Microsoft Surface Studio
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The screen. Clearly that is the thing which makes this announcement. For me, the 3:2 aspect ratio is so more reasonable for computers than 16:9. And having a zillion pixels is wonderful although my CAD package (TurboCAD) still doesn't deal well with the high DPI screen off the Surface Book, I'm sure it would look silly on this machine.
My experience with the Surface Book tells me that the PixelSense technology is really great for drawing. I have both it and the iPad Pro and not too surprising, at twice the cost, in my opinion the Surface Book's drawing experience is better than the iPad's. I base that opinion on precision of the drawing, expressiveness, and the response time.
Touch. Microsoft is really doubling down on the whole touching thing and so far Apple has stayed away from it with its compute platforms. That is both a strength and a weakness. The rest of the ecosystem doesn't always understand what to do, so you get controls that are too small to use your finger on sometimes, and odd sort of multi-monitor experiences where things appear on one screen and then when you resize them they jump to the other and try to adjust for "touchiness".
If the tools people can get their act together, and by that I mean the designer tools (I for one would love to see a schematic capture and board layout system that was touch enabled and pen enabled) then I think it is only good news for Microsoft, if they can't, then Apple will look really smart at not adopting a "gimmick".
Either way these things are hugely fun to use and play with.
Monitors were always 16:10 or 5:4 to allow for a task bar.
Then LCD makers didn't want to make separate panels and console gaming as well as later on streaming solidified the 16:9 home entertainment AR as the defacto standard for computer monitors.
I love the 1400*1050 screen on my old T61 and I wish there would be still notebooks with this aspect ratio.
It may interest you to know that there is a reasonably priced 1:1 aspect ratio monitor available for purchase on amazon:
EIZO FlexScan EV2730QFX 26.5" Square IPS Monitor 1920x1920 (EV2730QFX-BK)
I bought one to tinker with.
Do you know what 1:1 ratio monitors (almost exclusively used for air traffic control) cost ? I think $8-10k IIRC ?
(really, I'm only slightly annoyed because I'd love to have a bunch of those on the walls as picture frames, but can't afford it)
I prototyped some of that with a mimo 10" touchscreen[1] but in my vision touching a control on the 'ribbon' screen doesn't steal the mouse pointer :-). I've been playing lately with some ST Micro 32 bit parts that can drive a display and use BT LE to communicate back to the PC. It may be possible to "download" control panels to the screen and then get the feedback through a BTLE handler rather than trying so somehow hook the event handler of a standard App and have it take control selection events from this screen/non-screen entity.
So if you find a long and narrow high DPI screen, DVI, MPI, or even VGA driven would be ok. And a capacitive touch layer, I'd love to get one of those to play with.
[1] https://www.mimomonitors.com/collections/10-inch-monitors
NEC has a fairly inexpensive one that you can buy on amazon for $675[1]:
Nec Display Multisync X431bt Digital Signage Display
... however the resolution is relatively low - 1920x480
There are others that are in the 4k range but I can't find the link right now ...
[1] http://www.necdisplay.com/p/large-screen-displays/x431bt?typ...
LiteMax and their spanpixel line of panels:
http://www.litemax.com/en/product/category/Spanpixel/22
I see smaller (15 and 19 inch) displays as well as the "smart shelf" displays.
Here is a 3840x536 display @ 43.5", which is the one I am interested in:
Glad I could help :)
http://www.litemax.com/en/product/category/Resizing%20LCD/22
it appears that they are cutting up existing LCD panels up to make these screens ...
It's still an order of magnitude less than doing that with 2048x2048 ATC displays...
Maybe we could do a Kickstarter or something to make a batch of 1920x1920 screens. Maybe we can even start a fashion - square is the new widescreen.
And hybrid drives!? This thing starts at $2,199 and you can't even get a full SSD? I know 2D designers probably won't mind the GPU, but they could definitely benefit from a true SSD.
Hell, the recently announced Razer Blade Pro has top of the line everything (including a desktop GTX 1080 GPU, 1TB SSD, and 4K screen suitable for photo/video editing) and it still costs less than the 980M Surface Studio: https://www.wired.com/2016/10/razer-blade-pro-laptop/
I must be missing the value proposition here because that price seems absurd, especially for a computer presumably geared towards professionals.
The screen.
Why chain it to mediocre, non-upgradeable hardware?
Then you're not the target market.
What's more, when we're talking about the professional space it's like... it's quite normal to NOT have hyper-upgradable boxes with cutting edge hardware that isn't well supported by the current crop of editing tools. Cutting edge hardware is the product of Dentists and Software Engineers who fancy themselves a member of that space even though they're really not. Not unlike how professional photographers almost never ride the latest model release.
