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New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

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That's what the OEMs get for not being able to put out a laptop that could compete with Apple in all those years, they always managed to introduce some fatal flaw in their premium laptops, from weird keyboard layouts to bad fan management software.

Let's hope the Surface Book will be succesful and Apple finally gets serious competition in the premium laptop market.

Exactly this ... outside of ThinkPad, many Windows hardware options have been pretty embarrassing.

Yes, and while Thinkpad is excellent, it's not really a 'cool' option. The Surface Book's design (and price point) places it solidly as a competitor to Macs.

i'd take the rubber coated ones over the cold and sharp metal ones you call 'cool' any time.

but i guess everyone in SF just use macbooks on their desks at all times.

thinkpad just feels like a solid, workhorse.

As a traveling consultant, the durability of the Thinkpad design is nice, but holy hell does it suck to carry through an airport, or to shove under the seat in front of you. I've had to switch to a backpack for my laptop, since a normal bag puts too much weight on one side of my body. A backpack is so much less professional than a laptop bag.

And then I drop it from a table onto a cement floor and the body cracks and the lid won't close anymore. So why do I put up with a laptop that's 50% heavier than a Macbook yet still breaks when I drop it from a table?

Or maybe Thinkpads are supposed to be used on desks at all times.

> A backpack is so much less professional than a laptop bag

I wouldn't worry too much about that, backpacks are standard issue for big 5 consultants

It doesn't sound like you are making fair comparisons between Thinkpads and Macbooks. My 15" T550 is just .2 lbs heavier than a 15" Macbook Pro. The charger for my T550 is much lighter than the one I have for my Macbook Pro, so the overall weight might actually favor the Thinkpad. The 13" business-class ultrabooks that Lenovo sells are pretty close in weight to the 13" Macbook Pro and the Macbook Air.

It sounds like you are basing your opinion off of an old system or a current model that isn't even in the same class as a Macbook.

Thinkpad W520. Core i7, like a Macbook. 16GB of RAM, like a Macbook. Spinning hard drive, worse than a Macbook. Has a desktop video card that is required in order to use video out, but you have to reboot and enable the video card, then it won't sleep until you reboot and disable the card... unlike a Macbook. Because Nvidia won't make Linux drivers for Optimus. No, it's not in the same class as a Macbook, that's half my point. It doesn't do anything a Macbook won't do, and it's less than a year old. It has all the downsides of being a Thinkpad with none of the upsides of... being a Thinkpad. Modern Thinkpads are not as durable or reliable as people make them out to be.

My company is switching everyone from Thinkpads to Macbooks, and this is a company that was built on Thinkpads. That's how awful modern Thinkpads are compared to basically anything else.

The W520 is a workstation-class model from 2011. If you don't need the dedicated graphics for something like CAD, it's probably not the right laptop for you.

I'm a bit curious why a traveling consultant is outfitted with what is marketed as a "workstation in a laptop form factor". Seems like a mismatch of use case to product.

I travel a lot, sometimes for work, sometimes for leisure, so when I chose my personal computer I went with a Thinkpad X230. Fast enough to compile C++ code for my game programming hobby, fast enough to do my excel stuff for work, and the integrated graphics card can drive two external 1920x1200 screens comfortably. Just don't expect to play any graphically intensive games. With the help of a spare battery I kept around I could get 12-14 hours out of it if, for example, I were flying to Asia.

My point being, perhaps your experience had more to do with being given a computer that definitely did not fit your work/life style? Though I'd agree with you that the W520 was not well designed.

I didn't have a choice, this is what all of my coworkers have as well. Some of them found it so hard to work with that they used their own money to buy a Macbook then gave it to the company so they could use it for their job.

My last job, I had a Thinkpad T520, which was just as thick but a bit lighter and smaller footprint. At home I have a T420, again same thickness but slightly smaller footprint yet. I'm no stranger to Thinkpads. I hope I don't ever have to use another.

Even IBM is disillusioned by the Thinkpads. They created the damn thing and they're abandoning it for Macbooks: http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/5/9099451/ibm-apple-enterpris...

I'd still disagree on many of the hardware aspects if we're talking about some of their latest X series or slim T series laptops, but you have a point.

I only continued to buy Thinkpads because I knew how to remove all of the Lenovo crapware the moment I got the computer. Especially with the latest privacy issues, Thinkpads are no longer the computers you buy when you just want a solid computer without frills.

The W series and the T520's though... they were always too big to be real laptops and too wimpy to match desktops. It's an awkward place to be.

> I knew how to remove all of the Lenovo crapware the moment I got the computer

Except for the crapware they've embedded in the firmware. That isn't as easy to get rid of.

You might have gotten a W520 less than a year ago, but the W520 is a system from 2011. That's ancient for a laptop.

>That's how awful modern Thinkpads are compared to basically anything else.

Your company choosing to buy Macbooks over Thinkpads is a sign that Thinkpads are worse than every other brand of laptop in existence? Its pretty obvious that you aren't interested in a logical conversation.

I work for IBM. Yes, IBM choosing to buy Macbooks over Thinkpads is a pretty bold sign.

What do you think I meant by "my company was built on Thinkpads"?

There is still a class of business users for whom the ThinkPad is cool (though I expect most of them regret the brand's decline in Lenovo's hands).

My last three laptops have been Thinkpads, but Lenovo seems determined to destroy that brand as well. Microsoft may be the only company selling hardware that is trustworthy.

I can only hope that this compels Lenovo to ship a non-16:9, with a great screen, hi-res at low-size with 16GB of RAM. (I've found it hard to find vendors carrying 16GB SODIMMs for the X250.)

I wonder what the heat scenario will be like with the Surface Book. If it turns hot like a MacBook, that'll set yet another disappointing precedent.

Finally though, it's nice to see MS doing what people have been asking for years.

Yeah, 16:9 is disappointing especially with huge bottom bezel on x250, I mean 16:10 would easily fit there.

ThinkPad is pretty embarrassing; you're supporting a company that decided to MITM all its users traffic to inject advertising using factory-installed malware by trusting the same certificate, whose private key can be extracted from any Lenovo product and trivially used to MITM all the others.

Lenovo needs to fail hard and fast. I recognize we'll probably never get those responsible into prison, but at least we can make sure they never work again.

If you wouldn't buy or recommend a Volkswagen after dieselgate, you certainly shouldn't buy or recommend a Lenovo product after Superfish.

I support the company that makes the closest thing to a product I want. Reimaging the computer is a lot easier than installing your own pointing stick.

I don't think people understand the magnitude of this betrayal. When you buy a tool, it should obey you, and any deviations from that expectation should be disclosed upfront.

Imagine if you bought a car that detected when you were driving to a particular business, locked out steering, and instead drove you to a competitor that had "partnered" with the manufacturer. You totally own the car, and no one ever told you it had this "feature."

Imagine if you bought a gun that would refuse to fire when pointed at people who had purchased protection from the manufacturer. You don't find out about this feature until the guy invading your home has it.

Lenovo lied to your face. It sold laptops that claimed to navigate to the websites you entered in the URL bar, but instead displayed a version edited by Lenovo on behalf of its partners.

Normalizing this sort of thing is not okay and anyone buying Lenovo post-Superfish shares the moral responsibility when this is our future.

Considering we apparently don't "own" our Kindle ebook purchases, I can see a future where our hardware purchases are on indefinite loans to us rather than outright purchases.

From the beginning, though, this was a known tradeoff that one could rationally evaluate when deciding whether or not to buy into that ecosystem.

A more apt analogy might be Amazon silently editing books to include product placement for corporate sponsors.

That's a disturbing trend that I hope doesn't continue.

No, I don't think YOU understand how unusable some people find a touchpad compared to a pointing stick. Your examples are still better than a car that does not run or a gun that explodes in my hand as soon as I touch it.

You even tried to fabricate examples where the surprise factor of the product not working as expected at a key moment was the bulk of the problem. As if that's somehow not the biggest flaw of a touchpad.

Actually Lenovo preinstalls malware that persists even through complete Windows reinstallations:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/lenovo...

I know, and stand by what I said.

Wait, really? So the things mentioned in the comment thread on this¹ post mean less to you than getting a trackpoint?

In any case, Lenovo isn’t the only manufacturer that includes a pointing stick in their laptops. HP’s EliteBook series, for example, has one. There’s a full list of manufacturers here².

――――――

¹ — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10039306

² — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_stick#Naming_and_bran...

Yes, far worse. A laptop without a nub-style pointer is effectively keyboard-only. Worse than keyboard-only if there is no way to disable the touchpad.

I know that elitebooks, latitudes, etc used to have these too. None of them do anymore.

Have you tried a Macbook Pro in the last few years? I agree most (if not all) Windows laptops' trackpads are unusable, but I've always liked Apple's.

Many Windows OEMs maintain their cheaper-than-Apple status by optimizing the things people compare (gigahertz, RAM capacity, HDD capacity) and putting in the cheapest shit possible on the rest (pixel density, keyboards, cases, hinges, and especially trackpads).

Macbooks don't have them, never have, and probably never will. The quality of the touchpad is not the issue. You are trying to sell a blind man a book by saying "no seriously, this one has REALLY BIG print" because you don't believe he's truly blind.

And you think Microsoft didn't make its Surfacebook NSA-friendly, after all the Microsoft/NSA partnerships that have been reported so far?

Hijackability is probably a feature of most consumer grade devices - accidental or not. What Lenovo did was a specific attack that enabled them blatantly to inject their own content and also did so crappily that it opened a whole back door. It's not like I expect my outdoor to be burglar proof. I do expect, however, for my door manufacturer not to give out keys and assist the tupperware sales reps to help themselves in to my living room.

> all its users traffic

It was only a subset of their customers, and none of the ThinkPad models.

https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/superfish

Is that supposed to be better? The same people profit from ThinkPad purchases as the other notebooks. In fact withholding it from ThinkPad indicates a deliberate campaign not to put it where a tech-savvy user might see it.

I think it's terrible - I just wanted to point out bad information in the parent comment.

I think even Thinkpads were prone to Lenovo's malware (if not Superfish)

I'm relatively unfamiliar with ThinkPads and happened to be looking at them yesterday. Here's my problem with ThinkPads (as well as most other Windows laptop vendors):

http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/?menu-id=laptops

Which ThinkPad are you talking about? ThinkPad X, ThinkPad T, ThinkPad W, ThinkPad Yoga, ThinkPad E, ThinkPad L, or ThinkPad Helix, or ThinkPad 11E?

Let's say we're talking about ThinkPad T.. Which model?

T440p, T450, T450s, T540p, or T550?

And ThinkPad is just one line of Lenovo's products, they also have: Y Series, Z Series, Yoga Series, 500 Series, Flex, Edge, U Series, Lavie, B Series, 100 Series, S Series, G Series, and finally Chromebook.

As a consumer, I have a hard enough time deciding between Surface Pro 4 or Surface Book... or Macbook Air vs Macbook vs Macbook Pro. When presented with so many options from one company I simply close the webpage. After all, how can they possibly make the product as good as MS's offering if they have so many models?

They can make it better than MS's offering because they are providing you with exactly what you need.

Take for example me, compsci student. I wanted to have a sub-600€ laptop with good hardware and good battery life, but did not care much about display. I ordered a thinkpad, replaced the HDD with an SSD, and am now happy with it.

The trick is called customization: Being better because they can deliver exactly what you need.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice

No, they really do have too many models. The yoga line is nice, but they clearly don't invest much individual resources on the design of each of the other models, which tends to make them generic. I have a work-supplied s540, and it's a decent workhorse laptop, but a macbook it is not. It's too generic for that. I was also pretty disappointed that the coating had blemishes. Even a cursory visual QA check would have detected those, so either they're shipping product sight unseen, or they're deliberately deciding to ship blemished goods.

There is nothing more generic than a macbook

No, there's nothing that espouses the "Modern" (capital M) design ethos as thoroughly as a macbook.

This is one of the reasons why I never bought a Lenovo because I am not sure which one to buy. Too many choices. They did the great job in confusing the heck out of me.

After a very long deliberation (few years:) I went with T450 (non-retina) this summer and I am very happy. I chose it over T550 due to slightly lower dpi (I have a a 15 inch Dell at work with T550's resolution and everything is unpleasantly small, on T450 it's fine).
I took SSD, 16gb ram, no DVD, 2 cores (quad core was very expensive) and 2 batteries which makes it very light, yet with proper screen size; very fast and the battery lifetime is amazing (10-20h)
Only thing I don't like is touchpad, but I usually disable it and use track point. I preferred touchpad in my old asus laptop which was lower than keyboard level hence one would rarely click it by accident.
I chose T450 over T440 since in ..50 series Lenovo readded physical buttons over the touchpad (in ..30 and ..40 they were replaced with touch zones on the touchpad and long time Thinkpad users were really furious about that on forums)

The DPI is really a software problem. More DPI should only be better except for battery use.
IMO Touchpads/clickpads on those are a deal breaker. They are so bad that it is almost impossible to be nearly as productive as with a mouse.
On the other hand, Apple really got the clickpad right.

I am surprsied reading those comments. A touchpad on my x250 is fantastic and very customizable. I hate touchpads in general but after customizing it to be very sensitive and proper dead zones (to avoid clicking on accident in areas I often put a part of my hands) even started to like it.
I customized to very low sensitivity and I use only for clicking these days as trackpoint is just much better an interface.

Lenovo should simply stop shipping touchpads on their X series.
Anyone that doesn't like the trackpoint can buy a MacBook clone instead.

I cant agree. I really dislike the feel of the MacBook touch pads. Besides that they work good

T450 has 130dpi, T550 has 140dpi. It is small but noticeable difference.
It is a software problem that for pragmatic reasons I don't want to get into. Good luck setting non-integer scaling on current operating systems (like 1.25 or 1.50). It's either not supported, or the effect is blurry. It's a different story for retina screens, you set scaling to 2.00 and you're fine. But I was talking about non-retina.

We use thinkpads at work. They're okay, but they're not Surface/MacBook level of quality. My T450s has bad backlight bleed at the bottom, the trackpad is a major regression from my T430, and it was chock-full of crapware before I nuked it and reinstalled windows. Apple isn't perfect, but the sort of annual model lottery that is notable when it happens in the Apple world is par-for-course in the PC world.

> Let's say we're talking about ThinkPad T.. Which model?
> T440p, T450, T450s, T540p, or T550?
T450s.
When looking for a competitor to Apple, go for the T-series, but also take a look at the X-series.
T5XX has 15" screen and numpad in the keyboard, so unless you like numpad, forget those. 440 is the older series, before it there was 430 series, and presently 450 is the current line.
"p" stands for "performance", basically it's a laptop with an NVIDIA GeForce graphics card, if you are heavily into gaming or video production. It makes the laptop thicker, heavier and consume more power. Usually you forget the "p" option. Also Apple makes do with just the integrated Intel graphics, so we don't need NDIVIA either.
"s" is maybe for "slim". T4XXs is the flagship, and the plain T4XX is an economy version. The T4XXs is, in my opinion, the best competitor for Apple laptops.

> When looking for a competitor to Apple, go for the T-series, but also take a look at the X-series.
Sure. Joe Average has no clue about that though. Most of the main vendors suffer from the same proliferation of models. Look at Dell:
Latitude - For Business
Vostro - for Small Business (WTF? Why is this a different model from Latitude?)
Inspiron - For Home and Home Office (Seriously? Why isn't this satisfied by either of the other two models?)
Precision Workstations - For professional creators (that seems like a reasonable distinction, but then looking at the specs it's not really, it's just a slightly higher spec than other models)
XPS - For the Ultimate experience (Okay.. but what about Precision Workstation then? Why on earth does something called the Ultimate have worse spec than some of the other not-ultimate models?)

Plus their sites are abysmal. It's like they were built with technology from the 90's and nobody told them about UX.

It's like they were built with technology from the 90's
HTTP, HTML and Javascript?

> Also Apple makes do with just the integrated Intel graphics, so we don't need NDIVIA either.
No they don't… the 15" MBP has a dedicated GPU, and a good one at that.

And costs 1000€ more than the Thinkpad W, a graphics workstation laptop.

A good one ? Nope, not for the price.
http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-R9-M370X.142763.0.ht... The AMD Radeon R9 M370X is a mid-range graphics card for laptops that was announced mid 2015.
Mac are awesome for work (mine at least) but useless for anything that requires a good gpu

Compared to the Yoga 2 (or is it 3?) non-pro (proper HD rather than faux retina or faux HD), the 'proper' Thinkpad is a generation of CPU behind with half the RAM and double the price.
The backlit 'chicklet' keyboard on the Yoga Whatever(tm) is also subjectively better than the barrage of nipples and buttons that come with those 'legendary' Thinkpad keyboards. The screen is of a magnitude more vibrant and you can run two disks - mSATA SSD + normal SATA SSD/spinny-disk. Plus touch is just a feature, not something that is a special requirement. The hinge seems better engineered too, even if it never gets used in 360 tablet mode.
There is proof of pudding in that my colleagues with 14" Thinkpads have those stands and external monitors, with external keyboards and mice, rarely with the machines being 'un-docked' or taken home. Meanwhile, my off-brand Yoga Whatever(tm) gets carried around as intended, used on trains and used at home.
Sure some of the shiny has worn off the fibreglass in the palm-rest area but I actually do not care, I don't like the feel of Apple-style aluminium, plastic is more me when it comes to what I want to rest my palms on. The build quality is absolutely fine on Yoga Whatever(tm), same power connector as Thinkpad with same USB3 connector.
I downgraded from Windows Whatever to Ubuntu and admittedly the wifi does need 'make install' every time the kernel changes, but it runs a full set of dev tools fine (my colleagues desk-bound machines run 'Outlook', a web browser and nothing else, maybe 'Excel').
I prefer a standard linux distro as the Apple dev environments don't have the repository 'apt-get install' thing done very well. Horses for courses but there are surprises in the consumer range that are better for getting work done and a worthy contender for Apple competitor. Actually I would be annoyed if company policy forced me to have either a proper Thinkpad or a proper Apple computer, the Yoga Whatever(tm) with 14" deep-colour proper-HD screen hits the sweet spot for me.

I went through this when trying to help my younger sister choose a laptop for college. HP had a sale / coupon, and the number of laptop choices was overwhelming. Not only do they have 3 product groups, but they have ~10 products in each group, and you can customize each product even further.
I spent over an hour narrowing down the list of laptops (with names that told me nothing) to the few that met her price / performance budget. After that experience, I can totally understand how Apple does so well. Most consumers want LESS choice, not more.

The human biases related to paradox of choice type issues are real, but there are all sorts of ways to manage that for yourself. You end up with something objectively better if push through the psychological toll that a lot of choices takes on humans. Sometimes this is clearly worthwhile, sometimes not.
It's totally reasonable to make the choice that a lowest common denominator set of features is acceptable if it means you don't have to deal with the pain of choices, but you don't magically get something better as well. I do this for all kinds of things where the extra effort to get "the best" isn't worth the mental cost, but I make that choice mindfully. I only vaguely remember the annoyance of having to pick from the myriad of Thinkpad choices years ago.
For example, Apple makes great stuff but isn't designing things for my needs in a work laptop at all. I place no value on appearance since it's just a tool to me, I'm in a very keyboard-centric software environment so a trackpoint keyboard is the best mouse for me on this machine. I need various ports to plug things into more than I need clean lines. I need features and battery life more than I need portability. And while I try to discount status concerns here as much as I can, if I'm honest the people it's most useful for me to impress with my work laptop are more impressed by novelty/customization (arch linux + tiling wm + vim-keybindings everywhere setup) than with Apple product beauty anyway. When people refer to a laptop being "ugly" it strikes me as about as meaningful an opinion as if someone told me my cordless drill or vacuum was ugly.
Now that I mention it, that's the reason I find the current designer culture (intuitive design is the be-all and end-all of design) to be fairly anti-creator. The people who create things with technology, who craft code or video or sound or images in order to build valuable things do better with tools that allow for expertise. They benefit from the payoffs that investments in mastering expert interfaces bring with them. They want the option to climb a learning curve if it's the only way to reach the heights. I find calls for the systematic removal of this option to be troubling, especially when they are aimed at young people.
So, as a consumer, value being given limited choices when it makes sense for you but please don't lobby for it to be more universal!

What advantage do we have with this whole confusion of product lines with meaningless names? In many cases they could be replaced by a couple of lines with optionals for customization and that's it.

yeah. My Mac Air is a custom build - but getting to it was a conceptually simple process. Mac Pro/iMac/Mac Mini/Macbook Pro/Mac Air? Low-end Air or high-end Air? Want to customize that?
Apple's got about fourteen separate computers they'll sell you (plus tablets/phones), but that's folded away behind six distinct products that come in two or three stock configurations. If you had to choose between those fourteen things up front it'd be a lot more conceptually complicated.

IMHO there is a difference between choice and the chaos you have with most vendors. I appreciate that there are different variants of Thinkpads, but why are they so cryptically? A customization based system would be better IMHO. Pick a screen size + maybe for 15.6 bulky vs ultrabook style, then pick the upgrades you want. Ideally just a bunch of sliders.
Some options really are unnecessary. Like "Do you want to spend $15 to upgrade the network card to the 3x3 model? (no, we can't tell you if you need that or not or even what it means, you gotta know that yourself)".
Makes the design step more difficult (because you shouldn't have crazy intransparent dependencies between upgrades), but is more user friendly. Give 2 or 3 preset options for users that don't want to fiddle.
This is something a dealer might be able to implement on top of the existing offerings, but I haven't seen it yet. Screenfulls of base models, then another page of dropdowns. No way to tell what specific options each of the base models offers (or doesn't offer).

That's the issue right there. You get swamped by options, some may be good, most are crappy. How can you tell? Sometimes they'll add a letter and an otherwise good product will be a crappy mess.

I think that complaining about "too much choice" is disingenuous. One of the things I don't like about the Apple eco-system is that there is hardly any choice. Choosing between a tablet and a laptop is not really making a choice. It must be hell for you to by a car...

I'm a fan of Mazda. Your analogy would make more sense if instead of Mazda offering a choice of compact (Mazda 3), sedan (Mazda 6), or sports car (Mazda Miata), instead Mazda decided to build a lineup of:
* Mazda6L (Our most green Mazda 6) * Mazda6 Yoga (Our Mazda 6 that transforms into a Miata) * Mazda6W (Our power version) * Mazda6T (Our version which includes more gizmos) * Mazda6X (Our version which includes even more gizmos) * Mazda6 Helix (Our version that's like our Yoga but different) * Mazda611E (Our rugged version for teenagers who are careless)
.. and then within each type, have specific models like Mazda6T 554p, Mazda6T 440s, etc.
.. and then allowing you to further customize each Mazda6 model down to the finest detail.
...and then repeat for each type of car in their lineup (Mazda3, Miata, SUVs, etc).
Yes, if this were the case then I would have a very hard time buying a car! :)

Mazda in Australia is particularly straightforward as far as full-range car companies go. Three cars (2, 3, 6) three SUVs (CX3, CX5, CX9) a ute (BT-50) and a sports car (MX-5). Each of these has a few levels of trim. Some have choice of engine, boot style. Overall it's very easy for consumers to comprehend.
Whereas take BMW, which seems to have a really simple product line but has endless subtle variations in the same segment. 5 series Sedan vs 4 Gran Coupé vs 3 Grand Turismo, anyone? Then try to comprehend the endless options for each model. Then try to comprehend the relative cost of one model versus another (or one trim versus another) factoring in the inclusion or exclusion of particular features. It's insane.

Oh, you mean like having a
* Mazda 6 SE Saloon
* Mazda 6 SE-L Saloon
* Mazda 6 Sport Saloon
* Mazda 6 SE Tourer
* ...
... and then within each trim level, with or without nav
... and then within each, auto or manual transmission
... and then within each, petrol or diesel engines (sometimes several power levels)
... and then of course colours, paints and fabrics and alloy wheels and all that cosmetic stuff.
Admit it, there's more different option in a car configurator even at Mazda than in a laptop manufacturer's line-up.

I admit that other makes allow more customization and there's regional differences too (Mazda USA offers far less customization than Mazda Japan or Europe specifically because their research determined us Yanks like less choices).
But I think your example is way off. You're showing Trim Levels which are equivalent to prepackaged options list like CPU, memory, Red type cover vs Blue type cover, black stylus vs silver stylus. It's still the same model (Mazda6), still the same chassis, same body, same car! And cars are far more complicated than laptops! Buying a car in the USA for 99% of the general public basically comes down to choosing the Model (Mazda6), choosing the trim level (Grand Touring), choosing the color, and then settling for whatever your nearest dealers have on the lot :)
In comparison, the ThinkPad T models have different chassis, different physical sizes, different weight before you even start customizing things like CPU, memory, batteries, etc. And remember we're only talking about the T series.

T and X are the ones you want.

You make a very good point for the average Joe. With that many options, you better hope Joe has a tech savvy friend to make the recommendation, and that said tech savvy friend doesn't just say "get a macbook" because these days that's a perfectly good recommendation 99% of the time.
As a long-time Thinkpad owner, there are really only two answers for most tech-savvy users with typical needs (media, browsing, travel, and maybe programming): The X series and the T4XXs models.

VAIO had an edge a while back. Toshiba still throw some stuff from time to time. Panasonic too but in the survivor category.

Somewhat off topic, what're Vaio users migrating to? I look every year or so to see what the current laptop offerings are, and nothing has convinced me to leave my 5+ year old Vaio.

The new Vaios? Vaio recently announced their newest offerings and they look, to me, like they're still in that high-end business offerings bracket.

As far as I know (and searching around seems to confirm this) Sony is out of the laptop business and just produces tablets. I should've phrased myself a little better, "what laptops are Vaio owners switching to".

It's it's own thing now, and still has a very nice looking high-end model:
https://vaio.com/products/z/
They just launched their Surface Pro competitor in the US: http://us.vaio.com/
(Typing this on the final version of the Sony Vaio Z, eagerly looking for a Skylake based successor...)

Sony recently released the Vaio Z Canvas (who comes up with these names???) which you can demo/pre-order in the Microsoft Store. I tried to use it, but I believe the keyboard was dead (I guess since it fully detaches from the display and was not being actively charged). It also seems nearly impossible to use on your lap.

I have a Sony Vaio Pro 13.3", 1080P, i7, 256GB SSD, 8GB, 2.3lbs, touchscreen; dual booting, but primarily running in Linux. It will cover me through this entire tech cycle.
The above mentioned "premium fatal flaw" in this case is the terrible internal wifi, but a micro-usb wifi has corrected that. I also fixed IMO the glossy display with a screen protector. Other than those two issues, I really like it.
When it's finally time to replace it I'll be looking at Microsoft or Dell. Maybe even Apple or ASUS. Probably not Lenovo, because they seem to be trying to destroy the Thinkpad brand. If I had to buy a computer right now without further research it would be the Dell XPS 13.

Another Vaio Pro 13 user here :)
Have you tried the internal Wifi with a newer Linux distribution? I'm using Ubuntu 15.04 and it works great :) No disconnects, speed good be better though ...
Regarding a replacement: What do you think about the Librem 13? It's one of my favorites along with the Dell XPS 13 and the Lenovo X1 Carbon.

I'm running Mint 17.2 which switched to following Ubuntu LTS releases only. So, I haven't tried a newer Ubuntu, but the wifi is terrible in Win8 too. The "Panda Ultra 150Mbps Wireless N USB Adapter" http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00762YNMG was my solution for a massive range/reliability increase.
Related: This screen protector makes the glossy display usable outside: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00HDTVJKQ
I'm really happy to see the Librem 13 nearing existence, but it's not ideal for me: i5 only, no back-lit keyboard. Up to 16GB and the matte screen is awesome though. The X1 Carbon 1st/3rd Gens are great, but Lenovo is being so bad recently.

