The Microsoft Surface Book Review
anandtech.com
anandtech.com
I just gave Windows 10 another try with a view to purchasing a Surface 4 if successful (OneNote + Stylus = :)) - but after a few weeks reverted back to Linux (Fedora).
Apart from the inferior development experience (outside of VS - which is top-notch), there are just too many bugs, unfinished pieces and a general lack of polish. Updates wouldn't install, the Store kept crashing/disappearing, Modern Apps would interact badly with virtual desktops.
Win 10 should never have been released in such a state. I'm hoping the Threshold release out this week will go some ways to repairing the damage and presume will be a better fit for the Surface Book.
Maybe I'll look at the Surface line again in a few months.
You can run Linux natively on the Surface, SecureBoot isn't a problem, but the bigger issues are drivers and a touch-unfriendly UI.
(I went with an Acer Aspire E11 - $150, 8hr battery, and fanless - it may be the best Linux netbook every made!)
Sounds like a hardware issue. Cannot reproduce. Are you running the mainline release or did you opt in to the experimental builds?
Updates would crap out with random errors like 80074005 - which a casual user should never see. I got it working again by stopping the update services from the console (net stop ...), deleting the cache and re-running.
The store would be running, then you'd Alt-Tab out and back again and it would be gone. Same happened with other Universal apps, OneNote in particular.
It certainly got more reliable over time, and I have tried the insider builds on a spare laptop and they're better - but the initial 10240 release was sub-par.
That literally means nothing. You can have CPUs which run Prime95 for days without fail and then die after running a proper memtest.
I do think that if I switched to Linux for "a few weeks" I'd have the exact same reaction as a Linux user switching to Windows. In fact, this is how I've used Linux for the last 15 years and pretty much every experience since 2000 has been just that "it's nice but lacking polish".
Everyone has their own favorite flavor of OS, Windows 10 is no better or worse than previous releases.
Although the latest Fedora 23 is perhaps the most polished version yet ;)
I LOVE LOVE LOVE my OpenSUSE desktops. I have a tiled window manager with means zero menus. Everything is shortcut keys (The way I use Windows 8). Windows PowerShell and CMD are catching up SLOWLY but I love my rxvt-unicode terminal. I love using Ranger (Comand line file manager) and VIM works perfectly.
People need to stop seeing Fedora as anything but a test bed for Red Hat and use another distro. Fedora is always unpolished and has a ton of hiccups. (My own biased opinion)
Windows at work stinks (I use 2 desktop computers that are Linux) one laptop Windows 7 and one desktop Windows 8. I have issues with updates on both windows machines and they are a PAIN to fix. It gets permissions wrong all the time and I can actually be locked out of removing icons from my desktops let alone the horrible exchange server. So I got permission to use Linux since I get things done much fast on it. Also the email gets blocked due to spam from all the stupid stuff my co-workers do.
My personal computer at home has not been able to upgrade to Windows 8.1 and my 8.0 won't install more updates. (Wife HATES Tiled Window Managers and hates when she has to switch between Windows 7 or Windows 8 or KDE). My memory gets used up all the time and I can't htop in command line and kill apps. I have to three finger salute and wait for the graphical interface to kick in. Hangs and is sluggish at random times. Still prefer Windows to OS X just for sane OS grammar sake.
It does not change the fact that they are testbeds, but the Gnome 3 did really wonders.
I admit to missing SSH, and a nice text-centric command line (sometimes), but Powershell is a decent shell that's built in. Chocolatey is a decent package and app manager that takes 15-20 seconds to install. And Atom and Sublime work wonderfully on windows.
Also, VS, which has a awesome free community edition, can be used to develop in most languages and frameworks. If you think it's top notch you should use it.
Part of the problem I've noticed with linux users complaining about Windows is that they try and develop linux applications or web servers on windows, then complain that it's difficult. This shouldn't really be surprising. The opposite situation is trying to develop a windows application or server on linux to deploy on a windows server. It's doable with Mono, but it's difficult. But I've never heard anyone from Windows land complaining about it.
And this is slightly off-topic but I have tried several times to fully embrace the Windows way, learnt PowerShell (ISE rocks), and even spent significant time building a startup using F# in VS and hosting it on Azure. In retrospect it was nice but there were just too many rough edges for me,
* Setting up a nice console environment means using a 3rd-party system like cmder/conemu + Cygwin/Msys/etc.
* Getting git working along with ssh-agent is still hit & miss
* Installing, for instance, Python packages that rely on C bindings requires extra trickery to set up,
* Chocolately isn't bad, but it is just downloading and running installers for you, it doesn't really have a dependency solver like yum or other Linux package managers do (NuGet does but don't think Chocolately uses those features). Plus it's more for packaged software than libraries/tools. OneGet may fix that in the future.
