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Comment by anjc | Hacker News Reader

What a bizarre conclusion at the end. Is it a Macbook alternative? Yes but no, because "Switching ecosystems is dicey business."

Tech journalist's reasons for the Surface not being a viable option are getting ridiculous. The SP1 apparently wasn't powerful enough as a laptop and didn't have the battery of a tablet. The SP2 was powerful enough with a longer battery, but it's hard to use full Windows in a touch device. The SP3 is powerful enough, long lasting battery enough, light enough, with a big enough screen to use via touch, but then "lapability" became a metric in articles. Now everything's great, but "switching ecosystems is dicey business".

It's strange the way goalposts keep getting shifted with each iteration. I switched completely to the MS ecosystem with the SP3 and it was easy.

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But all those criticisms of prior iterations were valid. My dad tried to use a surface 2 as his main machine. His big complaints? Screen is too small to use as a laptop and the kickstand + keyboard cover suck for using on your lap or in an airplane seat.

SP Book isn't so much an evolution of SP1 as it is an abandoning of most of SP1's key design decisions: laptop-size rather than tablet-size, full-keyboard rather than keyboard-cover, and clearly designed to be used foremost with keyboard and trackpad attached (most of the battery is in the keyboard base) rather than with touch.

It's slowly worked its way towards being a MacBook with a stylus and flexible hinge, instead of being an iPad with full-powered CPU and keyboard cover. And that's probably what it should have been all along.

But that's what I mean, fair enough if the screen was too small and kickstand fiddley on the SP2, but the SP3 fixed that completely. But then the goalposts shifted...

And they definitely aren't abandoning this philosophy seeing as they announced the SP4 at the same event. The Surface Book is a competitor to the Macbook Pro, but they aren't slowly creating a Macbook Pro. My sense is that Apple are now slowly moving in this direction.

Right:

Surface Book - I want a laptop that I can use as a tablet once in a while.

Surface Pro - I want a tablet that I can use as a laptop once in a while.

Both- Dock it and replace your desktop.

> But that's what I mean, fair enough if the screen was too small and kickstand fiddley on the SP2, but the SP3 fixed that completely. But then the goalposts shifted...

I see it the other way. The SP2 was too small to use as a laptop so the lack of a proper hinge and keyboard was secondary. SP3 was big enough to use as a proper laptop, so the lack of a proper hinge and keyboard became more glaring.

In any case, the whole narrative is a bit revisionist. Here's me complaining about the Surface 1's lack of "lapability" almost three years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4869442. It was a common complaint at the time.

> But then the goalposts shifted...

The goalposts didn't shift. High priority complaints just tend to get more visibility than low priority complaints. Each iteration of the Surface Pro has fixed a high priority complaint, shaving it off the queue and revealing the rest of the queue. But the entire queue was always there from the beginning.

In other words, the issues that are now primary were previously secondary or tertiary in prior iterations of the Surface Pro. They existed, but there was little reason to focus on them because of other, more glaring problems that had to be fixed first.

I think you could say that the goalposts shifted. After a long time of whacking down the other complaints, people who would like machines like that have been using MacBooks. And so their target has likely been becoming increasingly entrenched in Mac Products.

Switching ecosystems is dicey business, though. I definitely want a Surface Book, but my entire development setup is now UNIX-centric having used a Macbook since 2006(?). It's not that I can't switch back, but there's a big, $1,500 leap into the unknown to be made, which is a professional risk.

That's actually the only reason holding me back as well. Cygwin is not very tempting.

And then there's vagrant. I switched back to MS because C# and profit, all other dev is on vagrant boxes which actually made things easier as I tend to be more comfortable with that what I push will work as I have the same *nix setup on my 127.0.01 as on remote.

True, I had not thought of that. Any shortcomings?

Vagrant under VirtualBox is a little slow, but taking the time to set up WinNFSd is very worthwhile for real file I/O gains. If you want to pay for VMWare + VMWare's Vagrant plugin, you'll get even better performance.

Supposedly you can also use Hyper-V which is included by default on Windows 8 and later. But since the time I found that I didn't yet have a need for vagrant again.

I'm currently on Win10 Home, but I use Vagrant so extensively that it's probably worth an upgrade (besides that, it provides a lot of other great features, anyway).