The Librem 15 has i7 and backlit keyboard.
https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-15

I've seen it, but it only runs 6hrs (vs 10-14hr) on the battery, weighs 2X and costs 2X my current machine. Plus 15" is too large. I'm really happy to see the progress on freedom-respecting hardware, I'm just not willing to make that many sacrifices at this time.

FWIW, I have the Dell XPS 13 running Linux (and Windows 10 from a USB 3 SSD), and it's great. I bought the one that comes with a Windows license and installed Fedora 22 on it. It was pretty rough around the edges at first, but with several BIOS upgrades and kernel updates, it runs perfectly now.

What model is it ? I'm looking to buy and old 10 or 11inch my teacher had around 2008. It was said the laptop case was carbon fiber based. It had a core2duo inside. A really cute machine.

Honestly, the post-privatization Dells have been my go-to now (I just got work to get me a Latitude E7250, although the new XPS 13s also are tempting).
That said, it seems like the next laptop I'm getting just might be this Surface Book, or the next iteration of it.

Dell XPS 13, 2015 model. That's what my family (who have two Vaio's) moved to, at least, and they're very impressed with them. Of course, they were relatively expensive, but hey, you pay for quality regardless of vendor in my experience.

One of the challenges of being the 'commodity version' is that a lot of value gets squeezed out of the pipeline.
One way to look at it is that a laptop is made up of a bunch of parts, sometimes those parts come in subassemblies, and every time someone touches a part, a small bit of margin is taken out to pay for that touch. This is the reason that vertically integrated (from chips to finished product) has a higher profit margin, it collects all of those bits into one chunk.
For a long time the windows Laptop market has been all sub-assemblies coming together at the last stage. Not much margin left for the laptop "maker" after they pay for the folks who built the motherboard, the folks who build the disk drive, Intel for making the CPU, Hynix or Samsung for making the memory modules, Sharp or Toshiba for making the display, and then pony up still more cash to Microsoft for an OS.
Apple's advantage is that they tightly control the supply line, using their own OS, and by not licensing their software elsewhere can charge a premium price for additional margin.
By going into competition with their partners, Microsoft took the the only path possible to compete with Apple, be vertical. Interesting to see what that means long term.

How much really is there to "veticalize" ? Microsoft won't build hard-drives, cpu's , memory modules, or display. And i think the big OEM's already design their own motherboards and assemble.
So the only thing MS can save is OEM margin, and it's supposed to be razor thin(maybe 10%) .
Is this such a big deal ?

I have tried and failed to buy X1 Carbon last month - i needed it to ship in less than a month, and their online ordering has no expedited shipping (not even an option, wtf?) and doesn't tell you when they will deliver it by (wtf??) and they don't sell X1 in any store in the area (wtf???)
I truly fail to understand this - the best laptop is not sold in stores, and takes over two weeks online. The other Lenovos are, but not that one.
I hope MS is better with this, but I don't have experience yet.

It's hard to find "business class" laptops if you want one for your personal usage, and you want to buy one in person or have it shipped quickly.

I use a Razer Blade. It's bafflingly the only laptop that exists that has premium build quality, doesn't weigh a ton, and has actually good graphics. Its form and quality is pretty much equivalent to a black Macbook Pro, but it manages to fit a GTX 970M in there. I recommend it to anyone looking to do portable work that requires a good GPU (like game dev).
Cons:
- It's a bit pricey
- Gamery branding
- Not a lot of ports

I love my MBPr and I couldn't agree more. It will be nice to have some real competition/viable alternative. It will be interesting to see if Apple will release a touch MBPr or just stick to their iPad Pro + keyboard.

My mobile kit is MBPr with iPad for 4G, a leuchtturm notebook and some pens and pencils. I will get an ipad pro when the day comes that Apple decides to stop supporting my ipad and it becomes painful. At least there's a real shell in there somewhere. Having just experienced the pain of buying a new windows server for my lab (I'm sorry, I need a license to access the server?!), I still have no love for MSFT.

Take a look at "Building Microsoft Surface Pro 3." [1] Microsoft definitely has set the bar for this type of device. I personally have been waiting for such a device that all the other offerings were just not up to par as each seemed to have some quirk or problem. Bad hinge design, drivers not working, performance was subpar, battery life was lacking.
Other manufactures will have to take notice.
[1] https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK3302

Too bad it was mostly slides. Very nice idea to release this anyway. I hope there will be a SP4 follow-up (somehow mentioned on this video)

Definitely worth a listen/watch. Just goes to show how seriously Microsoft is taking the quality of their products.

Yes yes yes. As someone who has used and always thinks of Macbooks but cannot stand them I really look forward to good Windows laptops.

This! At least from the initial look and spec it looks like they did a lot of the things right and put effort in making this nice. Yes there are things that maybe I can get by without but the basics looks fantastic.
You don't chip $50 off a premium laptop and make it crappy. OEM just keeps making too many model at every price point .. at every 20 dollars it feels like. While I hate the almost singular choice for OsX .. both for Windows and Android I think there is just too many price points and when you try to reduce by 5-10-20 dollar you skip things that seems not so essentially but the degradation in experience is much more than the money saved.
What I really hope from this is that it shows the OEM that there are enough interest in quality product and also let them know what are some of the things that people really care about like the build quality, nice keyboard/touchpad etc. Beyond this particular laptop my real wish is that it motivates and gives confidence to the windows OEM. We really do need some good windows laptop even if to just to run linux :).

This is what I was hopeful for when VAIO was spun off of SONY last year.
When I saw the "machined magnesium body" line in their video [1] I was immediately reminded of the VAIO laptops that had beautiful material way back in the 90's.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVfOe5mFbAE&feature=youtu.be

I still miss the z series... But the z series had ethernet ports. This surface thing is useless to me.

I use a surface and I have an ethernet to USB adapter, works pretty well.

But then you loose the USB port. But the main problem of USB adapters is that they don't like being unplugged and plugged back which happens quite frequently with a laptop. With a real port connectivity is pretty much instantaneous. I used USB adapters for a while on a MacBook pro and came to the conclusion that I will never ever buy a laptop without ethernet ports.
What I wonder is why they don't come up with a mini-ethernet port format? Ethernet ports aren't exactly high tech.

Remember these? http://www.recycledgoods.com/media/extendware/ewimageopt/med...
Never quite sure why the small connector didn't become the standard for laptops.

I think that was before my time. All it would take is a different plastic socket format. The top 10 laptop manufacturers could agree on a standard in a 10 minutes conference call.

Real products don't work like fads in Javascript.

The 15-pin I/O connector for ethernet was part of the PCMCIA CardBus standard, which is why dongles could be shared between cards. After PCMCIA picked up speed, a "non-practicing entity" pulled a patent out of their portfolio for a "programmable connector". Because the PCMCIA ethernet card itself plugged into the computer and presented a different connector to the outside world, the NPE was able to sue and/or settle with something like 90% of the companies making PCMCIA ethernet cards & modems.
3COM had a cool connector on some of their cards called XJACK. It was a little tray you slid out of the card. It had a hole that your RJ-45 plug slid into and some pins. It would certainly make for thinner devices today, but the connectors broke pretty easily and you ended up with an ethernet cable sticking out at a weird angle.
Before everybody standardized on RJ-45, there was a standard called AUI which used a 15-pin D connector. Your network card would have an AUI connector and you'd buy an adapter for whatever kind of network you needed to attach to. Apple had their AAUI which was much, much smaller (about the size of 2 mini Display Ports?). But I think licensing kept that from taking off as a standard.

Well, that's actually an alternative. Instead of having a full standard RJ45 port, having a smaller laptop-friendly proprietary socket with a cheap plastic adapter to RJ45. The adapter would just be a piece of plastic and therefore this would avoid all the driver related problems and would not require manufacturers to pick up the phone to agree on a standard with their peers. That would work for me.

> What I wonder is why they don't come up with a mini-ethernet port format?
I suspect that is part of the problem. The plug is just so big - though IMO Thunderbolt and USB adapters work OK. Realise not everyone thinks this way, though.
> But the main problem of USB adapters is that they don't like being unplugged and plugged back which happens quite frequently
? That's basically what they're designed for.

Maybe I am unlucky but I tried different adapters. The Apple ethernet adapter is not even plug and play on windows and requires a reboot. But even USB adapters take a while for drivers to load then I had all sort of problems: the connection regularly being recognised as 100Mbit when it should be gigabit or the USB adapter not being recognised after a couple of unplugging without a reboot.

The Apple Thunderbolt Ethernet Adapter is basically a PCIe devices over Thunderbolt. Unless your OS has hot plug PCIe, it's going to require a reboot.

IIRC, the apple thunderbolt ethernet adapter violates thunderbolt spec and relies on the adapter specific driver for hot-plug when it's supposed to be a generic interface... this is a problem in other OSes running on mac hardware even.

At least Windows and Linux have supported hot plug PCIe for ages.
Although hardware PCIe slot register must support the optional presence detect bits. Also slot capabilities register must report optional hotplug support and surprise removal support.
I guess thunderbolt has those features supported by default.

How about a cable that’s USB-C on one side, has the ethernet controller built into the plug (similar to the way a Thunderbolt chip is crammed into the plug), and ethernet on the other end?

Anker makes a USB 3 hub with gigabit ethernet. I've got one, it's pretty great.
http://www.ianker.com/product/A7514041

I didn't realize such a thing was being made! thanks for the tip

That is my docking station at work! Fully linux compatible, built properly too, albeit Apple aesthetic rather than the black plastic that is more me.

> What I wonder is why they don't come up with a mini-ethernet port format? Ethernet ports aren't exactly high tech.
Regular ethernet is so ubiqutious that you'd end up needing adaptors anyway. At that stage, you may as well use a USB-whatever to Ethernet adaptor.

Not if it's a standard. Think micro-usb ports. You can find micro-usb cables everywhere. In this case you would find RJ-45 to mini-RJ-45 cables.

You can do Ethernet over many connectors. The end points will still be RJ45, which are very ubiquitous. That issue will not be resolved any time soon.

You'll probably be best served by the (ugliest ever) "surface dock." See the same page.

You can order a new Z here: http://us.vaio.com/
As a pleasant surprise, it still has a built-in RJ45.

At $3000 I expect a dedicated graphics option...

It has, in the docking station; which makes sense to me.

"Fun fact": Steve Jobs is said to have admired Sony [0] and things like the MacBook Air is presumably inspired by the Sony VAIO X505 [1].
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=steve+jobs+admiration+for+so... [1] http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/6/5385716/sony-vaio-iconic-pc...

I bought a Sony Vaio 15 Flip ($1200)[1] new vs. a MBP, Surface Pro 3 or Wacom Cintiq (needs a computer) for drawing. Artists are still looking to buy them at $1400 to $1800. It has a large drawings surface vs Surface Pro 3, a dedicated GPU, lots of ports, and a great screen. It runs my CAD programs (Rhino, MOI and AutoCAD Fusion) sufficiently for an i5-based notebook. It has some other great screen positions for just browsing. It a very sleek and well-designed unit. I can see how Jobs would admire them or be inspired by their innovative designs. Just look at the PSP vs. the Nintendo Gameboy physical design. I did consider an Apple Modbook [2], but it was too blocky, expensive, and going to a third-party for a modded Macbook didn't feel right, although they are Apple-endorsed and sponsored now.
[1] http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2425731,00.asp [2] http://www.modbook.com/

I worked at Geek Squad in the mid 2000s and we had one regular customer who had one of those X505. Its thinness and its lightness were unbelievable back then.

Sony actually manufactured the early Powerbooks under contract.

That's correct. The Powerbook 100.

>You don't chip $50 off a premium laptop and make it crappy
I got that kind of feeling though when he was talking about both the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book. The SP4 is thicker than it could be because you wanted to add a full USB-A??? WHY?? and there are USB-A and not USB-C and a full SD slot on the Book ... WHY??? It made me ill to see them add that shit. It felt like typical MS snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Full SD?? Not micro SD??? Not mini SD??? Why again??? sigh

Full SD makes complete sense. Many cameras use an SD card.
Now you need a separate adapter to carry around with your laptop instead of a nice built-in SD card reader.

I'd bet an extremely high (and growing) percentage of people never connect a digital camera to their computers, and those that do probably do so rarely. So do the benefits here justify the costs?

How do people transfer photos from digital cameras then?
Many cameras don't have built in USB/networking of any kind.

Most people don't own digital cameras any more, they just use their smartphones (which have USB/networking).

LOL, your comment is quite funny. This may be true for "most hipsters that don't care about photography", but in reality there are still many folks using regular mirrorless camera or even better, full frame DSLR because their price has dropped so much in the past 3 years. And these folks also happen to be the ones looking for premium laptop options in order to get data transferred fast (wifi is too slow for RAWs) and work on their pictures before publishing them.
It's not because you dont have a use for it that everyone out there is just like you.

Wifi is not too slow for RAWs. I backed-up my entire library to the cloud over wifi. I would bet most people don't need to transfer their files on a fast enough timescale that wifi is too slow for them.

Actually, I have a dSLR myself. But I'm a tech nerd and extremely aware that most people are nothing like me. Most people just take selfies on their smartphone cameras, run them through an ig filter, and call it a day.

Again, most people dont have a 1000+ USD laptop. You are not talking about your regular laptop user here - there is definitely more people who have large cameras and not only smartphones among the ones who buy expensive computers.

I mean, I'm obviously biased because of my age, but walk into any college lecture hall and it's all $1000+ MacBooks. Only a small minority of those same students will ever buy a dSLR.

Most people use only their phones as cameras now.

No it doesn't its a horrible and unnecessary dependency. Why not simply do what Apple did with the MacBook, for those hands full of users who still need an SD reader and can't connect the device directly by wire, they could simply plug in a dongle. It's absolutely stupid really, especially with USB-C looking to take over. Hell, they put it in the damn phone, why not be consistent and go with it everywhere. stupid.

pretty annoying, especially when its so close to being the perfect laptop for me, one that i could go a good 10 or so years without having to upgrade if it only had included usb c and a fingerprint reader.
but from their point of view it probably makes more sense because where would you go after making a perfect laptop like that!? it would already be as thin as it can and there wouldnt be that much more to add to it apart from and slightly better cpu or gpu

> and a fingerprint reader.
It has a fingerprint reader.

You have insert mini and MicroSD with small adapters into SD slots, but you can't do the opposite. On top of that, SD cards are the ones with the biggest capacity out there. MicroSDs are very limited in storage and tend to be very costly when you go in the high storage range.

And every price point has one thing you want that the other ones don't have, so you end up sophie's choice-ing your way through Dell's website. And then you go from their Home to their Business site and the prices, features, bundles, and add-ons are different for the same hardware.
It's the same reason Google started making Nexus phones: so that someone, somewhere, would make a good Android phone without messing something up.

Exactly. I mean there are basic things for which you shouldn't have to hunt models. Anything with the basic size, shape and weight should have the standard ports and connectors I am guessing they are cheap enough. Having to shop for a different line of laptop for want of 2 USB 3 port is ridiculous. This is a made up example but you get the meaning.
What I think can be reasonable price points for laptop
Basic build vs. premium construction (Non-plastic super rigid maybe) Weight (regular vs ultra light) Ports, keyboard, touchpad should be standard I think. Maybe premium ones might have the latest techs but nothing should be atrocious. The next bit should be priced based off whats chosen but really most cpu, ram, storage, display should be available on all model. You might restrict the premium to some high end configuration but even on a non-premium build you should be able to get high end display for most part.
What you shouldn't end up is having a $1400 vs. $1500 line of products where the $1400 has got better ports or display option then the $1500 laptop.

Something I do want to note: everyone seems to only ever look at two, maybe three companies for "serious" notebooks: Dell, Lenovo, and (maybe) HP. However, I've found that by far the best company to buy laptops from is Asus.
The latest example of this I've seen is the Asus Zenbook UX305LA. The specs are:
8GB Ram 256 SSD Intel Core i5-5200U 1080p IPS display A keyboard devoid of obviously poor layout[0] Nice large multi-touch trackpad[0] Weighs 2.86 lbs (1.29 kg) 8+ hours of battery Full out of the box Linux compatibility --------------------- Price: $750
It seems to have an absolutely killer set of features at a great price point, and this seems to be a trend with Asus. My current laptop is an Asus TP300LA, with nearly the same specs (though thicker and heavier), and it sold at the same ~$700 price point two years ago.
I highly recommend people look to Asus for their standard "programmer machines".
[0] - http://cuttingedgenotebook.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/AS...

There's more to a laptop than just its theoretical performance. It also needs to be reliable and tough, light-weight, ergonomic (good keyboard, touchpad that isn't touched accidentally), cool (otherwise CPU & GPU might be throttled), etc.

And to add to that, how repairable if something breaks?

the out of the box linux compatibility is a game of chance on those. you have half the models with shitty broadcom cards. a third with the only atheros cards they can find without any drivers and the remaining with an intel card for this month and realtek after that.
it's just a pain in the arse to find one that you can reliably recommend. and 1920x1080 is still a shit resolution.

I used a laptop with a broadcom card 2-3 years ago; it worked for me.

I've found the general quality of Asus machines, especially the zen book to be exceedingly poor when trying to come off of a MacBook Pro. The touchpad and keyboards typically are horrible. That's what matters to me more than ram or Cpu.

which ones? The zenbooks have been pretty sweet, accurate trackpads, decent keys, although personal preference is hard to really nail down. build quality pretty good, screens could give you 1920 matte screen even back to their 2012 iterations.

My two last laptops have been from ASUS. No complaints, no problems with reliability, decent trackpads and generally solid builds (not Apple-solid, but they are also not Apple-priced as you point out). For a while, they were the only company making decent 13" with discrete graphics.
The thing that I found incomprehensible, and somewhat tangential to the grandparent, is how ASUS manages to screw up distribution so badly. They release slightly different models at slightly different times in different geographic regions, and it is usually impossible to buy, say, the European or Asian versions, in the US. A year ago I was quite literally ready to throw money at them in exchange for a UX303LN to replace my aging U36SG, but my dream model was only available in Europe. The only two options I could get in US both had something wrong with them. Repeat: they actually manufactured a laptop to the exact specifications that I wanted, but didn't give me a way to buy it.
Considering they have global distribution channels, it don't imagine it actually being hard to make all models globally available, so the only other explanation I have is forced market segmentation: the two models available in US were pretty much the lowest and the highest end, with nothing in the middle.
I had been waiting to see if UX303UB will make it to US, or if it will suffer the same fate. Instead, I just pre-ordered a Surface Book.

A huge amen to this...
The universe needs
4 size formats (11, 13, 15 and 17 inch) 3 screen resolutions (1920x1200, 2560x1600, 3840x2400 (17inch only) all 16:10) 2 keyboard options on 15 and 17 inch models (with or without keypad) 4 RAM options (8, 12, 16, and 32 GB) 7 drive options (128, 256, 512 or 1TB SSD, 500GB or 1TB hybrid, 2TB HDD) 4 GPU options (Embedded, High end gaming, Mid gaming, Stable/Workstation (K620, for example)) Touchscreen or not option Removable batteries (except in thin and light and cheapest possible which have integrated batteries)
3-6 body types 1) thin and light (only 11/13/15inch) 11hr battery life, no discrete video, SSD only 2a) middle of the road plastic (13/15/17inch) 6hr or 9hr battery 2b) middle of the road metal (13/15/17inch) 6hr or 9hr battery 3a) rugged/thick/workstation (15/17inch) 4hr or 6hr battery, option slot for either BlurRay RW or 2nrd drive or 2nd video card or secondary battery 3b) thick/gaming (15/17inch) 4hr or 6hr battery, option slot for either BlurRay RW or 2nrd drive or 2nd video card or secondary battery Optional) cheapest possible (15inch) no discrete video, 6hr battery
Not sure why OEM’s can’t get this straight. Also not sure why 1366x768 is still a thing nor why keyboard options aren’t a thing.

> It's the same reason Google started making Nexus phones: so that someone, somewhere, would make a good Android phone without messing something up.
The problem Google have though is they have zero input into the hardware design, other than choosing from the existing models. So their ability to prevent cock ups only extends to the software.
Except there was the Nexus 7 TRIM issue that killed SSD performance and took a year to patch. I suppose they've had a lot to learn.

> While I hate the almost singular choice for OsX
I actually find that this is less true now, and I miss when it was more true. There are a lot of choices now, not just at price points, but at form factors. Do I get a 13" MacBook Air, a 13" MacBook Pro Retina, a 12" MacBook, or the upcoming 12.9" iPad Pro?

I was just speaking to one of my devs about this today. Steve Jobs' turned Apple around by removing choice. You had a Consumer and Pro category and they each had a laptop and a desktop. The new Apple is slowly drifting into Dell territory, where I have too many options. It becomes the Netflix problem where I find myself having too many options, so I browse the offerings, and before I decide, fall asleep.

I think the problem is they're in a transitional phase right now. Retina displays aren't ubiquitous yet and are introducing an extra axis of differentiation on the one hand, while the new ultralight Macbook is the first example of a step change in form factors. They're a long way from PC manufacturers where the main distinction between two models can be as trivial as the audio chip and speaker specs.

Steve Jobs got rid of a lot of stupid choices in the Mac line, but he was not anti choice.
At one point, the ipod lineup went from about $50 to $500 in $25-$50 increments. Every little increment was just that much better, in a way that made it very easy to spend a few more bucks. This one has more space, that one is a little bigger and has a screen, that one is a ton bigger an can play videos, this one has more storage than you'd ever imagine.
The ios lineup looked like that a few years back, between the ipod Touch, carrier subsidies for phones, and the new at the time ipads. The declining subsidies has cut off the 0$ upfront low end, but they're extending up with the pro.
My feeling on the laptops is that the Air is not long for this world (which sucks, cause I really like mine), and the model confusion now is essentially a transition state because they can't make all the engineering happen in one year. At some point, Apple is going to manage to make all of their laptops essentially iPads of different sizes, with attached keyboards.
(Why they can't do a bigger one with a real keyboard, days of battery life, and a monster processor is left to the imagination)

What I meant is a single vendor. There are other laptops out there good or bad and if I wanted one for price or design I can't. For example I would probably love to run OSX on something like a surface book if that was possible, or linux for that matter.
I hate the lack of ports in the Macbook 12 but thats the only 12" OSX machine you can get.

Microsoft has done really, really well with the Surface tablets, from what all my Dev Ops and Systems friends tell me. I'm still a bit wary of the detachable keyboard form factor but hey, it would be cool to see them get another win with the Surface Book.

Weird keyboard layouts. Shifting the keyboard off-center to include numeric keypad which no one uses anymore. (Gamers? Please stop.) This alone makes one question what exactly they are "smoking". There wasn't a single big Windows laptop on the market that wouldn't fall into this hole of a flaw.

No one uses numeric keyboard? WTF? How’d you enter numbers then, using the number row?
A huge issue with non-standard keyboards are international layouts. German layout is already requiring 2 or 3 keys combined to reach {[]}, but on some laptops you need either 3 or 4 keys combined, or often can’t reach it at all. Equally on most mobile bluetooth keyboards.
It’s as if no one thought about languages using more than US keys.

Dell D630: Want to enter numbers? Hold FN, use uiopjkl;m,./ as a numpad. No mode switching.
No one replicated this. Sigh.

What? I have a HP 735 which has a similar thing. I believe many others do as well.
However, if you really are into all that much entering numbers to spreadsheet, you'll probably want one of those USB or Bluetooth number keypads.

> How’d you enter numbers then, using the number row?
How could anyone possibly enter numbers using the number keys in the number row?
It's almost as if the typical purchaser of laptops isn't entering numbers into spreadsheets endlessly.

I use the number row. Is that weird? I think it's much faster than using the numpad anyway since you have 8 fingers you can use instead of just 3 (or 4?) for the numpad. It also means you can much more easily switch between letters and numbers.

I think the num pad is a huge addition. I use it both in Excel and Photoshop. that being said i love this device more than anything ive seen since the XPS 13

I think the number pad on a laptop is a massive waste and an anti-feature for 99% of users. Most people don't use it enough to justify the space it takes, and especially the ergonomic awkwardness of having the keyboard perpetually off-center.

Here are some other keys that are a massive waste for 99% of users:
* Home
* End
* Backtick/tilde ` ~
* Backslash/pipe \ |
* PrtScn
* Break/Pause
* Any F key that is not F1 or F5
When's the last time most users typed a backslash? A pipe char? A backtick?! (If you say "in a command prompt" you are not talking about the mythical 99% of users)
Depending on the audience, [delete] is a waste of space too - a lot of people just use backspace. Would you abandon it?
Not being useful for everybody doesn't mean it's useful for nobody.

Sure. A number-pad that nearly no-one uses takes up a lot more space than keys that would leave empty space or necessitate a brand-new keyboard layout if they were removed. Very different.

Removing the function keys wouldn't necessitate a brand-new layout, and I suspect the num keys get used more than function keys.

This is 100% a decision in line with much of the core premium Windows audience - corporate employees who use Excel and other programs with numerical data entry on a daily basis.
There has been massive encroachment of MBP and MBAs into the corporate world as BYOD policies have been adopted.
Very smart move.

Yuck. If you are doing this much data entry, you are probably not at a Starbucks and most likely, at a bigCo desk. In that case, a $5 numeric keyboard will be better.
The offcenter keyboard (and worse yet, off-center trackpad) is a much worse compromise.

Many people including me use the num. pad every day. I will not buy a laptop without it.

> Gamers? Please stop.
I've never used the numpad in a game in my life (except maybe some flight sim from 1998).
I had to use one of those dinky Apple keyboards without it for a while, and I dearly missed it using Blender, Excel and even just Calc. I installed a numeric keypad app on my phone to work around it.

And for those of us early adopters with the Surface Pro 3, I can upgrade my pen and use the new charging doc. Well done. Feels thoughtful, not something I can say about my Asus Windows tablet experience.

Oh wow, you can use the new pen with the SP3? Interesting.

Why wouldn't you be able to do that? Seems logical that it would work. Unless Microsoft changed the pen manufacturer (again).

It does work. Microsoft bought n-trig last year.

Ah, I'd been wondering how they had single-handedly managed to take on N-Trig and Wacom with in-house tech. Makes a lot more sense now. I'd missed the acquisition.

In the presentation they went on about PixelSense and how they had re-engineered everything. Evidently the protocol between the pen and screen remains the same though.

Can you use the old dock with the Surface Pro 4?

It is probable. I can't find perfect specifications, but the dimensions of the Pro 3 and Pro 4 are very similar. Lining up the machines visually, as shown in the image linked below, indicates that the dock port is in the same place and is the same size. That's by no means proof but it's not ruled out. The USB and DisplayPort certainly change by comparison.
I have ~20 Surface Pro 3's in production so I am very interested in this answer.
Surface Pro 4: 11.5" x 7.93" x 0.33"
Surface Pro 3: 11.5" x 7.93" x 0.36"
http://i.imgur.com/aUCyzLi.gif
Again, this is a sloppy image comparison, not a guarantee.

I've heard rumors that they'll release some sorta spacer that will allow the pro 4 to work with the old docks.

yes[1]. I thought I read that they promised this at the surface pro 3 launch but I can't find proof of that.
[1] http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/tablets/1403174/microsoft-sur...