These are all surmoutable issues, for sure, but in the end it was just easier to move back to Linux. Not just for familiarity, but also convenience and ease - for me Windows was like death by 1000 papercuts. A shame, as I much prefer the Windows/PowerShell data model of communicating objects to text. I just wish MS would spend some time working on the overall dev experience outside of VS.
(I'm sure enough people will say desktop Linux has it's fair share of issues and I totally agree. Wireless drivers, Wayland still not quite there, battery usage, and much more. Which is why I'd be happy to pay for Windows if the dev experience was improved.)
- you have exact MSVC version, that was used to build your python (and yes, they are ancient, and no, you cannot purchase them anymore),
- it is possible at all to build the given package by the required MSVC version (see also: icu, boost, qt5 and the minimum MSVC version required),
- there are no dependencies on many additional libraries (i.e. building GDAL for Windows python is a real pain),
- the extension does not use some kind of home-brew build system that the author never tried to run on Windows (hello, py2cairo),
- you don't need some other compiler (scipy, I'm looking at you and your fortran).
But for simple extensions like psycopg2, it is a piece of cake. It is building packages, that are not native in Windows, but you have them in dependency chain, that are the problem.
Windows or MSVC does not really have a standardized way how to cope with third-party SDKs. It is basically unzip the libs and includes somewhere and configure that path that in your project (good luck making other people build your solution). It kind of works with shallow dependencies, but not when your dependencies form a nice graph.
In Fedora, these things work out of the box and you don't have to waste your time.
>> unfinished pieces and a general lack of polish. Updates wouldn't install, the Store kept crashing/disappearing,
>> Modern Apps would interact badly with virtual desktops.
>> Win 10 should never have been released in such a state.
Sounds like El Capitan.
In El Capitan, I've never had Store crash, not sure what would be equivalent to Modern apps, but the virtual desktops are ok-ish, etc.
The only thing that is really bugging me is non working IPSec/IKEv2.
A very strong selling point for the Surface family, in my opinion.
I bought a family member an Asus laptop from the Windows Store that was running 8.1, and the Windows 10 update has destroyed it. Asus refuses to look at it, calling it a "software issue". So now I'm in the process of trying to get Microsoft to look at it, and waiting to see whether they will take responsibility or shove it off to someone else.
For years the Windows experience was completely ruined by hardware manufacturers pre-loading laptops with a ton of very poorly developed software. It's a night and day difference.
in some ways, android has it worse, because they have to deal with hardware vendors and carriers
Or are you just talking about doing a factory restore on system which brings back everything to it's original state?
Source: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/lenovo...
In fact the music player regularly redirects to the apple music tab while I just want to listen to my own playlist.
It feels really really cheap.
Gave microsoft a second chance with the flagship Lumia Windows Phone 7, and Surface RT, because I was primarily a windows dev. Needless to say, I was burned on both of those devices (buggy, very poor and limited apps, and microsoft basically gave up on both platforms within 2 years). I've since purchased an iMac, two more iPhones, and a new iPad
Looking at some of the early problems with the Surface Book, I'm worried microsoft is going to drive more users away.
Apple really needs an heavyweight competitor that can challenge them in terms of design and innovation, otherwise they will get complacent (IMHO they already are, to an extent).
The pro 1 came out only a just few short years ago, and they wrote down a lot of that product.
It's really weird to say this about the guys who once were called the Borg, but I have faith in their design team.
Sadly they seem to be creating an expectation that one should wait for the 3rd device in a series.
From a business perspective - the end result is the same. Whether you wait for Steve to stop barking say 'ship it'. Or you ship when it's 'good enough. Apple knew where the hockey puck was heading as early as the mid 90's [1] and could probably have shipped something better than the Newton but before the iPhone. They were touch and go there for a while.
Microsoft can afford to ship first and ask questions later. The end result in terms of getting the product right within a given timeframe is the same.
Their modus operandi has always been to throw stuff out there, and then if it seems to be finding a market iterate on it until it doesn't suck anymore. So in that respect Surface is just continuing the grand tradition.
Microsoft really need to pick a differentiator and advertise on that basis. Maybe two for the consumer/enterprise markets. For years the unofficial slogan was "Microsoft: because you have to use Word" or "because it's the only open games platform". Both have been badly eroded in the past decade.
I'd be amazed if I could get my rMBP (2015) to pull 15 hours though which seems like a fair comparison on most fronts, so I'm definitely impressed.
But it's also only claiming that battery life for "light usage", and so I suppose it depends on what that means.
People who pony up that kind of money for same software experience are brave in my view.
My favourite which I'm tempted to actually buy is http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00O636WJU , which costs ~£60 and comes with a year of Office 365 + terabyte cloud storage which also normally costs £60.
"The other half of the typical notebook interaction is done with the trackpad, and here Microsoft has delivered one of the best trackpads on any Windows PC."
"With that one quirk aside, anyone who uses a Surface Book is likely going to be very happy with the trackpad experience."
"The surface is glass, which makes it very smooth and easy to glide your finger over."
Good:
* The build quality is stellar.