Cygwin is terrible but there are alternatives, such as:

https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow

Which work extremely well. I can go back and forth between Debian and windows without too much trouble. Many tools are cross platform.

How is Cygwin terrible exactly? It’s fast and lightweight (compared to other recommendations like MobaXterm) and has a huge selection of packages¹. Frankly, I don’t get why Cygwin gets so much flack; I’m glad it exists.

――――――

¹ — http://cygwinports.org/

Also msys2 which is well maintained.

The point (as I understood anjc) is that "switching ecosystems is dicey business" would be a ridiculous statement to make in a review for an Apple product.

The press tends to treat Microsoft like Cinderella's stepmother treated her: unreasonably critical.

I actually find it kind of interesting.

Historically, Apple absolutely would have been the risky platform to go for (I waited until their Intel laptops, using Boot Camp as an insurance policy). But these days people have iPhones, iPads, some even have Apple TVs... the Apple hardware ecosystem is actually far stronger than Microsoft's. You absolutely are risking that syncing with your iPhone etc will be worse.

Why are people trying to bend over backwards here? Let's step outside the startup world for some facts:

iPhone market share in the US is 43%. Macbook market share is 12%. So the vast majority of iPhone users are "risking" this.

Which is really not a risk at all, because if it really were a risk Apple would be shooting themselves in the foot. They would be killing one of their most successful products for the sake of some of their least.

I don't know for sure how many iPhone users have ever plugged their device into a computer for anything other than a quick battery top up, but my hunch is most people just don't sync phones with computers any more, they sync them with iCloud or Google. I don't own an iPhone, but I've never even attempted to synchronise my phone with my laptop - contacts, calendar, and email come from Google, music from Spotify, and video from Netflix or Amazon. The closest I've come is copying some photos off the SD card.

But that is on Apple. Copying music to an iPhone is about as cumbersome as Apple can make it without destroying their music business.

You just add it to playlist in iTunes

The only people that need to worry are professionals. Developers and so on. And they can decide themselves whether switching is a risk without a journalist saying that a good product isn't an alternative because of this risk.

The Microsoft hardware product line is arguably more complete than Apple's at this point, when you factor in the Xbox. There's minimal risk to casual users in switching.

For one thing, you'll have to use Windows iTunes, which is notoriously bad.

I find it very interesting that Apple is now the "default" laptop and Windows is the strange alternative that people are worried about switching to.

> I find it very interesting that Apple is now the "default" laptop and Windows is the strange alternative that people are worried about switching to.

Only in a tiny minority of wealthy dev/artist types.

Also, it's much easier to get a MacBook to run Windows than it is to get a Windows laptop to run OS X.

Exactly, not only is it irrelevant in a discussion about specific hardware, it's also subjective. I've found the transition to Windows easy (and well worth it) and I'm sure that my demands are more thorough than the average user's.

But with a Mac, if I find I don't like the OS X ecosystem, I can always install Windows and be done. I get to enjoy my laptop and the ecosystem I want. I can't do the opposite with a Surface.

How about installing Linux on it? (I am curious to know if that's possible because I'm considering to buy the Surface to put Linux).

I wouldn't recommend it, the Desktop Environments lack decent HDPI support, and Touch feels cumbersome.

I’m old enough to remember when people said things just like this about Apple products: “It’s very nice, but switching ecosystems away from Windows s risky.”

But it still is. As another comment said, only 12% of laptops are Macbooks; it'll remain very hard to replace PC's and Windows in the large corporate and government worlds, thanks to Windows-specific software. A lot of software is moving to a more OS-agnostic platform (i.e. web), and cross-platform applications (like MS Office) are becoming more and more the norm, but there's still a long way to go.

It'd help a lot if Microsoft manages to get .NET applications to become popular on OSX. That's only possible since this year, and it'll probably take a few more years for applications to become properly crossplatform.

You don't need to switch ecosystems when you buy an Apple product. Macs run Windows just fine, either as a VM or dual-boot. They also ship with a full Unix shell. Macs are popular in part because they are very flexible computers.

The Surface line is not as flexible. It's perfect for people who are immersed in the Windows world, but a lot of people are not anymore.

