and your Covered Equipment’s eligibility to receive a particular method of service. Service will be limited to the options available in the country where service is requested. Service options, parts availability and response times may vary according to country.
It sounds like you can get treated differently based on where you are.
I think this is to deal with products/parts which aren't available in different regions. As some people have mentioned, getting a keyboard replaced in a different region that has different keyboards isn't possible(unless you accept the keyboard used in that country).
Similarly if your power brick dies, you can't expect an apple store to carry power bricks for all possible outlets(especially with the iPhone style bricks that don't have removable prongs).
Still sounds like you'll get supported to that countries ability to support you.
I think you're confused. I bought a Macbook in New Zealand, and had it's motherboard replaced for free in the US. Then later bought a new Macbook in the US and it serviced in Germany.
Maybe they didn't have to do it, but I bought a Macbook Air in Korea (no official Apple stores there, strangely) and had the body repaired for free at an Apple store in Japan. The repair was minor, so maybe that was why they did it? But it certainly seemed like they were going to take care of whatever problem I had.
I've travelled with Mac laptops since the Powerbook days and every single time it has been fixed in the country I was in. The warranty checks done on Apple Support make no reference to the country of purchase.
False. From the UK terms for MacBook Pro (I checked the terms from the Netherlands as well, and they are similar):
You may obtain service in the European Economic Area (EEA) countries and Switzerland without paying any shipping and handling fees. Outside this region, service options may be limited. If a given service option is not available for the Apple Product in such country, Apple or its agent shall notify you about any additional shipping and handling charges which may apply before rendering service. Shipping and handling charges will not apply in countries where Apple does maintain an Apple Retail Store or Apple Authorized Service Provider (“AASP”) (a list of current service locations is provided at locate.apple.com/uk/en).
IANAL, but basically this seems to say: (1) in the EEA you can get your support no questions asked, (2) outside the EEA you may have to pay S&H charges, unless there is an Apple Store or Reseller.
"If the product is portable, meaning that it can operate independently without a power cord, you may obtain warranty service worldwide. However, service will be limited to the options available in the country where service is requested. If the product is not portable, warranty service may be restricted to the country where the product is purchased."
1. Even in the EEA, you may have to pay shipping and handling.
2. Where there's no representative of Apple (and I'm not saying there should be), can you really say "Apple service is available, you just have to pay shipping"? The reality is closer to "You will have to ship it internationally". Apple isn't "doing" anything here but accepting a package in a country where they have service locations.
I've had my MacBook Pro, US bought, fixed in India. Within the 1 year warranty period. No charge! (F1 INFO SOLUTIONS & SERVICES PVT LTD) This was not an Apple Store/Center, but an Authorised Service Center.
I had a 2012 Macbook Air from Europe and it had some issues. I had no problems getting it fixed in the US. Not sure if it was because I had Apple Care.
Indeed, Apple maintains stock of "foreign" devices (e.g. Japanese phones which use different payment hardware than US phone are in repair stock in the Palo Alto store). This can be a problem too, e.g. you move to the US with a Japanese iPhone which doesn't do Apple Pay in the States; if it breaks Apple will replace it with another Japanese phone only. I assume this reduces the sum of customer complaints (since most people with a Japanese phone in the US are tourists returning home).
As for the keyboard discussion below: when the mechanical layout is the same, or close, you can just change it from the preferences. I poured green tea into my powerbook 1400 in Tokyo; while waiting for a repair part I used it with an external Japanese keyboard set to US letter layout. I would get confused if I looked down so just typed with a blanket or jacket over my hands and it worked great. (Ironically that model was made in Japan, by Sony I believe, and was only serviceable by sending it to Japan. Since I was there I got to watch someone fix my machine while I waited).
I have gotten Applecare repair support in India where there were no Apple stores (at the time).
Another obnoxious one: Employee purchased devices will be denied warranty if you aren't that employee. I'm assuming this is to prevent people from "trading" devices or something. I got one from a friend who worked there, and they refused to even provide with an OS image much less do any repairs. The serial number was just blocked.
This is categorically not true of apple or several other brands i've gotten gear this way from.
My two times dealing with Apple Care have been pretty good, but a friend had a horrible experience with them. I haven't had to deal with a warranty issue out of the country though.
I have the exact same problem with my Surface Pro 4 (among many many others that Microsoft refuses to fix).
As a pro-tip you can disable the touchscreen in device manager. Even if you do this the pencil/pen will still work on the touchscreen, but 'touch' will be disabled, so you can can still use it in a pinch but without it being a non-starter device.
I stay in India, and considered buying an iPhone on a trip to the US. But Apple India told me that US-bought iPhones may not be serviced in India, because Apple service centers in India aren't Apple-run, but franchisees.
Apparently, if there's a service center directly run by Apple, they'll service it regardless of the country.
That's incorrect. I returned a MacBook to Amazon.in a week ago. There was no fault with the piece I received, I just changed my mind about it. I've returned other products to Amazon too, like a phone that was slightly defective and other electronics.
I've spoken to people who sell products online on Amazon.in and other marketplaces. All of them accept returns and write off the losses on those as overhead of doing business.
Not eligible for return if the item is "No longer needed"
I've confirmed this with Amazon. You may have been successful, but nobody should buy a product assuming they can return it, when the policy says otherwise.
If they ever changed the policy I could fly from Ireland to the US buy the I7/512GD SSD have a coffee and fly home all for the same price of buying it in Ireland.
Currently a €584 difference in the price between the US and Ireland. Any tax minded people know if this is caused by Irish VAT or pricing structure?
Its even €60 cheaper in the UK, €50 cheaper in Germany.
Not always true, I bought a Surface Pro 3 from USA and the power brick was not working, the Microsoft branch in the Netherlands replaced the entire laptop and I live in Romania. I received the replacements one by one (separate packages for laptop, brick, pen) from Germany.
My surface book has had the same phantom tap issue in the past. It seems to be resolved now, whether by driver updates or other magic unknown to me. It hasn't happened in months now even though I'm using it about 10hrs per day.
In my case, I bought a Surface 3 via an employee discount program and it didn't come with English-capable Windows. It was a PITA, Microsoft doesn't do international as well as Apple.
Eh, is it really? How many customers does this really affect? If you're from a European country and buying in the US, odds are you're trying to avoid VAT.
I'm a so-called digital nomad and travel to a lot of different countries a year. The fact that Apple offers worldwide warranty means that I'm more likely to buy from them (even though OSX is becoming more and more buggy over the years).
I'd love to buy a surface pro but not having world wide warranty would stop me from buying it.
I've been using a Surface Pro 3 as my one-and-only for almost 3 years, and it really feels like time to upgrade, so I've been looking forward to this one.
My workload is probably something like 40% reading, 30% writing, 25% coding, and 5% running code, and the Surface has been a nearly ideal form factor for this.
The new "Surface Pro" ticks a lot of boxes for me:
- Supports my existing keyboard, pen, dock, and power adapter
- Improves battery life substantially
- Offers improved keyboard and pen for when I get around to it
- Fanless options
- Improved performance (not that I need much more)
Unfortunately, the configurations are weird. My ideal machine is an i5/256GB/16GB. The closest I can get is i7/512GB/16GB, which nearly doubles the cost, and requires a fan. I just don't get how they can make the floor for 16GB RAM $2200. Is there any professional workload where 8GB isn't constricting today, let alone in another 3 years? My only thought here is that maybe the RAM increases the thermal envelope enough to require the fan, but that seems unlikely, and I would still happily make that sacrifice if I didn't have to also pay for the processor and disk upgrades.
I'm going to harangue them on Twitter, and also look into clearance SP4s with 16GB.
The priciest part should be the SSD, and most people are fine with a small SSD and use the microSD for overflow. I'm similar to you, I just chose a 16GB i7 256GB model SP4 with the Alcántara keyboard, and it came in well under 2K. Super powerful and the price point well beating a comparable Mac was one of the top selling points for me.
I have storage coming out of my ears after years of collecting disks cards servers and clouds so I have no need to buy a larger SSD.
Being forced into a higher bracket would make me look around more. The clearance SP4s are a great deal right now and I'm not regretting my full-price purchase.
I've got 256GB currently, and I definitely couldn't go smaller, but it only becomes limiting every few months. 8GB RAM on the other hand, is 85% full nearly all the time, so I actively make decisions to work around that.
I've got 8 in my SP3, and Chrome by itself is usually eating 3+. My development work isn't that heavy (but is very dockerized). I'm usually around 85% utilization, and then if I have a video call I may need to shut other things down.
Mostly I'm just hoping to reduce the amount of trading like that I need to do.
Then there's the fact that I expect to keep it for another 3 years, and I doubt memory usage will go down.
Well, I have found performance to be a little choppy over the last few months, but a fresh Windows install would probably help there at least some, though it wouldn't surprise me if the Creators Update isn't quite as smooth on older hardware.
Somewhat more concerning is the half dozen times in recent months where it has crashed and then had some kind of trouble starting up. Two such times I was convinced that it was the end for it, but leaving it for a while always allowed it to recover.
But mostly, battery life. SP3 wasn't a champ to start with, but I could get 4+ hours of work done easily without charging. At this point it's less than 2 hours before I'm hunting for a charger, which does change how I use the device.
Their reasoning might be if you need 16GB you're probably a professional, doing professional work on the laptop. So you should be able to afford to pay more.
I agree, I have had a SP3 and SP4 with the i5/256 configuration, and I'd pay more for the 16GB option...but the i7 is too expensive of a leap. I really wish they'd offer an i5/256GB/16GB RAM option. The Pro 4 is a sizable leap from the 3 (surprisingly, mostly because the 3 throttles at high temps, I think.) So an upgrade with just 8GB will probably suffice...but yeah, it would be nice.
I have the same issue with the new Surface Pro: I run some VM's for robot automations (the environment is quite strict, that's why I need a VM) and 8GB is quite limiting, while the CPU does not matter, no need for an i7. Tough luck, I will not spend $2000+ just to have enough RAM, so I use the desktop (32GB) for solid work and a cheapo' laptop for portability. Too bad :(
RAM really isn't that expensive, even if it is soldered onto the board. I wish more laptop manufacturers would make 16GB available in lower end models and have a true higher end of 64GB or more (instead of just 32GB).
From what I've heard, certain types of memory are only supported by certain CPUs/chipsets up to a certain size, and even though other types of memory are supported, those are a more power-hungry variety that laptop makers tend to avoid.
But in spirit, yes, this. The upgrade in RAM should be $80 in hardware, but I have to pay $900 for it because of the configuration options.
what sort of coding do you do on the spro? I'm going to be buying a new laptop / ultraportable / tablet in the near future, and I'm curious about this.
Can you comfortably run some kind of linux VM on it? What kind of external keyboard does it support? How does the display hold up in moderate lighting conditions?
For a lot of work, I've got a desktop, but I use my 2013 mbp at cafes and such. I mostly do node and frontend work, so while a strict windows dev env is feasible, I prefer linux.
A Surface with i5 does Hyper-V nicely. The current incarnation of Docker keeps a Hyper-V VM running for Linux containers, but my understanding is it'll soon just use the kernal's Linux support.
I have a Core m3 SP4 (because fanless), and am running Hyper-V on it too, with NixOS. That said, I wasn't able to give it more than 1.5 GB RAM, and even this only after I temporarily close Firefox on the host. (Firefox starts a-OK afterwards, even with numerous tabs open.)