Pretty sure I heard the presenter say 'surface pro dock, yes I said surface pro not surface pro 4 because the 3 works on it, too'. Should double check though.

I've heard this detail but I am curious about the other way around.

The simple answer is, yes.

Not having a Thinkpad-style nub mouse is a fatal flaw.

Yep - for example, Windows 10, although being rather nice update, changed start menu to XAML (in a separate process), and a result is that when I press the Win button on my i5 with new SSD, either nothing happens (missed keystroke? really??) or I wait up to 5 seconds.
Needless to say, all keystrokes before it opens are missed, so Win + type program name + enter turns into Win ... wait ... type program name ... wait some more ... enter.
Also, touchpad drivers. They sold more macbooks to PC laptop owners than anyone else.
---
Ah, you were talking about third party hardware :).

Wonder how many billion dollars were lost by PC makers for the lack of a normal touchpad?
Apple's touchpad is not especially great, it's just normal, like a touchpad should be.

"That's what the OEMs get for not being able to put out a laptop that could compete with Apple in all those years"
Exactly. I don't know why it was rocket science, but they had years to clone the MBA (which, imo, is the end of the laptop form factor - it's the platonic ideal of the laptop computer) but they couldn't.

Not only that but they bring hardware for people to get things done. Instead of stripping away as much as they can, they strip away as much as they have to (As Apple did in the past).

I dunno; My Acer S7 was definitely a competent MacBook Air competitor. They were out there, if you looked.

No function keys though :(

Not stand-alone, no.
I've had the laptop since it was first introduced and I've found I've missed stand-alone function keys exactly... zero times.
Your mileage may vary I guess.

What about key combinations like Alt + F4? And triggering a build? Switching fullscreen with F11?
Also I don't have a picture of the keyboard at hand, but what about turning brightness / volume up and down?
I remember this being the only flaw I saw in the S7.

>That's what the OEMs get for not being able to put out a laptop that could compete with Apple in all those years
Dell XPS line-up is quite nice, and on par with any Apple laptop.

That's what all the Dell XPS reviews said 2 or 3 years ago too. So I thought I would surprise my wife with a Dell XPS Signature Edition laptop for Christmas. Everything from the touchpad, to the display, to the flexing keyboard, to the cheap looking hinge was truly awful and no where near the quality of the equivalent Macbook of the time. A few months later she got a Macbook Air from her company and the XPS has been pretty much collecting dust ever since. I'm sure the quality has gone up in the last 2-3 years, but since that experience I'm much less trusting of the reviews online.

I own a Dell XPS 15 and comparing it to a Macbook air is complete nonsense.

I own a Dell XPS 13(2015) and it's a damn good laptop. I would absolutely put it up against any MacBook.
(I also like the touch-screen more than I thought I would, and I wouldn't go back).

I switched from a Macbook Pro to a Dell XPS in mid 2012.
I was a long time MacBook Pro user I went though three MBP models from 2006 to 2012. I switched mostly because I was frustrated with short comings of OS X. I wanted to make sure I got a good Laptop with first class Linux support so went with XPS, which had the best specs on market at time.
Pretty happy with it. The Trackpad had issues. When I first bought Laptop I had to compile my own custom kernel to get two finger scrolling working(has long since been mainlined). But quality was comparable to Macbook's quality. I have had no issues with either the keyboard or the display certainly nothing like you have mentioned...
The fan is starting to die in it now but it has lasted 3 years of heavy use about on par with lifespan of my old Macs. I'll probably pick up a new laptop in post Christmas sales I'll likely go with Dell again.

Theoretically, yes. In practice there's been things like Dell having to issue 130W power adapters because the 95W ones weren't powerful enough. The XPS 16 runs too hot and can't use max GPU and CPU at the same time without sounding like a jet engine. The XPS 15 was nice but weighs a ton, and was also a funny shape to fit into a bag. Hinges fail regularly. Some sort of residue from the keyboard makes grid patterns on the screen if you leave it closed.
I'm now using an e7440 which is my favourite so far, but even that still has hopeless graphics (Intel HD 4400) that get the fan going crazy, and it also has the keyboard drawing patterns on the screen.

What's wrong with the lineup of ultrabooks? I've switched from a Macbook Air 11 to a Sony VAIO Pro 13 and couldn't be happier.

Dell XPS 13/15 has been out for about a year.

How is your experience with it?

I only tried a friend's, and it was cool. Personally speaking, I cannot work on a any keyboard without a Numpad, since a lot of my work requires entry of numerical data. I love the look these high-end 13" laptops, and I am intrigued as a geek, but I can never fit them in my work flow.
I use an 2012-ish 17" Asus gaming monstrosity. It's not easy on the eyes, but it works for me and can run Batman Arkham games at 50+ fps.

Could you use a USB number pad? Would need a heavy one so it does not move around I guess.

But then it would mean adding yet another thing to my bag when moving around. I hope Surface book succeeds so they come up with 15" model with a numpad.

When you don't have to make a profit, you can do stuff liek this.

"weird keyboard layouts"
You could argue that Apple's keyboard layout is weird, but they are at least the same across the board. Now other manufacturers are copying Apple's keyboard layout in cargo cult fashion. There should have been agreement between non-apple manufacturers on the layout, including placement of page up, page down, home and end keys. Now we have to suffer them being removed altogether thanks to Apple.

Dell XPS laptops are amazing. What flaw did you find that noone else did? I would even go as far as to say the hardware is better (obviously many here will disagree about software side). I mean, they are carbon-fiber, lighter, smaller, with better build quality.

If he's running Linux, it might be that it tooks 5 months after the release of the Developer Edition (the one w/ Ubuntu preinstalled) to fix the most basic/egregious issues: http://bartongeorge.net/2015/08/28/recent-fixes-for-xps-13-d...
Also, that even now, they still ship w/ Broadcom, not Intel wifi. (drivers not in the kernel)
I'm curious about the new Skylake XPS models, but you'd have to either be foolish or a masochist to guinea pig their new models...

Wow, this page is a mess - here's an element based breakdown of the switching elements in their presentation:
MSFT:
- nav 1
- nav 2
- header with what sounds like a call to action, but no button to buy?
- hero image with text overlaid that has terrible contrast nobody will read
- inter-page menus with some insane zooming function that scared my browser
- another hero image
- 3 columns - maybe buttons? no not clickable.
- another hero image
- 3 more columns - maybe buttons? no not clickable.
- another hero image
- 3 more columns - maybe buttons? no not clickable.
- 2 columns marketing other products? maybe buttons? yes - those little ">" things mean they're clickable i guess.
- 3 more columns - maybe buttons? ok now they're buttons. but there's no ">"?
- another hero image with a price action, no button to click to follow the action! WTF!
VS vs the iPad Pro http://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/ which is single column and nav consistent throughout.
As the old quote goes "If I'd had more time I would have written a shorter letter."
Feels rushed.

Agreed. Adblock totally breaks the rendering as well.

I’m on mobile. More so than usual?

Wow, so that's what's causing that. Even when I disable Adblock, while the page is loading for 20+ seconds on this high-end iMac the formatting is completely botched (in Chrome).

Came here to say this, i was testing my work on a smaller window and page is a complete mess !

Respect for detailed analysis and quote.

I'm pretty sure it's a Safari problem (El capitan update I suppose) but I was actually getting massive lag earlier on that iPad Pro page. Upvoted you though be have you're right and your analysis is spot on.

Nope, I'm seeing messed up pages on chrome too.
EDIT: So the page finally loads properly, I guess for some reason it takes forever to load the images. The biggest file is a 3.5MB mp4 while all other images are under 700KB. And the loading speed doesn't change back to normal even with cache enabled. It could be some problematic static file routing and controls.

Looks like crap on IE also.
(Disclaimer: I don't use IE, I just have it available when I need to check something. I don't want people to get the wrong idea.)

No, the problem is that the pictures take ages to load and until they have loaded, the page is completely garbled. It's the same in Safari, Chrome and Firefox.

Page on a full sized browser on a 13" screen with ublock:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/gmyi3jjwq25w0d1/surface_book.png?d...

Similarly, on a 13" 1080p chromebook, I get this: http://i.imgur.com/pGhjAwQ.png
Turning uBlock off didn't seem to help at all.
Edit: after letting it load for 3+ minutes, the page does load successfully, giving this: http://i.imgur.com/qnNlvYj.png So maybe it does work! Eventually.

Pretty sure it's just one of their CDN's failing.

How can we trust Microsoft Azure then?! Not even able to serve their own product

https://www.microsoft.com/surface/assets/... is resolving to 2600:1409:a:18c::2768, which is owned by Akamai.
But your point still stands: even Microsoft doesn't trust Azure's CDN offering.

I'm pretty sure Microsoft has always relied on Akamai as their CDN. They gave up on rolling out their own CDN a while ago, which makes sense.

Isn't the Azure CDN offering through Akamai?

Isn't everyone's CDN offering through Akamai these days?

Should've used IE6

They are getting pounded with traffic, give it a minute.

didn't find out why but resizing the browser (from fullscreen to something smaller) fixed this issue. Of course you can resize it back to fullscreen afterwards.

Apple isn't exactly who I would point to as a good comparison. They have plenty of overdesigned pages: http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/

I agree that Apple overdesigns too, but the DIRECT competition of the Surface Book is the Apple page I referenced.

Can't use mouse-scroll on this page, only arrow keys.

I'm able to scroll, but it just move me to the next part of the "keynote," and not down the page.

Disable JS on Apple.com and reload the pages. They should render flawlessly and give you back responsiveness, without the animations.
(I'm talking about their iPad Pro and Mac Pro product pages, not necessarily the whole site.)

You think the above site is acceptable because it works well if you disable JavaScript?

Yes. For me it makes no difference because JS is not enabled. So for my use case, it is acceptable. Visit the Surface Book page without JS. You'll see it renders perfectly fine and all the information is there!

Flash?! Wow, I wasn't expecting that from Apple.

That's not flash, it's just video:
http://movies.apple.com/media/us/mac-pro/2013/16C1b6b5-1d91-...

It shows up with a Flash "click to play" icon on my browser (FF under Win7.)

Took a while to load but looks OK now.
Servers / CDNs probably were hammered.

So the Surface Book must be a fantastic device. Given that there's seems nothing else to hate about ...

Since the presentation of information is so broken that we have no clue what it is, hating on the web page is pretty much the only thing to hate about.

it's contradictory to have a premium device such as the Book & then have a basic webpage that doesn't load.
Traffic on launch day should not be a problem. They've been advertising microsoft Azure and the infrastructure for years. If you are web startup and launching, this is a bad sign. Better go with other providers who can scale properly

Microsoft need to add this to their jQuery to fix the layout issues:
$(window).trigger('resize');

Blocking microsoft-int.com using NoScript fixes the page for me.

ugh yes finding it almost impossible to scroll through this page

You give all this solid critique but didn't consider that maybe some assets (CSS, JavaScript) were not getting properly included/cached/invalidated? That shit happens to even companies at the scale of Microsoft. But rather than waiting a few minutes and see whether it is fixed you immediately scream "IT'S NOT WORKING! LOOKS HORRIBLE! LOL MICROSOFT! APPLE DOES IT BETTER". You are like a stereotype head-of-QA. ;)

Looks like a doge meme

When I view the iPad Pro page on Firefox latest with NoScript blocking Apple.com, it is much more responsive than when JS is on.

When it's all said and done for me the website is over 6MB, that's not acceptable!

Turn off JS. Then it works fine. I think their servers are hammered.

Renders fine in Firefox with uBlock: http://i.imgur.com/G7XeKs9.jpg

What Microsoft has done today is prove they're very focused about providing a top of the line personal computing experience. You can argue about server, but when it comes to applications (which are floating windows), Microsoft Windows has proven they can keep that title for their operating system.
I'm glad to see them take ownership over the hardware. That has always been the black mark. I build my own PCs and always bought ThinkPad to keep the good experience. Now, Microsoft can help others who don't or can't do that.

Microsoft's server software is actually top-notch and has been for years. Server 2003 was rough, but after that MS really started improving the management tools and allowing a lot more command line via powershell, etc.
And in corporate America, Microsoft's Server products are near-ubiquitous. Consider that most of the in-house workflow tools at any company are built in Sharepoint -- and Sharepoint is actually a great platform for business apps (and easy to hire developers for). Exchange/Outlook/Lync is a great corporate collaboration suite that mostly "just works". And from what I've seen, Google Apps isn't really a threat for Microsoft -- it's largely just displacing Lotus Notes at the bottom end of the market.

At the risk of sounding overly snarky: Top-notch does not mean putting the Goddamned Metro UI, a thing for users on touch screens, on a Goddamned SERVER OS like they did with 2012.
It's insanity. Every time I have to RDP into a 2012 machine, I cringe a bit. Whoever was responsible for that decision should be shot, and the corpse fired.
For all Microsoft has been doing to improve their standing lately, they still make some rather absurd missteps...

Yeah, the UI is shit, though in the next server release they're adding native PowerShell over SSH, so hopefully you should never have to log in to one again.

will I need a CAL to SSH in?

..what's sad is that this is a completely legitimate question :(

I thought MS had mostly done away with CALs? I haven't been in an environment without Enterprise Software Assurance for a while, but I thought they were actively moving even their SMB customers over to SA licensing as well. No idea how far their plans got though...

By definition of how Windows Server is still licensed, yes, you will. Anyone using any resource hosted on a Windows Server system (with exception to public websites) needs a CAL.

There's been remoting in powershell since V2 the only cool thing about SSH is linux gets to join the party. And that is very cool

Have you actually tried to use Powershell remoting? When you try to do remote automation on Windows machines you land in this Bizarro world where some things work with psexec, some with remoting, and some not at all.
A working, secure protocol where things actually execute on the remote machine will be very welcome, and when we think SSH that's what we're excited about.
(The hit-and-miss nonsense I'm talking about was a script that reached out to a collection of machines, shut down a Win service, set it to "manual", deleted its log file, then set it back to auto, then started the service. It was a hodge-podge of psexec, remotable commandlets, and Powershell remoting. There may have been whiffs of WinRM in there too, but I'm trying to forget it.)

The only hassle I've had is trying to use external resources while already in a session. e.g. enter-pssession "someserver"; copy-item "\\netshare" .
In thins case you need to further enable CredSSP on your domain to allow passing on your auth credentials through the session to the third machine.
Any cmdlet I've seen that doesn't take a session (wmi or cim) I've just wrapped up into invoke-expression -computername "commands..."
Ps remoting lets me do great things like import module from servers to clients that I don't have remote tools installed on. e.eg. $session = new-cimInstance "domainController"; import-module activedirectory -sessions $session

We just upgraded to Office 2013 and the colors in Outlook are killing me. Microsoft basically gives you three themes which are basically some form of a light white/grey background.
I don't understand how this color scheme made it out of QA testing without someone complaining about it.

I had the same issue and ultimately fount the solution. I forced myself to use Office 2013 and avoided being exposed to earlier versions with much better contrast, in particular Office 2003.
In a few weeks of immersive experience, you will see that your body will start accepting Office 2013 and you will not notice the lack of contrast anymore.

I've found it much easier to navigate Windows 2012, Windows 8 and Windows 10 with just the keyboard than past versions. Maybe because it has forced me to learn some of the short cuts but I also think the commands have become more powerful.

I haven't RDPed into a server for at least a year. Do everything with WinRM and powershell remoting and DSC. All our kit is 2012 R2 core.
It does suck on a server though big time.

I wish I had down voting ability , You would be my best candidate for down voting.

And this is why most people on HN can't down vote comments.

And why the people who can get to decide who can’t.

really? How's that work? Or is it just a subset?

When you get enough points (and maybe hasn't been too annoying?) you get downvote privilege.
I think the point is to force people to lurk around a while before they can downvote anything.

The point is mostly to make sure people are feeling as part of the community by the time they get downvote privilege, and downvote based on what contributes and what doesn’t.

Ah. My question is regarding this:
> And why the people who can get to decide who can’t.
How does someone with downvote privileges get to decide who can't downvote? Simply because a downvote removes a unit of karma from the downvotee's score?

Correct. If your Karma is below a specific value, I think 1000 or something, you can’t downvote.

> Lync... "just works"
Those are two things that I would never say together. Lync is great if you are all on Windows within the same building or campus perhaps, but the video quality is horrible compared to Google Hangout or (consumer) Skype for cross country and international communication.
Also: Lync is now called "Skype for Business" and old Lync will be sunsetted per http://research.gigaom.com/2014/11/microsoft-announces-skype...

Depends on how you build it out, but yeah I do agree that Lync/SfB is the weak point in the suite. But the Exchange/Outlook combo is the gold standard for corporate communication.

No. It does not depend on how you build it out. Lync sucks, period, and has for a long time. Similarly, Sharepoint sucks irredeemably. It looks and acts like bad 1990s software. It's consistently the most painful, frustrating part of my workflow, and I use it as little as I can possibly get away with.
Next time you want to defend the full Microsoft software suite, just don't mention Lync and Sharepoint, and your argument will do better.

Sharepoint is a core part of it; and while I agree that Sharepoint is awful, it's a necessary evil that's better than the alternative.
Sharepoint just generally sucks because it's a platform for building one-off custom apps that part of your accounting department uses. Any platform with that use case is going to suck. But maintaining a Sharepoint environment is a lot easier than maintaining 30-40 individual web apps running on separate Linux machines, and it's a lot more maintainable of a business process than doing everything in an Access database or a shared Excel file.
It's also just flat-out ubiquitous. It really doesn't matter how much Sharepoint sucks because nearly every company uses it in some form.

I think you been living in a Microsoft world for to long. Many companies use far more Linux servers then Microsoft.

For sheer number, you're almost certainly right. But Microsoft products lie at the center of nearly every major company in the form of Active Directory, Exchange, Sharepoint, SQL Server, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big Linux guy and have been for a long time. If you want to build a product, Linux is definitely the way to go. But for a corporate IT platform providing applications and communications tools to business users? TCO is the name of the game; and while license costs for Microsoft products may be higher, you're going to get a lot fewer support requests because end users are capable of diagnosing and fixing far more issues on Windows/Office than Linux.

I think I'd argue against Sharepoint simply because of the investment and vendor lock-in required. You do have an extremely solid point about Google Apps at the bottom end because of this exact reason though.
I only wish the O365 platform was more stable. I had endless issues when I tried to setup a paltry 50 accounts from a different managed Exchange platform. We ended up with using the Office products using the O365 license (cost of 2013/2015 products was far too high to justify individual licenses), but switching Exchange back to the previous provider.
Also, when it comes to high availability, there isn't much that can beat the ease of SQL Server's HA solutions. I personally greatly prefer PostgreSQL over everything, but there is no doubt in my mind that MSSQL is a solid platform.

Well, with any Intranet software you're going to have some element of vendor lock-in. Sharepoint has at least been around for a long time and gone through a number of major functionality upgrades. I have a new appreciation for Sharepoint after seeing too many of my clients using collaboration software that is either homegrown (and the developer left 5 years ago, which is when new feature development stopped) or no longer supported by the vendor.
And I agree with your points about SQL Server as well. It's not very popular in the hacker community to talk about licensed database products, but SQL server is rock solid and far less annoying to configure/test/deploy than Oracle.

> Microsoft's server software is actually top-notch and has been for years.
I disagree because I think there's a lot more important things to a server than those tools. What I want from a server is versatility. I want to learn one server OS and use it for all of my server needs (for the most part). I can't do that with Windows Server because it's not a good platform for non-Microsoft technologies.

By that logic, wouldn't most/all server OS' be considered not very good? Linux isn't really a good platform for Microsoft technologies...

If all you plan to do is develop applications for the web, then go for Linux.
If you ever plan to step foot into corporate IT, you're going to have to deal with Windows because Linux is a bad platform for Microsoft technologies -- and most corporate IT departments exist to deliver Microsoft technologies to end users. Exchange, Outlook, Excel, Word, Powerpoint, Sharepoint, etc. are the standard in the corporate world, and there really aren't any other applications that measure up.

I've been the linux guy in many meetings arguing for Exchange/Outlook and AD. Those two tools are best of breed by far. AD is a HUGE standout when it comes to centralized AAA controls.
Sharepoint is sharepoint. It just doesn't suck as much as everything else.

Top notch as in they can't add HTTP/2 to IIS without upgrading the entire OS? Yeah...
Exchange/Outlook/Lync are amazing, sure. (Lync destroys other PBX software.) But Windows as a platform, outside of managing a large company's internal IT is really not so fantastic.

Could be a MBP replacement for developers. The only thing is those of us running on OS X, how is Windows 10?
I love my command line and linux like commands and tools. - Homebrew - Bash scripts - Docker (Windows 10 currently not supported) - Vagrant
I just feel the tooling for MS isn't in the direction I am. I still have a Windows 7 desktop and it's just not the same.

I would just install Linux on it.

Good luck getting the touch screen to work flawlessly with your Linux install

Not sure about this particular machine, but touchscreen laptops work just fine with Linux nowadays from what I can gather.

Yup, I'm running Ubuntu in a Lenovo Yoga - for the most part it's great, but the touchscreen stuff and tablet mode do not work at all.

As a developer who spends the entire time in the terminal and only touches the keyboard... so?

Unless you are reading this in lynx then you do sometimes use graphical terminals. For some people reading websites and consuming other media that don't require much textual input is more comfortable in 'tablet mode'. Dual use nature of Surface computers allows people to carry around one device instead of two and with no syncing required.

It's all there, just different.
PowerShell = bash, Chocolatey = homebrew, Windows Server Containers = docker, Hyper-V+powershell = vagrant, DSC = ansible etc etc.
I don't use Windows 10 for reference though. Still on 8.1 until they fix a few things and release a version-matched server platform.

Vagrant works on Windows. You can use Hyper-V or VirtualBox for the virtual machine environment.

I know. However it's buggy on windows and painful for deploying windows VMs on (with packer).

> PowerShell = bash
While a great fan of PowerShell in theory, in practice it seems to be extremely cumbersome. Sort of the opposite of bash and other Unix shells, which suck in theory and are very useful/convenient/powerful in practice.

Cumbersome or you just aren't familiar with it yet?
The whole design of PS is meant to make it so you can "guess" the names of cmdlets you've never used before. Everything is Verb-Noun, Get-Service, New-Service, Restart-Service, Stop-Service, etc.
Discoverability is valued over succinctness.

Although you can have succinctness, most commands have shortcuts for them.
Get-Content = gc or cat
for example

Which is fine when you're starting out, but infinitely frustrating after you have an idea of what you're doing.
A recent example, looking for errors in windows logs:
Get-Childitem "C:\Windows\" -recurse -Include *.log ` | Select-String "Error" -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue ` | Group-Object filename | Sort-Object count -descending
Closest *NIX analogue I can think of would be
grep -r Error /var/log/ | sort
English is an arguably fine speaking language but an awful programming one.
I love what Powershell can do, but gods do I hate typing it.

I'd also wager Select-String is an order of magnitude slower than grep or ag.

You'd be wrong (at least for grep) http://www.jwgoerlich.us/blogengine/post/2013/01/21/Grep-ver...

Except, GNU grep is even faster than Select-String, if you run it on a better filesystem.

NTFS is only a turd on lots of small writes. It really flies on reads.

Unless it is fragmented heavily, which often tends to happen.

Pretty much a non issue since 2012. It defrags itself.

Try links and environment variables to substitute long commands and flags, respectively. Fine, it’s not there by default, but as a power user you have the ability to adapt it to your needs. (That would also be a cool fix to release on GitHub for others like you to use as well. Yay hackability!)

Right. When I found out that this was supposed to be the alternative, I almost lost it.
For the thing to become usable, you have to do personal configuration, meaning your system will be unusable to anyone else and theirs will be unusable to you.
Back to the drawing board...

Lots of powershell cmdlets have aliases too. They are less discoverable than the verb-noun names, but for cmdlets I use often they are great. Get-ChildItem is aliased to gci, ls, and dir.

Those two lines do different things. They're not analogous.
The equivalent to the UNIX line above in Powershell is:
ls "C:\app\*.log" -R | sls "Error" | sort
You cannot just tack on a bunch of extra requirements for Powershell (grouping, sorting by certain things and in a certain order) and then not include them in the UNIX example, that's disingenuous/misleading.
The only big difference between PS and UNIX in an actual analogous example is that the PS version of grep gets files fed in one by one and processes them, whereas UNIX's grep processes files itself.
PS - The above Powershell code may not work in 2.0 (2009). You'll need 3.0 (2012) or higher.

Hence "I can think of". That was copypasta from an internal wiki. I don't appreciate being accused of "disingenousness" from an off the cuff example.
By the way, your example is precisely 12 characters longer than mine and still multiple times shorter than the equivalent PS, so if your goal was to somehow disprove PowerShell's annoying verboseness rather than snark at me, you failed.

(iwr "http://Slashdot.org").Links | select href
Nearest Unix equivalent please.

What does that even do? Sorry, I’m not familiar with Windows, but would love to provide a unix equivalent.

Fetches http://Slashdot.org (`iwr ...`), parses it as an HTML page and extracts all the anchor tags (`.Links`), and selects the href of each anchor tag (`select href`). Since this is the end of the command, the hrefs are returned and printed as an array of strings (so one href on each line).

Including the href="" bit?

Just the values. The same things you'd get by accessing the href property in JavaScript.

Well, with just grep and curl, it'd be something like:
curl http://slashdot.org/ | grep -o "href=[\"'][^\"']*" | sed -e "s/href=\"//"
But presumably this is being discounted due to the lack of HTML parsing, so not the same as the Powershell example. Then one somewhat ugly method would be using the html xml utilities provided by the W3C and available on most package managers:
curl http://slashdot.org/ | hxpipe 2> /dev/null | grep Ahref | sed -e "s/Ahref CDATA //"
Obviously not as pretty, but it does do a nice job of going through the HTML tree, and doesn't rely on nicely formed XML that /usr/bin/xpath would.

Yes, a naive grep will pick up variables named href in JS, the text content of a div that contains "href", an href attribute on a non-anchor element, etc. so a utility that specifically parses HTML is necessary, but not sufficient.
I'm not sure how robust your hxpipe example is against those.

It's a shell script. If you're architecturing more than that in your shell script, I would suggest that you shouldn't be doing this in a terminal in the first place. And if you're just trying to click links for a quick shell script, why not just do it via wget in the first place, rather than have this intermediate list of strings?
But since you asked, hxpipe assumes that href on a non anchor tag is an error and should be represented as an Ahref... which isn't too bad an assumption to make, tbf. The other situations is dealt with (text content, javascript).

lynx -dump -listonly http://Slashdot.org
Not exactly, but close. Needs more work if you want to pipe it further.

> I don't appreciate being accused of "disingenousness" from an off the cuff example.
Then check your examples before you post them to make a specific point. It is a point of fact that calling those two things "analogous" is incorrect, and your offense doesn't change that fact.
You also specifically said "I can think of" implying that you created the examples rather than that you got them from an "internal wiki." The fact that you said you thought of the UNIX example gives me solid ground to describe the created example as disingenuous.
I cannot help it if you're being misleading about how your got your examples.
> By the way, your example is precisely 12 characters longer than mine and still multiple times shorter than the equivalent PS, so if your goal was to somehow disprove PowerShell's annoying verboseness rather than snark at me, you failed.
My point was your examples were poorly constructed and misleading. I proved my point I believe. The difference between my accurate example of PS and your inaccurate example are night and day.
I'll leave it up to the reader to decide if PS's syntax is more to their liking. I just think they should start off with accurate information so they can form an accurate determination themselves.
In other words I won't get drawn into comparing my PS example with your UNIX example. I just want both examples to be truly analogous of one another.