Except that exactly the same criticism was said about moving to mac back in the day.

There's always virtualbox

Yes - and given that I'm trying to be more disciplined about doing my development work in Docker instances it might actually be the direction I'm headed in anyway.

It's difficult to test drive that idea, though. VirtualBox on my Macbook to Windows, SSHing to another VirtualBox for development? Hmm.

It's especially dicey because Windows as an operating system has been a convulsing mess of confusion for years as they've tried and then partially abandoned a shift to mobile-first. It would make sense to wait for an actual paradigm to re-emerge before trying to get used to one.

I find that the UX experience of Windows 10 is better than that of OS X. That's highly opinionated, of course, but this is coming from someone who's been a more or less OS X diehard for 8 years.

Of course, Windows is still a mess under the hood, which is why I also run a VM (debian with xfce or xmonad).

> Of course, Windows is still a mess under the hood

Go a little deeper. The Windows NT kernel is decades ahead of UNIX paradigms.

This is why we have products like Vagrant & Docker. A lot has changed since 2006.

I had to solve this problem when I built a new high-end desktop aimed at gaming a while back.

As it happens, Windows 10 is actually pretty great from a basic UX point of view. In many ways I find it better than OS X now in this regard, which I didn't think I'd ever say.

But the lack of Unix underpinnings was a big loss. My solution was to run Debian in Virtualbox. I set it up with xfce as the default window manager, since it tends to run really well in a VM. But in truth I almost always use xmonad, which runs even better in a VM. For me at least, this has been a nearly perfect solution.

I imagine the same would work on a Surface Book.

My solution was to run Debian in Virtualbox

I think that's what I'd do. I don't have a problem running Sublime etc. in Windows, so I figure I'd only need command line access to the Linux box, so even windowing isn't a problem.

But still, my Macbook Pro is only about a year old. As much as I want to justify that upgrade...

A great thing about Macbook Pro is their high resell value.

I plan to sell my 2014 MBP when I get this. I'd lose around 20-30% for one year of utilisation, good enough for me.

With the addition of virtual desktops to Windows 10 you can keep the full-screen Virtualbox in another desktop. Switching between OSs just by pressing Ctrl+Super-Right/Left is fun.

"With the addition of virtual desktops..."

I heard they're adding SSH soon too. May get a usable workstation out of windows one of these days...

/ducks

Hyper-v runs debian fine if you rather avoid virtual box. Also there's cygwin for anything that doesn't require a vm (scripting). I'd always run a dev environment as a vm to simulate a production environment. However, if I'm just writing bash scripts or anything that doesn't require installing a db/web server/etc cygwin is adequate enough.

Yes, I got an SP3 a couple of months ago so I'd have a machine for a road trip I was planning.

I'm pretty heavily invested in Linux, and before getting my SP3, I only ever used Windows for gaming. I considered dual-booting Linux, but I was nervous about accidentally screwing things up ahead of my trip, so I decided I'd postpone that to after my trip.

So I installed stuff to make myself comfortable instead. PuTTY was one of my first installs, so I could SSH into my VPS whenever I wanted a familiar command-line environment (and with that, access to my coding projects and vim). Another was the suite of KDE apps, so I could use the GUI apps I'm familiar with. TortoiseHg, too, so I could pull stuff down that I wanted to work on (I use Hg as a means of backing up my stuff -- not just code, but a lot of plain text documents and stuff -- to my VPS).

So, yes, if you want a Nix-like ecosystem on a Surface, you can do that. I could've gone even farther and installed a full Cygwin environment, but I didn't bother just because PuTTY into my VPS was a much more efficient way of accessing a CLI environment. For that matter, I could've installed a Linux VM, too (and I probably would have, but I forgot, and it didn't come to mind until I was already packing).

And it's totally possible to install Linux, if you want. There are guides for installing Arch, Ubuntu, etc. on the SP3, and I doubt the SP4 or SB will be much different. Only reason I didn't is because I wanted to make 100% sure that if I accidentally did something wrong and blew away the wrong part of my SP3, it wouldn't happen until after I'm home from my trip.

Try babun: http://babun.github.io/

I currently do my dev on a Macbook Pro but exploring the options available on Windows because I intend to switch to either the Surface Book or SP4.

