Microsoft needs to keep building their own hardware because 3rd party manufacturers are doing to Microsoft's brand what Mac clones did to Apple in the early 90s.
The Surface is absolutely gorgeous. If they softened the edges on the tablet portion it would be on my list of greatest pieces of tech hardware ever made. I would love to see MS try to build its own 'Yoga' type laptop...provided I can still install Linux on it.
Dell, Lenovo, Sony, and HP should be ashamed of themselves. Apple makes the best hardware to run Windows on and they don't even like that you can.
> 3rd party manufacturers are doing to Microsoft's brand what Mac clones did to Apple in the early 90s.
I’m not sure whether that’s a fitting analogy. The Mac clone program was launched for other companies to build cheap computers with low margins, so that Apple could continue serving the higher end markets while MacOS would gain marketshare. Instead, clone makers ended up building very high end machines that were faster than anything Apple offered. They hurt Apple’s brand because they were so much faster, not because they were cheap trash.
Daystar Digital’s Genesis had 4 processors, PPC 604e @233Mhz. It had 12 RAM slots and 6 PCI slots. It was a monster and it creamed Apple’s PowerMac 9600, but it was also considerably more expensive.
I agree. And some of the clone makers offered a better customer experience than Apple, too. For example, Power Computing had a great online store before Apple did.
Power Computing was doing pretty well, even though Apple wouldn't allow it to make notebooks. And then, of course, Apple/Jobs bought back its license and eliminated the competition....
No doubt on the quality but the reality here is that even with proprietary hardware and thus able to optimize everything for the surface like apple does it this has a low battery life.
It's all the x86 baggage windows has, osx threw everything from the powerpc years away, let alone the stuff from the previous 20 years of systemOS. Windows still carries crap from when 32mb of ram was more expensive than a computer today.
And for what? I got several winxp apps that don't work with 7 or 8, it's pointless.
While you don't use the battery for code you don't execute, when your code is finely tuned to a single machine (as in CPU + auxiliary chips) architecture rather than able to run on a wider choice of hardware, you may be able to squeeze some extra juice from your battery.
Shipping fat binaries with different versions for every different Atom/Core/Xeon/FX/Phenom/Opteron Intel/AMD/Nvidia + chipset glue combination would be quite a feat.
This could go well beyond what compiling every package for your specific machine can do.
That's not what I was talking about. I said that, if all you support is a specific Intel Atom processor, you can tweak your kernel to support every bit of energy-saving performance-enhancing silicon in there.
Shipping fat binaries is not new. I remember them (not very fondly) from the MacOS 7/PPC days.
True.
What is fun is that you could imagine a technology where you would (powering down some unused memory chips), but I don't know if this would be worth it.
Attended a lecture by a grad who implemented this back in 2006. Code resided on the southbridge. Never got commercialized as the penalty of waking/sleeping the chip was not worth the few watts saved. Plus, most servers used all their ram, or near it, all the time.
I don’t know much about semiconductors, but Apple started shipping x86 Macs when Intel had just switched to the Core architecture. I can imagine that Apple didn’t bother to write for technologies that were present in earlier Intel chips. Apple has only shipped Intel-powered computers with Core and Xeon chipsets (the first gen AppleTV ran on a Pentium M, though).
“The Core microarchitecture is a major architectural revision”
Microsoft didn't bother either. SSE2 and PAE requirements mean a Netburst or later Intel Chip. (or K8 or later from AMD). So Windows8 requires a relatively modern chip, and ignores the earlier ones.
IIRC, Windows 8 and 8.1 take advantage of the new P-States in Haswell / Clover Trail. (And connected standby on Clover Trail definitely shows that Microsoft is working hard on the power problem).
I definitely think its an issue with Apple Marketing. Apple is basically selling Y-class processors in their MBA. 1.3 GHz max speed is some 25% slower than the 1.6 GHz that Surface Pros ship with. The Surface Pro also has a superior screen and active digitizer, so it isn't too curious why it would use more power.
BTW: Xeon has been shipping for like 15 years. When talking about architectures, it tends to be more precise to use the core architcture names. IE: Netburst (P4), Nehelem, etc. etc. "Xeon", "Core", and "Pentium" are marketing names that barely mean anything technically.
> If they softened the edges on the tablet portion it would be on my list of greatest pieces of tech hardware ever made.
I actually like Surface's edges quite a lot, I think it looks brilliant and stands out from the army of cheap looking iPad clones most of which look exactly the same. And the magnesium casing is also a great choice by MS, it makes it look expensive and well built (which it really is)
The chance that that happens, is abut the as Microsoft giving the physical devices out for free. Lock-in is the common way today to get market control.
The Surface is absolutely gorgeous. If they softened the edges on the tablet portion it would be on my list of greatest pieces of tech hardware ever made. I would love to see MS try to build its own 'Yoga' type laptop...provided I can still install Linux on it.
Dell, Lenovo, Sony, and HP should be ashamed of themselves. Apple makes the best hardware to run Windows on and they don't even like that you can.