>By the way, your example is precisely 12 characters longer than mine and still multiple times shorter than the equivalent PS
I think you didn't realize, but what Someone1234 has there is the equivalent PS, not UNIX shell.

I'd agree it's a bit more to type out, but it does seem to make more sense from a readability perspective. And for those of us who didn't grow up with the UNIX shell to understand the reasons why things were kept so short, it's a bit easier to digest. (I do appreciate why bash is so short and succulent. =)
But really, taking the above into consideration, the might in powershell comes not from the terms used, in my opinion, but how it works on things. With grep for example, you're parsing a file. If say, you wanted to filter on that more, you'd be using awk to pick out parts of the text.
In Powershell, everything's an object. Everything's already an object, you don't need to pick the file apart to isolate the date, you just filter on the date object. It's got a data type.
That makes it really powerful, in my opinion.
(Example largely pulled from "Windows Powershell in Action". I really like this book, as it goes into detail to describe /why/ things are they way they are in PowerShell, because he wrote it. =) https://www.manning.com/books/windows-powershell-in-action-s...

> but it does seem to make more sense from a readability perspective
Not really, as everything is given an unreadable alias anyway, and many are given multiple aliases: Copy-Item -> copy,cp,cpi. So there are just more names to learn.

You don't have to use the aliases though, and they don't tab complete (only the full name does)
Personally, I never use them. I saw them more as a help for people coming over from bash.

You do have to use them unless you work alone. I regularly see PS1 files that use the various aliases, as well as the fully-named commands.

> Cumbersome or you just aren't familiar with it yet?
Cumbersome. To create my own cmdlet that does the cool stuff Powershell can do (as far as piping) my choices are a terrible language like ps1 or .NET.
On Unix I can use pretty much whatever I want because the shell isn't tied to a specific runtime.

On Unix you can do pretty much whatever you want as long as "whatever I want" can be represented by a string of text. In PS you get to work with objects. PS is more like a Python shell than bash.
If you want, your PS commandlets can return strings as well, so it's not like every part of your pipeline has to be in PS either.

yeah, powershell is limited on the backward compatibility with dos. the few times i had to do anything on windows more than that one-off time, i end up installing a sshd (there are a few options) and use putty to localhost.

Powershell is great, it lets you hack into almost any machine and take control of it, incredibly easily.

Bollocks.

So, no, developers on windows are not stumbling in the night. But also, no, your skills and familiarity are not transferable from OS X to Windows.
In contrast, I was a desktop (laptop) Linux user until a year or so ago, and found my skills almost entirely transferable to OS X.

YMMV, when I switched from Mac to Windows last year, my skills were pretty much transferable.
The biggest aid was finding a terminal emulator that worked like Mac's Terminal.

You're right, which is why I use all three platforms regularly.

I have Vagrant running on my Windows 10 machine fine. It's native.

RE:Homebrew. I feel like most of the time I'm developing on OSX I'm just trying to fill in the gaps. I wish I could get the same battery life out of my air on real unix.

I was intrigued by the first Surface tablet until I played with one in person and realized even with the fancy Metro skin, it's still crappy-old Windows.

Indeed windows for development is not always as streamlined as a unix-based system like OS X. I use a surface pro 3 with windows 8.1 and wrote a python script that opens a cygwin terminal at the top of my screen to provide Guake-like functionality for windows. Most development work I do however is done within a Ubuntu virtual machine, but then again I've usually been doing web development over the past couple years.

Someday someone should write a book published by one of the tech book publishers about how to set up non Visual Studio dev environments on Windows (RoR, Django, PHP/MySQL, etc). It seems like things have gotten to the point where developing on Windows == MSFT dev tools, and everything else is Mac/*nix.

It certainly feels that way, perhaps because I'm so used to apt on linux and windows just doesn't have any equivalent tools that I'm aware of. There's still a long ways to go on the software side to bridge the gap between the Microsoft and open source ecosystems.

It honestly feels a lot like all the kids in the neighborhood just got new mountain bikes and you're still using a scooter. You can usually keep up, but as soon as they go off the road, you're on your own.
VMs are 100% the way to go, but I am consistently frustrated by incompatibility, especially with the nodejs ecosystem. Windows users are a huge minority so tools are rarely built with a non *Nix environment in mind.

With WAMP you can get php and MySQL running quickly. Python and java also works very good on windows, both runtime and selection of dev environment.

been using windows for web development for a long time. almost every tool comes with windows support. there are some exceptions but there are always alternatives.

If all you want is a dropdown terminal emulator with Cygwin/git-bash or the windows command prompt why not just use https://conemu.github.io/ . You can configure it to behave just like guake/yakuake. No need for Python scripts.

http://thenewstack.io/docker-just-changed-windows-server-as-...
Microsoft explicitly has made Windows10 Docker compatible.

That link seems to be about Windows Server (no version stated, but given it's upcoming, presumably 2016), did you mean to post a different one?

They're trying, they're moving in the right direction, but it's still a ways away. Some nice things recently:
- The console host application on Windows 10 finally doesn't suck. Resizeable, copy-paste supported, word wrap text selection, etc.
- It seems like they're trying to make their dev tools use a lot less "black box magic", the kind that that's wonderful when it works right and impossible to debug when it goes wrong. At an ASP.NET workshop recently, Scott Hanselman went to great pains to emphasize that everything he was doing in the VS GUI could also be done from the command line.
- Nuget keeps improving. It's still not a replacement for apt or even Homebrew, but they're listening to feedback and making the changes people request. I feel like in another year or so it could be a real contender.
Edit: Formatting

>> Could be a MBP replacement for developers. The only thing is those of us running on OS X, how is Windows 10?
>> I love my command line and linux like commands and tools. - Homebrew - Bash scripts - Docker (Windows 10 currently not supported) - Vagrant
I switched from OSX to Windows last year. I thought I'd miss stuff, but you don't.
There are package managers like chocolatey to replace homebrew.
I use Cmder as my terminal and it works a lot like Mac's terminal. It was probably the key app that made my transition easy.
I use Vagrant on Windows and it works fine.
Can't say much about bash scripts or Docker though, since I rarely run those locally.

I use babun for everything. It's cygwin on steroids with oh-my-zsh. You have a packet manager called "pact" that works way better than chocolatey (so far)

> I use Vagrant on Windows and it works fine.
Not really - there are some big differences to keep in mind.
If your shared folders have symlinks, they won't work within the VM unless you're using Virtualbox's native shared folders, which is dog slow.
Permissions are also messed up if your VM is on an NTFS HDD - all files and all folders will basically be 755/777 within the VM.
There are plenty more tradeoffs.

> I use Cmder as my terminal and it works a lot like Mac's terminal
What advantages does this provide over the Windows 10 terminal? Windows 10 fixed all of my biggest gripes with cmd.exe

It's more about muscle memory and not having to retrain your brain.
After using Mac for such a long time, it's nice to not have to recondition yourself to having to use backslashes or using commands like `dir` instead of `ls`.

Powershell supports both dir and ls

PowerShell calls its directory listing `ls`. Its "support" is limited to little more than the command name.

Out of curiosity, do you use vagrant for everything?
I used Windows a little while ago, and I couldn't do any work without firing up a VM. I missed my environment, but if I did everything in a virtual machine, I could accomplish what I needed.
Eventually I gave up. I was actually doing my development in linux and windows was just acting as a VM host. It's almost comical that I ever said I did development in Windows.

No. I do a lot of stuff in CMDer. I only use vagrant for testing deployments.
Most of the apps I use are cross platform GUI apps like Sublime, Evernote, SourceTree, etc.

I found compiling on Windows always a bit of a PITA.
On Linux I just install build-essentials and everything works fine. On Windows I had to install a specific version of VS and fiddle around with the path to get things running. But maybe there is something like the build-essentials package in chocolatey?
The terminal command history also feels strange. But I like cls more than clear, haha :D

I use msys and mingw for Windows compilation. It's so much easier than Visual Studio --- no messing about with stupid configuration panes and easily scriptable. I also get to use the same makefiles as the Unix port of my program.
The only difficulty is that msys doesn't support parallel make, so builds are fairly slow, but my program's small and I do most of my development on Linux, so I don't care.
(As an additional bonus --- gcc supports C99!)

Oh, so I can use gcc to build on AND for Windows?

> I found compiling on Windows always a bit of a PITA.
Yes, that is a legitimate source of pain, but thankfully that's usually a once-and-you're-done problem (for me at least).
When I switched to Windows as my full-time platform, I found Scott Hanselman's Developer's Tool list immensely helpful with my transition.
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottHanselmans2014UltimateDev...

alias cls='reset -Q && echo'

Compiling what? May be some of us can help you.
If it's C++, I did learn cmake, and now I use the same script for Ubuntu and for Win7/VS2008 and Win8.1/VS2012, and so far I just don't care about compilation issues anymore. Sadly the VS site only has VS2015 now.
But yes, the first time you have to check the VS version and add all the proper env vars for the cmake scripts to find the libraries.
But anyway, it is much better than when I used mingw and made makefiles by hand.

Doesn't help the slow-as-molasses NTFS unfortunately, or the inefficient scheduler.

Native modules for Node.js for example.

How about code written in C11? Or Fortran 95? Throw in a couple of numerical libraries you want to link to, maybe CUDA or some MPI or an optimized BLAS/LAPACK, and it's an all night party.
I lurk on a few sci.comp mailing lists, and the number and nature of problems that the Windows people have with compiling is crazy compared to Linux where the OS actually has a package manager and stuff Just Works.
As for cmake, I don't think it's any better than (gnu)make. I've seen big projects with complex buildsystems (eg. PETSc from Argonne) switch to cmake and then switch back again to make quite quickly. A frequent "problem" with make, I think, is that people learn just enough about makefiles to compile HelloWorld.cpp and then use that knowledge for everything.

I think I agree with you on all fronts, simply because the online cmake documentation is not as good as it should be.
For BLAS, it has a
find_package ( BLAS )
script, which you can use. The same for CUDA. They define cmake variables you can use later for the include and link search paths.
https://cmake.org/cmake/help/v3.0/module/FindBLAS.html
https://cmake.org/cmake/help/v3.0/module/FindCUDA.html
I haven't used C11 or Fortran95, only C++11, and I had to add a cmake script for it, you can find it as CheckCXXCompilerFlag somewhere in the web.
I have to use Visual Studio instead of mingw because I'm using some winSDK libs, and VS has no (gnu)make, and what VS offers for the command line is not cross-platform, making it a poor investment of my time to learn about it.
After climbing just a section of the the steep cmake learning curve, I have deleted the solution and project files from my repository, and now I use cmake to compile and run the project in the command line with both VS2008 in Win7 (the PC) and VS2012 in Win8.1 (the laptop), without any path dependency. Previously the solution files depended on both my username and the path, and just moving the folder was cumbersome and required a lot of fiddling with those files.
Another thing I really like is the concept of an out of source build, and that's very easy to set up and use with cmake.
I now can write
git clone somewhere:my_project.git cd my_project mkdir build && cd build cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=../install .. cmake --build . --target install && cmake --build . --target run
in both Ubuntu and Windows and see my program running, which means I will not go back to make, or nmake or gmake anytime soon.

Try msys2 - it has pacman for installing extra packages, it's basically what cygwin should have been.

Thanks for the Cmder tip. I'm a linux guy now working for msft (started a few weeks ago) and am having a not-so-fun time with tools and the cmd.

Interested to know how your experience has been as a Linux guy working at Microsoft?

I use both a MBP and a Win10 laptop. I really do like Win10, and honestly probably better than OS X.
I have a powershell console open on Win10 just as often as I have the terminal open on OS X. It's just a different dialect of command line than what some folks are used to

As a developer my first question would be: Can I dual boot linux on it? If so it would be an extremely attractive developer machine and switch to Windows when you need it. The hardware is the show stealer here.

This. Is the bootloader locked?
So far I have mixed feelings about tablets. I like the "tablet" part but not the "it is cryptographically sercured from doing anything that might upset a government, corporation, or business model" part.

The Surface Pro 3 you could. Just had to disable Secure Boot for setup, boot from a USB stick, and after installation you could re-enable it (assuming you had a Linux distribution that supports Secure Boot signing).
Obviously nobody outside of Microsoft will know if that remains true with the Surface Pro 4.

Secure Boot is always disable-able on x86. This has been true since Surface Pro 1.

The Windows 10 hardware certification permits the OEM to make Secure Boot not disablable. But the way the major distros work, they get a pre-bootloader signed with the Microsoft key through Microsoft's signing service, and that pre-bootloader contains a key permitting the chaining of the real bootloader, the kernel, signed with the distro key. So it's not a big problem.

Up till W8.1, the spec (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/jj...) explicitly requires the ability to disable Secure Boot:
On non-ARM systems, the platform MUST implement the ability for a physically present user to select between two Secure Boot modes in firmware setup: "Custom" and "Standard". Custom Mode allows for more flexibility as specified in the following: ... B.If the user ends up deleting the PK then, upon exiting the Custom Mode firmware setup, the system is operating in Setup Mode with SecureBoot turned off. ... Enable/Disable Secure Boot. On non-ARM systems, it is required to implement the ability to disable Secure Boot via firmware setup. A physically present user must be allowed to disable Secure Boot via firmware setup without possession of PKpriv.
I can't find the doc for W10. Has the language changed? Can you link it?
The closest thing I found is https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/dn... which isn't really a spec, but does say:
For most PCs, you can disable Secure Boot through the PC’s firmware (BIOS) menus. For logo-certified Windows RT 8.1 and Windows RT PCs, Secure Boot is required to be configured so that it cannot be disabled.
which seems to imply that it is no longer a hard requirement for x86 unlike before.

I'm not finding an actual Windows 10 hardware certification requirement document. Yet Windows 10 is out and shipping pre-installed on hardware, so how can there not be a document somewhere?
"The precise final specs are not available yet, so all this is somewhat subject to change, but right now, Microsoft says that the switch to allow Secure Boot to be turned off is now optional. Hardware can be Designed for Windows 10 and can offer no way to opt out of the Secure Boot lock down." http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/window...

yes. I run ubuntu on my surface pro. Everything works well, with reasonably good battery life (not as good as win10, obviously).
it is a painful install process, but that should change completely with ubuntu 15.10

Why painful? Can you desable secureboot, but UEFI on Ubuntu is still sucky?

Ubuntu 14 doesn't support a lot of the latest hardware at the moment. I had an Intel i7 NUC and installing ubuntu 14 on it was a nightmare... You fix one thing to move the installer, another thing breaks. It's trial and error. Ubuntu 15 was just straight forward, one click install.

I have a Surface Pro 1, and installed Ubuntu and Linux Mint pretty easy... but I wouldn't use any Linux in a Surface honestly, the Desktop Environments are far from having decent HDPI support, and the touch experience is still far from feeling usable.

It seems like running in a VM is a much more attractive option than dual booting these days. The performance hit is negligible (especially with 16GB RAM), you can use both OSes at the same time, and you can use all the native Windows touch/pen drivers and have them carry over to the VM.

Good point, but not ideal for everyone. Especially with IOMMU and an SSD, performance isn't so bad when it works. I haven't liked the overhead with this in the past though, plus no full disk encryption, (although I guess you could do it in the guest), and Windows security in general, and bad 3D drivers for the guest (compositing please), and anything that wants low level hardware access is out. So if you don't actually want to _use_ Windows it makes a pretty crummy hardware abstraction layer.

Windows security in general is better than Linux security in general.Unless you are running Grsec/PaX but hey i do not believe you do that on desktop.
Also you can still run EMET on Windows.

> Windows security in general is better than Linux security in general.
Can you elaborate on this or provide some sources?

Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD made a comment in this line recently. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXS8ljif9b8&t=54

> Windows security in general is better than Linux security in general.
Maybe. Have they fixed UAC not being security boundary [1] if you are on a default administrator account? It's hard to take them seriously when most software for most users still runs effectively under 'root'.
[1] http://www.pretentiousname.com/misc/win7_uac_whitelist2.html

Sorry, I didn't really mean to say that Windows securtiy is inherantly worse, so I should probably rephrase. What I mean is I am more comfortable dealing with client security issues on Linux systems than with Windows. Of course you're right that I'm not running grsec patches.
I feel like I know how to reduce the attack surface a bit more easily on linux client systems. Most OEM Windows installations are pretty bad, so I would want to install Windows myself, sans crapware, and with unneeded built in services, apps and hooks and so on removed. If the bootloader was locked, I'm not sure whether I could reinstall the Windows OS of my choosing. Maybe these products have less crap on them though, since the OS image comes directly from Microsoft.
I didn't mean to refer to situations other than personal clients used by me, and I don't really have an opinion about this in general, except maybe: It depends... :)

Pro and Enterprise versions of Windows 10 come with Bitlocker Drive Encryption, FYI.

Which is as trustworthy as mailing a copy of your HDD to the NSA directly.
We, as users, have no way of verifying what BitLocker does, if it has backdoors, etc.

We really need to differentiate between the two types of "security" when we're talking about them. Are you worried about your personal information being stolen? That's security. Are you worrying about being spied on? That's privacy. People generally aren't worried that the NSA will steal their personal information, run up their credit card bill, etc. They're worried that the NSA will see something that could be used against them in court, or used to target government actions against them in any way. Not to say that an NSA backdoor couldn't compromise both security and privacy, but this is a simplified view.
BitLocker is secure in that it keeps out the attackers. If it keeps out the NSA is a different story (one that is much harder to determine).

As someone from EU, if it was only NSA I would be mostly okay, but I can't trust NSA/USG to be competent enough to safeguard the private key controlling possible BitLocker backdoor from the Chinese and other governments running massive industrial espionage campaigns.

I tried to do become OS ambidextrous last year. After a couple weeks, still felt slower / bogged down by the differences. I hated it and gave up.

I'm running Windows 10 with multiple Linux server distros in the background. Hyper-V shuts them down and brings them up with Windows. WinSCP is my file manager and Putty is my terminal.
I prefer this over OS X on Apple hardware because I can get the exact Unix experience that I want without having to fight with Apple about who is in control of the machine. Perhaps more importantly, I get the desktop experience that I love, which is Windows.

If you haven't tried it out I'd suggest checking out SuperPutty (https://github.com/jimradford/superputty) - it allows for multiple Putty windows in a tabbed interface.

I use exact same configuration , ARCH and DEBIAN cli in background and putty in windows 10 for my C development , and btsync for syncing file between two . I hate tabbed interface , especially in command line.
One good reason is window managers , with windows 10 window manager I get almost perfect tiling window manager functionality , but with tabs ?

Thanks for this! I'm using putty and without tabs it drives me nuts. When I read the GP comment my first thought was "yeah same but tabless terminals sucks!" Then I saw your comment.
Didn't know about super putty - switching today.

I really enjoy Bitvise over PuTTy. If you haven't checked it out, give it a gander. BUT, in the upcoming Windows 10 update SSH support is coming to Windows' shell. So technically you won't need either. It will be more like Terminal on Mac. I still will be using Bitvise, just because of how it manages key files, etc.

Thanks! I have tried Bitvise a few times over the years, but it seems to be missing some features of WinSCP such as "Keep remote directory up to date..." which I use a lot. The terminal immediately seems nicer to use than Putty, but I have to find some way of using Bitvise terminal with WinSCP, or I need to find that one feature of WinSCP in Bitvise' file explorer.

I use Windows as a desktop but have it host a VirtualBox Linux VM for my real work because I don't find either Windows or OSX acceptable for serious Linux development. OSX is actually more insidious because it sort of looks like Linux and makes you think it just about can be Linux, but it's just not.
Under VirtualBox my development environment can match my production environment almost completely. There's no awkward "but here's how you do it in Windows/OSX" that mostly works but often doesn't in some subtle way. I haven't tried Windows 10 yet but this setup has worked very well under Windows 7 and 8.1 so I expect it will be fine under 10 since it's just an evolution. I've used this setup in OSX and Windows and it goes more smoothly in Windows.
One of the keys to it is that you use SMB to mount your VM disk as a local drive to the host, so you get the benefit of any Windows editor.

I toyed around with a similar setup recently (but I'm not actually doing any Linux development) to try out Nuclide, Facebook's big addon for Atom.
Basically you run a server in your Linux VM that Atom/Nuclide (running in Windows) connects to, and it lets you edit files in the VM as if your project folder were local. For those who like a GUI, I think it's worth looking at to save yourself the hassle of VirtualBox guest tools, etc. that never seem to work reliably. And frankly, I've never been particularly happy with the performance of a virtualized Linux GUI, though most of that blame goes to Ubuntu and its apparently impossible to get rid of (in some locations) fading animations.
Anyway, neat tool, worth checking out. You set up a VM to match whatever you'll be deploying to and then work on files in the VM from an editor in Windows. When it works smoothly it's really cool.

Using VMWare Workstation fullscreen in Windows 10 is great, since Microsoft finally added virtual desktops. Just put the cursor on the toolbar at the top of the screen (to send keyboard input to the host) and press Ctrl+Win+Left/Right to quickly switch between VMs or host desktop.

What's the i/o latency (clicks, typing, etc.) on linux VMs in W10? Is it a native VM?
Two years ago I was using VMware in W7, but ended up dual booting Linux since the lag was so annoying.

I never had any problems on hosts with VT-x.

The VM is native on the Windows machine and there's zero latency. Not that I've ever detected, anyway. I've been using this setup for 5 years.

I suspect it helps to remove shitty window managers like Unity or Gnome3 and go to something more basic like xfce. I just set up an example Ubuntu VM today. Unity is annoyingly laggy. My primary VM with xfce is fine.

Is VMWare easier than Virtualbox in sharing files between guest and host? I can never get Shared Folders to work on Virtuabox, and end up configuring Samba.

I've found that Samba is better than the shared folders feature because it understands Linux file permissions better. Also Samba is a more transferrable skill and will work the same way if I switch to another virtualization product.

Cool, that was always my problem with VirtualBox, namely I could not minimize it the way I wanted.

Can I send analysis work from ipython within VMWare to the GPU?

I do something very similar when I'm on a workstation, but I've found that running a full VM is less than ideal on my laptop because of increased battery drain.

I occasionally have to work with Windows servers. Most of the rest, for me, is somewhat painful, but Powershell is probably going to make you wish somebody would port it to unix-y OSes. Just a shame that all the convenient line-editing commands don't work.

You might be interested in the most recent episode of Shop Talk Show (http://shoptalkshow.com/episodes/186-dave-goes-windows/) and associated blog posts.
One notable thing from the blog side was significant issues with RoR, but otherwise I think there's a lot of good.

As an Android developer, I don't think I could seriously use Windows. Anecdotally, out of my 10 colleagues working on our app, 8 use OsX, one Windows and one Debian.
- Drivers are a pain in the ass for Android devices on Windows. You always need to install one when you first connect a device.
- The linux like commands are awesome on OsX and not something I can give up easily.
- Some very important tools are OsX only : ColorSnapper2, Sketch, Zeplin (it does have a webapp though)

Try Cygwin! It’s a *nix environment for Windows. I plan to install it once I get my hands on this beauty. Package management still works for CLIs, I suppose.

If you are interested in Cygwin - try Babun. http://babun.github.io/ its a prepackaged Cygwin with a great command line and good package management.

I feel the same. The biggest annoyance is not having a better command-line application, at least provide tabs or split-windows. With enough work I can get around not having unix but having open 4 powershells is annoying.

Powershell is pretty powerful. You can do some crazy/awesome things with it. It has a learning curve but is worth the time to learn it.

We merged https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10340117 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10340022 hither, since there shouldn't be three stories about this on the front page.
Since the live event looks done now, we've picked (what I think is?) the most significant product URL to change to from http://www.microsoft.com/october2015event/en-us/live-event. If anyone suggests a better URL we can change it again.

Found prices and specs here (redirected from surface.com): http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us
Page's not looking too good on Mac Safari, though.

Not looking too good on Chrome either right now.

There's a resource on the page (https://controls.account.microsoft-int.com/me?partner=surfac...) precluding other resources from loading. Just wait it out.

on firefox, just press ESC when the status bar shows that.

Consider changing the title to mention Surface Pro 4, Lumia 950, Surface Book, and Band 2.
The event was about more than the Surface Book.

Happy to, but won't people complain about the URL then?

Would this link work better?
http://blogs.windows.com/devices/2015/10/06/a-new-era-of-win...
Blog post with links to all the new devices.

Ok, let's try that. We changed the URL from http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/devices/surface-book and the title from "Surface Book".

Actually that link doesn't even link properly to the Surface Bookj page now, which means anyone new reading these comments won't get the context, seeing as all they'll find via the link is Surface Pro devices.

I really like how this site does that, while other sites flood the front page with 8 threads of the same thing.

like when steve jobs died there was only one top story? i hope this is a new standard and not special treatment for microsoft - it's super helpful to merge the topics and other important threads should be also handled this way.

Not new, and definitely not just about Microsoft.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&date...

Of all the things to complain about this isnt it.

I'm starting to suspect he faked it and went to work for Microsoft

The merger of these threads really takes away the scope of the announcements made and the different discussions being had. The editorializing and changing of URL really alters the environment for conversation in a way that's not healthy and hurts the scope of these things. Then the second highest comment on the thread becomes about the design layout on the page.
So be it if Microsoft/Apple/Google/Android/Amazon/Uber is on the front page multiple times...

I'm not going to claim we execute it correctly every time but the general approach seems fair to me: have a distinct thread on each distinct major story.
It's true that merging threads sometimes eliminates some context (hopefully not too much) but duplicate or near-duplicate threads on the front page are arguably worse. If there were a way of pleasing everybody we would jump at it. Unfortunately, people disagree about this.

I think the Surface Book is finally something that can give the MacBook Pro line a run for its money, this should be interesting.

Credit to Panos and everyone who put that together, I didn't see the removable screen coming. That was the kind of "one more thing" moment that rivals Apple at their best showmanship.

Right before he said that I noticed the vents in the top of the screen and thought "huh, that's a weird place to put ventilation" but it didn't click in my mind until I saw it in the video.

I was really excited about the Surface Book even before they showed that the keyboard is detachable, then I about lost my mind. Holy wow.

That reveal was pretty great.

How do they prevent the Surface Book from toppling over, given that all internals must be in the screen part?
It seems this would either double the system weight (due to counterweights) or require an extra stand in the back.

Not all the internals, apparently the GPU is in the keyboard (there's an Intel GPU on the CPU die that's used in tablet mod).

If it's anything like Asus does, it probably also has an extra battery in the keyboard.

Most of the battery mass is in the keyboard. Not sure what battery life is when you detatch the screen - they didn't say.

I was hoping you could bend the screen all the way back but I guess that'd make the tablet too heavy?

You can just invert the screen and bend it over the stand. I'm guessing the problem would have been making the hinge solid and rigid enough more than a weight problem.

If it's anything like other convertibles I've used that stand upright, the hinge is usually stiff enough to keep everything standing.

Well the keyboard is in the stand, part of the battery is probably in the stand, all of the ports are in the stand, the dedicated GPU is in the stand, plus the stand actually lays flat while the screen is mostly upright so in any normal position the stand could only be a fraction of the screen and still not cause it to topple right? I guess the combination of all of that and perhaps a little extra counterweight if necessary makes it work out okay.
A quick comparison, Microsoft cites 1.6 pounds as the weight. I'm assuming it's the screen only as the Surface 4 Pro (the tablet computer) alone is 1.73 pounds, and the Macbook Pro is 3.48 pounds. If the stand held the GPU, a battery pack, keyboard (and possible counterweights) and weighed as much as the screen, it'd be 3.2 pounds and still a fair bit lighter than the MBP.