I think with babun for a basic unixy terminal and vagrant to manage projects I'll have a nice dev machine. The massive plus to the surface is having ability to sketch out anything I want which helps immensely trying to solve problems, kind of like an ultra mini whiteboard.

> PuTTY

Nope.

midipix is making steady progress and will provide a true Unix experience for Windows http://midipix.org/#sec-roadmap

Wow, it looks great! I especially like this section:

“unicode as expected

Unicode in midipix is not an afterthought, but rather an essential concept. When your application enters its main() function, for instance, its argv and envp point to utf-8 strings, just like they would on modern unix systems. Similarly, the size of the framework's native wide character (wchar_t) is four bytes, meaning that your unicode application can share its entire code-path between platforms. Last but not least, midipix adds an important 'M' (as in multibyte) variant to the 'A' (ansi) and 'U' (utf-16) GUI flavors, meaning that you can seamlessly call functions such as GetWindowText or SetWindowText using utf-8 input and output.”

Which unix features/commands/tools do you think you need/essential for you development that you do not think are available on windows?

Unix and Windows are two different cultures, it's not just about features/commands/tools - any of the latter has always a counterpart which "at least somewhat works", but that is besides the point.

This is the reference article: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Biculturalism.html

I've never had a good experience with Cygwin, and I've never really liked any of the terminal programs available for Windows either.

I'm not familiar with the tool, but why not use Hyper-V and install your favorite *nix?

I'm certainly intrigued as you.

Maybe they've fixed it since I tried it, but enabling Hyper-V on my Surface Pro 3 messed up sleep. It would only Hibernate and not reliably. Took me a couple weeks to figure out what happened.

Switching ecosystem is dicey but moving from Mac OS to Windows isn't so much an ecosystem switch though.

Here's my blog post addressing that myth: http://www.kentran.net/2015/10/how-macnix-users-can-stay-pro...

Please have a look at MSYS2. It's far, far easier to use than cygwin and even has `pacman` as a package manager

I have used MSYS2 but decided to come back to Cygwin.

1. Commands in MSYS2, while fast in its shell, are slower than Cygwin's commands when run in PowerShell. 2. MSYS2 can't be installed via Chocolatey. It's because MSYS2 owners are against Chocolatey (insane!). Which makes it harder to automate the replication of my environment across machines. 3. Cygwin does has package managers. I use Cyg-Get, which is also available via Chocolatey.

>Commands in MSYS2, while fast in its shell, are slower than Cygwin's commands when run in PowerShell

The only bugs related to this are to do with slow LDAP/AD lookups - can you elaborate?

Just install Linux on it?

I've run Ubuntu on a variety of Mac and non-Mac hardware since 2007, and the experience has only improved over that time frame.

So true. Not everyone in the world is a programmer, developer or a "power" user. Internet consumption and most applications are run within a browser today; so what does the author mean my ecosystem for everyday users? I'm pretty certain that installing a Linux distro would be a non-issue.

I held off on buying a machine when I heard MS was doing the Surface. I figured they'd nail the convertible tablet - it's not that hard. When they announced, I thought the specs were terrible, but hey maybe I could live with it. Then it became clear the keyboards were crap, and you couldn't actually use them as laptops, I laughed and got another ThinkPad.

Windows as a touch device has sucked forever. I know this having used convertibles in 2005. It's great when it works, but you better have a keyboard nearby. MS has done effectively nothing to make touch/pen really outstanding on Windows. Apart from their terrible Metro apps approach.

Surface Book looks great from the waist up. If Lenovo made a $500 adapter that let me slap an X201-style bottom on it, I'd buy one in a heartbeat.

The price/performance ratio wasn't good enough. I went with an ASUS laptop instead. Same price, but instead of 8GB of ram, I get 16 GB. Instead of 256 I get 512. Instead of i5, I get i7.

The monitor is much bigger as well. Sure, form factor is not as compact, but geez.

The ecosystem has changed, too.

It used to be mediocre software where you got locked in and paid much. Now, it's a much more attractive experience with excellent hardware and reasonably priced, sexy software, but you are now the product.

Accepting this depends on your privacy requirements.

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