EDIT: ah, yes: worth to note, the first specimen I bought had some kind of hardware issue; the GPU driver was crashing somewhat frequently, and the whole machine was crashing from time to time too (like, a couple times a week). Was super disheartening. Fortunately, I was able to replace it in the shop where I got it (they had a limited time offer where you could replace during the first month, no questions asked; http://x-kom.pl, just to thank them through some lip service). The replacement doesn't show such problems, fortunately (over a year already).
I'm a web dev front/back, I just use the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Works like a charm. Check out this huge comment chain from a couple weeks back on styling it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14317932
Most of what I do is python, but I've done a fair amount of JS, some PHP, Java and others, as needed.
I have run VMs on this, but 8GB RAM gets tight, so it's not something I do regularly. I do use Microsofts version of Bash on Ubuntu for things where I am more comfortable with standard linux tools.
I use the type cover for almost everything, but I've got a more traditional keyboard hooked up to my dock.
The display is excellent. It's glossy, so direct sunlight is problematic, but otherwise it gets plenty bright and looks very good to me, though I suspect my tolerance for colour inaccuracy is pretty high.
I am going to start learning Python, then eventually Django in a few weeks on a Surface. What is your overall setup for making it as painless as possible on Windows? I'd say my number 1 frustration in PC devops and I'm trying to figure out the install with the least amount of headaches.
I would recommend Python 3 for sure. I just use the installers from https://www.python.org/ and don't tend to have any problems.
I prefer lightweight tools, so I use Visual Studio Code. It won't hold your hand, but neither will it get in your way.
When working on projects, get in the habit of using virtualenvs. It's a small amount of overhead, but will save you a ton of frustration in the long run. A primer on windows:
From project directory, initialize it:
> python -m venv .env
(I put my virtualenvs in .env out of habit. Virtualenvwrapper, itself a useful addition for managing virtualenvs, puts them in your home directory, which can be fine too.)
Activate it:
> .env\Scripts\activate.bat
Use "pip" to install your dependencies. Also use "pip freeze" to record those dependencies for installations elsewhere. I'm currently following this for dependency management: https://www.kennethreitz.org/essays/a-better-pip-workflow
At work it gets hauled around as a notebook for writing notes and annotating documents. If I find I need to do some more serious work, I just stand it on the table and start using the keyboard. When I get back to my desk it gets used as an ancillary laptop.
At home whether it's a laptop or tablet depends on what I'm doing. If I'm just mindlessly clicking through reddit while using it as a remote for Netflix, then I'm definitely just using it bare. If I decide I want to type out a lengthy reply to a Hacker News post or do some programming, I'll shift over to the coffee table with a keyboard.
Definitely see a lot of people that bought them with the best of intentions that don't really make full use of them. I've had my eyes on the "convertible" market for years, though, and I don't regret the purchase at all.
It's a laptop* 90%+ of the time. It's a tablet when:
- Reading, watching, or gaming, particularly if I'm walking around frequently
- Taking notes (principle reason I got the Surface was my attachment to handwritten notes)
*I often use the Surface with the keyboard attached, but in positions that no ordinary laptop could support. Laying on the couch with the hinge hooked between my knees and the keyboard on my thighs, or with the hinge hooked over the steering wheel and the keyboard more or less dangling (not while driving, of course).
Even though it's a small amount of my usage, having that capability available to me means I can avoid carrying other things.
I've got a surface pro 4 and use it roughly 33% of the time in 'tablet' mode. I also have a Surface Book which I used a lot in 'clipboard' mode (reversed and folded down over the keyboard). Always when drawing, and mostly when reading.
Perhaps not surprisingly I think a pixel sense "screen" that could be paired to something like a NUC wirelessly would be a pretty awesome peripheral as well. Something I intend to build out of my SP4 when I upgrade it.
I use mine in tablet mode when watching a movie. I get the keyboard out of the way so I can angle the thing just right when on a plane or a train. I also do it when browsing my RSS feeds with NextGen Reader.
i use my SP2 primarily in tablet mode for note taking in onenote. I study part-time and all my writing and notes go in there, which are auto synced to my Desktop and Macbook.
In theory i could use the Surface for everything, but then i would need to hookup external peripherals and the note taking experience would suffer with rearranging/unplugging all the time. I wonder how others solve that.
One trend I am noticing is that I keep sensing a clear difference between, say, a standard iPad vs. a Surface. A standard iPad feels like a tablet appliance, whereas a Surface is a full-bore laptop in tablet form.
Mentally, whenever I hold a Surface, I don't find myself thinking of the kind of experience I expect from the iPad. I realize now there is the iPad Pro, which has more horsepower/keyboard/pen etc., but it still doesn't feel like a full laptop.
Does anyone else feel like the iPad experience is more.. I dunno, geared towards casual use and entertainment with the walled garden of apps, and Microsoft really doesn't reach/target the same market (even though they are trying)?
EDIT: I guess I am trying to say, something about this market still doesn't feel quite right.. maybe there are still options to innovate.
I think you are just channeling the tensions that exist in the market. And that is to be expected.
It is really fascinating to look at laptop and tablet and phone evolution from a distance.
Computers became "personal", and then "luggable", and then "portable", and then "laptop", and then "handheld", and then "phones." As they walked that transition computers were getting more and more powerful, but they were still shedding features as the evolved.
And then at the 'phone' endpoint of evolution they sort of 'bounced backward'. The key to that bounce was screens. First they got to be higher resolution, and then they got to be bigger (clearly testing what was more desirable). And as boundaries along size have started to settle out they have been getting back peripherals (pens, styli, and keyboards).
I feel like the current hardware has re-affirmed a couple of truths. One is that keyboards remain an accelerator for input much like bicycles accelerate walking. Very difficult to improve upon. Styli only make sense if they are at least as good as the instruments most people use and that measure of 'goodness' is sensitivity and lag. The last is that command entry is often gesture based, and while you can do it with keyboards or styli there is a certain "grace" associated with turning the page by flicking your finger rather than pressing the 'down arrow' key or the 'next' button.
The tension is that all of them, the laptop, the tablet, the phone are the "same" thing but tuned in slightly different ways.
I had really bad experience with Surface Pro 3 (lots of hardware and software issues), but I have to say this: Microsoft is trying to do the right thing here. There is no reason tablets should be dumb-down media consumption devices when they have computing power equivalent to desktop PCs of a few years ago. But to be used as real computers they must have keyboard and stylus by default and must allow to install arbitrary apps without jailbreaking and hoops.
The biggest thing that's dragging Surface down is its UI. Neither classic Windows apps, nor Metro apps are very pleasant to use on the given hardware.
I wonder what Alan Kay thinks of Surfaces compared to iPads.
Something that works well for a desktop with a large monitor, keyboard and mouse doesn't necessarily work well for a tablet with a relatively small touchscreen and vise versa.
Unfortunately, as far as "tablet mode" is concerned, Windows 10 is still a step back from Windows 8. Obviously Windows 8 had its problems, but the tablet UI was fantastic. W10 has gradually been getting back the W8 tablet features it dropped though, so maybe it'll get there
And that's the problem. The two modes doesn't "change" (or the apps are just the properly optimized for the different modes) the apps enough so in reality, an app is either good in one mode or the other, not in both.
The primary use-case I'd imagine using with the Surface during the time I'm using it as a tablet is via the web browser. So as long as it has the web browsing UX down in tablet mode then I'd be perfectly happy with a product that switches between tablet vs laptop/desktop mode.
> Microsoft is planning to release a dongle that will plug into the new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop devices and provide USB-C support. It’s like any dongle you’d expect, and it simply slots into the Surface connector port on the device. “If you want to charge a device with a Type-C charger, you can. If you want to put data back and forth with a Type-C peripheral, you can,” says Panay.
> “If you love Type-C, it means you love dongles,” jokes Panay. “We’re giving a dongle to people who love dongles.”
And of course I would prefer to have a magnetic charging connector over USB-C all day. Makes even more sense if your USB-C is from this very same connector.
I don't fault Microsoft for doing this, the USB-C connector is so far from being off the ground in the market, there's no reason to support it on major devices yet. Most new technologies are going wireless, you move data wirelessly, you charge wirelessly. The need for USB connectors is dying, the old USB connector is nice to have on the Surface out of sheer convenience with some legacy devices, but I only use it maybe 2 times a year.
What would you even plug into it? It's not like USB-C accessories are readily stocked everywhere, I'm still carrying around dongles all day for my TouchBar MBP.
If the laptop shipped with USB-C people would be whinging they need dongles, literally can't win.
Not really, if they replaced either mini-DP or the surface charging port.
I have a 4k monitor with a USB hub and it connects via USB-C. So I can just plug in one cable for power, video, keyboard and mouse. On the surface that means three cables coming out of both sides of the thing, and one of the cables going to a USB hub since there is only one USB port. But I guess you could use the dongle, assuming it supports HDMI output.
That monitor is 2 years old now, I bought it with my 2015 macbook.
I think you are vastly underestimating how fast trends in the market come out.
USB-A was two years ago.
We're currently in the "having tons of dongles" state. In a year, it'll be 50% USB-C 50% other stuff. In 3 years, it'll be 100% USB-C, with high probability given the current market trends. Even Apple is adopting the USB-C standard. That speaks volumes to the coming trends, and how fast they're coming.
USB-C is already shipping on cheap desktops, a lot of smartphones, and many laptops. In two years Apple won't ship any computers with USB-A. USB-C has arrived:
Sure, but most of my USB-A stuff will still be fine in 2 years, and much of it in 5. I won't have acquired enough USB-C things in 2 years to care much about it.
Everyone buying a newly released Mac this year will only have USB-C. People buying svelte Windows PCs will be getting only USB-C. Next year's Surface will be only USB-C.
I'm guessing that many of the almost 400 million Android phones that ship this year will have USB-C. Chromebooks? They're going USB-C.
You're just telling us that you'll be happy with legacy. That's fine with me. Not everyone has to plan for the future. It's coming with or without you.
Those are host devices. My wife's and my external CD/DVD burner, USB DAC, Arduino, external hard drives, iPhone 7 Plus, two iPads, half-dozen flash USB drives, various controllers, external keyboards and mice, wireless non-Bluetooth mouse adapters, laser printer, et c., et c will mostly still be working just fine in 2 years, and all connect over USB-A. I'm guessing I'll only have one or two USB-C things by then unless I decide to drop a ton of money replacing lots of perfectly-good equipment.
[EDIT] I'd add: yeah, we have some USB-C Android phones at work. Most of them have... USB-A on the other end of the cable that came with them (there's one exception).
Why are you telling me what people have in 2017? No one is saying that USB-C is the standard now. Although in thin laptops it will be the standard this year. I'll be using my "legacy" USB stuff until it dies too.
The point is that market is starting to adopt USB-C, and everyone should be ready for the transition. I want a future port on my new computers, which will have a 5-10 year lifespan. USB-A would be nice too, but if I can only have one type, I'll take the future port.
> What connector do you think you'll need in two years, five years, 10 years?
And my answers were USB-A, both, and USB-C (but probably also whatever replaces it), respectively.
Your response to my answer was to tell me that lots of host devices are shipping with USB-C, which has no effect whatsoever on my answer (which I expect is typical, even of people on HN). I thought you must not understand that a bunch of host devices supporting USB-C barely has any effect on what I'll be plugging into my computers for the next few years, since you responded that way, so I gave an (incomplete) list of my USB-A devices which will almost all still be working in 2 years, and most of them in 5, and also, incidentally, a complete list of my USB-C devices (none).
USB-A is hands-down the more useful port to me for the next few years. USB-C is a nice bonus for future-proofing but has zero immediate utility, and will still have little or none in 2 years. Just answering the question.