It seems like a lot of people here are thinking of this as a recreational gaming box for rich people. Surface machines in general perform poorly there.
Works for Apple. Seems to be working so far for the "Smart TV" market.
I don't get it myself, but then I have not owned a completely "new" desktop in over 15 years, even though my desktop PC is full of modern components (and I'm fairly sure at this point, not a single piece that was in the original is left, including the case).
I'm not the type of person who thinks "Hm, I need more disk space. Guess I better throw out my PC, monitor and keyboard and buy a completely new system." but I think this is aimed at the segment of the market that thinks that way, or at least is willing to in order to get the new input/interaction features.
They probably went with the hybrid storage since PSD / illustration files take up an enormous amount of space. Unfortunately there's no such thing as git for design. The SSD would be appreciated, but once Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator is opened, SSD makes little difference.
From a feature aspect the surface dial seems pretty amazing. Ill be interested in trying it out at the store. The ability to go from desktop to working directly on it is also incredible. Cintiqs take up a lot of space...
Tying it to the computer allows them to control the entire user experience including adding specialized software to take advantage of such an interesting screen. There is a reason Apple owns the full stack and why Microsoft and Google are trying to get into that space: it offers the best UX and ROI.
They don't need a breakneck GPU - they need a device like this that gives them new, intuitive input options.
That said, for any kind of 3D development this hardware isn't up to snuff. Anyway, the device seems more targeted at 2D graphic designers.
It's misplaced priorities due to lack of knowledge, not that they don't benefit from high-end hardware.
So, yes, you can get two, even three iMacs for the price of a Surface Studio, but the specs will be nowhere near the same between the two.
I've said this in this tread before - you don't dump 4k$ on a desktop for mobile performance - when you spend that kind of cash you probably really need a high end workstation - think of the mac pro use case - and this device doesn't cut it as that.
But trying to draw on an 1200 dpi A3 canvas (unsurprisingly) doesn't really work very well. But if I were to use it professionally, some of the things I'd want to do was draw high resolution A2 to A0 prints.
I've yet to play much with photoshop, so I'm not sure how well it handles a modest 20 megapixel image.
For me using Clip Studio Paint seems best so far, as it has dedicated tablet mode UI and is responsive enough, thought 1200 dpi A3 will might be too much for it at times.
Pure SSDs only shine for gaming and compiling, and much more for the former than the later.
A machine where you're constantly shuffling for space is no fun.
This looks like an amazing experience, I'm just worried about performance in my workflow. That said, the future is bright.
The SSD impacts every single aspect of computer performance - from startup times, to application start times, to swap space speed, to reducing times when the computer is locked up loading from disk.
And these days, a 1 TB SSD can be had for around $300 USD - at which point, there is no obvious need for shuffling for space. Of course, if you are needing the 3 TB drives for video editing, that's fine. The surface studio specs say 1TB or 2TB - so even at such a high price, I find it really disappointing that it's not offering the 1 TB SSD (which is probably the first aftermarket change I would make if I bought one). For many 3D graphics pros, you would run the OS on a 512G SSD, and load the assets onto a larger 3TB hybrid drive or even better, a 10TB RAID array, for example, but you can't discount how much performance that SSD drive brings just for loading the OS and the software (Maya, or Adobe suite, etc)
Face it - any new machine today without an ssd is one where the manufacture is trying to claw back some profit.
This device has some pretty intense performance requirements for the form factor. Could we wait a bit for some hands-on with reviewers before saying MS botched it?
And yes the SSD's are not as fast as the latest m.2 drives, but are still miles ahead of any spinning drive. I'm not really sure what you are trying to say ... like a Ferrari is faster than a Tesla in Ludicrous mode, so ... go for an electric hybrid like a Toyota Prius? I know that the car analogy doesn't always work, but can you think about your reasoning? That a true M.2 SSD (which can be thousands of dollars) is faster than a last gen 1TB SSD in the 2.5 inch form factor, so therefore MS should use a spinning hybrid drive???
You can wait for a teardown, or you can use logic and common sense.
The only other choice is for MS to use a non standard size spinning platter, maybe around the old Compact Flash drive size - but in that case, there is absolutely no point - they should have just gone straight to M.2, especially for something in that form factor.
To be honest, current generation hybrid drives pair up a really slow 5400 rpm drive with some flash. Now it can still get good performance, but in the end, you're dealing with a hard drive from a few generations ago. Seagate had 7200rpm hybrid drives last generation, but they recently changed to 5400 rpm drives, which makes the drive kinda slow, even with the flash addition.