From: http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/devices/surface-book#...
Starting at 3.34 pounds (1,516 grams) including keyboard

Very disingenuous of them to not include the full weight spec with the keyboard.
my big worry with the MS hardware is its flimsy plasticky nature.

I believe the case is all magnesium.

None of the Surface Pro range has ever been either flimsy or plasticky. At the launch, Sinofsky put wheels on a Surface Pro and used it as a skateboard....

You ever use their keyboard?

Yes, I've used all the Surface Pro keyboards. However, the keyboard is an optional accessory. You can use just about any USB or Bluetooth keyboard you like. You can probably get something industrial strength, if that's what you need....
However, I suspect we're talking at cross-purposes here. I don't know about the Surface Book keyboard. I watched the webcast but have not had a hands-on....

The surface pro is NOT the same build quality as their cheap keyboard.

Hmm, the fact that all the ports are in the stand sucks.
I like to pull the keyboard off my surface 3 and lean it up against the wall and watch movies on it while still having mouse control from a distance.
What we really need is for every device to have an embedded Logitech controller so I no long need the usb nub dongle

Why do you need a dongle if it has bluetooth?

Bluetooth nice suck and have lag issues. It may be a subjective feeling but I hate blue tooth mice

In mobile devices the batteries has a lot of weight and it looks like the keyboard part has more batteries than the top part:
http://www.technobuffalo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Micr...

The keyboard contains the nVidia GPU and another battery-- surely enough weight to hold the screen securely.

Surface book looks very interesting.

My thoughts exactly. To me, OS/X's quality has been slipping, but I haven't found any non-Apple hardware that's comparable. If they get the trackpad and keyboard right on it, this will open a lot of interesting doors.

I can't believe how few laptops get the trackpad right. It's the first and primary interaction anyone has with the laptop, how are all of them so terrible! I'd love to get a non-macbook, but the list of laptops with powerful hardware that plays nice with a Unix based OS and has a trackpad that isn't unbearable is shockingly short.

Anyone except trackpoint users!
But yeah, it's mindboggling. The internal hardware is largely the same anyway, why are companies throwing away a chance to get ahead of the competition and use the same shoddy keyboards/touchpads everyone hates?

Trackpoints are painful for me to use though. My fingers just aren't willing to go through that trauma anymore.

For me it largely depends on the cap. The soft rim cap is really easy on the fingers, while the old IBM and default Lenovo caps only seem to exist to generate callus.

> but I haven't found any non-Apple hardware that's comparable
Thinkpad Ts series? Dell's XPS/Latitude 7000 lines?

> To me, OS/X's quality has been slipping,
I'm amused to see the 'OS/X' typo still lives on, more than a decade since OS/2's been relevant :)
On topic, I've just upgraded to the latest version of OS X and it really seems rock solid. Fastest, most stable, and most secure version yet. Still a bit of an evolutionary dead end though, in that there have been no moves to add touch support beyond multitouch trackpads. I admire their vision with keeping iOS and OS X separate, but given touch is so ubiquitous elsewhere, I can't imagine it'll be long before Windows users are genuinely surprised and baffled by the lack of touch screens in Apple laptops...

Probably apple's next move is not to add touch to os x but to release an iOS laptop to replace the MacBook air, they could call it an iBook. It's pretty clear OS X is legacy tech and on the roadmap for being phased out.

The big step for that would be XCode for iOS. Currently, iOS is one of the few platforms where the platform does not let you develop for itself.

I'd buy an iPad Pro tomorrow...if only it ran Xcode. But I can't justify $1200 or more if I doesn't help me to get my work done. At that price, and admittedly for my purposes, the iPad Pro is just a very large and very expensive gadget.
The really annoying thing is that these days a late-model iPad probably has most of the horsepower needed to pull it off.

For me it's "I'd buy an iPad Pro tomorrow...if only it ran Xcode [and had a terminal]." It can be heavily sandboxed as far as I care, I just need a proper Unix terminal. The trouble with Xcode is that it just needs so much screen real estate, I just can't see it working very well on iOS.

I assume you mean a terminal for the local machine, not an SSH session to another machine, in which case Panic's Prompt is what you want for SSH.
I'm with you in that I'd like a local terminal, but I could live without if I had Xcode on the box and some sort of full-screen editing mode. Working with storyboards would indeed suck, though.

There are terminal emulators on iOS already, that's not the issue, but not having a local filesystem means it's only useful for remoting, there's nothing a terminal will let you do on the device (unless it's jailbroken)

The MBA is already replaced, that's what the "new Macbook" is, an MBA replacement. The iBook brand was replaced by the Macbook brand and isn't going to come back (the name would collide with ibooks anyway).

The whole discoveryd fiasco was the final straw for me with regards to having a Mac. Having such serious networking issues in your primary OS and not fixing them for almost a year after release tells me something is rotten in the Kingdom of Apple.
Yes, the issue was eventually fixed, but I'm done with Apple. They have lost my trust.

My girlfriend is still having networking issues on her MBP. I asked about the problems on IRC and was told that it was a regression that should be fixed in El Capitan, after updating to El Capitan the issue still persists.
I was considering buying an MBP myself but after seeing the issues she is having I am changing my mind, especially after this reveal from Microsoft.

> To me, OS/X's quality has been slipping
I don't understand how anyone can state that, OSX has always had shit-show releases as a rule with a few exceptions (spit and polish cycles like Mountain Lion), and "never buy a v1 of a new design" has been the community's mantra since before I bought my first Apple device 15 years ago, it's one of the first things I was told.

Can only agree about the quality slipping.
It used to be that your computer was faster with every release of OS X. It hasn't been true for a few releases now. Oh that and my niece's iPhone 5c (not even a year old) was bricked by an iOS update. And the only thing Apple offers is a discount on the purchase of a new one...

If I can put Archlinux on that (and keep Windows for tablet mode), I think I've found my next laptop

XMonad, or any other tiling WM, would be lovely for tablet mode too, but probably requires some work.

I know someone who uses a TWM on a tablet, and it works fairly albeit as clunkily as you might expect.

Oh, that's exactly the person I'm looking for! (I'm considering a similar setup) Do you know what software they use/where the touchscreen works best? Thanks a ton!

Not quite how I remembered it. Hopefully it's still useful information. In his words:
---
I was using ArchLinux from within an Android setup using a chroot. The X server ran under Android an was called XSDL, which handles keyboard and allows me to simulate rightclick. I was using Awesome. I bound volume keys to right click and Super (my WM controlling key).
The setup wasn't particularly ergonomic. Problems included the clumsiness and limitation of the X server's controls, the keyboard oriented nature of my Awesome setup, And the general lack of benefit from using a TWM. As far as I was concerned, there was limited merit in having multiple windows active at once when screen space was limited, and other WM with touch in mind would probably work better.
---
It was around 10 inch, but the resolution was about 1280 or lower, and touch wasn't that accurate. (1280x800)
---
Note that this was a while ago, and XSDL has undergone changes.

Hybrids have a very different audience compared to regular laptops (ultrabooks), as they're structurally very different (that is, they are a compromise by definition), so I wouldn't compare them directly.
Don't get me wrong, I have one instead of a regular laptop, but I can see how people used to the latter would feel uncomfortable with them, unless they have a strong motivation to move to the hybrid form factor.

I'm not sure you could call the Surface Book a hybrid form factor. It just looks like a laptop until you lop the screen off.

Typically the tradeoff is balance. I'm curious to see how well it balances on a lap.

True, yeah. It seems theres a lot of batteries under the keyboard so it might be ok.

Makes you wonder how good the battery life of the tablet will be.
There has to be some trade offs? If they pull this off thou.. I'll line up for one.

I have a bay trail asus T200 which is a similar, albeit low-end, device.
The problem for me, under Windows 8.1, has been getting the machine to enter a true low power sleep state. If the machine enters the true low power state than it can work like a tablet, and if you use it lightly (say an hour a night) you can get a week's worth of use without recharging.
Unfortunately if any of the hardware components doesn't go to the low power state, the device will likely be dead or close to it if you don't use it for a day. Microsoft has a utility which tells you which component is keeping device from powering down, but doesn't tell you what software is causing this behavior. Windows 10 is supposed to improve this, but you can't turn off windows update so you lose one way to fight the battery drain.
One way you can fight this, besides plugging it in every night, is powering it down when you are finished, which isn't as bad as it seems because the device boots cold in about 5 seconds.

That's the definition of hybrid :-)
Academic definitions aside, there hybrids have to choose a very serious compromise due to the balance:
if you make the base light (surface pro case), you won't really have a laptop, instead a tablet which sits on your legs.
if you make the base heavy, you're making a relatively heavy laptop.
now, there is of course a spectrum of choice, but practically speaking, even they make a very light tablet part (say, 850 grams), with a "heavy base", you will add 550 grams at least (550 being an odd balance).
I'm absolutely happy to have a 1.4 kg hybrid, but it's not going to compete with the upcoming wave of ultrabooks (note that I'm somewhat skeptical it will be 1.4kg, I bet it will be a little more).

Update: they've just published the spec, and it weighs, as I was suspecting, 1.5kg, which is not bad for a sturdy (I assume it's going to be robustly built) hybrid.

> Hybrids have a very different audience compared to regular laptops (ultrabooks)
Ultrabooks/Subnotebooks are already a compromise. We've made the transition from massive 30-40W CPUs to 15W-CPUs for mainstream notebook over the last 4 years, where net performance for notebooks stagnated at best (and regressed during the first year or two). Going from there to whatever hardware the Surface Book uses won't a big leap any more.

To me it's not a question of CPU power, but form factor and user experience. Hybrids have for me two big drawbacks --- and it's really subjective:
- I like small tablets and larger laptops (13.3 min, 14 prefered). So an hybrid is either a too big tablet or a too little PC, often both;
- hybrids are top-heavy, and I don't like having an hinge. I really want a LAP-top, and a ultrabook is perfect for this. An hybrid, not so much (I've heard about "lapability", not convinced ;).
Both are intrinsic trade-offs of hybrids. So I stick to small tablets + 14" ultrabook, and just don't bother with hybrids. But to each its own.

Absolutely. Lovely to see some innovation from Microsoft that's made it out of labs (the hinge alone looks fantastic). I'd be concerned about duplication of components between the screen and the keyboard though? I can't quite figure out from their website, but it looks like the keyboard part has the dedicated graphics and battery, and the rest (and more battery) is in the screen?
I completely understand why Apple doesn't put touch-sensitive screens in their laptops, but it's such a shame. I'd love to be able to use a pen with a MacBook like this. The iPad Pro would be ideal except it lacks a proper Unix terminal, so that's pretty much out of the question for me (ssh doesn't count).

Yes, would be interesting to know how much battery is in the screen and how long it lasts when its detatched. Perhaps not that long? Maybe thats why they call the screen a clipboard.

Probably, also the screen doesn't have any port.

>the hinge alone looks fantastic
The hinge is the only thing that bothers me. Close the book and it seems like you'll have a thin area of metal on metal grinding on itself and end up with a rather thick profile for putting it in a laptop bag.
Also, at one point they showed the internal structure of the hinge and it looked like the Yoga's hinge that's covered with some sort of articulating plastic (god I hope not).
I'm impressed with everything else though.

I agree with you. If you open the lid, everything looks very good. But if you close the lid, it looks weird.

If they are able to optimize the Oculus for this hardware, it could be a winning combination.

Why? Are you really going to drag an Oculus out to a coffee shop etc. and flail around in a VR world to everyone else's amusement? Not to mention you'll have a heck of a time getting positional tracking setup in a public environment.

No, I wasn't thinking about mobility. I was thinking that this may sell pretty well, the price is adequate for the specs, and it's standardized (just one product, unlike HP or Lenovo with their Z, X, P, T32... variations).

I spent about 1 hour in the Microsoft Store playing with the SP3. I loved toying with it, but I knew that if I wanted to use it for serious software development I would probably dock it with a real keyboard. The Surface Book seems to be the answer. Truly amazing.

I own one and that is definitely my experience.
Most tablets are content consumption devices only. The SP3 allowed you to be a "little" productive on the go with a type keyboard, and a "lot" productive in the office with a dock and a real keyboard.
If you want to be fully productive on the go, then I'd agree that buying a full laptop (e.g. Thinkpad, MBP) makes a lot of sense, and even then I'd still plug in a real mouse.
The Surface's niche is that it can be a content consumption device, semi-productive device, and a fully productive device when you need it to be (with no cover, type cover, and full keyboard/mouse respectively).
I will say the SP3's four biggest issues in my view:
- Touchpad on the cover is just terrible. Totally unusable.
- The Surface itself is too slippery without the cover.
- Some overheating issues when the GPU is utilised.
- The magnetic power cord fails too often/easily. Replaced it twice already. Look on Amazon for reviews/pictures to see what I mean.

Wow. I've used a SP3 hard for about a year now. I charge nightly, throw it in my bag daily, and cart it from meeting to meeting all day long. It's been great. I find the touchpad is excellent, I've not had problems with overheating (I mostly use Chrome and Office applications), and I'm happy with the power cord. My only critique is that the keyboard is a little louder than I'd like, and for that reason I'm considering buying the SP4 keyboard.

Coming from a rMBP 15", I found the SP3 touchpad was too small for me to use comfortably. But it was still usable.
Now that they have increased the size of the touchpad and made the keyboard better, I actually have a bit of a dilemma. You can customize the SP4 preorder with an i7 and 16GB of memory for cheaper than the Surface Book i7 with 8GB memory. I'm not sure how necessary the Nvidia card is for my purposes.

I loathe touchpads... I only mouse so I've never had any issue with the SP3s KB

Now that I've used the SP4 for a good 30 minutes, I've changed my opinion. The new SP4 type cover is vastly improved over the old one. I could use it as my primary input device.
In fact, I think it's actually a problem for MS! :) The reason why the Surface Book was so appealing was partly because the keyboard/trackpad just wasn't that great with the SP3. Now that they've improved the type cover so much, the SB seems less necessary.

Good observation and consistent with a person close to me who got an SP3 for use in a college environment as an instructor. Their experience is that the keyboard is fine for typical use, but the trackpad is awful compared to what they experienced after years of MBP use (remedied by an external mouse). They have small hands and very precise fingers though, so I can see how they are potentially an exception.

I had a long discussion a few weeks ago with some friends about how in the short term, Apple messed up with iOS/OS X while Microsoft took the hard, long, correct route and made the OS work in both places.
This was after the launch of the iPad Pro which is xbox-huge. I was imagining a product which was a MacBook "Base" which you could connect an iPad to as the 'screen' - except you'd have two different OSes that you'd have to cover. It's not exactly a product that fits anywhere in Apple's lineup.
This Microsoft thing is exactly what I was envisioning. You have a solid base which can include a GPU and more battery life and a detachable screen that works as a tablet. Brilliant!

Oh how quickly the past is forgotten :) In early 2000s, microsoft, through its partners, tried releasing remote displays powered by windows CE - they were essentially a precursor to the tablet. Several devices were exactly as you describe.
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/50755EA6-A75...
Im surprised it took over a decade to get a device that doesn't suck in that form factor, but im glad it happened.
Will be preordering one tomorrow! edit: this post was written on an MBP :)

I still have my beta Viewsonic Mira unit, along with a non-branded one. And an unopened first-gen Zune, hah! Mira worked fairly well, and we used it to control what was at that time a Homeseer-based home automation setup, but battery life was awful (battery tech has come a LONG way since then).

> And an unopened first-gen Zune, hah!
A family heirloom!
It was actually a pretty good standalone MP3 player, for its day. (Just forget about the fairly useless sharing functions, and the marketing.)

It really is. I sold my 7 year old Zune a few months ago for $100 on ebay. Solidly built, fantastic device.

This right here. I'm almost afraid it might be too late for them, but Microsoft has been doing it right time and time again with their hardware, and now with their OS (at least after 8.1). I've been a Windows user since 3.11, but I'm always on the verge of switching over to OSX as my main dev/personal machine... Windows 10 & the Surface Pro have been able to at least delay this switch this time around.
Microsoft is the one that is closest to what I think the future should be: only one device you dock and use.
Not sure I'd want a Windows phone either (I'm currently on Android) but I might rethink that in the future as well.

Same here. Been using Windows forever and Android for mobile. If Google releases their apps for Windows Phone I might give it a go.
I believe the idea of Continuum is targeted to light Office users, people who work on basic spreadsheets and word. It has a target market but I am not sure how big it is.

I went from a Galaxy SIII to an Nokia Icon, now running WP 8.1.
IME, the OS and associated MS apps are fantastic, the phone is solid, and I have no complaints. If that's all you cared about I'd say switch today.
But there is definitely an app gap. I was never a huge app user, and most of what I used was there, but I'm pretty sure that's not true for most people. It's pretty hit or miss. You can find Facebook, Teamviewer, Netflix, and Plex, but if you want Snapshat, you're SOL. There aren't even any third party Snapchats around, because Snapchat demanded they be removed from the Windows Store.
There's no first-party Google apps, no doubt a big stumbling block for a lot of people.

Exactly right! The dual operationg system approach was a good short term decision, but I also think that Apple made a mistake, taking a long term view.

I disagree. OS X already has touch support. All Apple has to do is make a touch-sensitive screen for an MBP and add an emulator window for iOS and you have a hardware unit that runs everything.
iOS was originally cut down for performance reasons. Then large parts were locked for security - especially carrier network - security.
Performance isn't an issue, but carrier security is. And I don't think mobile users are going to be happy about having to download a constant stream of unlabelled Windows updates.
Where Apple went wrong was with iTunes, and especially with the horror show involved in getting information into and out of an iDevice. If you have an independent collection of music and books, it's just too clunky.
I bought an Android Galaxy Tab recently, and not only is the screen better than the screen on any iPad, getting books into it is trivially easy.
Either way, I'm glad Cupertino has competition. There's been more than a whiff of complacency from that part of the world in the last year or so, and I hope this makes Cook and Co sit up and stop taking the high end laptop market for granted.
Although gotta say - I'm still amused to see the MS presentation design following the Apple/Jobs presentation style so closely.
Maybe both companies should just merge? That would be interesting...

I don't think apple cares about the laptop market any more. Apple is and wants to be a phone company. Their MacBook Pro line is a legacy product. Also, their desktop OS is converging towards locked down mobile appliance and away from UNIX roots (it seems Apple won't be happy until they kill the file system access for the regular user and lock down OS X so only App Store apps can be run on it). In the end it will be a choice between buying a computer or a Mac.
So, to me Apple are out if the game. It will not be Apple who will give us the mobile workstation quality OS in a pocket device that can hook up to a screen around you and allow you to work like you do today on your desktop.

I disagree as well; not because it is Apple as Google is doing the same thing; 'people' (not people reading HN generally) really don't need to power of OS X or Windows or a fullblown Linux distro. In fact, they are much better off without. Windows / OSX drive a lot of people mad; iOS/Android/Chrome are simple. There is a market for Windows/OSX/Linux obviously but the current use of Windows is very much because of the history; by far most people / most jobs do not require anything like this and are, in fact, better off with a far more limited and more straight forward option. From companies that went to iPad (Android would've worked but it seems less popular) for sales reps and other staff; they say it saves them millions on training, installation, updating etc. Nevermind for non tech savvy consumers where this is even worse. I do not know how good MS Office is on the iPad but if it is good I have no clue why 99% of employees and consumers would not be fine with a tablet + keyboard and a very limited OS.
Edit; that said; bring on the competition. I would buy a Surface Pro just to experiment if it had more battery life. I hoped the 4 would be (a lot) better in that department but it is not. So then I'll just run my MBP with El Capitan instead for now; http://i.glui.me/1GuUc4H

I remember when the iPhone was announced (when the OS was still called "iPhone OS") Apple actually made a point to say it was OSX, and a non-compromise kind of OS. I still remember people drooling over the fact that Apple had managed to put the Macintosh OS on a phone.
The OS was way ahead compared to what else existed out there, and I do think it got some stuff from OSX, but now it's clearly on a very different state rather than merging/

Oddly enough, Microsoft had a dual operating system approach back in the 1990s. It developed Windows CE for small devices like PocketPCs (PDAs like the iPaq) and tablets, and for Windows Mobile smartphones.
CE was also the base for Windows Automotive.

Except it's still about the OS. It has always been about the OS. I'd use a $400 HP from walmart if it ran the latest version of OS X flawlessly.

Interesting. The general consensus I get when talking to people, especially devs, is that it's about apple's quality of hardware.

I guess it depends on which devs you're talking about. I'm mostly doing web development on a day to day basis; very little VM usage, and I've never really gave my hardware a second thought. Maybe because I've always used a mac? Perhaps I'd be more picky if I had to endure poor hardware.
Having said that though I'm much more concerned with the OS capabilities, user experience, aesthetics, toolchains, etc.

For me it's the software+hardware, and the killer feature is a unixy OS with great battery life and little to no fuss. Is it possible I could get similar results out of Linux on commodity hardware? I'd put it at long odds, but even so I bet I'd have to shut off features (losing convenience) and spend a lot of time tweaking it to make that happen.
It's not even just the OS. I've switched to Safari because losing 1.5-2 hours of battery life to use Chrome or Firefox isn't worth it. I'll just open Chrome when I really need it, use it for a few minutes, and close it.
There's also a "no one got fired for..." factor. OSX refuses to work with the client's projector in a meeting? Apple sucks. Arch Linux refuses to work with the client's projector? You suck.

> Is it possible I could get similar results out of Linux on commodity hardware?
I'm using a Sony VAIO Pro 13 with Ubuntu and EVERYTHING, yes everything, works perfect. Touchpad, standby, brightness, wifi, ...
Also a friend of mine is running the Dell XPS 13 with Linux and also has no problems AFAIK.

Yes, it's good great quality hardware -- for a Unix laptop. That was one of the biggest reason why a lot of developers who used to work with Unices on servers switched to PowerBook. Back then, Linux really lagged behind in that regard, even on ThinkPads.
The next big boost was a GUI and market situation that made it possible to create some neat productivity tools (and profit from them).
The early Ruby on Rails community probably was the epitome of that setup: TextMate as a uniquely OS X editor, easy development on your laptop, then deployment to a Linux server. I think Keynote came out right at that time, too, which was really neat for a rather weirdly conference-driven community.
Then the pretty great Unibody systems came out, combining the aircraft destroyer feel of olden Thinkpads with a more sleek design, and the first of the ultrabooks, the Air… And, of course, you basically have to use a Mac system when doing iOS dev work.
But in the recent years, I feel that Apple lost it a bit. OS X is stagnating (what's the last feature that could compete with e.g. Expose? And still no decent 1st-party package manager). Third party development/productivity software doesn't matter that much these days (it's either webapps or mobile apps; no really shiny single-platform editor anymore). Some of the Linuxens are pretty good with supported laptop hardware, so that's an option for the Unix hardcore.
And as this article is showing, Windows itself is getting more of an option even if you're not buying into the MS stack: RAM and hard drives are big enough to support virtual machines for your development environment (esp. w/ docker/vagrant/etc.) -- if you even need that, as high-speed internet is ubiquitous enough so that you can do remote development throughout.
So, yeah, while I personally still think that OS X is a more developer/hacker-friendly environment than Windows, the incentives don't appear as big anymore. So if they lose their edge in hardware quality, style and solid driver support, they'll lose a few developers more.

Nope. I switched to OS X in the early 2000s because of the OS X Unix underpinnings, while still having a proper GUI for design apps.
Nothing beats having the ability run Unix command line tools.
MS really needs to add these to their base OS.

But the idea is that $400 won't get you a machine powerful enough to run OS X flawlessly. I too would like to pay very little to have high computing power.

Only problem for me is that price... $1499 starting price is a bit high for my tastes, though I'd love to have one otherwise.

I drooled when I saw it but I don't think I can justify a nearly $2k price tag. 128 GB isn't enough and I'd like the detachable GPU, which puts it at:
- 256GB/i5/8GB/dGPU: $1899

Yeah... I really want the i7 with 16GB RAM but there's no way I can pay for it.

Costs as much as a MacBook, and a Windows laptop that costs as much as a MacBook has never had the widespread adoption a MacBook does.

Never say never. I love my MBP but the Surface Note has me salivating. If it works well then I'll sell the MBP.
OneNote with pen is just amazing. Coupled with the detachable high quality screen, this thing is all I can dream off at the moment.

It seems like Microsoft really did their homework. The Surface Book has a 3:2 display, which was one of the biggest reasons many (me included) were interested in the latest Chromebook Pixel. Complete specs are visible here: https://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/devices/surface-book...

One advantage that Microsoft has is better cloud services and integrated apps. I am typing this on a MacBook, but I use Office 365, and all of the cloud services and apps run just fine also on my Android phone and iPad. Perversely, Microsoft supports Linux very well: I find the web versions of the Office 365 apps useful on my Linux laptops and I use Linux VPSs on Azure.
The Surface Book blows me away. It looks like it covers all use cases except for a phone.
Apple has their advantages, primarily most people love Apple devices. They just need to improve their cloud services.
Google's huge advantage is their AI based systems. Google Now has no real competition right now.
I am almost 65, and even though I enjoy running a machine learning/AI consultancy, I am transitioning to a more complete retirement. I am looking for a "winner" in the digital life space, adopt their products, and make my leisure years simpler. But, Microsoft, Apple, and Google blow me away with their products and choosing will be difficult.

Agree with your comments. Google is cloud-centric while Apple is Apple device-centric. Since I use Windows and Office, Mac OS X and Android, Microsoft does a better job of bridging devices, cloud and local storage.
> Google Now has no real competition right now.
Cortana is getting there. I'm looking forward to getting Cortana on my Nexus phone....

One of Apple's advantages is that it is really difficult to build and submit apps without access to a Apple computer.

When I got my first MacBook back in 2008, it was a revolution for me. The industrial design, the multitouch trackpad that actually worked 100% of the time, the backlit keyboard, the battery life, the trackpad-friendly OS -- these all worked together to make me wonder how other laptop manufacturers had got it so astoundingly wrong.
I haven't had that feeling since then. Sure, the MacBook Air came out and it was amazingly thin. Now there's Force Touch, and that's quite nice as well. But this whole time I've just been waiting for somebody, Apple or not, to blow me away the same way I was blown away ~8 years ago, to do something that makes you wonder how everyone else got it so wrong.
Is this that moment? I don't know, but it might be.

Agreed. I've been a Macbook loyalist since they went to Intel (Boot Camp was my gateway drug) but this looks like a phenomenal device.
I think I'll need to experiment with some Windows inside VirtualBox to see how many UNIX-y things I can get running. Or maybe I should be doing all of my development inside Docker anyway...

I was never particularly sold on MacBooks, probably because I was used to always building my own machines and the costs of MacBooks never felt like they were justified in any way regardless of pollish.
The Surface Book looks like the first laptop I've ever seen that makes me think it might be worth it and it may be one of the first laptops to ever have an upgradeable internal GPU since the base could be switched out if Microsoft decides to support that.