> so I gave an (incomplete) list of my USB-A devices which will almost all still be working in 2 years, and most of them in 5
If I'm not mistaken, save from the flash drives and non-bluetooth dongles, all of those can be converted with a simple cable switch. Wired KB+mice may unfortunately be cabled into the device but it's still practical enough to just keep an adapter on the end or there's some soldering for a cable swap to be done. Unless you plan to change all of your gear at once, you're in for such a transition anyway, one way or the other.
I have to agree with melling here, such a pricey device that I'd plan to keep for at least 5 years should have the new port.
No, the question is "why is it important that the Surface, or other laptop, ship with a USB-C port today. Asking 2, 5, and 10 was to illustrate that over most of the life of the Surface, USB-C will be preferred.
But what things other than flash drives (Who even uses those anymore) have ports built in? I have a USB-C -> USB 3.0 mini-b cable that I use for my external hard drives that cost me about $5.
seriously... what do people even use usb-a for besides charging things? compatibility was crap, transition to 3.0 was crap and even the highest end computers offered limited ports - opting to keep a few 2.0s given that support for 3.0 on the device side was even weaker, big, asymetric, fragile, ...
lets just let it die and move to cables that won't need a dongle and aren't thicker than almost everything in a laptop from this generation
I'm pretty sure I didn't retire the last of my ps/2, serial, and parallel port equipment until about 2010. Gameport and AT probably went out around '05-'07—until then USB saw very little use and if I'd had to pick all-USB or no-USB, I'd have chosen the latter. My ~3-4yr old unremarkable desktop motherboard still has several legacy ports. I've made no special effort to resist USB, I just haven't retired equipment if it's still useful.
USB came out it 1996. Peripherals stick around a long time.
A bit misleading. Apple was the first major manufacturer to adopt USB in 1998. It took a good 5 years before PC's started adopting them. The move to USB-C is happening much faster.
Serial and parallel devices died off pretty quickly though the ports lived on for various reasons. PS/2 keyboard and mice endured a good while longer.
I've only seen the joystick port appear on sound cards, which themselves are pretty much dead, and the AT connector was all but extinct by the mid 1990s.
New motherboards seem to fall into two camps: Legacy ports of all flavours, or ridiculous numbers of USB 3.0 ports. I saw one recently with 12 USB3.0 connectors on the back.
Doesn't mean those people were wrong at the time. I was still using a serial port until 2012, still using a PS/2 keyboard until 2014. So I was right not to buy a USB-only PC in 2010, even though I've now switched to one.
I picked up a 2-pack of USB-A/USB-C adaptors on Amazon for $10. I keep them in my bag, it hasn't been a problem. If you're plugging in more than two things at a time then you'd probably benefit from a hub anyway.
I still want to be able to transfer data to/from my phone (S7) and my camera. I still want to use my headset. These things are going to last for several years; as such I'm not buying a laptop without USB-A any time soon.
I tried a bluetooth headset but it had enough extra latency to throw me off (I play rhythm games sometimes). In theory my wifi's fast enough for copying data to/from my phone, but I don't think it offers an easy way to do that (and my camera doesn't have wifi at all).
i think we're pretty much done with USB-A given any form factor besides desktop(-replacement?) these days. I'd rather not sacrifice the space for the next 3+ years when its basically relegated to phone charging duties - and barely that given this generation of battery life.
Plus that kickstand always looked so inconvenient to me. On normal laptop I can adjust screen angle however I want. The kickstand also require a bigger surface to put it down properly. On normal laptop I am fine as long as the bottom half can fit on the table (or any flat surface), here there is need for much more space, seems very inconvenient especially when working in tight spaces like server room, car, or small coffee table.
So buy a f*cking laptop! I'm only half-kidding - but criticizing an integral part of a product, when there are multiple alternatives with exact the feature your desire is ... silly.
It's a throw-away marketing headline not some super-technical classification. One-click away is a comparison grid of Surface products which includes ... a laptop.
This looks like a laptop to me! Having read your comment I imagine I have to reassess. But in my head while watching the video I was evaluating it to replace by old MacBook Pro.
It is a laptop, or at least a laptop replacement. Try the kickstand setup and see whether it's good enough for what you want to do or not. Criticising the kickstand is absolutely reasonable, but do so based on experience rather than speculation.
As some others have said, the kickstand can actually be more convenient in tight spaces (especially flights.) Most of the time, it's perfectly lap-able (typing this from a chair by my pool.)
Additionally, it has the great feature of elevating the heat source off the ground. This comes up any time I want to sit it on, for example, my couch. With my old laptop, the fan exhaust was largely getting smothered in upholstery, but with my surface pro it's sitting 6 inches above the table/couch/surface.
You can barely use it in your lap if your legs are crossed, and the keyboard can't be used if you're holding the device in mid-air. Other than that, my complaints are all about heat dispersion/generation, not the form factor.
My wife inherited my 1st generation Surface Pro after her beater HP laptop died two years ago, out of all the things I expected her to complain about the kickstand was never an issue (the touch cover pissed her off to no end though, so I bought a type cover instead).
I can see some people not digging the kickstand, but I'd say give it a try before dismissing it.
I own a SP, and I actually like the form factor, which I find much more flexible than it looks. I didn't find any condition where I can't use it.
I don't have experience on a car, but I routinely use it on my lap in the public transport, on airplanes, and on "small coffe tables", as long as I accept "90% of comfort".
Of course, the SP is a hybrid, so if the laptop form factor is a requirement (or "100% comfort"), then no hybrid is an appropriate choice (except the Surface book, which is arguably overpriced).
Regardless, it's definitely wrong to state that it needs more space; it actually needs less than a laptop, as it only needs three contact points - the kickstand, the screen bottom, and the top/lower side of the keyboard.
Honestly this is the number one reason i quit using my SP. I know a lot of people here love them, but it was just too obnoxious to use on my legs, soft surfaces, and lots of other places.
I will agree it was awesome on plane tray tables, but that was about the only "oh cool! obvious advantage!" location.
i found myself wanting a normal laptop that could hold itself up repeatedly, and kept switching back to my macbook pro
Yes I'm saying it's not enough. It's the same RAM that was available 4 years ago on Macbook Pro (and still not available any higher on MBP either).
It's common to run several types of server in production, these all need to be run on localhost for development purposes. Also virtual environments so server architecture can easily be scripted.
16GB works for me, but is far from ideal. I was hoping MS would one-up Apple here, but not yet.
Counter-example: I worked in ML research at one of the largest companies in the field (in the billions of predictions per day) and 16GB was more than enough to do anything I would ever do on a laptop/tablet/etc..
Furthermore, I found that solutions which couldn't be successfully worked on with <16GB RAM were basically architecturally unsound. Not being able to scale the workload on demand or control peak demand. Extra RAM just hid poor developers from their non-scalable solutions - or just increased their downtime till they got an OUT OF MEM error. The issues were only exacerbated at scale - failing even with 128+ GB in RAM.
Basically, when the difference between a dev sample and a prod sample is 3+ orders of magnitude, your ability to scale the process up/down, fail gracefully, even battery life, etc. are far more important than having large swathes of memory to fail on. Especially on the go.
If you do deal with production (big) data, you're ssh'ed in to some always-on, process-maintained hardware if only for the sake of latency and interruptions. And you better have the toolset to do it. How much memory does a terminal take?
For graphics, I understand - but then you're definitely not working on a surface pro or on the go at all really.
I'm not crunching big data in development or doing much with graphics (other than occasional faffing on some image editor). What I'm running is a lot of local servers. Each server has overhead even if you are only storing one byte of data.
ie I'm running Rails, MySQL, Elastic, Redis, Nginx, Memcached, and in some cases, multiple instances (dev, test, and multiple shards)
And then the usual OS requirements - Vim, 250 browser tabs, Slack, Hangouts, etc.
I'm sure there are all manner of optimisations and assumptions that could cut things down, but I'd rather the big manufacturers upgrade their RAM capacity every few years so I can focus on a dev environment that's a good approximation for prod.
Dev-Prod parity is probably the best reason to want the extra power, but then you're just limiting your software to the lowest common denominator between mobile computing and a server farm. At the end of the day, if you want to take advantage of the big guns, you will have to sacrifice mobility or parity and spend some good time on devOps. And even an extra 16GB won't get you around that.
Also, 250 tabs? dayum. I don't know how anyone could effectively use that many tabs. I don't think thats what browsers/laptops are designed for. My mind memory of just the tabs would be saturated long before the laptop's.
I frequently have that many tabs open because I use them as lighter one-shot bookmarks (although see onetab). Basically things that I need/want to refer back to once or twice but don't want to bookmark. So they tend to stack up until I go through them and close out the stuff I'm no longer interested in. Really I think FF/etc should probably just garbage collect most of them if they haven't been active for a few days.
> For graphics, I understand - but then you're definitely not working on a surface pro or on the go at all really.
I do work in graphics/rendering, I work on laptops often and plan to get a surface pro, 16 GBs is the most painful part of working on a laptop for sure. It is the primary reason I spend most of my day on the 128GB ram desktop whenever I'm close. But even 32GB would go a long way for me.
I'm using 13GB right now just doing some normal web/backend dev. 4GB to a Linux VM running VScode and some servers. Then add Outlook/VS/Firefox/Chrome and a bunch of other utilities and I'm there. I've only got about 40 open tabs total (few docs, few Azure, few GCP, several reading), across all browsers so I'm not going nuts on that side.
Yea... I never said you couldn't saturate the memory, just that if it saturates 16 GB easily, its a shitty architecture. you're running a 4GB VM to run an IDE inside it... and "40 tabs"? That could be anything between a couple MB and X GB depending on the content. Not really a measure of anything. Just think about how much more efficient Chrome/Google is being than you're 4GB+ VSCode (text editor) set up.
To go over 16GB right now on Intel mobile chips you need to sacrifice battery life (going from LPDDR3 to plain ol' DDR3 or 4). This will be resolved with Cannon Lake/Coffee Lake, but until then don't expect to see many ultra-thin form factor computers with >16GB.
I have a lenovo t460p which has 32 gb of this supposedly power hungry RAM and it can make it through a workday on a charge just fine. From what I can tell, the power needs of non-LP RAM are overstated.
AFAIK, the reason ultrabooks have LPDDR3 is because it is very low profile when soldered. If thin is your thing, you want LPDDR3. My t460p has a smaller footprint than a MBP, but it is as thick as a whole stack of them.
That has a 72Wh battery; the Surface Pro 4 has a 40Wh battery, and this is presumably similar. So it's a pretty big difference.
The difference between LPDDR3 and DDR3 isn't dramatic in actual operation; LPDDR3 uses about 70% of the power of DDR3.
It becomes a bigger deal when the machine is in standby, however; LPDDR3 uses 10% the power of DDR3. This would be a big deal for Apple, which also insists on using LPDDR3, and has historically sold machines with standby times measured in weeks or months. Not sure if people have particular expectations of standby times from Surface Pros, but if they're used like tablets you'd want it to be decent. Keeping the memory powered is nearly the only power used when a computer's in standby, so 10x the power usage would be a huge deal.
I have had several windows laptops with lpddr3, and the standby battery life was never that great. Windows just isn't good at managing battery in standby. I think only apple can bring up the power argument for choosing lpddr3 because it only makes a real difference in their case.
Never really used a modern Windows laptop; I remember the whole power management situation being a complete nightmare in 2001 or so, but would have assumed it'd been sorted out by now...
RAM is lung capacity for a device, as well as longevity.
Longer device life and usefulness comes come from additional ram than a beefier processor.