* Having the CPU in the screen means the keyboard never gets uncomfortably hot, even when running games. Very comfortable.
* Pretty fast CPU.
* The SSD is obscenely fast, I can get more than 1gb/s on sequential reads. Wish I got that kind of performance in my desktop.
* All the custom hardware integration (the latch, rotation, tablet mode, etc) is pretty robust.
* Good touchpad and pretty decent keyboard.
* Great battery life. When I'm reading ebooks or news I can easily get 5hrs out of the tablet; the laptop mode lasts way longer than that. The numbers in the Anandtech review are pretty representative. Playing Armello on the tablet gets a few hours battery life; I'd probably get 5+ using Steam In-home Streaming.
* When the fan is running (high cpu load, etc) it's very, very quiet. This is the quietest laptop I've ever owned.
* The external port dock is pretty convenient.
* The charging connector is magsafe-style and it's already saved me from a couple nasty incidents.
* You can charge the tablet by itself if you want to.
* The pen and digitizer are great. I have a pretty reasonable time doing web browsing, email and IM on the tablet using the pen to write. The quality of the pressure sensitivity and precision tracking on the pen is pretty good.
* The iGPU is actually (though still only somewhat) up to the challenge of driving the panel at full DPI. Past high-DPI laptops I've owned had Intel GPUs that were clearly not up to the task of compositing the whole screen at 60hz while rendering webpages.
* Considering the problems I've had with the device, Microsoft customer support has been helpful and responsive.
Bad:
* In general the Surface Book and its accessories are just too expensive.
* Intel's video drivers are a goddamn trainwreck. It's an embarrassment. I've had more BSODs (all in the Intel drivers) and TDRs (at least a dozen video driver resets) in the couple weeks I've owned this thing than I've had all year on my desktop. When you're using the NVIDIA GPU in the keyboard things are pretty solid, except that Intel's surface sharing implementation is also totally hosed so vsync doesn't work right. :(
* The WiFi drivers (and probably some other device - I haven't figured out how to profile windows user-mode drivers) are really terrible, they burn a ridiculous amount of CPU and cause latency spikes that make audio hitch. The ethernet in the port dock is fine, at least.
* The cable on the port dock is too short and it's actually quite inconvenient.
* The keyboard/tablet latch requires ever so slightly too much force to remove - It's pretty hard to do one-handed without lifting the whole device. (Very easy with two hands, though.)
* The Fn-lock setup on the keyboard is an annoyance (but not remotely as bad as past Microsoft keyboards with this design)
* Microsoft hosed palm detection for pen input in Win10 and it's a real annoyance. It's not as good as it was in 8.
* The touchpad drivers don't have adjustments for things like palm detection.
* The weight balance between keyboard/tablet is ever so slightly off, such that if you fully extend the screen it tilts backward a little. Not a problem when typing, but it makes me nervous :-)
I'm not complaining too much if only because when I bought it, a 17" i7/16GB/nVidia/1920x1080 laptop for under a grand was a great deal of power for the cost (and it's only a backup machine for occasional use at events) but man...it's the one thing that's been a pain since I got the thing. Additionally I was bummed to learn that even with the dGPU forced on, it doesn't play well with my Oculus dev unit but I didn't know the requirements when I bought the notebook so that's just hindsight. Usually I just force the dGPU and leave it plugged in whenever humanly possible.
What you mean by that?
Whenever you hold the function key and hit another key while holding function, then release function it will stay in the mode you started in.
On the other hand, I'm not the sort of person who would buy a dedicated tablet otherwise. I can't stand owning a bunch of devices.
As a superlight-no compromise-unlimited budget laptop there was sony's z series, which I really miss. It had everything, including an RJ45 port, 4 cores i7, two SSDd in RAID and was significantly lighter than this thing (just over 1kg). The only thing it didn't have is good speakers.
I see people in meetings sitting there and jotting away in OneNote all the time. It is very useful when you project one and then use OneNote as a "whiteboard" of sorts.
I enjoyed using the iPad as a tablet for watching videos or casual web browsing (typing in URLs or searches on an onscreen keyboard is OK), but found the keyboards available to be utter crap.
The Surface works great as a tablet and the keyboard is great on flat surfaces -- I can use it on a train or plane with fold-town tables, no problem. But if I am lying on the couch and try to type on the keyboard, my belly is too jiggly and does not provide an adequate surface. I am hopeful that (once the software bugs are ironed out) the Surface Book will work in that use case, while still being tiny and tablet-like.
Could I just use a laptop sometimes and a tablet sometimes? Sure, but then I'd have to have two devices I carry around instead of one.
I won't buy any MS devices though because they are incredibly buggy (in my experience). I have a surface and it has so many irritating bugs (mostly related to power management) that I hate it now. Many of the surfaces in the MS store were unusable due to various bugs. I know people bang on them hard in the store, but I never ran into a macbook in an apple store that didn't work as expected.