I was initially quite excited but the $1500 version doesn't have a dedicated GPU. It's still a pretty sweet laptop that should outperform a MBP, but then a MBP is $1300. That's a justified price difference I think, the SB has touch, pen and tablet functionality, too, plus better performance (MS claims), for $200, that's not a bad deal (unlike the iPad Pro, the pen - and obviously the keyboard - is included in the price!). Still, if you actually want the GPU you'd have to pay up $1900, at that point it gets kinda steep although that's true for the competition as well, plus your storage is doubled together with the GPU for that price. (can we all laugh at the MBP 15' at $2k that doesn't have a dedicated GPU for a moment :p?)
I totally agree with the MBP's value not being fully justified, at least until recently. I felt like that for years (~15 years of Windows user here), until I recently needed OS X for work and looked at the market more closely. I find that where I live (which reflects the international market pretty well), if you buy a $1500 Windows laptop, 4 years later people look at it as if it has no value and offer like $200 for it. For a MBP, it's more like $600. These things just retain value incredibly well and I'm stupefied to see some of the prices, e.g. yesterday I saw a guy ask $800 for a 2010 MBP (yeah the default one without an SSD, 4gb of ram, an intel core duo and 1280x800 display), it's just ridiculous but people actually buy those things. A 5 year old laptop - i.e. battery is shit and parts could start dying within 1-2 years - that has worse specs than brand new laptops at the same price, yet people buy it, in this case for something like 50% the original price, that's just ridiculous. Reminds me of that time I bought an iPod touch for music (2nd hand), and 18 months later sold it for the same amount, basically had a free mp3 player for a while. These things retaining value means a ton for my buying decision.
That fact right there means I'm, in effect, comparing a $1500 MBP to a $1500 Windows laptop, only the MBP in comparison would only cost me $1100 compared to the full $1500 for the Windows laptop. The Dell XPS 13 non-touch for example is $1k and that has a lower resolution, worse battery, worse cpu/gpu and half the storage, obviously, to a $1300 MBP, yet given the resale value of the two the MBP's lifetime value should be cheaper for the average person. That's why I ultimately bought the MBP (mostly for work, but also because taking into account the 2nd hand selling value shifted the economics such that it made the price justifiable)
The Surface Book feels like it might be different as it's got potential to become a solid 'real brand' that should retain value for quite some time. If I put a Dell XPS 13 on a second hand website, most people considering to buy a 2nd hand laptop (like my dad) haven't a clue that it's an amazing machine, especially 4 years after launch, because it's not a distinct enough brand. But even my dad who has never used an Apple device in his life thinks Apple means quality and knows about the Macbook brand and would pay up for one. The Surface Book seems to me to have a shot of becoming such a brand that everyone heard about and knows works really well and that could be sold for at least 30%-40% four years after launch like Macbooks. But apart from that, the economics of windows second hand laptops never looked good, maybe with the alienware/razer series as a niche exception.
I think you're right on switching out the base, that must be possible if MS wanted to make it possible, but that may be unlikely. One is that it's going to be much more expensive as the base probably has battery packs, cooling and a keyboard in there, alongside of course the actual casing. So for every GPU you buy, you're also buying all of that. With economics like that, it'd probably be a niche demand for a few people who are rich enough to do that, that MS won't be bothered to cater to, as these people are rich enough to buy a new device, too. Two is that cooling & power in such a small and enclosed device might become an issue when you bump up the card, although part of that (better cooling, more battery) is probably in the base so it could be co-upgraded, but that goes back to expense. And three is that it might not make a ton of sense. i.e. the on-board GPU of a 6th gen intel CPU is already pretty damn good, powers 4K, photo and video editing etc. So any dedicated card they do put in should probably be really good, and any upgrade of that that's worth ditching that, plus buying an even better card, plus the rest of an entire new base (keyboard, battery packs etc), would probably then cause CPU to be a bottleneck for practical applications. (i.e. when the CPU is made for the onboard GPU, then the GPU becomes dedicated, an upgrade of that dedicated GPU might create too much of an imbalance where the GPU outperforms the CPU and the latter bottlenecks the former.) Finally it doesn't feel like companies are excited to facilitate this usergroup much, everything seems to be moving towards non-exchangeable.
What if it worked the other way around though... Think about it, the default model's base has a keyboard and some battery packs and no GPU. Now what if I wanted to buy the Surface Book 2? Well nevermind the base, I just want to buy the new tablet and put it on my old base, then give my old tablet to my kid, a friend, sell it 2nd hand. That way you can upgrade the screen, the cpu, gpu, the ram, the storage etc, while using the same keyboard and battery packs. There are some reasons why this won't happen but this might make more sense to a larger amount of users than the niche who wants to switch out their laptop's dedicated GPU every few years.

I think they've pulled the rug from under other HW vendors, and that is well-deserved (for the vendors). MS essentially made the ultimate Windows PC (tablet, pen, long battery life, powerful GPU if needed), after waiting for the partners for years.

Arguably, the vendors needed it.

Yeah, the high-end Windows laptops these days are all mostly Apple knock-offs. No wonder everyone who's serious wants the real thing instead. So Microsoft made a hero laptop that isn't a MacBook knock-off. Now the Windows OEMs will start knocking it off instead.

Not even good Apple knock-offs. The build quaility on machines like things like the ASUS Zenbook is no where near Apple, and business machines are always think/bulky. This thing is amazing.

I guess moving to USB-C is asking for too much?

Unfortunately, they chose to support 99.9(999?)% of existing USB cables instead.

You can always make that argument. If you want progress, you need to Think Different. Intel and Microsoft have enough muscle to get 100 million PC's shipped in 12 months wth a new standard. Of course, no one said that they only have to ship USB-C.

I guess if you think that walled gardens and locked down platforms are "progress", then you really are thinking differently because you have to basically swallow that pill if you want to enjoy the occasional hardware progress that is seen with fruitier companies.
Of course real progress, to me, means that there is a good standard and everybody uses it. Remember when cell phones all had their own type of charging adapter? I'm so happy now that most manufacturers use micro-usb. Everybody except Apple of course because they're always too busy trying to invent something that will keep you locked in.

I'm sorry, I guess by referring to Apple I confused the point. You went off on some pointless irrelevant rant. How about I mention Google instead?
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2478157,00.asp
http://www.androidcentral.com/google-says-look-out-more-usb-...
USB-C is an open standard that is not controlled by Apple.

And it's always a good argument, especially for a series of standards that have always depended on vendor buy-in to proliferate, rather than solid design. Just because USB-C is the first USB not to absolutely suck, doesn't mean manufacturers ought to fall head over heels to put them in new devices, considering the countless existing devices that use the old, shitty connectors we got stuck with because the standards body couldn't get its act together.

That would have been nice to see, since I expect these will have amazing longevity otherwise. Ideal might have been one USB 3.0 and one USB type-c. (Along with adapters in both directions if we're talking really ideal.)

Its like Microsoft's Google Nexus series....

The Google Nexus never seemed to pull the rug under anyone, they weren't a best selling device in most circumstances.
The Nexus devices were often also available straight from their vendor at the time in the same form or a slightly different model.
And most importantly the Nexuses were always sourced from on of their partners, here MSFT is directly competing against their partners.

Suspect you might just be a tad over-negative about this.
First, Microsoft doesn't own any factories so the business is going to a partner (probably Pegatron).
Second, Microsoft partners can sign up to sell and support the Surface Pro range. Dell and HP have already done so. Shipping thousands of Surface Pros into businesses, imaging them, and supporting them on-site and remotely is the part of the PC business with margins, which are rather thin on Windows hardware.
Also, Microsoft isn't competing in the mainstream Windows market, where device prices are typically $200 to $500. In fact, it's mainly competing against Apple, which is arguably a good thing for the rest of the Windows ecosystem....

The bread and butter of other hardware vendors is not laptops starting at 1500 dollars. Microsoft is making the Surface line Windows' flagship. It's directly competing with Apple on hardware quality and features and most importantly ecosystem. Microsoft is building cattle that will make people who want pets happy while making life easy for enterprise's cattle ranchers.

"The laptop that can replace the tablet that replaced your laptop is also a tablet" - someone on twitter (edit: @schaemelhout)

https://twitter.com/zzatkin/status/651445545194622976

Classy move to retweet it and attribute it to yourself.
https://twitter.com/Schaemelhout/status/651420894150152192

I have been skeptical after a lot of Microsoft misses but the Surface Book Pro might just put Microsoft on the high road. Splitting up the hardware breaks new ground. If I understood it correctly, the GPU is in the keyboard which you can attach to get more power. In detached mode the screen itself has an i7 processor that's plenty powerful. So they managed to let you hot-plug the GPU while the OS is running?

> So they managed to let you hot-plug the GPU while the OS is running?
Yes. And I think they said that with DirectX 12 it'll split the load between GPUs when both are connected.

I'm curious how this works in practice? I have a laptop with AMD integrated + dedicated graphics, and AMD's implementation with dual-graphics resulted in herky-jerky framerates (it seemed to alternate between the GPUs, so frames rendered with the integrated one took slightly longer than the dedicated one). I ended up telling the driver not to do that and just use the dedicated GPU (and splitting the work didn't really result in observable improvements anyway).

It's a DirectX 12 feature that software developers have to opt-in to, and it is up to the software developer to figure out how they plan to spread the workload across the GPUs, but they can program against any and every GPU on a device regardless of manufacturer now. (The fun thing here will be to see software handle hot drops as GPUs get attached/reattached with the Surface Book.)

Only if the application supports it.

> So they managed to let you hot-plug the GPU while the OS is running?
Is that news? I think I've seen similar setup with ExpressCard-based PCIe adapters for desktop graphics cards for a few years now. Thunderbolt also has had hotplug PCIe connections from the beginning. (Less elegant, of course, but the same engineering challenge.)

The seamless part is new, very new once a GPU is initiated it's locked, the fact that they can turn it on and off without a full reboot is quite amazing.
If you run a hypervisor setup with multiple GPU's you need to make sure that the UEFI and the hypervisor/main OS do not initialize them until they are passed through to the guest VM and after that you can't recycle them easily and usually need to reboot the host if you want to pass them through to another guest.

Is that any different from how Windows has restarted the GPU and reloaded the driver whenever a the video driver crashes since Windows 7? I think the new part might just be userland software being able to take advantage.

Even that's not new. I had a circa-2010 HP Envy laptop would switch from discrete to integrated graphics when you unplugged, and had a tray icon to manually switch between them without rebooting.
http://i.imgur.com/47z9U46.png

It's not the same as disconnecting the GPU, it would go into low power mode but not disconnect the GPU completely.
You have had that feature for quite a while, but it's not the same as reinitating the GPU completely from scratch.

> I have been skeptical after a lot of Microsoft misses
The Surface 3 and Surface Pro 3 weren't misses. They were extremely well received and fairly successful products.

Indeed, nobody makes knock-offs of unsuccessful products....

> Splitting up the hardware breaks new ground.
I'm not saying you're incorrect (I think the Surface Book indeed appears innovative and useful), I just wanted to share the history of at least one product class -- Panda Project's Archistrat workstations and servers - that separates CPU, memory, and I/O into allegedly independent and upgradable subsystems connected by a passive backplane.
BYTE wrote about it, and the Internet Archive luckily saved the interesting preview:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080907024539/http://www.byte.c...
As I searched for this article, I happened across Panda Project's patent for their backplane, published almost 17 years to the day:
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5822551.html
It's probably just coincidence (I'm guessing MS wasn't waiting for this patent to expire before releasing the Surface Book), but it was a fun find.
Edit: "Pics or it didn't happen", courtesy Infoworld via Google Books:
https://books.google.com/books?id=qj4EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA59-IA3&...

Surface Book promo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVfOe5mFbAE
Worth watching.

1:30 [1] Why? Everything was so elegant until that.
[1] https://youtu.be/XVfOe5mFbAE?t=90

My thought exactly. I'm not sure if it's the color or the text or both.

I may understand their need to differentiate from Apple with the blue background. But why the sliding laptop that made it look like a cheap BestBuy commercial?

It is a bit jarring, but I think that is the point. The show off this beautiful machine. Surely, only Apple could have designed it. Then at the end - BAM - Microsoft.

Microsoft is trying really hard to be Apple.

Agreed. I'm extremely impressed by the quality of that video. Reminds me of the original Surface teaser[1] in that it's surprisingly ambitious and self-confident marketing, for Microsoft.
[1] https://youtu.be/dpzu3HM2CIo

I think this device really shows the different approaches of Apple and Microsoft to "tablets".
When the iPad Pro was announced, many joked about the fact that it was just like a surface. With the release of this device from Microsoft, the look even more similar then before from the outside.
Still, the huge difference in the approach is the software. Microsoft is bending a computer operating system, with a full hardware keyboard and an interface made mainly to be used with a mouse, to adapt to touch and the use of a tablet. Apple instead is slowly expanding the functionality of a pure touch operating system that reject the idea of a mouse and a cursor entirely, to accommodate more computer uses, adding a keyboard and a pencil.

History repeats itself. In the '80s, it was going from glass TTY to GUI, but both parties played the same strategy.

Microsoft isn't bending anything. Windows 10 has two distinct APIs for different types of program. The old Win32 API handles traditional desktop software and the separate Windows Runtime is used for sandboxed apps that can be installed and updated from the Windows Store.
If you're writing for Windows Runtime, you are as fully touch-enabled as you are with an iPad, and the apps run in a similar way.
The complaints about Windows 8 were that the two environments were disparate. Windows 10 does a reasonable job of integrating Runtime apps for desktop users (eg scaleable windows and mouse control options). It could do with further improvements, but it's still being developed.
If you're, say, a photographer, you can use full-strength Photoshop, Lightroom etc on Windows 10 then switch to an iPad-style app for viewing or showing stuff to other people. It's actually very convenient.

On an added note, the "Tablet Mode" in Windows 10 is actually pretty decent with traditional desktop apps.
I run Chrome on my Vivotab in Tablet Mode so that I can still access 1Password, and it is surprisingly usable (haha, weak praise, but still praise).

Fair point. It's a bonus!

As a Surface Pro 3 user, who saves a Macbook Pro for heavy lifting (like video) at home, I can safely say the MB is getting replaced with the Surface Book. Depending on in-person use, it might also replace the Surface Pro 3. I typically watch Apple's and Google's product launches, have to to say this event was concise and unveiled products in a great forward moving momentum. Solid work Msoft marketing team!

I thought video people used OSX due to the apps available?

For the parts of the industry who run Apple's Final Cut, yes - but Avid Media Composer, Adobe Premiere Pro, etc also exist and are used by many video pros without the same platform restrictions as Final Cut.

The Adobe suite works on both platforms, OSX and Windows. The files can be shared. I have not seen performance or workflow improvements on either. If anything, Photoshop on the Surface hardware is great for sketching and painting.

I meet an increasingly large number who use Windows now. They're often people who used to use Mac Pros and switched to PC towers when that fell behind in price/performance.
The new Mac Pro is very expensive compared to what you can assemble in a PC tower, and the tower gives you a lot more flexibility.
As others have said, there's plenty of video editing software for PCs. The main one that's missing is Apple's Final Cut Pro (which Apple bought from Macromedia, though it's changed a lot since then).
See http://ppbm7.com/index.php/tweakers-page/87-what-pc-to-use/9...

In closed state, the surface book has a giant gap between screen and keyboard (https://goo.gl/n5B7Te). I think, it can easily happen that things in your backpack slip between screen and keyboard and damage the screen. That is why the old Thinkpads used to have a "click" mechanism.

Good point, this is a touch screen with 'gorilla'(or whatever name they give for strong quality) glass though, so it might be less of an issue.

I would imagine that they're using some pretty strong magnets to hold it closed, although I can see small sharp objects, like keys, sliding in from the sides.

Neoprene sleeves are pretty inexpensive and would afford a little more protection.

It's an inconvenience though.

How would you rather treat your $1500+ piece of technology? I don't throw that sort of money around lightly.

For something that's disposable in a couple of years, yeah, I throw it around with fair abandon. That's a large chunk of the reason I bought a macbook air to run Windows on; I didn't want any moving parts (apart from fans) and I liked the solid aluminium design for strength when mixed with a lot of other random objects in a bag.
I still have an impression of the keyboard on the glossy screen (from compression), but it's perfectly liveable for a device I only use a few weeks of the year.

I would rather get the $1500 piece of technology that would not need the extra protection (not entirely sure this one does to be honest).

Not really? My VAIO Z has lived inside a sleeve in my back-pack its entire life. I just slide it in and out of the sleeve at the same time as putting it away.

A better image of it: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Scree...

That isn't fully closed. Look at the promo video posted elsewhere.

That is a design to allow for accessories. Like a pouch or a surface-book-empty-space-between-screen-and-keyboard-cushion.

> I think, it can easily happen that things in your backpack slip between screen and keyboard and damage the screen.
Most laptop-designed backpacks have a padded compartment designed to hold just the laptop; if there aren't other things in that compartment, then that shouldn't be an issue. (If there are, and they aren't the kind of small, loose things that could slip between the screen and keyboard, same thing.)
> That is why the old Thinkpads used to have a "click" mechanism.
I always thought the click-locking mechanism on most older laptops (not just old Thinkpads) was there to reduce the wear on the hinge.

Damage or no damage, that gap really bugs my inner obsessive-compulsive.

Not sure why people are sticking up for this design. Even in a neoprene sleeve or backpack pouch it looks much easier to damage with downward force on the top or bottom than a normal laptop where the force would be distributed through the entire chassis. Bendgate 2.0?

Page looks bad and it loads so slow! At some point, the msdn pages were awesomely fast and I would've imagined they spent more time on load testing for such a crucial day.
That aside, the product looks very interesting. I was a Windows user for a long time and switched to Mac in the last few years. This makes me want to give the newbie a try.

Came here to say the same thing about load time - I'm on a fast connection using Chrome and this thing will hardly load for me. I thought it was my ad blocker at first, but nope, just the site. Also tested it with Firefox and Safari and got the same thing.
EDIT: someone below said the CDN might be on the fritz, so that likely has something to do with this. it may be fixed by the time some people see these comments.

On top of that there is a typo:
"Intel HG Graphics"
http://i.imgur.com/kLt8Ydz.png

Wow Microsoft, do you even proofread? :P

At one point in the page, it actually plays the old Microsoft Band video!
http://imgur.com/a/v71Bi

Looks like one request to 'controls.account.microsoft-int.com/me?partner=surface&market=en-us' makes whole page very slow, at least for me it waits for 20 seconds and only after it fails page continues loading.

Yeah, I noticed that blocking the microsoft-int.com domain lets the page load just fine, without the hang. (I'm using the RequestPolicy addon in Firefox.)

The offending resource is hosted at microsoft-int.com.
I'd bet good money that domain is "Microsoft Internal" and was never meant to go beyond staging.
I'm sure the site works perfectly in Redmond! ;-)

not only it is slow, the subpage is also completely messed on Chrome/OsX . That's not something I would expect from a company with Microsoft resources.

shit didn't render properly for me

I can't believe I'm seriously considering buying a Microsoft product. But, this is a really nice looking laptop, and I suspect does not fall prey to all of the bullshit that is so common on Windows laptops, even high end ones.
If it were possible to dual boot to Linux, I'd be sold. I have my doubts that it is, however. I guess one could use a VM...I've always found that clumsy in the past, particularly in terms of getting accelerated graphics drivers working, but maybe times have changed.

> If it were possible to dual boot to Linux, I'd be sold. I have my doubts that it is, however.
Why do you have your doubts? It's typically pretty easy and people have guides for doing it on the Surface Pro 3; it would be odd if the Surface Book couldn't do it as well.

That's cool. I haven't followed anything about the Surface. I have such a long history of avoiding Microsoft products that I have very little knowledge of them. What knowledge I have is from a time when Microsoft would have happily made it impossible to dual boot if given the power to do so (like if they were designing he product from the ground up).

That was an epic launch. Docking the phone and using desktop apps, and then the removable Surface Book screen, wow. It eclipsed the Surface Pro 4 launch, which is what I expect most people were most hyped about. I have to go back and remind myself what changed there...

I wonder if I can get it to run Linux. That would make a pretty nice machine, if so.
Edit: I'm not hating on Windows. I just don't prefer it.

Linux does not support hybrid graphics properly. (I've got a Zbook G2, dockable, Nvidia + Intel. I'm developing for Linux, so it'd be great to run Linux on it, but it's not practical at all.)

This saddens me.

Don't be. You can just use the intel driver and use the NVIDIA GPU for compute purposes only. All of this can be achieved WITHOUT hybrid graphics on Linux.

At this point, it definitely works, but it depends on the distro and how much tweaking you're willing to do. I've got hybrid graphics working on a Dell XPS 15 with no real problems. Bumblebee works like a charm when set up correctly. The battery life isn't perfect, but it's still much better than just running the nvidia chip.

It works on a per-program basis if you set it up nicely, but (afaik) it's not possible to get the docking station work nicely. The problem is that to drive external displays, you need the discrete GPU (esp. for UHD displays). Therefore whenever you dock it in, it should start driving the external display with dGPU, etc.
I've not seen a single successful attempt on getting this working (this = hybrid graphics + docking).

Fair point. Wayland promises to make this possible, but it's definitely not completely ready yet.

I run Linux on a VM inside my Surface Pro 2. Best of both worlds. All the touch and pen gestures are handled by Windows and carry over through VirtualBox.
Would love to get a Surface Book as soon as possible.

The big downside to this is poor battery life.
When I tried this on my Surface Pro 3, I found that running Ubuntu inside a VM was really only viable when the device was plugged into wall power.
(Trying to run Ubuntu natively never worked well either, because of missing driver support for things like WiFi/Bluetooth/Keyboard/Stylus, not to mention Linux's poor support for resource scaling on high-DPI displays.)

Does you version Linux properly support the touch input?
I'm on a Lenovo T440s, and aside from a handful of gestures to manipulate window size, all Ubuntu programs insist that my touchscreen is just another mouse input. It's a bit of a bummer that I can't use proper multi-touch for my own OpenFrameworks sketches.

Ooh, this is actually a really attractive option, thanks for the idea. How much is the speed decrease? Is it enough to be noticeable? And how much does the battery life decrease by? Thanks!

With a SSD on the host OS, I really can't tell much of a difference.
Not sure on the battery life, but I've had nothing to complain about as long as I'm careful not to have some random process hogging 100% CPU on either guest or host.

A part of me hopes (read: dreams) that the keyboard/gpu is all interfaced to-spec as Thunderbolt 3.1 (spec supports bidi power, and external GPUs).
And that the TB3.1 spec is "bullshit free" (unlike DisplayLink).

The Surface Book feels like the second coming to me. This is everything i wanted them to produce and they delivered perfectly. Thanks Surface Team!

How about the Band 2?
Unaware of this event, yesterday morning I ordered the first MS Band for a little more than 1/2 the list price of the Band 2. I'd been shopping for fitness trackers for a long time, and settled on the Band as the only tracker meeting my needs that can also act as an Android trusted bluetooth device & keep my phone unlocked.
From what I can tell, the Band 2 adds: - softer, more flexible strap (soft shell vs hard shell) - barometer for elevation - gorilla glass - better touch sensitivity
Is that it? If so, given the nearly 2x price difference, I think I'm just going to keep the old band and use it.

The first one is uncomfortable to wear, which makes the Band 2 worth the price. No way I'd purchase something for daily use that isn't comfortable.

I've had a Band for most of the year and highly recommend it. Unlike watty, I think it's pretty comfortable. Admittedly it took a couple of days to get used to, but I rarely notice that it's on my wrist. The only exception being that the non-curved display does get in the way when I type on a laptop — which is very rare for me, your mileage may vary.
I'd recommend that you get a screen protector for your band, though. The weird, soft bezel around this version is extremely prone to scratches doing even the most mundane tasks.

Thanks.. I think I'll give the 1st gen band a try. My 1st gen LG Android watch has gotten me used to wearing a watch again, so I'm hoping for a minimal transition. If it doesn't work out, I've got ~30 days to return it, and get the Band 2.
BTW, I read how easy the thing scratches, and purchased some screen protectors along with it.

The new one specs says max altitude is 1200m/3937 feet. That's unusable in pretty much the entire state of Colorado. The previous version was 12000m or 7.45 miles. It must be something to do with the new barometer, but this is a miss.

The specs say the Maximum Operating Altitude is "-300m to +4877m".

Where? I'm getting it from http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-band/en-us/support/hardwa... and it says Maximum operating altitude: +1200 m (3937 feet)

Your link appears to be the specifications for the old band - there's no barometer listed in the sensors, and there are dual batteries listed (I believe the new one only has one).
I wish there were a better distinction between the two; this should be called the Band 2, not the "new Band." This is made worse by the fact that your link is reachable by clicking "Support" -> "Hardware" -> "Microsoft Band Specifications." Nothing in that path suggests anything about the old Band.
The specs for the new Band are at https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-band/en-us/features - you have to click on "tech specs." This supports the -300 to +4877 meters number.

Overall quite happy with these updates for the Surface and Surface Book, but personally I'm a bit disappointed by the lack of shiny new technologies like USB-C, Thunderbolt 3, Wireless Charging and WiGig.
After having used a laptop with a WiGig dock that can support a fully populated 10-port USB Hub, 3 DisplayPort displays, and Gigabit Ethernet transfers wirelessly across most of my room, I'm thoroughly convinced that a device with both WiGig and Wireless Charging would be absolutely amazing to use.

I believe the Lumia phones have USB-C and Wireless Charging. Though it sounds like you're talking about the Book and Pro 4?

Yep, I should have been a bit more specific.

Looks terrible on Chrome https://imgur.com/H75ejZN

Looks like the CSS hasn't loaded, leave it a few more seconds and it will look fine.

Same here after leaving it for 30 secs. I think a server is overloaded somewhere.

Ain't exactly a great example of the scaling abilities of azure....

Same here on Mac/Firefox.

Triggering a window re-paint seems to correct this: resize the window, toggle the embedded developer tools window, etc.

Microsoft could do a much better job managing their vendors who create these sites for them to render well cross-platform and responsively.
This one looks decent on Chrome mobile with the photos going edge to edge with no margin, but the site for the event at http://www.microsoft.com/october2015event/en-us/live-event looks pretty amateur hour on Chrome mobile on my Moto X: huge margins and padding that result in text paragraphs with two words per line.

Same in Safari on iPad (ironically enough).

Linux/Firefox too. Eventually the pictures load. Wonder how it's looking on edge?

Resizing the window and trying to scroll causes a lot of scrolling bugs as well.

Silverlight or Flash needs to be installed? ... Eh no, thank you.
Googling for Surface Book reveals enough; a beefy (but Ultra-thin) Ultrabook with Skylake CPU + Nvidia GPU and detachable as tablet. Surface Pro is similarly specced with a Skylake CPU based tablet as successor to the previous version.
Dutch Tweakers.net: http://tweakers.net/nieuws/105651/microsoft-brengt-zijn-eers... http://tweakers.net/nieuws/105648/microsoft-onthult-surface-...

The CPU and RAM are inside the tablet, the GPU is inside the keyboard.

This thing is awesome. Does this mean that we can now finally upgrade the GPU of our laptop by buying next years keyboard dock?
If they sold that separately in the future it would be a killer feature!

I'm kinda bummed now that i just bought the MBP 15" with dedicated graphics.
After finally swallowing my pride and getting an apple device MSFT announces this.
I've never been invested in the Apple eco-system and I've spent a week to find comparable software and even after that I'll still be needing to run a windows guest on VMWare Fusion 8.
If Amazon returns will accept it I might actually return it once the UK prices for the Surface Book will be published, the funny thing is that Amazon sold the MBP 15 for 500 GBP less than the apple store, it's almost like they new this will happen.