Apple mentioned somewhere the 32 GB laptop jump involves dealing with a battery usage hit. While 32 GB arrives, a few vendors like Lenovo seem to have the 32 GB offering available in laptops, but not their Surface Pro clone.
I think the point they're trying to make is that the sort of person who wants 32 or 64 GB of RAM in their laptop (and I'm definitely in that group) also wants a fast processor and a decent graphics card. The number of people who need 32+ GB of RAM and are happy with a slow processor is probably quite small. The sort of work I'd use my Surface Pro for doesn't need more than 8GB of RAM and the sort of work I need 32+GB of RAM for I wouldn't do on a Surface Pro.
But, depending on your workload, fast enough may well be... laptop i5/i7 are pretty fast, again depending on workload... if I'm trying to simulate a tech stack, with modest data loaded, I'm the only user, so it's plenty fast, but memory can become constrained pretty quickly...
Windows overhead, Visual Studio, Linux VMs, multiple docker containers, local dynamodb, sql database, queues, etc. If you're developing locally against a workflow with a few VMs in the mix, 16gb can be an incredible constraint. I'm not trying to simulate hundreds of users, just one across a stack.
But that is probably not the usecase most people who will buy a Surface Pro for. It's a very portable device and 32GB would consume more power and probably be only bought by a very small amount of users.
Not sure... "PRO" should probably be a label for "PRO" versions of something, and 16GB should probably be a minimum in that case. Lots of people doing heavy image work or video may be better served by more than that as well. Which is well within that segment.
Thats a matter of definition. Surface Pro originally was to distinguish against the Surface RT, where it made sense. Same goes for iPad Pro which is clearly not meant in the same way you are suggesting, Macbook Pro is the same. The PRO label is meant to distinguish them against their own lower tier products.
Imo the demand for 32GB RAM Laptops is pretty limited right now, which is why you usually find that in workstation laptops only.
I don't know any 13" Ultrabook with 32GB to be honest.
The issue for that is kind of like the "faster horses" vs cars. In this case, however the touchbar was a half-baked interface in trade for the lack of full touch.
I think that the users who DO have that usecase (like the OP) are clamoring for a machine that is more portable. The same debate raged when the MBP was released; people want a powerful, sleek and portable workhorse that they can use for longer than 2 hours, and no one is delivering right now.
Maybe because its not easy todo with current technology ? Size, heat and power consumption all have to be balanced carefully, so you can not just stuff an i7 quad core with 32GB RAM in a tiny package and expect it to be great. Compromises have to be made. I think it's incredible what kind of processing power we can have in small packages today and it will of course move forward, but for some people it's never quick enough i guess.
How much more heat/power would 32gb vs 16b use/generate... okay, so I get 12.5 hours instead of 13... As long as it's more than 8.5 hours battery life under modest load. The RAM is very far from a big consumer of electricity in a laptop.. the screen and cpu are MUCH more of an issue there, likewise in terms of heat.
People who needs lots of RAM usually willing to pay extra for i7 and other expensive parts, and hardware manufacturers know and exploit that.
Fortunately, there’re some ultrabooks on the market with user-upgradeable RAM. This article says Intel CPUs supports 16GB DDR3L modules since Broadwell, i.e. you should be able to install 32GB yourself:
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/16-gb-so-dimm-ram-module...
Sure, but even if the surface pro came with 32gb of RAM (all other specs identical), would you consider trading your XPS 15 for a surface pro? We're really talking about two different market segments here.
Neither the Surface Pro i7 nor the XPS13 (not talking about the 1 in 2 XPS13) are fanless. Its the same class as the Macbook Pro 13 but Kaby Lake as opposed to Skylake allows for a fanless i5 Surface Pro.
The space of people needing >16gb are typically looking at more fully-fledged workstations, is maybe the idea here? Not that an upgrade option wouldn't be good, it just seems a bit at odds with the surface's goals
It absolutely isn't. I'm a C++ programmer working in games industry, my work machine has 64GB and all our work-issued laptops are 32GB(which is not enough to actually start local servers of our game, so doing any mobile work is quite limiting).
why does this apply here: because I can easily imagine artists using this to modify some assets and trying to run the game to see what they look like, but with 16GB of ram they won't even load the editor, much less the actual server+client combo.
I know you don't mean this to sound hubristic, and I hope you consider the same of me as I'm not trying to be insulting.
But I work in the same company as Gambiting, on the same game I think. And yes, loading a map that is the size of San Andreas in GTA5 (with more props) is expensive on memory.
You can't "load a region" in the editor, not because there is a design constraint but because you need to generate navigation meshes, collision systems, render objects etc before you "stream" them in, not to mention that "streaming" is a hack that is build for consoles and weak PCs and has to be optimised for to work reliably, you'd spend more time chasing bugs in your streaming than actual bugs you were working with.
So, you load the whole map, you generate your navigation mesh and run your collision detection, and then you can do mapwide things like "find breaks in the world" and other stuff.
In this case, yes, 64G is helpful, because a developers time, especially a tools programmers time who deals in very low level C++/ASM optimisations for AAA games' time is worth more than a studio full of 64G ram modules.
I am curious if you do this mapwide thing very often to debug game bugs. Cuz we all know the usual game renderer does a lot of culling optimizations like z buffer, occlusion. Maybe another approach is not doing this in realtime but rather generate frame by frame to do post-render analysis?
The main map of the game is almost 30GB on its own and is a result of work of hundreds of people - suggesting that limiting ourselves to 4GB on work machines would be "beneficial" is silly.
Who in hell does run a game server on a laptop, and outside office?
by the way the integrated graphics are real shit in this laptop, better go get a MSI or something. This PC's are clearly not for high end work, it's just Macbook Pro kind of "pro".
PD: I think if you're running the whole map on the RAM you're doing something wrong.
I think people are missing a point here. The game itself runs perfectly fine on a 7 year old CPU and 8GB of ram(it might run on 4GB but I haven't tested this personally). - I'd say the actual game client is optimized extremely well.
Is it really shocking that dev machines have a lot of ram?
If someone works in full frame photography or edits 4K video, do you tell them to try working on machines with 4GB of ram to see what they come up with, and how it's going to be "beneficial"?
Why would it be any different for games? When a level designer loads the entire map into editor, it's the same as loading a 4K video into Adobe Premiere - it's going to eat up your ram, and you need to have loads of it.
>>Who in hell does run a game server on a laptop, and outside office?
At E3, the answer is - literally everyone. We send one guy with a fully encrypted beefy laptop that runs all servers during the show, and he has to keep an eye on it 100% of the time. You're not going to fly a desktop over the Atlantic just for a games conference.
I suppose that would work, but a one-time big laptop purchase that is then owned by the studio is easier to justify than buying a machine abroad(not to mention you can test that the laptop works several times before going, a brand new desktop might/might not work and people usually arrive a day or two before a conference so it's not like there's loads of time to debug problems before the big show).
What he wrote was extremely arrogant. Unless he tried to be funny. I am tired of people who tell you that you are doing it all wrong after a quick look.
I work on a pretty complex system myself and every few months somebody comes in,takes a quick look and tells us we just need to use framework X and all will be easy. Guess what, we are not totally stupid and have looked at it already. And it wouldn't solve the actual problem which is that it's just a very complex thing we are doing.
First understand what people are doing before telling them they are wrong.
What's so taboo about creating things under the constraints of machines that everyday people own? The best engineers are always the most resourceful and focused.
> What's so taboo about creating things under the constraints of machines that everyday people own?
Because it's impractical, unnecessary and wasteful. There are a number of processes that by their nature require global knowledge. These are not the sorts of processes that need to be done in the client (many of them in fact are done up front precisely so that a client will not need to do them), but they are the sorts of processes that a developer will need to do if they are to be able to make a change and see its effect. Also, there are good reasons to generate assets at a higher resolution than needed in the final artifact.
Just like if you're rendering a 3d animated film you might need a more powerful machine than those who are only watching it, or if you're training a neural net, you need a more powerful system than if you're merely running it.
TEST things under the constraints of machines that people own. Multiple people have given multiple reasons why there are better ways to do things. I read another recently talking about being able to capture all the game state for debugging, too.
Maybe their stuff is extremely complex and is already optimized? Before you make such a suggestion you should be very sure that you understand the situation.
It reminds me of the story "The programming antihero" from an old Gamasutra article[1]
"He knew from experience that it was always impossible to cut content down to memory budgets, and that many projects had come close to failing because of it. So now, as a regular practice, he always put aside a nice block of memory to free up when it's really needed."
Being able to use the same device travelling and at your desk is really useful. Even if it were a case of only opening the actual editor at your desk and just working on emails/design docs/what-have-you while travelling, it makes for a much nicer workflow than switching devices.
Well then this isn't the laptop for you. Me neither, but I'm sure e.g. web devs would be fine. Can't make a machine for everyone. Look at the form factor, obviously it's not trying to be a behemoth gaming laptop.
if you need to work on assets that won't work well with 16GB of RAM then the Surface Pro is probably not the right choice..
It competes with an iPad Pro etc which don't even offer a full desktop. The surface runs a full Windows with Photoshop and Unity Game Engine if you want, and with the i7 and 16GB would run that pretty well.
We do. But if you take an alpha build of the game to E3 or an external presentation you need to run everything locally, and usually beefy alienwares or custom-built laptops are used for this.
It vastly depends on your work flow. If you are like me and just using editor, browser, small LEMP stack, git, gulp, ssh and some other small tools then you are fine and 16GB is plenty but when you start doing virtualisation, docker instances, data crunching, in memory dbs etc. then suddenly 16GB doesn't look like much.
Yes, but this "laptops" are set to use cpu in burst mode. So if you run servers like docker and VMs etc (like I do on my SP4) you often hit the burst limit and the cpu throttle's right back down.
I've taken to using an external usb fan to get extra speed.
If you run servers then SP4 is not for you. Choose proper tool for your job. SP contrary to its name is not pro at all, it just looks professional but if you want to do serious work you need serious horse power.
Obviously not running prod servers on it. But for on the go development, what's wrong with using some of that 16gb to start some docker containers to work?
Yeah and slow down every time connection is a bit slower or you want to search something across whole project. Very often I am doing search trough all files directly in Sublime and I can do that because I am restricted only by throughput of my SSD and CPU.
If you're searching across a whole project, the server is footing the brunt of that. it's only sending back the results. That's not usually a lot of data, so your connection would have to be in the kilobits to be that big of a burden.
This is simply not true. If you search using external application, all the work is done locally, not server site. During the search Sublime have to open EVERY file, search for word and then close it. That's a lot of data going back and forward. Of course search can be done using server tools like grep, then the search will look just as you said, server will do all the work and then return result. There are two problems with that approach, first this is not as nice user experience as it is in Sublime, second: server (usually VPS) is in most cases slower than my dev machine, because not everybody works with multi cpu behemoths.
Either ssh into a real server, or use (or ssh into) that clunky behemoth gaming desktop I have sitting under a desk, which I sadly use way more for work than for gaming.
Have fun every time your unreliable coffee shop wifi breaks down. It quickly gets far more convenient to just connect the power cord and do everything locally.
I'd say that HDMI would be make the machine a lot more versatile than USB-C (or MiniDP, for that matter). Showing a few photos on a TV, using your client's projector for an unplanned demo, using an absent coworker's screen - I can't remember how often I've envied MacBook Pro Retina users for that port. It's magic.
TVs and projects are not going to switch from HDMI to USB-C either, so waiting won't solve that problem.
Will RAM capacity remain a true valid complaint until the end of time? How much power on one device do we really need in the age of cloud computing and multi-device ownership?
Developers use more memory because it's available.
Most developers seem to assume their program is the only program running on the system.
This is why my girlfriend can't have multiple browsers open. For a "demanding" workoad (IE; IntelliJ IDE, browser, mail client) windows can easily consume 15/16G already.
Personally I use a stripped down linux machine but I'm regularly over 8G, where's the future-proof option?
The way we use our machine matters along with the continual upkeep and fine tuning of our tools. It is our responsibility to not put the foot down on the gas completely all the time. The real world constraints on this machine do not seem unreasonable for me and my type of work (software, web) at this time.
Fortunately, in my arena of software we distribute work off of the computer and our programs are more piecemeal. Very few software engineers need a large amount of resources locally.
On the same boat, waiting for the sweet spot laptop, of a good enough processor, but still 16GB ram and enough hdd space. Whoever provides the better laptop will get me as their customer, whether Apple or Microsoft. Anyone else has to fight for it hard enough, I am considering Dell for Ubuntu though.
My current laptop is an ASUS ROG but I'm waiting to see who else is competing, I kinda want hardware that'd be most likely to have better Linux support.
Haha, you literally stole the thought out of my mind when I had hit send - Asus has some great value/performance, but I wasn't sure of the Linux support.
I have a good friend who runs linux natively (I use a VM) and is raving about the new Lenovo Carbon X1 as well.
Don't get me wrong, I run a Ubuntu Variant natively, no dual-booting on my ASUS ROG laptop, but the Nvidia drivers are iffy, also battery life is a downer. Would love to see a Linux compliant laptop with amazing battery life. I would think MacBooks are very common enough hardware wise to where Linux support would be pretty decent, same with a Surface... Maybe even the Dell ones, so I'm just waiting and waiting...
The pen is amazing for what it does. You can annotate things on the same machine where you're doing everything else. It's also a wonderful machine for flying.
But you pay up for those things. So for you, definitely just get the solid laptop. Surface pros can be maddening, and often feel finicky enough that they can't be primary machines.
> why not just get a really solid laptop at that point
Their goal is to be a more versatile version of exactly that, though? The surface isn't meant to be a tablet alternative, it's more of a laptop alternative that's also sort of a tablet.
For me personally, I bought my Surface Pro for its capabilities as a drawing tablet. Comparable dedicated drawing tablets run close to $1000, so shelling extra for a fully functional laptop was a no-brainer.
I'm inching towards getting a Pro 4 to use as a extended display for my Mac. Need some native windows again after switching to MacOS. A Surface Pro 4 will be discounted and not a bad pick up.
I have an SP3. It is the best device I've bought in years.
I interact with the device in a fundamentally different way. I will sit and read a document with a pen and no keyboard (to proofread, highlight and makes notes). I'd tried this on ipad and it never fit in my workflow well.
I will use it to take notes at a meeting in OneNote. Again, the ipad workflow never worked for me for this.
The benefits definitely aren't for everyone. But it fits me perfectly, and I wouldn't go back from it now. Its probably at least a year before I upgrade (I also have a desktop for heavy lifting). I'm feeling the pinch of the older SP3 cpu a bit on some of the work I do, but not enough to warrant an upgrade yet. If I had money to throw around, I'd get the new one as a drop in upgrade without a second thought.
OOC, can you explain why the iPad workflow has never worked for those things you mentioned? Seems like one of its core intended designs is taking notes/reading documents much like an actual notebook
When I tried it might have worked if you'd fully bought into the apple ecosystem, but in a mixed corporate environment it just wouldn't work.
A document had to be somehow transferred into each viewer, and manually saved back out so I could use the reviewed document on the desktop.
With the SP3, live documents are stored in either dropbox or a network share and its seamless.
I do a lot of design work in indesign and photoshop, and even word. Being able to make both simple and substantive changes on the fly is a lot more use than far more limited ipad apps.
The SP4 pen is far more pleasant to write with than any ipad stylus I came across. This is all just a matter of taste, but I found my muscle memory reacts for better to the SP4 stylus.
My ipads were great for many things, but work was never one of them for me.
The form-factor is pretty amazing. The portability is very good. The performance is also very good within the above two factors.
The problem is the software and features:
- Windows 10 is a known factor, and it constantly frustrates.
- No Thunderbolt or USB-C is ridiculous in 2017.
I'd like to see Microsoft releasing Linux drivers for the Surface Pro. If they really love Linux enough to support it on Azure, they should support it everywhere. (I know, they support it on Azure to compete with AWS and Googs)
I've pretty much gotten used to Windows 10 at this point, and there are even a couple of minor UI tweaks that I miss when I use my Windows 7 machine at work. What frustrates you?
Windows 10 updates frustrate a lot of people. It will attempt it when you have a bad wifi connection and make the internet unreachable, or it will reboot when you're in the middle of something. And woe if you run out of battery power in the middle of the update... I'd rather have more control.
My pro 4 works perfectly fine. I'm just a desktop apps junkie (sales mainly) and so there is no real reason to upgrade. That said the new pen's deeper resolution is impressive, as I switched (primarily) from Evernote to OneNote and haven't looked back. (I still pay for Evernote, now it is purely for legacy info).
Awesome! I wasn't aware of that and did briefly google for one a while back. Hopefully I can migrate, the $5 bill every month, while not expensive, is becoming a bit annoying now as the value exchange simply isn't what it used to be for me.
I have an iPad pro, a MacBook, and a Surface Pro. I carry the MacBook and the iPad. The surface is too hot, cooks off battery too fast, the screen is small, the UI for the desktop app I use has icons too small to Target with the pen. The charger is janky.
I realize by "too hot" you were mainly talking about how it affects battery life. But I thought I'd add that I have a 15" Macbook Pro (work) and a Surface Book (home) and at times I find the MBP's keyboard almost unusable as it generates so much heat I can barely touch the keys. I've resorted to using third party apps to run the fans at higher speeds earlier to try and mitigate this. One of the features I love about the Surface devices is that the CPU is in the display and thus the keyboard never gets hot.
This new Surface Pro supposedly has longer battery life and the core i5 is fanless. We'll see how it translates to actual real world usage in future reviews hopefully.
In my case, I wouldn't upgrade just for the sake of upgrading to a newer device since the ones we have are still doing the job, maybe parent poster is in the same boat.
You got it in one. I'm very happy with my pro4, so no need to upgrade. It is perfect for meetings and quickly doing work on the move. I will never[1] go back to a standard laptop, my desktop does the heavy lifting.
[1] Never say never, but it is a pretty big improvement!
As an apple fan who gave the surface 3 pro (with surface 4 keyboard) a try, yes you can mix and match the keyboards, I didn't end up keeping it long. My MacBook Air's keyboard and touchpad was much superior to the surface and I found coding on the tiny surface cumbersome.
Usecases: Web Dev in node/javascript/HTML/CSS, now using WSL. Notetaking in onenote + surface pen for general journaling, notes at meetups, notes from MOOCs, notes from self-language-study. Vague low-power gaming sometimes. Adobe Lightroom photo editing.
Issues: Onenote is absolute fucking garbage at syncing. It is absolutely unusable when offline. It will throw unskippable error dialogs about being unable to sync when offline, meaning I can't use it to write or take notes at all unless I tether. It is so useful in all the above usecases, with no competitor, that I have subjected myself to just getting my tether on my phone ready when I'm out and about and needing to use onenote. However, it is frustrating to the extreme.
Anybody here at Microsoft care to comment on this actually being addressed? Syncing and offline issues have been a "top priority" for the onenote team since 2014 according to the flares of investigating I do occasionally.
I hear you. OneNote uses OneDrive which is a huge mess itself. Sync to Dropbox would help so much... there's even ticket for that on their uservoice. OneNote also sucks massively at searching in notes...
My #1 gripe about OneNote is that it can't be moved to the SD card on Android. It's manageable since you can decide which notebooks to keep on the device, but still annoying.
Intentionally omitting a USB-C port kind of reveals how petty microsoft is being. Deciding to omit backtracks from a nice universal standard presumably to intentionally hinder Apple who put all there chips in it. Now accessory manufacturers (thumb drives, displays, etc) are forced to support older ports now longer, potentially forever, until MS adopts.
Lest we forget, the dream that was USB-C was that we wouldn’t need half a dozen different cords and adapters to connect things, we could just use one port for everything. Sure dongles are slightly worse than cords, but one cord for everything is the best solution. So Mac users need dongles now, but MS is like “fuck that, give people what they immediately want and screw the future”.
Most people will have replaced their new Surface Pro long before they actually need a USB Type-C port. Apple chooses to act against it's own customers' interests by rushing to new ports and requiring they buy all new hardware. This will be the third generation of Surface Pro that does not require any new accessories.
If I end up buying the new one (which I might for the built-in LTE), I won't have to buy a new type cover, pen, dock, or spare chargers. Everything is compatible. In my car I keep a Mini-DP video adapter, a portable DVD-RW drive, and an Ethernet adapter, all are USB Type-A, and all would still work with the new Surface Pro.
Consider how much loathing I hear from Mac fans about Apple taking away MagSafe. Why would Microsoft do that to their Surface customers? This is Microsoft making a pro-consumer decision.
My phone (Nexus 6p) uses USB-C and my GF's laptop uses USB-C (Macbook). I really don't see the problem with using USB-C in mid-2017. There are plenty of products out these days which use it.
The key difference is that these products all purchased early last were all in the early adopter or luxury category.
Surface Pro in mid-2017 should very obviously use USB-C. It fits in both luxury/pro categories. But even beyond that I could see the incentive to use it regardless, just based on it being the future interface for all devices.
> Apple chooses to act against it's own customers' interests by rushing to new ports and requiring they buy all new hardware.
I just moved to a 2016 MacBook Pro and the only "all new hardware" I've purchased is a pair of $10 adapters. I haven't replaced any of the hardware I already own, because I don't need to.
I can only really criticize Apple for not including an adapter or two, and for not including more than two USB-C ports on the base 13" MBP. The latter's really pretty regrettable.
That's certainly true. Apple included the ports that people will use the most, at some point in what they believe to be the justifiably near future (we'll see!), and they naturally support adapters for those who need what are currently the more popular ports.
So with the Surface Pro you're probably buying adapters one to two years from now, whereas with the MacBook you're probably buying those adapters today. Whether adapters are bought now or two years from now I don't think is that great of a concern.
That’s so short sighted. Sure, if we stick with what everyone uses now everyone will be supported. They only way to move towards those greener pastures is to have companies actually support them.
MS hasn’t supported the port, and is intentionally taking a swipe at Apple “people who love USB-C love dongles.” To me implies they know what they’re dong and are trying to reap the benefits of the inevitable awkwardness of transitions.
It was only a commentary on whether buying adapters/dongles or converting to new hardware now vs. later doesn't (or shouldn't) matter to users individually, not a suggestion that USB-C adoption shouldn't concern users in a more collective sense.
For what it's worth if I was in the market for a Surface Pro I think I'd have also preferred USB-C, given its momentum.
I am willing to bet you're still going to see USB 2.0 ports on desktop PCs in 2025. (Most come with at least a pair of non-3.0 ports today.) Some computers still ship with DB9 and DB25 ports today. VGA is still one of the most common video ports, and a lot of brand new PCs and monitors come with them to ensure people have compatibility with whatever PCs and monitors they already own.
USB Type-C is nice in theory, but even if you assume they get all the compatibility issues with it worked out, we're gonna be using USB Type-A for many years to come. Type-C only accessories being common is a really long way away, and you'll have replaced your Surface Pro by then.
This is an excellent explanation of USB Type-C: https://xkcd.com/927/ (That isn't to say that USB Type-C is bad, but pretending we're all moving over to it in 2017 is silly.)