The surface book looks nice. I like the idea of tablet/laptop hybrid, but not a fan of kick stands and keyboard covers. I liked the idea of Asus's transformers but I don't recall seeing one with really good specs. They were either Android(don't need a laptop there) or the Windows ones I remembers seeing were Atom powered.

Weighing in as an artist who works in Photoshop all day: I just preordered one because they look awesome. This is exactly the sort of machine that people in my profession want.
I've used the Surface Pro 3 exclusively (as in, no desktop) for about a year now. This will be a fantastic replacement.
Props to Microsoft for actually looking out for creatives.

the PC Makers and the windows OEM echo system deserves this.
msft and intel tried for years to bring them along... remember the "ultra book initiative?"
2011: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/09/ultrabook-intels-300-...
thinks got so bad that msft realizes that they've got to "make the whole widget" despite the reluctance to cannibalize the ecosystem. (we ship gold masters, not pcs)

Does anyone know why the fingerprint reader on the Surface Pro 4 keyboard is only available in the US?
http://i.imgur.com/0GfZtzz.png

NSA fingerprint database only has U.S. citizens?

Educated guess: export controls on encryption used in the fingerprint reader.

No NSA servers outside of the US.

I'm amazed that Microsoft has introduced a laptop that is worthy of going head to head with the best. All of the specs look great and it looks like it could possibly replace my beloved Chromebook Pixel (the original). If linux can be installed on it easily, it would probably be my next computer.
Very interesting to see a "pen first" interface which I hope works much better than that shitty "touch first" interface in Windows 8. I don't care what the fanbois say, windows 8 sux! Windows 10 is a major improvement in usability compared to 8, so I hope MS is back on track to making productive systems. If the new surface book works as good as it looks, MS is back on track to being relevant in the computing landscape.

As someone who was completely out of the loop on Microsoft's recent offerings, I found the comparisons at the bottom of this page helpful:
http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/Surface-...
It's also loading a lot faster right now.

Why on earth is it so hard to find video of the keynote? Here we have a genuinely exciting product announcement with a brilliant "one more thing" hook, and I can't find the video. Microsoft should have it plastered over every news outlet in the world.
I found the video below (with 97 views!?), which makes me really want a Surface Book...and then it cuts off RIGHT BEFORE the big reveal! Microsoft seems to have caught up to Apple in terms of hardware, but it seems they still have a ways to go in marketing and PR.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6c6ZLdJ1rkA

Microsoft, always half-baked.

Here [1] is the second part of the presentation, featuring the complete video (which you can find here [2]). I actually think the way they presented the device during the keynote was brilliant: present it first as a "regular" laptop, then revisit the presentation immediately and reveal the device as what it actually is (a tablet pc with a base). Even if you could rather easily see it coming, I think a lot of minds were blown at that moment.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UAvdxEjns0
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVfOe5mFbAE (1.6M views in about 22 hours)

It's at the same URL as the live stream:
http://www.microsoft.com/october2015event/en-us/live-event
But yeah there should be a big link right on the front of Microsoft.com to watch the recorded event.

Funny how both fruity and glassy company "inspire" each other - first fruit's version of surface, now glass' version of a "book" :-D

Even funnier is how Apple used to be mostly for creators, now most of its profits come from iPhone and iPad - devices mostly for consuming. And Microsoft markets their Surfaces quite aggressively to creators.

The detachable part is very important if you are buying a touch screen laptop. I have a $1800 lenovo x1 carbon which has a awesome touchscreen which I rarely use because it doesn't support tablet/detachable mode.

I find scrolling and cursor placement to be the most useful aspects of a touchscreen in a laptop form factor.
After I got my Surface Pro 1, I found myself constantly touching the screen on all of my other computers (laptops and desktops) to do that.

I'm not crazy about paying extra for the tablet capability and hinge as I'll only ever use it in laptop mode, also curious that there's no USB-C port. However, I'm glad Microsoft is showing its OEMs what a proper Windows laptop should be. The OEMs have been shitting the bed on this for years.

I don't know about that, I think you should give the tablet mode a try before you speculate about what it can and can't do.
I use my SP2 a lot with the Pen and OneNote, which provides automatically digitized handwriting that is viewable and searchable from any computer. It's a pretty killer app but I would probably still be using pen and paper notebooks before someone integrated a screen and highly accurate pen in one device.
You may find some uses for the tablet that you never imagined before.

Can OneNote data be exported to some open, editable format? I like the idea of OneNote's functionality, but I worry about having my data trapped in that application.

It's an Open Specification file format, at least:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd924743(v=office.1...

.docx, .xps, .pdf

There's also an api you can use to pull data out.

I'm hoping to find something editable. If the document is complex, with multimedia, are the .docx exports reasonably functional? Some conversions to .docx and some multimedia content in that format can be unstable.

Can you suggest a commonly used format that would allow complex multimedia editing like you're suggesting?

Maybe a web CMS like WordPress or a wiki platform, but nothing that is stored in a single file. It seems to me to be a big hole in available technology. Why in 2015 can't I easily create a document with multiple videos, markup, etc. in it?

Yeah. PDF and XPS are two that I know for sure.

The problem is, no one has really come up with an answer for the previous Surface machines Microsoft has put out. The Yoga, XPS, and whatever that newer Asus is are nice, but still not a perfect product start to finish. The OEMs still are not getting it.

Well ignoring the software, it looks like the specs beat similarly priced Windows Laptops and Macs, so you're probably not going to pay extra, if you do (say compared to a solid Dell XPS 13 2015 which has different price ranges) it won't be much. Either way, while I appreciate some people will never use tablet form factors much, I was personally pleasantly surprised by the form factor despite being a guy who always built his own PCs, barely used laptops and didn't care for any mobility in my computer/device usage at home or at the office (even keeping my laptop almost permanently docked), I now take my tablet to the couch quite a lot to read, play some chess, watch some video. I think you'd be surprised to use it as a tablet but that's just a generalisation, perhaps you are an exception.
The lack of USB-C surprised me a bit, too, especially as they said 'we only stopped going thinner because we wanted to fit USB', i.e. they're claiming they could go even thinner without compromising anything except losing USB, which is where USB-C would've done the trick. Anyway I probably would've gone USB myself, too, there's just too much stuff out there for existing laptops using USB. But instead of the charger, why not offer USB-C as a charger, alongside the regular USB ports? The charger could then connect to a new docking station that'd give you both charging as well peripherals like a monitor, mouse and keyboard office setup. That way you could push USB-C forward, create an easy charging and docking setup, maintain the old USB ports this generation (thereby not excluding anyone), while also facilitating those who buy new USB-C peripherals because they actually work on the Surface Book, making a full change to USB-C in the future (Surface Book 2 or 3) easier, which would then allow an even thinner device. I mean I get they built a cool charger and docking solution and it sucks to ditch that but I don't see the advantage over USB-C.

i will take regular usb over usb-c for the next five years, thank you.

That hinge will not last 10 minutes in my backpack. Or, if the hinge survives, either the base-keyboard or the display-motherboard will bend enough to break whatever is inside them.

I was very impressed until I saw the pricing strategy. $1500 for a 128GB SSD/8GB RAM and no discrete graphics? I'm not as interested.

How much adoption of windows phones do you think it will take for google to start releasing dedicated apps like they do on iPhones?

Not sure where I read about it (a couple of days ago) they are already working on them.

I'll buy one if it can support Linux.

It's more of a question of if Linux can support the hardware.

ubuntu 15.10 is adding lots of support for the surface hardware

I wonder if all the Windows drivers were written by hardware manufacturers or Microsoft?

The Lumia 950 docked into a screen and keyboard was pretty interesting

The computing power in a modern smartphone is amazing, to allow something like that to actually be usable.
I imagine some companies might think about equipping their mobile employees with Lumias for when they're out of the office, and the dock adapter for when they're back in the office. Sales, insurance agents, car inspectors - any job where they go on site, but return to the office afterwards.

But the thing I don't understand is why they don't make it possible to run a full Windows on phones that already has the Intel Atom quad-core CPU which can run full Windows in tablets with good performance. For example the ASUS Zenfone 2 not only has the Intel CPU but 4GB RAM too. It could be just a question of having Windows drivers for the components like the PowerVR GPU.

There are rumors about a "Surface phone" that will run full Windows. And full Office, etc.

Because I use Emacs, I was pumped when I saw that the keyboard has symmetrical keys around the spacebar like a Thinkpad or Microsoft's own Natural Ergonomic 4000 keyboard.
Then I went to the computer with the big monitor and zoomed in on the keyboard photo. The assignments are committee meeting fucked. Fn and <- instead of two Cntl's on the third key outboard. Oh well.

Welcome to the party Microsoft! We were missing you...

I wonder what the exact CPU models will be? Microsoft seems to be taking clues from Apple's guidebook and doesn't bother with stating the exact CPU model even in 'Tech specs'. Likely the Y-series of the latest 6-gen (Skylake) mobile i5's [1] and i7's [2]. They are not released nor announced yet, but the Surface Book is not exactly shipping, either.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i5_micropro...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i7_micropro...

I bought a Lumia 435 recently to test Windows 10 and see if it's worth going all in (they announced they would upgrade 435). Now MS are not going to upgrade this model. Behaviour like this is not how they will build credibility and new users.
Overall current version of Windows Mobile seems 80% there. Some things are done better than Android/iPhone, many other they don't. I was really looking forward to trying 10, but now will likely try out alternatives (Sailfish/Firefox/Ubuntu Touch?) as I can flash an existing phone.
I'd love to see a market where there are four+ OS's each with reasonable share seriously competing to be the best. It would be a consumers dream!

One of the first things in years MS has put out that I'm seriously considering buying. It looks like they nailed the tablet / laptop experience from the previews so far.

I just pre-ordered the i5/dGPU model in Australia. Ive been a mac user for at least 5 years and my current machine is a 15" Macbook Retina from mid 2012 and its is an EXCELLENT machine and works flawlessly.
What sold me on the SB was the pen, the slight increase in portability and the dedicated gpu. I was given a macbook air for work and I really noticed the weight difference between it and my 15" retina and I started considdering getting the new "Macbook" which is basically an air with retina, but living without a dgpu basically meant no more dota/sc2.
I also considered getting a surface pro 3 mainly because I love the pen, I have watched for years how different companies like 53 and Wacok have come out with over engineered "fingers" for the iPad! People clearly want to be able to draw and write on it, I think apple missed a HUGE opportunity here, specially since all the creative types favour apple.
However I am DREADING being stuck in Windows. The constant updates, the bugs, the lack of dev tools, lack of xcode, antiviruses, bloatware, no proper terminal... Sincerely worried I'll end up hating it.

On the Aussie Microsoft site there's a phone number you can call to reserve your Surface Book for pickup at the new flagship store about to open in Sydney.
Called them today, got routed to an offshore call centre, which I have no problems with, the lady who spoke to me was VERY polite and all around great at her job, she tells me they don't yet have the number for the flagship store so can't do anything...
WTF?

I'm very curious how well the trackpad on the Surface Book works. I've had MacBooks and the HP Spectre; the Sprectre is awesome but the trackpad...I mean holy shit it's just absolutely awful to the point where I've pretty much stopped using it.
So how good is this trackpad and does it work like a MacBook's where two fingers = right click versus this weird obsession PC vendors seem to have about dividing a single trackpad into invisible click zones?

generally with standard drivers you should be able to configure the click mode. I don't know about HP in particular though.

Yeah it uses the Synaptics drivers but the most you can configure are click zones at the very, very bottom of the track pad itself (so you can't do a real right click anywhere but the bottom right of the pad) and it also does the annoying thing where you can't use the keyboard and trackpad at the same time (so you can't play any FPS with it). I was able to hack up the registry to get them to work at the same time but never got a satisfying right click.
It was so unfortunate too because I really liked that machine. It's just that damn touchpad...and the store models worked the same so it wasn't like I had a weird one or anything.

In Windows 10 I think MS ship trackpad drivers now, on the old Surface products at least two finger tap is definitely a right click anyway.

Interesting; I haven't tried messing with the drivers since Windows 8.1 but using the default ones didn't support two finger scrolling and just seemed wonky. The two finger tap works on either though; I want the two finger click. Taps don't work well in games :)

Up to 16gb and lightweight? It competes directly with Lenovo X series and the Dell XPS 13.

I am very interested in learning how they provide 12 hours of usage for the Surface Book. What do they disable to extend the life? They battery capacity?

My hunch is both halves have a battery. Also that 12 hours is listed as video playback, which is not how Apple measures.

Or they're just misleading about how they measure the battery life. We used to have "8h of battery life" 10 years ago, when in fact they lasted 3h. Apple has done this, too, more and more lately unfortunately. Their "12h" battery life is more like 8h for moderate usage.

I think this is really interesting as the gap between casual browsing and more intense stuff like running my unit test suite on the software I'm developing has such noticeable effects on battery life.
With all the low power states and stuff, when you're actually using the CPU for a while, the battery life easily cuts in half.

Apple products consistently get their advertised battery life (or beyond).

The discussion thread is about battery life under heavy usage which never meets the advertised battery life since no one would buy a laptop that only advertised its minimum battery life. "Will last at least 3 hours after full charging" isn't catchy.

It's just 12 hours of video playback that they actually cite when selling the thing (wifi locked to a network and autobrightness off, all else default). That's nice and similar to other high-end devices like a MBP, but it's so powerful that if you actually do the things on it that you'd want to buy a high-powered device for (e.g. editing video, gaming, 3d modelling) you won't last anywhere near that.
In short, if you use it like a tablet, you get typical tablet battery. If you have it docked to the stand to use the dedicated GPU etc, I assume you're going to get more typical windows laptop battery life. But that's not much different from my MBP either, I usually get about 5-6 hours of battery life rather than 10-12 because I use it a lot for the things I actually needed to buy a MBP for, which isn't just watching video and checking my mail.

What i5/i7 processor are they using MQ, HQ, M or U?

That looks like it might actually hit the spot to replace my old ThinkPad X-series.

Surface Book looks neat but is it an admission that the Surface Pro and its flexible keyboard, kickstand, etc. perhaps aren't the best design?

Seems more like an admission that there is a spectrum of users that want/need different things. Surface Pro is the tablet to replace your laptop and Surface Book is the laptop to replace your tablet.

> Surface Book looks neat but is it an admission that the Surface Pro and its flexible keyboard, kickstand, etc. perhaps aren't the best design?
Seems to me its an expression of the basic fact known to everyone (well, except Apple for a while, but even they've mostly come around to it) that there is no one "best design" for all users and uses, and that different users (and even the same user for different uses) have different needs and preferences resulting in different "best designs".

The Surface Book doesn't replace the Surface Pro 3. The Surface Pro 4 replaces the Surface Pro 3, which has been very successful.
What the Surface Book does is expand the range and compete more strongly with the MacBook/MacBook Pro, rather than the MacBook Air.

Does anyone know what type of cable the SurfaceConnect cable is? Is it yet another standard, or thunderbolt re-labeled?

By reconnecting it to the keyboard, you unlock its full creative power in a pen first mode.
Hmm... what does the keyboard contain? Are we looking at another dual-processor hybrid? Or perhaps only dual-graphics? Or even simpler, does the keyboard have most of the battery and so the screen aggressively throttles itself when undocked?

GPU, battery, keyboard, and IO ports.

Well, the photo with that caption is with the keyboard folded fully over backwards used as a pseudo-tablet. No keyboard use in that case, and probably no IO either.

USB ports, dock, and SD card will work no matter what orientation the screen is in.

Sure, but it seems like if they wanted to be able to connect USB devices while the Book is in a tablet mode, they would simply put USB ports on the screen instead of engineering a fancy reversible hinge. Ports just don't seem like the killer reason to offer that mode.
Usually the keyboard-folded-back mode is offered in lieu of a detachable screen.

That mode is for artists / creators who need the discrete GPU and the pen, it should have no effect on the ports.

It seems to me that once they've built a detachable screen, making it reversible is simple: you just make the data connector reversible, OR you put the data connector offset and build two of them on the keyboard side, so the screen plugs into one or the other depending on orientation. Either way, pretty cheap. There is no "fancy reversible hinge"; the fancy is in the detachability.
What do you get for that? Battery, IO, and GPU.
If you want to put USB ports on the screen, that limits the thinness of the screen (SBook screen: 7.7mm. SPro4: 8.5mm, which they allege was limited by USB ports).

I'll be the odd one out and say that I will miss the kickstand on the Surface Book. For me, the kickstand is what has made the SP3 into the best computing device I've ever used.
While a proper laptop will cover many of the same cases as the kickstand, there are times when the kickstand can function as a hook, allowing the surface to be used in positions a laptop simply wouldn't be practical.
Probably my favorite example is to hook the SP3 over my steering wheel (not while driving!), and allow the keyboard to drape down mostly vertically. Certainly not the most productive position, but for videoconferencing on the go, it's come in handy half a dozen times.
Another similar one is lying down with my knees up. The stand wedges it nicely between my legs, with the keyboard over my thighs. It's fairly comfortable, and pretty good for typing.
Otherwise, Surface Book looks terrific. :)

There is still the Surface Pro 4 for the kickstand lovers among us.

If this doesn't convince musicians and DJs to more seriously consider the Microsoft Surface line of products, I don't know if it's possible. Personally I love the look of this, and in time, will have it earmarked as a replacement for my Lenovo X class ultrabook. I'm impressed.

Of course, the page has a photo of DJ using it. What about a developer ;)

Haha yeah of course they'll advertise a DJ because it's a hip kind of gig! Makes sense!
I see developers as - stereotypically - having a better understanding of hardware and software interaction. As in, a developer who likes Linux could see the Surface Book as a hardware platform.
In my experience, DJs and music types have been traditionally drawn to Apple products for three main reasons: 1. Ease of use, 2. Stability, and 3. Native low-latency drivers.
There is a pretty worthy backlash regarding the new Apple single USB-C unveiling, and from my perspective, the iOS vs. full OS fork is only getting worse from a creative user standpoint...if Apple continues to push the way the have in the past (dropping multiple USB ports like they dropped optical drives), musicians might be reminded of the fiasco surrounding the Final Cut product in recent memory.

Anyone here know how usable this would be with a tiling WM/on Linux? I've got a touchscreen Ideapad Yoga and I just bought the newer Yoga Pro, which looked really nice, but I've never gotten any use out of the touchscreen on Linux. If you assume that you can't use the touchscreen (which seems to be the current reality on Linux) this has very few advantages over any other laptop (beautiful construction aside.)
Specifically, I'd love any names of Linux applications that people use with the pressure-sensitive pen/touchscreen/multitouch.
-or- anyone out there that dualboots Windows and Linux on a touchscreen just for the Windows touch features? How usable is this?
I'd be very appreciative of anyone who has any comments/suggestions, as this is something that's bothered me for quite some time.

Question is: Whats the battery life of the detatched screen?

Answer: About 3 hours apparently.
See: http://surfaceproartist.com/blog/2015/10/6/microsoft-unveils...
Battery life of the Surface Pro 4 is 9 hours. The Surface Book will offer 12 when configured as a laptop. But when the Book's display is detached, it will only achieve 3 hours.

An interview with Panos mentioned the split is 4 hours in the display, 8 hours in the keyboard. But I guess we'll see once someone does an in depth review.

I would love to read a new Penny Arcade review of this vs. Surface Pro 4. I hope it happens...

Great to see 16GB RAM in Surface Book. Disappointing they've not embraced USB C/3.1

This looks like a great step in the right direction for Microsoft, but their marketing copy, "Use it like a clipboard" is profoundly jarring. Why is Microsoft afraid to use the word "tablet"? Clipboard is hardly a synonym.

I don't think they're avoiding calling it a tablet, but highlighting the fact that it can be used like a clipboard - as in papers clipped to a board with the pen stuck on top.

I can only speak for myself, but when I spend $1,500 on an electronic device, I hope that "like a clipboard" is the least accurate analogy for its functionality.

As I posted in another thread: I was wondering and after some Googling it seems the dock is not using DisplayLink but some proprietary connector routing DisplayPort and USB3 which means it works with Linux well. This is awesome news.
The keyboard we discussed yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10334026 is less than an inch bigger in each direction -- I am wondering whether I could replace a laptop with that keyboard and the Surface Pro 4. Previously I wouldn't even consider because of the 8GB limitation but it's possible now with 16GB.

1. how does it charge? I've looked at the promo video, I don't understand where the power plug is
2. on a completely related note, why the Type A ports? Why not put a bunch of nice Type C, maybe a single Type A for backwards compatibility?

1. SurfaceConnect on the right edge of the base: https://dri1.img.digitalrivercontent.net/Storefront/Company/.... Same connector as the new dock.

What an amazing event. Every announcement was mindblowing. It's saying a lot when I'm hyped about the Surfacebook and Lumia, and then realise that I forgot about the Hololens devkit being released in 3 months. Amazing.

Looks like a nice, inexpensive docking solution for the Surface Book too [1]. $200 for a full-featured dock with ethernet, 2x DisplayPort, 3.5mm, multiple USB ports, and charging, all with a single cable.
[1] http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/Microsof...

It's a perfect fit for what I imagined to be a dream laptop for programming: 3:2 high res screen (more vertical space than 16:9 or 16:10), real quad CPU, good battery life, 16GB of RAM. It's light and great looking as well. The only thing I am missing there and which makes me unlikely to switch is no trackpoint option. I find trackpoint to be so much superior to a trackpad I don't ever want to go back. I even prefer a trackpoint to a mouse these days (and the fact that you don't need to carry it around is just an additional bonuse)

Interesting, I think the iPad Pro announcement did them a favor. Now I'm going to have to visit a store and actually play with one of these things, could be an expensive fall season for me this year.

Good point. The iPad Pro popularized and legitimized a lot of ideas that people may not have been willing to accept if they came only from MS.
Yet, when the iPad Pro was released many felt a nagging feeling that something was missing, and at least on the Surface (no pun intended) the Book seems to fill those gaps.

Absolutely. The Microsoft employee that came onstage during Apple's event totally knew what was coming and just laughed internally.

Available with 16g RAM. Interesting. The upcoming XPS 13 refresh supposedly offers 16g, too, but the current version doesn't. I wonder how well a Microsoft laptop is going to support Linux.

Honestly, if Linux supported the pen fully, I'd buy one of these in a second. I feel like Microsoft has nailed it with their Surface Pro line.

Curious how Microsoft can enter the market this openly. Don't they have an agreement of some sort with hardware manufacturers ( HP, Dell etc) that they won't enter the market?

They won't make up that much market share. Most PCs are sold through distribution channels and those will remain for the OEMs most likely. Just like the Nexus line.

Dell and HP have signed up to sell the Surface Pro line.
See my earlier comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10342009

The design reminds me of my 2005 plastic iBook for some reason. And I totally mean this as a compliment. Probably the best device I've ever owned (adjusting for contemporary tech).

Looks like a great Linux laptop... Let's hope it works with it.

Google Trends "surface pro" vs "macbook air" vs "macbook pro" is informative. Of course, none comes close to the iPhones or iPads, but it's impressive how much market share Microsoft have snatched up compared to the almighty Apple behemoth.
https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=surface%20pro%2C%20m...

Personally, I actually prefer the 16:9 aspect ratio for any screen that has sufficient raw vertical resolution to not hinder productivity (i.e. a lot more than 1080px for me).
I feel that once you get past the point where the lack of vertical resolution limits productivity, the marginal utility offered by even more vertical resolution becomes rather insignificant, to the point where I'd benefit more from having more horizontal resolution for snapping windows side-by-side.

I cannot open this page somehow. It's accessible on my mobile data, but not from broadband. In fact, no Microsoft sites are opening. What could be the reason?

I wonder if this will work well with Ubuntu Touch.
Ubuntu is on a similar path of creating universal OS for both laptops and tablets. On this hardware it can be something really epic.

Not different than most current offers on laptops, the keyboard still looks horrible for programming[1]. Fn keys shared with Home/End/PgUp/PgDwn, Up/Down arrows sharing a key. I guess they call it "slick", I call it won't buy.
[1] ok, depending on what you are programming, I'm sure there will be people saying they only need the "0" and "1" keys working.

I don't like where they're placed on my keyboard either, so I use AutoHotkey to bind those functions to alt+arrows. Alt+up for page up, alt+down for page down, alt+left for home and alt+right for end. After a couple hours it became muscle memory again.

How do you press Shift+Alt+Up/Down/Left/Right? Text editors I use do vertical block selection for Shift+Alt+arrows. Doing this kind of remapping will give you Shift+PageUp/PageDown/Home/End which is not cool...

I use shift+alt+left/right to highlight lines, but I don't use shift+alt+up/down ever. I use my mouse for that.

If you're using a Surface Pro, try pressing Fn + Arrow keys instead.

You can always use your USB keyboard of choice. This lets you lift the screen to an ergonomic height.
Working on laptops for long periods of time is a really bad idea, and very bad for your long-term health. (Voice of experience here, sadly.)

Some tips and common sense to combat the hype train:
- Never buy "iteration 0" products. If you do, at least wait a few months for long term user reviews.
- Never buy non upgradeable ultrabooks, unless you plan to sell it right before the warranty expires. If that's the case, then get a product that doesn't depreciate like crazy after a few months (stick to MacBooks and nothing else really).

yes very nice hardware, both the phone and the surface book. But the real standout here for me is continuum. This takes the logical next step where all the heavy lifting compute / storage happens remotely, and your "PC" doesn't need to be anything more powerful than the device in your pocket. I for one am overjoyed at not having to cart around a notebook, as the vast majority of my sit-down work happens in locations where monitors are available (ie office, home, client location, in that order of frequency. I personally don't do desktop-class work in trains/planes/coffee shops, even if I understand that there is a use case for this, and that's what the surfaces are for).
I'll even reconsider Windows now. My only slight concern is it would be great to get a slightly less clunky USB/HDMI docking cube. Did it have to be a cube? Surely a cable of some kind would have worked?
Now the only thing left is for Canonical (finally) to ship Unity 8 convergence. Please?

tell me the didn't remove true multitasking from windows (pro no less)
faq got me very worried:
""" Can I run multiple programs at the same time?
A: Your Surface Book allows you to run up to two apps side by side on a screen at a time. You can schedule meetings on your calendar while you respond to email, or edit your PowerPoint deck while you listen to music. """
up to two ...what?!?!

Probably referring to the windowing system that makes it easy to snap two apps side by side, each on half the screen, while in Metro mode. You can probably still go to the "desktop" and multitask however you're used to.

> probably
I'd like it to be the case, but they may allow only metro apps, can't they?

It runs full Windows 10.

For people who uses tablets like the surface exclusively, does your neck get sore? It doesn't look comfortable working like that

Are the bootloaders locked?

I wonder how hard it would be to just virtualize linux all the time, rather than trying to load linux on new hardware. How much do you lose as the tech to virtualize gets better?

Not really the point. Sure I can stick Linux in a VM but what if I want to run something other than Windows on hardware that I own?

Yeah, not your point, but it's a question for me. If the machine has drivers for the windows kernel, and probably terrible drivers for linux, how thin can that shim get?

Why pay a license for a host OS if you just want to run Linux?

Drivers. Sadly.

The Surface Pro 3's bootloader wasn't.

That hinge is so cool! Finally a real tablet/laptop hybrid comes out!
Seriously, this makes the difference for me. I never wanted to buy a tablet device because I thought I wouldn't use it much, but if I can just pull off the keyboard and turn it into a tablet that runs the same OS occasionally, that's something I'm interested in.