Heck man, I didn’t say take away anything, just add USB-C. Perhaps take away a USB 3 port for it or something.
They’re now making a stink about “People who love USB-C love dongles. so we have a dongle for you” so it seems like they’re going after the standard intentionally for short term gains.
...It only has one USB 3 port. The one everyone uses.
The dongle method makes sense. People using USB-C right now, are indeed pretty used to dongles. And by offering a SurfaceConnect to USB-C dongle, they'll let you use your USB-C charger... while still having the full benefits of a magnetic charging port that won't yank your tablet off the desk if someone trips over the cable.
Although it's odd, I suspect it's more a reaction to USB-C blowback than a conscious decision to harm Apple. These days, Microsoft is not generally one for going out of their way to put the pain on Apple.
Besides, Microsoft's products occupy only a portion of the PC hardware market, and several vendors have USB-C products out now. If it slows adoption of USB-C products, I think the effect will be fairly negligible.
No Thunderbolt 3 as the leaks said. Can't buy it for that reason alone. (Our office goes for TB3 Docks everywhere so Mac and Windows Users can use the same Flex Desks)
I have a Dell XPS 15 9560 with the TB16 dock. I had tried a couple (Kensington, etc), and had issues (like, buried waaaaay down in the Kensington fine print was the fact that if you had a 4K display, the USB3 ports would "downshift" to USB2, and the GigE port would go to 100mbps...)
The TB16 dock is great though, works seamlessly and smoothly with 4K displays, GigE, supports Power Delivery and remote 'wake' (there's a power button on the dock that if the laptop is sleeping will wake it).
Currently CalDigits TS3 Lite works well, we have a couple, but we want to Rollout the full TS3 as soon as they become available so we can ditch the chargers aswell.
The new surface pro is not a huge update from SP4 in terms of processing power. SP4 is still in the game, just without the extra pen sensitivity and battery life. That's my guess.
I'm interested to see if the claims of ~20ms latency on the pen hold up in reviews. That's less than half of the latency of the Apple Pencil and within spitting distance of the 10ms considered to be the holy grail of imperceptibility. I could never get into pen-based input because the latency drove me nuts, but may have to rethink that.
Apple pencil was never touted as having particularly low latency. On the other hand surface devices have always made a point of having the best touch/stylus experience, so I won't be surprised if that 20ms really holds good.
I tried Apple Pencil at an Apple store, and can't help but feel that it low-pass filters much more aggressively than my Surface Pro 4 which uses a version of NTrig2 tech. More low-pass filtering means more effective latency.
Yes, it is very rare as it is highly expensive. These cameras use film sheets with a size of 4x5 or 8x10 inches (depending on how you process the film and scan it the total might be in the hundreds of dollars per image). The image quality however is unmatched by any digital equipment.
Scanning back solutions also exist (basically a scanner that you can attach to the camera) . These cost thousands of dollars each and may take a few minutes per image. You cannot use them for moving subjects. [1]
These factors make cameras like this a very rare sight indeed.
The biggest note to me seems to be the addition of tilt sensitivity, which will also be available via Windows Update for other surface devices (the footnote is vague on which ones).
As a side-note: if you are selling premium devices with these mark ups and charging extra for essential accessories (a keyboard) you better have premium physical stores where I can try them out. I'm in the UK and PC World does not count: they will most likely not know the difference between this and a Surface Pro 4.
I only have the sp4, and apparently Linux support is getting there. On my first attempt (almost a year ago) there were a number of issues - but now a recent distro/kernel should work out of the box (on the sp4).
But I haven't gotten around to trying yet, as with the Linux subsystem and hyper-v - I have enough Linux for my current needs.
I do plan to try and move to Linux (again) now - for better window management and better package management (scoop.sh and chocolatey notwithstanding) - and because I strongly believe in FOSS.
That was my first thought as well... I'm currently using a MBP for my work laptop and personal, but my next personal laptop will probably run linux... and I've considered switching my MBP over.
Can you actually use this "laptop" on your lap? Doesn't the fact that it has a kickstand make it extremely awkward, if not impossible? I have not tried one like that myself, so I honestly don't know, but I'd be very surprised if it worked on one's lap.
I've never used one, but I suspect one of the benefits is with the CPU on the screen side, you don't get bacon legs like you would with a traditional laptop.
I have SP4 - despite many other issues I have with it, the kickstand DOES make it great to use on a lap. In fact I find it much easier to use on my lap than any laptop that I have used.
Being able to adjust to any angle means you can use it just as comfortably in an airport chair vs on a lounge etc.
I have a Surface 3 and it's doable. Mind that the device is also a bit smaller than the usual laptop, so there's enough space (on my knees at least) to place the kickstand.
Look I'm a fan but until I see it running some real heavy artillery (Ableton Live 9 Suite, Massive, AmpliTube, and a half-dozen VSTs) in real-time vs. the competition, then it's just another hollow claim. Sure, hardware and performance are getting better. Sure, the Surface Dial is a massive game changer in the long term.
But, look, the problem with marketing to creative people is that they take it sort of as a challenge to prove you wrong. It's like ingrained. Kind of a bad habit, but, hey, it is what it is and I will happily admit I want one of these new devices and would consider it a major upgrade from my current gear.
I'm a fairly professional creative myself and have been using Surface products to do my work for the last 4~ years almost exclusively. Heavy Photoshop work, lots of video editing, 3D modeling & rendering, etc.
Sure, I'd love to have 32GB of memory and an even more powerful machine in general, but I've been damn happy with all of the Surface products I've owned.
You might want to check out 'molten music tech' youtube channel. He has tons of info about the surface pro and music making... he puts it through paces and provides a good analysis. Recent videos he looks at the surface book.
Much better to watch people actually using the software rather than just reading reviews...
I run FL Studio and a bunch of VSTs, and I agree with you on at least this: the processor still can't meet the need if you use a lot of synth, and 16GiB RAM is still too small if you replace the synths with samplers instead.
I have used Surface pro 1, and I got too many problems such as keyboard's key is broken which I had to buy a new keyboard twice. The surface is totally freezed when I connected keyboard to it.
I again convinced myself that the Surface pro 3 is better so I bought it. Wow, some problems are:
- The top right of backside is extremely hot when I watch youtube.
- Again, the Alt btn of the surface pro 3 keyboard is broken.
- batter length is not as advertised.
Therefore, I wont never buy a new surface even if it is cheaper than macbook pro. I am saving money to buy a new macbook pro.
Apple Pencil is $99 and NOT included in their tablet offering, also artificially gated to their higher end tablets not available to the whole lineup like Surface Pen is.
Seriously how is Microsoft even supposed to compete when they're held to completely different standards to their rival. I do feel for them.
Not to mention Surface Pen works with REAL Photoshop and REAL Illustrator.
They lowered the prices on the SKUs to compensate.
Honestly, there's no pleasing some people. When the pen was included, everyone was saying, "let me buy a cheaper SKU without the pen; I don't want it!", and now that they've done that everyone is complaining.
I got mine for the equivalent of 1028 USD: SP4 i5, 256G, 8GO pen and type cover (this was a special offer though). This was one month ago. So when the new model will go out, the prices of SP4 will probably drop.
So far the only drawback of the SP4 is the battery life, so except if they improved it a lot I don't see the point of paying the 500-600$ more. They say it's possible to watch 13.5 hours of videos, but manufacturers tests are not trustable anyway. It would probably be more like 7-8 hours of real-world usage. Are the extra 3 hours worth the difference? Maybe, but for my usage no.
Yes, it is why I said "Maybe" :-) I'm actually working in research and I'm going to conferences, but the limit of ~4 hours kind of forces me to focus on talks instead of coding all day long.
I mean, during the conference day I'm kind of depressed of not having battery any more, but with cold head I tell myself it is better for me.
People are pushing this as a MacBook killer but it's more like an iPad Pro killer. With the same 4GB of RAM, a Core m3 and 128 GB of storage, it costs $100 less than the iPad Pro with the same RAM and storage (but an ARM processor). The m3 here makes a good difference.
For the same as the 8GB i5 with 256 GB, you get a MacBook with a Core m and the built-in keyboard. It's slower than the i5, but it's an actual laptop.
Their pricing structure floors me. On the i7 models, you pay $1100 more for 750GB of extra SSD space and 8GB of extra RAM over the entry level i7 model. That is ridiculous. With that kind of premium to protect, they'll also make it nearly impossible to manually upgrade/replace the RAM and SSD, which makes buying one of these things a pretty bad decision.
I'd argue that iPad Pro isn't really competition for the Surface Pro. It's a tablet; the Surface Pro is a full-fledged PC. I would absolutely buy one because I love the weight and form factor, but I'd need at least 16GB of RAM, and I just won't pay an $1100 idiot tax for the top of the line model. I'll watch to see what iFixIt says about soldered RAM etc., but I'm not hopeful.
Most of my heavy-duty work is done via SSH into a remote VM. I watch movies, but mostly browse the web. Most of my actual work is programming intensive. I like pretty screens. Larger is usually better. I want to be able to take it on a plane without hassle when I travel.
New surface? HP Elite x360 15"? Wait for Surface Book refresh? Yoga?
XPS 13" has convertible model. Nowadays Precision laptops come with the same chassis as XPS, nothing premium there as XPS is the regular multimedia laptop. I'd recommend before getting Dell's laptop to first go through the owners comments at the Amazom/reddit/etc, I saw many complaints about quality control and the coil whine problem, so for me Dell is not an option.
50% more battery life than the 4, fanless options for the m3 and i5 versions, on screen support for the surface dial, and a new hinge that lays a little flatter seem like the big changes. It's largely an incremental improvement.
More battery is a big one - I love my sp4, but I think (even with the improvements with the pro) they should have added a few 100 grams for more battery.
Fanless i5 would be nice - my sp4 i5 isn't loud, but quiet would be better.
Was hoping the new sp would be waterproof though (it's the only remaining "obvious" improvement I see. We'll that and enough gpu power to drive vr - but I suppose we're still a few years from that in a small, light, quiet battery-powered device).
I use my tablet quite a lot to browse the web. It's an old iPad 2. Everytime a new tablet comes out, I wonder if I should update but cannot find a reason. Is there anything new in this tablet that would benefit me?
All I really care for in a tablet is that it is:
1) Fanless (The iPad is fanless)
2) Lightweight (The iPad weights 600g)
Is there anything new in this tablet that would benefit me?
Do you ever want to use keyboard with your tablet? Can you see that advantage of a pen? Is there any windows software that you might want to run on your tablet? If no, then no.
Basically this isn't a tablet that is competing against the iPad, it's a tablet that's competing against the macbook/macbook air.
I use my laptop to do anything else then browsing the web. If a tablet would run Linux smoothly, I could see myself using it with an external keyboard. So I could put the tablet onto something so it's on eyelevel and put the keyboard on the desk. I guess that would work with a bluetooth keyboard?
However, as far as I know the surface line does not support Linux well.
I want to use all the software that is in the Debian repos. I don't want Microsoft to spy on me. And I don't want to be exposed to their security issues.
I'm in the same boat. I have an iPad 2 and it's starting to feel a bit sluggish (and only 16GB). When I look for something that fills the same need that the iPad does (casual browsing and entertainment), the only thing I keep finding that seems right is the new non-Pro iPad. I haven't been able to convince myself to make the transition to an Android tablet, because those seem to come and go so quickly and the iPad just feels nicer for casual use.
Everytime I pick up a Surface, I think to myself - this is too much for just casual use. Maybe if I wanted all that computing power and options in that form factor, but that's a different use case.
>I use my tablet quite a lot to browse the web. It's an old iPad 2. Is there anything new in this tablet that would benefit me?
If you're fine with an iPad 2, the new Surface is probably overkill.
As someone who just retired an iPad 4 (first retina I think?), new tablets will be much faster and lighter. I'm currently using a $200 Lenovo tablet, mostly as an ereader, and it's snappier than the old iPad (though the screen is worse). Also, Opera mini is great on these old devices.
To be fair an iPad 2 is quite slow and bulky compared to the current model. Maybe you don't know what you're missing, but I'd say there's no going back if you use a current iPad Pro, or just the recently updated non-Pro version.
Judging by your requirements you're looking for a tablet and compared to the surface an iPad still offers a way better tablet experience.
Following the Apple school of numbering things up to a point the throwing a random self-titled reboot, I see. It won't work, Microsoft. It didn't work for Apple. Just ask anyone who owns an iPad, and count the amount of time it takes to figure out exactly which model iPad they own.
I think the numbering system goes away when the innovation ends. Meaning, the only thing changing in the future is slight hardware upgrades, like the MB Air or Mini which are identified by date.
The keyboard looks bad. I don't want the oversized left and right arrows. I want pageup and pagedown there instead.
The XPS 13 2-in-1 is better for me if only for this reason. The XPS also comes with a pen, USB-C, and a decent hardware configuration like 16Gb of ram because we are in 2017!!!
I just wish I could get QHD+ screen. No option on dell.com, while I see that on https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N5MV7YA so it must exist somewhere. I also have been told that it may be possible to get a trackpoint on similar models that share the chassis - but no touchscreen then.
Oh, and there is no LTE in any case. I guess I will have to wait for 2018 to at least get the QHD+ option.
I own a Surface Pro 3 with the SP4 type cover (i.e. the version before the one that just came out and which is basically the same). I thought I'd miss all the keys from my laptop and desktop keyboards. Turns out, there are lots of hidden shortcuts. I got used to doing Fn+Arrows for Home/End/PageUp/PageDown and now I wish I could use that on other keyboards too. To me it's easier than having to reach for those keys when they are to the right or to the top of the keyboard, so much that I think I type a bit faster on the type cover, as long as I'm properly seated and the keyboard is on a solid surface (e.g. a desk).
I find the keyboard very good (the right menu key is a bit useless, but you can remap that using many methods) and the touchpad is the best I've used too, although it's probably not as good as the ones in Macbooks.
If the keyboard is the only thing holding you back, rethink it. You should be more worried about the price and the kickstand which is not a problem for me but might be for you, especially if your legs are short and you intend on using it on your lap a lot.
The keyboard is holding me up. I have shortcuts mapped to the keys above the left and right arrow. I use them extensively to navigate between desktop and tabs. A few years ago I read about using such shortcuts and now they are deeply ingrained into my workflow.
I don't think I could do without them, and they are one of the only reason I'm considering the XPS: a proper keyboard.
FYI, by default these 2 keys go to the next tab, when using the shift key right above: they go to next desktop, using the control or menu key right next to them they reorder the tabs, etc.)
For the tool I use everyday, price is not the problem. However, a bad keyboard is.
IMHO the sp4 keyboard is among the best you can get on a portable device today. I like the old thinkpads better - but other than that I prefer the sp4 to Apple, lenovo or dell keyboards I've tried. Came as a surprise to me.
I've been very happy with my SP4, but I wish I'd gone for the i7 CPU instead of the i5.
It would be nice if the top-level configuration on the SP5 had 32gb of memory - I end up swapping sometimes (which TBH isn't that bad with a SSD, compared to the old rotating rust drives)
That's the really weird thing about Core i7 mobile processors. They are also 1 socket, 2 cores, 4 logical processors. Just slightly faster base/turbo clocks than the i5. I dislike the naming. I only recently realized my work laptop is a U series, which explains why my 8 year old desktop (AMD quad core) is much faster at compiling the same projects...
My laptop with U-series i3 builds C++ just as fast as my 3 years old quad core desktop i5.
The reason is eDRAM i.e. large L4 cache in the mobile CPU. Some workloads (compiling C++ appears to be one of them) like lower RAM latency even more than extra CPU cores.
In an era when even Apple is rumored (and even if false, still plausible) to be switching to USB-C for the iPhone, Microsoft still tries to force a proprietary connector. Didn't they learn anything from IE? Even if it's good for them for a while, it'll be their demise not following standars and thus locking thenselves out of everything.
From what I’ve seen, USB-C is a disaster. The ports and cables all have to support specific profiles, which are just getting more and more complicated, for specific features to work, and there is no visual indication at all of this. If you got a cheap cable (which people will do), you may suddenly find that maybe charging doesn’t work. Or maybe it melts. Or maybe it doesn’t transfer data. Or maybe using it for a video signal doesn’t work. There is no way of telling without trying it.
USB-C just isn’t popular enough yet to have crashed and burned (though even after that it’ll still be popular for ages for want of an alternative).
I have a Surface Book (the hardware was good enough to get me to switch from Linux, without ever actually having seen one), and the Surface cable is marvellous. Magnets are awesome, and the Surface Book is probably the most carefully magnetically-designed computer hardware. At work I have a Dock and I pretty much just put the Book on the desk by the connector and it jumps into place and my external monitors connect. And removing it, really easy and it can’t go wrong. The whole thing is really, really nice.
What we like to think of as USB-C are actually 3 individual parts that an be swapped around as the OEMs feel like.
there is the 3.1 bus speed, that can be swapped for older and slower speeds.
There is the Power Delivery spec, that can be replaced with older or omitted entirely.
And then there is the C plug itself, that can be replace with an A or B plug when mixed with any of the above.
The only thing that the C plug offer on its own is hte aux pins that can be used to carry Displayport, HDMI or Thunderbolt signals. But again this depends on the OEM.
It is a downright combinatorial explosion, that is just waiting to set fire to something.
Hell, a while back there was a story about someone getting their phone drained because the C port allows bi-directional power delivery. And their powerpack used the C port for both charging itself and charging other devices. This, in combo with a phone that could charge other devices as an emergency option, allowed the two devices to ping pong a charge between them until both were run dry.
Frankly the C plug and related specs are overdesigned, trying to be all things to all people.
USB-C works just fine on most laptops that have it and it's incredibly convenient when you figure out you only need to drag a single charger with you to charge your laptop, phone and tablet.
Also HDMI/DP adapters worked without issues across my MacBook Pro, Samsung's Chromebook and another Dell laptop which is also hugely convenient.
> The ports and cables all have to support specific profiles, which are just getting more and more complicated, for specific features to work, and there is no visual indication at all of this. If you got a cheap cable (which people will do), you may suddenly find that maybe charging doesn’t work. Or maybe it melts.
Ah, but then you should be incentivized to buy an Apple® Certified Cable™ (made 100% from organically grown coppers and hand-milled by crafty Chinese masters from a solid plastic core). Not that I would dare to suggest that the chaos is create on purpose or anything like that.
That's often how reality works though. I remember the Apple fans mocking computers shipping with floppy disk drives, but floppy disks were useful at the time. Migrations take time, not everyone can afford to just rush out and buy all-new accessories. For a device that you buy today and will use for say 3 years, USB-A and a dongle for compatibility with -C is probably better for most users than the reverse.
That's the truth. But our society will only move as fast as we say to. All of this, economy, technological advance, social issues all exist in our mind. Surely a giant such as Microsoft could be dedicated to being at the forefront of a wave of events
If it's anything like the Kensington sd3600p I had, not so great. Buried far below anything else was the not so little detail that if you plugged in a 4K display, USB3 ports on the dock would downshift to USB2, and GigE to 100mbps (why bother?).
I got my dock for about $70. Presumably if you shop around a bit, you can manage to do something similar. I haven't seen a full dock, but I have seen off-brand SurfaceConnect chargers.
Every laptop in existence, up until quite recently, used a proprietary power connector. The fact that Surface also uses it as a dock connector doesn't erase this fact.
But it does point to the fact that many of us have such a dock, and are very happy to not have to buy a new one to use with our new Surface Pros. It also won't hurt that our old power adapters should still work.
One particular gamble of the Surface line was that it relies on accessories to really meet your needs. Microsoft has done a commendable job in this area, allowing me to "upgrade" my Surface Pro 3 with a new keyboard and pen, and now allowing me to continue using all my accessories with the latest device.
I agree they have to break compatibility at some point, but I don't think there's much value yet in doing so. Maybe in a year or so, USB-C will be standardized and reliable enough to really make it advantageous to use as a power supply for all my devices. But it's not there yet.
Looks more complicated that it sounds.
MSFT already did the job of sourcing cables, connectors, and power supplies for all their surface line for the next XXX years (where XXX is the time they're commited to support all their hardware products).
Switching to USB-C from the bussiness perspective would be a great expense... and would involve higher price tag.
That is what I mean, it's basically a similar situation to 2005's IE. From the business perspective it wouldn't have made sense to support standards and would have involved a higher price tag.
What this means is now people (those who buy an extra $200 device) will be happy for a while until their devices start to be incompatible or work slower than the competition who have a single cable type for everything. Then they will resent the brand and thus not buy again. Of course totally my opinion.
I like a single magnetic cable that does power and data. Until there's some open connector that does that [1] I'm happy to keep using the excellent Surface Dock cables.
They could add USB C, but I still have more USB A devices, and I suspect others do too.
[1] USB C isn't magnetic, and the fake 'magnetic USB C' is just an adaptor and doesn't do data.
Good point, however this whole device line is an experiment itself. Realistically, I decline to entertain Microsoft is risking building these devices in a declining market to make a buck. Their approach, especially with the marketing, imagery, the counterpoints to Mac (pretty much imitating Apple) all points to constructing an image, instilling consumer confidence (and displaying a lot of ego). The deeper purpose of these devices prevail, even if they don't sell, what they bet on returns value.
They could've started a low cost evolution on a single device instead of handicapping the whole Surface line. Now it has this whole funk of "no USB-C" all over it and it increases the cost of when they upgrade the whole line. And seeing as Surface is experimental (not core to MS, they would shutter it rather defend if it goes south), I doubt that they bought an overwhelming amount of cables, connectors, etc., I think it has more to do with a slower product development cycle due to politics.
I assume it was a combination of limited engineering expertise AND Microsoft's tendency of being a late adapter due to its business customer base. No matter how hard they try, little things like this show Microsoft's competitive handicap.
799 USD for 4GB RAM, 128GB of flash, and an "Intel Core m3"? Come on. I understand that the Intel CPU is almost 300 USD per unit, and that pushes the price. I hope that Snapdragon SoCs running Windows 10 with emulation for x86 stuff drive down Windows 10 tablet/laptop prices dramatically. BTW, despite being expensive, the new Surface Pro looks great.
In my opinion, Intel is playing Serguéi Bubka's technique: because there is no enough competition, they go as slow as possible in the mobile market, just matching the performance of the second competitor.
I don't mind the name. However, differentiating between versions when buying a surface from a third party site e.g. EBay would become problematic and unnecessarily time consuming.
They picked some low-rez pictures to show this off. Check out the picture of all the software being demonstrated. Apple is always really good at showing you a crisp picture of the software side.
Microsoft is completely unashamed and masterfully brilliant at copying and improving on Apple's strategy. The only concern is that they're making a bunch of machines not many people will buy, however, in the long run it's better that they have the production expertise and well minted engineers. Apple should and probably isn't resting on its heels, I bet we're going to see a preemptive strike on HoloLens (and probably .NET) sometime soon, maybe starting at WWDC this year...