I love the `thunderstruck' theme song but the `start me up' one from the stones was a better fit when MS communicated about Windows 95.
I remember some Office ad campaign that had more punch and coherence too.
Adding the weird Lumia branding I'd say there's a decline in MS marketing efforts. But I might very well be in an echo chamber of my own.

I have a surface pro 3 and it's the first windows based machine I've touched in five years and I love the thing.
I really want the book now though...
The keyboard for the pro 3 is awesome. I really love how solidly the magnetic attachment feels for the keyboard, the backlit keys and the actual mechanical buttons...
It's fantastic.
I look forward to seeing how the book feels in person

I feel the same way about the Surface 3 Keyboard. I wasn't going to buy one initially, but the cheapest (used) SP3 came with one. Really give me the best of all worlds - tablet for media consumption, detachable keyboard is a viable laptop replacement (trackpad is not great but usable), and the dock gives me a decent desktop replacement (Quad-core i5/8GB RAM/Gigabit Ethernet/USB3/Mini-Displayport gives me everything I need for anything except gaming).
I've also been impressed with MS's customer support - the tip on the Surface Pen broke, and getting a new one UPSed to me only took about 20 minutes (register serial number, then a quick live-chat on the support website).

Does the Lumia 950 have a barometer? Or does anyone have a full specification sheet? I don't see the specs listed at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/mobile/phone/lumia950/

Microsoft has been chasing Apple for a while now, but chasers never win, because they depend on whom they are chasing for instructions. They even hired the Apple store firm to do their stores. Now they are making notebooks at Apple's price points.
What's ironic is Microsoft has often tried things first. They tried tablets and hybrid laptops and smartphones before Apple. They even tried flat design before Apple. They have ideas, but some of their products have been just awful.
Microsoft still leads in the living room with xbox, the office with Office, and in the market (or big parts of it) with affordable computers. They're actually killing it with their smart phone apps and the subscription model. They even seem to be embracing open source. These are core strengths, and are areas where they are actually ahead.
Yet, by doing as Apple does, only later and weaker, the conversation is always about Apple being better and ahead. And the kicker is, it's true. It's hard working around the truth in America when it's this blatantly obvious.
I'd love to see Microsoft open source Windows and make it a subscription. I'd love to see them put Windows 10 on every device and produce a phone that could run the real photoshop, just as a statement, even if it sucks. I'd love to see them define a new laptop that OEMs could build instead of selling one and competing with them. I'd love to hear a competing philosophy and not just a product.
If anything, what they lack is philosophy, and a face that speaks it. What I'd love to see is a philosopher sharing ideas and inspiring an audience... I would do anything to see Steve Jobs again.

> by doing as Apple does, only later and weaker
Seems to me that touch, pens, detachable screens and a full desktop operating system is Microsoft doing things ahead of Apple, and stronger.
Putting the same base OS on laptops, tablets, convertibles, smartphones and games consoles is, arguably, ahead of Apple.
Putting smartphone apps on Windows, Android and iOS is ahead of Apple.
Running a world-class global cloud service is ahead of Apple.
> I'd love to hear a competing philosophy and not just a product.
You should have watched the demo. You can catch the video repeat...

Windows 8 was not stronger. Microsoft Tablet PC was a modest attempt in 2002, but again, not stronger.
The issue with the Surface Book is how closely they intentionally align themselves with their biggest competitor. They are begging for a comparison. And I could have easily mistaken the page for a 2002 Tablet PC overview. Only the pictures are different. "Redefining the laptop" is hardly inspiring copy.
Which demo? Any great quotes?
FYI I have an iPhone like everyone else, but work on a PC. I'm not on either side.

Are you really comparing the company that just put out the Macbook (oh wow a thinner than thin enough MBA with a higher res display, no ports, worse battery, worse CPU, worse GPU, for a much higher price) and the iPad Pro (wow a bigger iPad with a pen many other tablets and laptops already had covered, that you have to charge by sticking it into the iPad like an idiot [0], to Microsoft which just demo'd a pretty damn awesome laptop which is priced like a MBP, but has touch, a pen, can work as a tablet and outperforms the MBP, alongside the newest iteration of the tablet, a phone that can work as a PC and let's not forget the Hololens which is a genuine innovation unlike anything Apple is doing, and the latter is just playing catch up? Come on, talk about bias.
So when Apple is obviously working on a self-driving car, you'd say that Apple is aligning themselves intentionally with their biggest competitor and 'begging for a comparison' to Google? Or not? Or when they finally allow adblockers, finally allow split screen, finally have a low-battery mode, finally add (private) NFC, jumped on the smartwatch bandwagon, jumped on the bigger-phone bandwagon, they're also begging for comparisons and aligning themselves with the competition? When Apple copied the Surface Pro's, and finally shipped a pencil after Jobs bashed them for years, they're also begging for a comparison?
Innovation doesn't always have to be some grand scheme that is completely unprecedented and radically different from everything else. Microsoft is engineering real innovations that are valuable and share some similarities with competitors, just like Google or Apple do, alongside of which it has some big ideas that nobody is really pursuing like the Hololens. I think you're giving them too little credit here.
[0] http://core0.staticworld.net/images/article/2015/09/ipad_pro...

Unabst was apparently of the opinion (above and in his deleted message) that the lack of innovation in the headline was much more significant than the massive innovation in the product.
Seems to me that if Apple had produced the Surface Book, Mac fans would be wetting themselves so hard that a lot of people would drown....

Please stop putting words in my mouth or those of Mac fans. I stated a simple fact, but got downvoted, so I gave up. Glad you admitted there was a lack of innovation somewhere though.
> Mac fans would be wetting themselves so hard that a lot of people would drown
@IkmoIkmo How is that for bias?

> How is that for bias?
I stated a simple fact. Well, I assume that's how you would describe it ;-)

I can state for a fact that the statement was not a fact, and that it was biased regardless of anything I could have said.

In comments https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Mac fans would be wetting themselves so hard that a lot of people would drown....
Be civil.

It's civil. It's funny. It's true.

?!
You missed the iPad Pro?
Microsoft have always been confident enough to go in their own direction. Apple are playing catch-up now.

> the conversation is always about Apple being better
Apple has done well. They have made great products and when my daughter needed a phone I bought her an iPhone.
But today is not a moment in time where the conversation is about Apple being better. In fact, people seem genuinely enthused with what Microsoft has created today.
Microsoft has been around a long time and so has Apple. The company that can continue to adapt will continue to stay in business. Microsoft has shown a capacity to do this and today reflects this well.

Also, the (pre)order page is here[0]
But without full specs ):
[0]http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/Microsof...

Not sure how they can claim it's 2x faster than MBP without any specs... not sure what they are comparing it too as well. Their highest end model to Apple's lowest?

Excited to see what this competition will do to Apple. Expect to see something radical in the MBP line now.

Does anyone have more details on the "NVIDIA GeForce"? I can't find the model, memory or any other info. What I really want to know is how powerful the GPU really is, and some benchmarks, but for now just some model-number or series-letter would be fine.

I second that. It does say it will have GDDR5 so at least it's not just DDR3. The tech specs could be a bit more techy.

They originally had "NVIDIA GeForce 8G" on the product page, but have since removed the "8g" bit. Either a typo, or something strange and controversial is happening behind the scenes!
8 gig of gpu memory seems unlikely. You'll find that in bigger gaming laptops, but probably not the surface book.
Perhaps because NVIDIA haven't officially announced the new GPU, Microsoft can't mention it.

Not sure many would agree but I would have liked to see a kickstand on the back of the Surface Book screen. I can see a desire to stand it up without needing the full keyboard. Other than that I think that may be my next device purchase.

Looks like a great machine, but almost certainly won't run a non-virtualised Linux distro very well (if the old Surface lineup is anything to go by). A shame for devs, but I suppose they want people to use the MS env/toolchains.

Why no USB Type-C?

Tech specs of Surface Book are very nice. But it does not look good and is too thick when the lid is closed. https://imgur.com/IXUzASs

Not sure the hinge of Surface Book is strong enough. If I put Surface Book and heavy things into a backpack, I will worry about the hinge. I don't worry if it is a normal laptop.

The site is screwed up on MAC chrome: http://imgur.com/1hHpSiy
How can you not check one of the most popular browsers on the internet.

On a page with the words "meticulously crafted" in large print. :)
I found that the glitches somehow corrected themselves; try resizing or reloading the page.

The surface book has the potential to propel Microsoft past apple. I was so amazed at everything that the surface book offers. dedicated graphics, pci storage, the design, and the convertibility. I highly believe that 2 in 1 hybrids like the surface book will be the future. A device like this embodies everything that we have come to love with technology in this time and age. the tablet form, touchscreens, portability, performance, sleekness, applications.
I currently use a toshiba click2pro [1] as my laptop of choice. This device has the same spirit as the surface book, but fails on many ends where I see the surface book exceeding. So far I have not seen any other manufacture crack the right formula for this type of device. The Asus transformer book, HP Spectre, Toshiba click all have their drawbacks or just weren't design right.
Take my Toshiba click 2 pro for example. 1. the weight of the LCD is heavier than the keyboard dock causing the laptop to be top heavy when moving it around. Toshiba circumvented this by docking the screen not at the the where the dock and keyboard meet, but by moving the docking location in a bit the lcd will stay without being top heavy and failing over. 2. The keyboard dock has potential to add components such as extra internal storage when docked, adding another battery cell in the dock, adding dedicated graphics. 3. The docking hinge is awful this is the main problem that I currently see with these devices. All the 2 in 1 have terrible hinge technology to hold the device together.
Now Microsoft has gone and put a lot of thought into this device and I believe they have a winner. The have set the bar for this type of device and other manufactures will be coming with their own devices. The hybrid 2 in 1, a true laptop and tablet device. Why Microsoft will succeed is because they have not only looked as design, but they have put a lot of thought into performance and functionality. From adding dedicated graphics to the keyboard dock it transforms the tablet to a true power house of a laptop. Also from what I saw, they added extra batteries in the keyboard dock by doing this they have distributed the weight of the components. I hope to see more analysis on the weight and feel of the device. The hinge looks to be highly in house designed. There was a talk about how Microsoft built the surface pro 3 [2] and watching the talk you can see that Microsoft spent a lot of time designing the components to be functional. I highly believe that the "dynamic fulcrum" hinge is a step way above of what other manufactures have done so far for a device of this type. I hope we get analysis on the hinge.
A device that blurs lines between the laptop and tablet. Between entertainment and performance. For some time we were split between a tablet device running an OS system that was designed for entertainment consumption, not being able to have the power to do more intensive tasks yet manufactures trying to sell it as if it could. (iPad Pro, the new Pixel C) to having to choose between OSX or windows for when we truly needed the power of full operating system. Like another comments stated we are seeing where Microsoft and Apple are heading. Microsoft is blurring the line of devices and like they stated are making us the hub where we are allowed to use our devices in different ways. To docking your phone to enjoy the desktop experience under continuum to using the surface book while lounging around and browsing as a tablet. I am liking where Microsoft is heading.
[1] http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2468274,00. [2] https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK3302

Great. I was all ready to get a Surface Pro 4 and now there's the new Surface Book to consider!
My biggest question is how does performance differ between the SP4 and Surface Book (detached from keyboard)?

In case somebody missed the presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=407Fykg8oz4

When is somebody going to come out with a convertable that doesn't have a trackpad? Does somebody have a patent that makes it illegal to make a PC without a trackpad or something?

Feedback from the Surface Pro 1 and 2 was that without a decent trackpad they were annoying. As in, they had trackpads but they sucked. Got a lot better with the Pro 3.

Exactly, instead of "get a bigger trackpad" the answer could be "get a mouse".

I'd rather have a trackpad than not have a trackpad. Sometimes using touch doesn't work that well.
In my experience, having to reach and touch the screen to get my cursor on a textbox is annoying. I'd rather us a swipe of my thumb to position the cursor.
Different strokes for different folks. I'm glad the trackpad is still here.

I have a touchscreen netbook, and using it without a mouse or trackpad is almost impossible. You lose a lot of fine control with just a finger.

Miffed that you gotta by the $2,600 model with dGPU (which most people don't want or need) to get 16GB of RAM. You can get a 13" rMBP with 16GB for only $1,500.

Totally agree. But typically vendors capitulate to buyer demand, so expect a 16GB model w/o dGPU eventually. And this launch price probably won't hold anyway.

So are there specs for the Book anywhere? If I can replace my notebook + wacom intuos setup with one of those, It'd be wonderful. A helluva lot more travel-friendly.

Typos, poor loading times. I'm not impressed, Microsoft!

How much does the book’s base weigh? Why will no one tell me?

Starting at 3.34 lbs and 22.8mm thick. rMBP 13 is 3.48 lbs and 18mm thick.
Similar weight but the rMBP is a fair bit thinner.

And that makes a huge difference how? I have one and they are great, but this thing has graphics card and is very powerful, on top of which it can work for 12h.

Weight: Surface Book Laptop: Non-GPU: 3.34 lbs. (1515 g) GPU: 3.48 lbs. (1579 g) Tablet only: 1.6 lbs. (726 g)
So the non-GPU base weighs 1515-726 or 789g.

PixelSense is apparently their name for what drives the pen now (rather than Wacom or N-trig). I think they bought n-trig and have developed it further maybe?

It's weird this forwarded me to "en-au", when I've always lived in the US. I had opened a separate tab directly to the Surface Book that was on the "en-us" site, and when I saw the device pricing, not knowing I was on AU, I was surprised to see the HUGE difference in price for the Surface Book from what I'd saw on the other page/tab -- 2.3K vs 1.5K. Hopefully that's rare for them, or there are going to be a lot of people turned off to that price point -- 2.3K for the Surface Book is insane.

The Aussie dollar is pretty weak right now. That translates to $1640 USD.

So..when your slogan is "The tablet that can replace your laptop," maybe it's not a great idea to announce a laptop next to it?

Why? The SP4 does replace a laptop, but there's still a trade off there. It depends just how productive you want to be on the go.
The type cover is amazing for its size and weight. But it is still a thin and relatively small keyboard. The Surface Book has a more robust keyboard but is thicker and weighs more.
I feel like the SP4 is a laptop replacement. But the Surface Book can be also while also acting like a laptop in some situations. They're both interesting, just boils down to the user's needs.
I'd likely buy a SP4, but can understand why others would be a SB.

Website layout is all messed up on Mac/Chrome

And Firefox/Windows. I think there is something not loading properly.

It's pretty messed up. It steals my ability to scroll correctly, it's not very responsive on my vertical screen, etc.

It is fine after sometime. Just wait for 5-10 seconds to load the 360 degree viewer.

Can it be said that MS is pivoting from a software company to a hardware one ? With Office and Windows as (almost fre) incentives ?

The headphone jack position is a deal-breaker.

Agreed - its not in the best location. However if you snake the cord behind the laptop and around the other side it shouldn't pose a problem. The only downside is that it will eat a little bit more of your headphone length. It shouldn't be a deal breaker though.

Wow, could they make it look more like a Mac Book? Apple will have to come up with a different look for theirs now.

I want one, but after the New Yorker article on Reid Hoffman I'm kind of waiting to find out if he likes it.

Wonder how hard they found against hardware backdoors on this. Also wonder what companies provided the hardware.

Finally! Now, the only problem is the os.

Apple - Microsoft seems interesting these days. Old rivals seem back after a whole silence for both of them

this might be something to expect after all these years...seeing lots of dudes wish Windows to come back just to give Apple more pressure to make the next revolutionary product...this might be a alarm to Apple somehow by lacing breakthrough all these years.

Hopefully this page (barely loading) does not represent the quality of their products.

I can't see giving up my 15" rMBP for this. Never have I ever wanted to take the screen off and use it as a tablet.
And when I've been forced by circumstance to do development on my Windows machine it's been at best awkward. (Basically trying to recreate a Unix like experience via Cygwin or what have you.)

Exactly. MBP is so lightweight and robust that you can take it anywhere where you would take a tablet. Since I got my MBP I completely stopped using the Nexus 10 tablet (which I used a lot before that). The battery lasts as long for similar workloads, it's quiet, and having trackpad means that your screen doesn't get greasy. Having keyboard at hand is a plus. I really cannot think of a situation where a developer would prefer tablet-with-a-touch-screen type of interface.

Well, it works with the Surface Pen, so for people who prefer pen and paper for note taking/drawing (like me), it would be useful in a meeting.
I can't imagine mouse/trackpad are as good as a pen for free-form drawing diagrams, etc.

Now that you bring that up (and it finally loaded the page in my browser) I'm intrigued by the pen. If this could be a good replacement for Wacom tablets (which have double the price) it would be really interesting.
Does anyone have experience with drawing on Surface with a Pen?

I can only speak to the Surface Pro which has the Wacom tech -- it's great but sucks at the edges.
The Surface Pen from the Surface Pro 3 forward does not have this issue.

The page cannot be displayed because an internal server error has occurred.

Anybody have any idea about memory? How much gigs of RAM it compromises ?

Up to 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD.

Since the Surface Pro 4 has up to 16GB of RAM, I'd assume this has at least that.

Specs are up: https://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/devices/surface-book...

* 128GB / Core Intel i5 - 8GB ($1499)
* 256GB / Core Intel i5 - 8GB ($1699)
* 256GB / Core Intel i5 - 8GB / dGPU ($1899)
* 256GB / Core Intel i7 - 8GB / dGPU ($2099)
* 512GB / Core Intel i7 - 16GB / dGPU ($2699)

Are any of those quad cores? I've been trying to find the actual cpu models but I can't seem to find them mentioned anywhere.

I'm wondering the same thing. In the announcement, they say "two more than MBP" so I'm hoping it's a quadcore

This pricing is absurd, you are better off buying the cheaper models and adding a $350 1TB SSD and 8GB RAM for less than $100...
Assuming they haven't somehow locked the hardware.

good luck soldering the ram and the SSD

At that thickness I would assume that the RAM is soldered to the motherboard.

LTE? Or do they really want to sell phones that badly...

how does their website not work on Chrome?
http://imgur.com/a/egqSU

It works ... after you let it load and everything reflows accordingly.
Terrible first experience.

Microsoft is one of the few companies in the world that will have this many people hitting them all at once.

They should be one of the many companies in the world that know how to produce high availability websites.

Ha. Safari desktop too. I guess it worked once I resized the window, but not until then.

Can confirm, resizing fixed it. Can't imagine why they did that.

Mine was stuck like this for serveral minutes while it loaded: http://i.imgur.com/FraHcfN.png

someone screwed up. here it hangs before loading any image waiting for accounts.microsoft-int.com or something.
network capacity issue, not browser.

that page does not inspire confidence
screenshot: http://imgur.com/uBQfoaX

Their CDN was crapping out earlier, seems fine now.

what's the target users for this machine?

The headphone jack position is a deal-breaker.
Rookie mistake.

there has to be another headphone jack on the attached keyboard. if not, then it will be a terrible experience to listen to music while working as the headphone cable will be interfering with the keyboard.

This is no other headphone jack.

bluetooth. who doesn't use bluetooth headphones?

No trackpad buttons, no sale.

can you install linux

I compared prices of it and macbook pro. They both are almost same!

The surface book has the potential to propel Microsoft past apple. I was so amazed at everything that the surface book offers. dedicated graphics, pci storage, the design, and the convertibility. I highly believe that 2 in 1 hybrids like the surface book will be the future. A device like this embodies everything that we have come to love with technology in this time and age. the tablet form, touchscreens, portability, performance, sleekness, applications.
I currently use a toshiba click2pro [1] as my laptop of choice. This device has the same spirit as the surface book, but fails on many ends where I see the surface book exceeding. So far I have not seen any other manufacture crack the right formula for this type of device. The Asus transformer book, HP Spectre, Toshiba click all have their drawbacks or just weren't design right.
Take my Toshiba click 2 pro for example. 1. the weight of the LCD is heavier than the keyboard dock causing the laptop to be top heavy when moving it around. Toshiba circumvented this by docking the screen not at the the where the dock and keyboard meet, but by moving the docking location in a bit the lcd will stay without being top heavy and failing over. 2. The keyboard dock has potential to add components such as extra internal storage when docked, adding another battery cell in the dock, adding dedicated graphics. 3. The docking hinge is awful this is the main problem that I currently see with these devices. All the 2 in 1 have terrible hinge technology to hold the device together.
Now Microsoft has gone and put a lot of thought into this device and I believe they have a winner. The have set the bar for this type of device and other manufactures will be coming with their own devices. The hybrid 2 in 1, a true laptop and tablet device.
Why Microsoft will succeed is because they have not only looked as design, but they have put a lot of thought into performance and functionality. From adding dedicated graphics to the keyboard dock it transforms the tablet to a true power house of a laptop. Also from what I saw, they added extra batteries in the keyboard dock by doing this they have distributed the weight of the components. I hope to see more analysis on the weight and feel of the device. The hinge looks to be highly in house designed. There was a talk about how Microsoft built the surface pro 3 [2] and watching the talk you can see that Microsoft spent a lot of time designing the components to be functional. I highly believe that the "dynamic fulcrum" hinge is a step way above of what other manufactures have done so far for a device of this type. I hope we get analysis on the hinge.
A device that blurs lines between the laptop and tablet. Between entertainment and performance. For some time we were split between a tablet device running an OS system that was designed for entertainment consumption, not being able to have the power to do more intensive tasks yet manufactures trying to sell it as if it could. (iPad Pro, the new Pixel C) to having to choose between OSX or windows for when we truly needed the power of full operating system.
Like another comments stated we are seeing where Microsoft and Apple are heading. Microsoft is blurring the line of devices and like they stated are making us the hub where we are allowed to use our devices in different ways. To docking your phone to enjoy the desktop experience under continuum to using the surface book while lounging around and browsing as a tablet. I am liking where Microsoft is heading.
[1] http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2468274,00. [2] https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK3302

it looks like a copy of macbook, and I love microsoft for that, actually might buy this because of that fact.
the tablet laptop thing is a must if you spend a lot of time in front of a computer. Unfortunately, sometimes you need a keyboard to answer emails and get stuff done.

What, a copy of a MacBook with a touch screen, pen operation, a serious GPU, and a detachable screen that works as a tablet running iPad-style apps?
Still waiting for a MacBook that does any of that ;-)

I would never be caught with an Apple product built on the backs of millions of Chinese children and women in horrible and tyrannical working conditions.
If this turns out to be the same case I will also denounce and boycott it.

What makes you think this isn't made in China? It's going to be a similar group of OEMs making the parts.

Actually, that does raise the question of what are you typing this post on right now?

Good luck avoiding all electronics with parts from China :P

While I agree with the rest, what do you mean by "serious GPU"? GPUs seem exactly the same as MBP offers.

13-inch MacBook Pro has Intel Iris 6100 Graphics, no?

Yes. And Surface has 5200. It's even worse.

Microsoft compared the Surface Pro 4 with the MacBook Air and the Surface Book with the 13in MacBook Pro.
It didn't compare either with, say, a Dell Precision mobile workstation that delivers serious power...

Thanks for clearing that up. I got confused by names and expected "Pro" to mean the same in both camps.

Did anyone notice that this site is rather sexist?
There's not a single image on that site of a woman using the laptop. The closest image is of a person who looks like they could be a woman under the "Key Features" > "Ultimate performance" text block, but since they don't show the person's face there's no way to know.
The only women on the page are at the bottom, being the support woman and the woman sitting next to the man using the laptop.
This is part of the problem that women in STEM have, and as a guy, it's really disappointing to see such a major player in the tech sector do this.

As a woman in STEM: I don’t give a fuck if the people in the ads using the device are men or women or cats. (Actually, I’d love to see a major manufacturer only use cats in their ads)
We have far bigger problems than this, like, for example, on the one side income equality, and on the other side people trying to fix it by banning wage negotiations. A good way to handle it would be by implementing a system – like VW did – where, up to the interview, the company only sees your CV, qualifications and references, but not age, gender or sex. This is far more useful for us right now than any kind of "let's force ads to contain 50% women"

PLEASE let this be satire.

Wow, this page looks incredibly bad and loads amazingly slow on my Chromebook. Either google is trolling M$ or M$ is trolling themselves.

Are we all just stuck in the bubble? I mean I love this thing for the specs, and Windows is a perfectly fine OS for development nowadays.
But I fail to see how this is helping Microsoft move forward. Capturing a chunk of the developer notebook market doesn't exactly move the needle for them, and they don't have the brand that allows Apple to sell MBPr as glorified Facebook machines to people that would otherwise balk at the price.

What a joke. Don't they vet out and optimize the page before mass releasing a new product? Just shows why MSFT lags behind Apple and Google and Amazon. ASP.NET FTL

Next year there will be a Surface Pro 5 (5"), Pro 8 (8") and Pro 12 (12") all with pens. 12 will be the successor to current Surface Pro 4.

They already have Surface (10.8") and Surface Pro (12"), so I don't see that changing.
There was speculation of a Surface Phone, but with the Lumia 950XL being pen compatible and still keeping the Lumia name, it's very unlikely.

THAT is what I've been waiting for, on all fronts. On top of everything else, run Ubuntu VM's on the phone (if and when possible), Surface 4 and Surface Book and you now have the best of both worlds.
We run various Windows-native engineering tools (CAD, CAM, EDA, FEA, etc.) yet do a lot of software development under Linux (by running VM's on all of our Windows desktops and laptops).
I can imagine popping an SD card into a phone and plugging it into a projector at a client's office to review a SolidWorks design. I know that's not possible today due to the SnapDragon processor but it isn't too far fetched to suggest companies like DS might very well consider at the very least having viewers and other tools available for the phones in the future. It makes total sense.
Microsoft is taking this in exactly the right direction. From user-accessible non-proprietary I/O to file system access on the phone and multi-user capabilities on the Surface devices. Everything is just right.
Sorry Apple. If reviews are good we are dumping our iPhones for MS Phones by the end of the year. Not upgrading to any of your new closed hardware and OS's. We are done. Bye bye.
I really like the energy I am seeing coming out of Microsoft.
There's only one thing missing from that presentation: Microsoft TV. You know that's got to be in the works.

> Not upgrading to any of your new closed hardware and OS's.
I've missed the part whre Windows was announced open source. Can you give me a link?

> I've missed the part whre Windows was announced open source. Can you give me a link?
Sure:
http://blogs.msdn.com/windows/announcing-windows-10-open-sou...

> Group Not Found
> The requested Group cannot be found.

Exactly, the status of FOSS Windows is 404 ;)

You know that is not what I meant. I didn't say FOSS or OSS.
Show me the USB port on an iPad, or access to the file system, or the ability to plug in a memory card, or an external drive, or dock it and run an unencumbered OS, with multiple displays, keyboards, mice/trackballs, game controllers, or the ability to install any software you want, even run a Linux VM, etc.
C'mon.

And by Microsoft TV, you mean XBox One?

At the end of the day it's balls in the back of the net that count. I'm pleased for everyone, so let's see if this translates into sales. It's a hybrid mix of things to get to success; and all about execution.
http://datagenetics.com/blog/september52015/index.html

You're crossing the line into spam here. HN is for intellectually interesting discussion, not site promotion.

I thought I was adding discussion. My point was that it's about business execution, and that at the end of the day success will be measured by sales and not about people saying "But this is a better product". It's the tastes of the fish, not the tastes of the fisherman, and there is more to product and desire than the tangible parts.
I wrote this down as an essay. I thought it easier to post a link rather than regurgitate the same text. I'm sorry if I offended.

An isolated comment is no problem, of course, but if there gets to be a pattern then users complain to us.

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