MS built out an entire hardware line that mimics Apple's hardware line and then put up counter points to Mac alongside each competing Apple product. It is obvious and Microsoft's collective ego shows. It is a very late response to Apple's old campaign, they have moved on completely.
Mimics? At last check, none of Apple's laptops had full touch screens or supported a stylus. If you're talking about design or style, you might be able to argue that.
Before the Surface, PC OEMs were building MacBook clones as their high-end laptops. The Surface's claim to fame is in fact that they showed that high-end PC portables didn't need to be MacBook clones at all.
You are talking about features. Not the products themselves. Tablet. Laptop. Convertible (in-between). There usage and perception is the same. There is no defining feature that make them different. They go after the same market, that is the key.
None of these products (Surface) really matter because Microsoft is just buying time and expertise with the Surface line. HoloLens will change everything, as soon as it drops. Microsoft will be working furiously to spin down the Surface line and ramp up its new platform. It is the gold key. We don't always have our phone in our hands but imagine you have these lenses on all the time to help you experience a deeper world.
The usage and perception of a laptop with a detachable keyboard, full touch screen, and a stylus is the same? I don't think so. Perhaps they're very similar, but I think it's a stretch to equate them.
one of these products (Surface) really matter because Microsoft is just buying time and expertise with the Surface line. HoloLens will change everything, as soon as it drops. Microsoft will be working furiously to spin down the Surface line and ramp up its new platform. It is the gold key. We don't always have our phone in our hands but imagine you have these lenses on all the time to help you experience a deeper world.
I think you're slightly overly optimistic about the future here.
I've used HoloLens and I don't think it will change anything for a very, very long time- and that is only if Microsoft stays committed to it enough for it to develop into a useful consumer device.
I recently purchased a new laptop, after looking through a bunch of options -- Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft, etc. Ultimately, I settled on one from Xiaomi. For $720, I get an i5-6200U, 8gb of DDR4 RAM, 256gb SSD, 1gb dedicated graphics card, a 13.3" panel, aluminum body, backlit keyboard, USB C + HMDI + 2 USB 3.0 ports etc.
Build quality is similar to Surfacebook, but I would have to spend another ~600 to match the stats. Is the whole touchscreen tablet combo worth that premium?
> Is the whole touchscreen tablet combo worth that premium?
I would say it depends. I love the touch screen (I've disabled my touchpad) - and I love the real pen/digitizer.
The sp4 is basically the dynabook: high dpi screen, a pen that works.
Still some annoyances with scaling in legacy apps - and I've yet to find a great "smart" drawing/cad program that really takes advantage of the pen - I'm thinking something like Ivan Sutherland's "Sketchpad".
I haven't quite gotten around to it, but I believe it would make a great Smalltalk companion (although it's a "button" short). It does work quite well with MIT's "scratch" system.
Regarding drawing and CAD programs, have you heard of Moment of Inspiration (MoI)? The interface is designed to be suitable for stylus input with fewer and fatter buttons, scrubbing, etc. More importantly, the workflows also seem to be designed around this so repeating or chaining actions is easy and you never feel like stylus input is cramped or lacking precise control.
Other pros:
-fully customizable HTML UI
-fast, lightweight but powerful
-advanced actions (cloning along a path) aren't archaic hidden abilities for advanced users, they're discoverable and usable by new uers
-reasonable price
Cons:
-not as serious/enterprise as some people might need
-due to semi-indie status it probably won't serve as your ONLY 3d modeling tool with only a handful of file format option
All said, it makes for a fantastic addition to existing toolbelts but could also be a complete game changer for a certain class of users.
The issue is, specs often don't tell the whole story. Look at phones for example. The Pixel is still according to a lot of reviewers the best every day phone. You can find other phones with similar specs for half the price, but the hardware/software integration is what really makes a big difference.
I'm not saying the extra 600$ is worth it in this case, we'll have to wait for reviews to know that, but generally you're paying for better build quality, integration, support and form factor.
At $899 USD, there are a lot of options besides the Surface Pro. Our organization will buy it though because they take a corporate approach to purchasing and they always buy warranties. I never understand that... but whatever. Just buy 10 more Surface Pro and swap 'em out if want "warranty". Still cheaper that way.
Its the combination of an over-sized tablet that you find impossible to hold and touch type on comfortably at the same time because 'TOUCH ON EVERYTHING', mixed with the idea the family photo frame sitting on your desk would make a great workstation if I just added a detachable keyboard. Lame!!!
I love my SP2, but i only use it for note taking in onenote for all my study related stuff and its amazing for that. Syncs to my Windows Desktop and Macbook in a few seconds. The whole note taking experience still has some small issues, but in general it's been a huge boon to my productivity.
If you're fine with the on-screen keyboard (which is fine for browsing, once you get used to it), flipping the keyboard so the keys are on your lap and the back rest lies on the back of the keycover is pretty good for lap usage.
12.3 screen, no thank you, I'd rather take the new 14" Lenovo X1 Yoga 2nd gen, which also has a 3 USB + 2 TB3 ports (amazing ports set for such a slim form factor).
Soldered or purely onboard everything is the only way to get devices that thin. There's just not enough space to include a RAM socket that's 50% the height of your entire device.
I don't know if you own one or not, but as someone who has owned one for several years now, I can tell you I've NEVER had a problem using mine, with the keyboard, on my lap.
I've had a couple since the original Surface RT and I have a tough time with it. I really don't use the device anymore because balancing it on my lap became really annoying. It's fantastic on a table though.
i think 4 and 5 are using skylake and kaby lake which is a minor perf improvement. the cpu comparison is not very interesting. we will have to wait for the next intel 'tick' before cpu comparison becomes meaningful again.
And to be clear, the Surface Laptop can be upgraded to Windows 10 Pro as well. Eventually that will be a $50 upgrade, but for the first year after launch, it will be a free upgrade.
I made an account just to provide some balance to the glowing reviews about the Surface Pros, and to see if I'm the only one here that feels this way. I own a Surface Pro 3. I want to like it but a few things ruined it for me.
TL;DR: Unless they redesign the charger and make the touchscreen resilient to cracks, I won't be buying another Surface in the future.
Complaint #1: Am I the only one here super frustrated by the design of the SP3's (and SP4's) charger? Specifically, the magsafe-like plug. It frays right where the cord meets the plastic plug and short-circuits. You can actually see the spark inside the plastic piece that connects to the computer, and the LED indicating it's connected to power will flicker on and off. I've owned two cables now (the original and the replacement I got for this issue) and it's happened on both. There's a thread here about this: http://www.surfaceforums.net/threads/power-cable-fraying.108...
The result is I have to be very careful when it's plugged in, because if I move and shift the cable, it might short-out and the computer shuts off (and it resets my Surface's time, too). Also, annoyingly, sometimes the LED in the plastic magsafe plug indicates it's connected to power, but when I connect it to the Surface the Surface says "plugged in, NOT charging" (emphasis mine).
Microsoft recalled the power cords due to the AC power plug, but not the magsafe connector. So when I contacted Microsoft about the recall, they sent me the part that plugs to the wall, which was not the problem. I've tried reinforcing the connection with electrical tape, and that helps to a very limited extent.
Complaint #2: A month into owning the SP3 I dropped it and the screen cracked. This broke the touch screen (the Surface thinks I'm repeatedly tapping where the screen is cracked.) I had to disable the touchscreen drivers to make the Surface usable, so now the tablet functionality is all gone, which is a bummer because I bought it in part for reading and videos. And, even with the drivers disabled, when the computer boots up from power off, it often waits indefinitely at the screen with the word "Surface" unless I "massage" the area where the screen is cracked. This behavior (and recommendation to massage the screen) is documented in this reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/4vmimv/surface_pro....
Dropping it was my mistake, but I wish the Surface's touchscreen was more resilient/better able to handle cracks. iPads and iPhones seem much better off in this respect.
Complaint #3: Occasionally, the Surface will turn itself back on when I've pressed the power button to turn it off. The result is I'll come back to use the Surface later and the battery will be totally dead. I'm 85% sure that it's not me hitting the power button to turn it back on, especially because my power settings are such that, if it's sitting idle for 5 minutes, it should go to sleep.
I really like the Surface in a lot of ways, but the issue with the power cable and the fragility of the touchscreen make me unlikely to buy another Surface, and make me hesitate about recommending a Surface to a friend.
How is this a functional laptop? And I'm being dead serious here and 100% literal - how do I work with this machine while it's on my lap? It looks like it would be a real pain in the ass to do so, with the "Kickstand" and all.
I use the SP3 on my lap every day, its my work PC. Actually the kickstand works as an anchor when I cross my legs and stays fixed. Suggest you try it in person.
It's not a functional laptop. Putting a Surface on your lap is the worst experience you'll ever have. But as a portable Windows 10 device, my Surface Pro 1 is one of my favorite devices.
I don't get why they don't use the regular surface pro keyboard connector and offer extra ports and battery life, especially based on how much space is being used. It literally doubles the thickness while only offering a keyboard. If they did that it would justify the cost and thickness, as it is this just not worth it.
Not to mention... google play store vs play store vs google play music vs google books vs Inbox vs gmail vs Google docs vs Google Drive (wtf is even the difference between these two?)
I want to mock but then I recall every naming meeting we've ever had at my company and I totally get it
These are neat, but expensive. I just ordered a laptop this weekend.
* 17.3" 1080p
* Core i7 (quad core)
* 16GB RAM
* Discrete graphics
* Backlit keyboard (at no extra charge!)
$800 shipped to my door. Only thing I need to do yet is order an M.2 SSD and I'll be happy for the next 4 years.
So my heart leaped a little seeing a new Surface announcement, but personally, smaller screens will never work for these tired eyes. That and when I bumped up to 16GB of RAM... I hit $2200. (It's also hard to see which Core i7 they put in these, but I have a sneaking suspicion there's a 'U' in the model name, meaning it's actually dual core.
Obviously the laptop I'm getting weighs 3-4 times as much and has a fraction of the battery life. It's a completely different animal. But for me, personally, the Surface will just remain "interesting" until it's portable, powerful AND the pricing is not exorbitant. Then I could see trying to get some work done on it when I'm out and about.
Ha yup - 6.6 lbs vs the 2 lbs the Surface Pro weighs. This is for at home/on the couch, where the weight doesn't bother me. I don't take it places often.
Not the OP, but I had a similar deal with a Lenovo P50 during their black Friday sale, 1k USD for 15" quad core i7, discrete graphics, and 256 SSD. I've never seen the OPs price point except for vendors like Sager.
15" is usually easier to find deals on. And to get the SSD included. I am spending $100 to get an M.2 Samsung 850 EVO 250GB. I'm willing to do refurbished and previous generation CPU/GPU, which gets me most of the performance for less money. If I was more into gaming, I think the newer Geforce would've mattered more to me.
> Support is limited to the country you purchased the device in.
Eg:
- If you buy an Apple laptop, and need a repair, they'll fix it if it's in warranty, regardless of where you are.
- If you buy a Microsoft laptop, and need a warranty repair done in a different country, Microsoft won't help you.
I purchased a Surface Book (which I love) in a Microsoft store in the US. It's been sporadically doing this since a couple of months after I unboxed it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_f85KlC5Bc
Microsoft UK won't fix it. Even when I travel to the US I'm not sure I'll be there long enough for Microsoft to do the repairs. I love the hardware, but this policy is really bad. I paid for the top of the range laptop and expect support for it.
Edit: I've raised this with Microsoft Support in the past and they've simply restated the policy and closed the case as resolved. When I attempted to escalate it, they told me to post a complaint to Microsoft's legal department (?!?).