Microsoft may certainly have gone custom with custom parts, but I don't think they have the volume, even in the wildest expectations, to go against the now popular ssd juggernaunt that is overtaking all of the slim laptop (Apple, Lenovo, Dell, Razer, etc), small form factor embedded pc, and high performance pc space - for good reason. It just makes sense, the parts are really widely available, and people are expecting that type of performance.
Microsoft has a lot of money, but I'm not sure that's where they should spend their money. An SSD in m.2 size is expensive, but less expensive than getting all custom gear.
This is about thinking things through ....
The logical thing is to have a 512G M.2 nvme paired up with a 2TB regular spinning drive (at 2.5") and calling it a day.
That's I would go with for a deluxe, small form factor, graphics pro oriented machine. That's the sweet spot. And it's really easy to build with off the shelf parts like the Intel NUC as a base.
I am no longer a professional (as in, primary income) photographer, but I was and trying to keep all my work on the "right" drive was about as fun as weddings.
Btw sorry I said 2.5gb but that was mobile correcting 2.5in.
I'm not arguing for abstract systems, but for that specific build that Microsoft has put together - in that form factor, a hybrid drive takes up too much space and they are not offering 3TB+ versions where the hybrid drive would excel.
I'm criticizing that specific assembly of parts.
It's not. It's really not. There is no damn room.
It's the same with the MBA, it's the same with the Surface 4 and Surface. Hell, it's the same with every all-in-one now.
I'm trying to take you seriously here but you keep repeating this line that makes it sound like you have some deep and clever insight into a machine the press has barely touched, let alone teardown specialists. You're mad because it's not a full SSD on principle but you have no idea what the hot set size of the hybrid is. You've got a bone to pick with performance but Surface devices have always been forced to use custom configurations of hardware (e.g., every Surface Book has an unusual configuration of their video card that gives substantially better performance).
I think you're arguing based on theoretical specs and without knowing the domain. Unless you're an ex-Surface engineer with special insight, I don't see why anyone here should trust you about this given how you insist this is all stock parts and it's trivially verifiable that that's not the case.
http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/pc-components/storag...
Hybrids are totally fine in a great majority of use cases. For this price I agree you might as well have thrown one in, but still, performance difference will be neglible.
As a dev I run an ssd because ides are shitty bloated awful pieces of crap (all of them tbh) they don't know how to run in memory and always spend time on file io.
Adobe CS suite ... that's a load of hot steaming garbage when you try to load it up.
They are one of the really bad culprits causing designers and graphics pro's to need fast SSD's.
Think having multiple copes of IntelliJ IDEA AND Eclipse running at the same time, and being saddled with poorly optimized code paths. (Because designers often need to run Photoshop and Illustrator, and sometimes Premiere as well for example, simultaneously)
In fact, I think photoshop on a code quality level (loading, optimizations) is worse than Eclipse by a factor of 2. Designers have been getting around this by throwing brute force processing power, gpu, and SSD's at it.
The image processing algorithms are top notch, that's why people buy it - but everything around it ... the ui, widgets, update framework, a ton of it is creaking old and really poorly maintained.
SSDs (and preferably PCIe or NVMe) should be table stakes at a $2k price.
A lot of people here are talking as if they've actually tested these hybrid drives and found them wanting. Hybrid drives have an SSD-like component so as long as your working set fits in those and is relatively predictable, the performance difference is not noticeable.
Says everyone that is still paying full price for a 3 year old MacBook Pro....
Not to say that Photoshop / Illustrator aren't being used. Sketch is also more beginner friendly.
Doing video editing, 3D at that resolution, VR, etc. are the kind of workloads you need a desktop machine for - this doesn't cut it.
This is in the price range of Mac Pro, you need to justify spending 3 or 4k $ on this machine - and it doesn't cover the Mac Pro use case at all. For the price of this machine you can buy a high end laptop that beats this on specs and utility (because it's portable) and a high end screen.
I mean I like the device and the screen - but no way in hell am I paying 4k$ for something that's outdated out of the factory - maybe on the next update.
I did graphic work for many years and have worked with dozens of designers. None of them have ever been worried about specs. In fact the only person who even asked about them wanted a high end laptop so he could play video games on it at home.
I am unconvinced designers care about specs unless they're working on something specific that requires very high performance (which the majority would NOT be doing).
Whilst I'd like to have the absolute latest, cutting edge GPU from AMD/NVIDIA I also appreciate that sometimes last gen parts are cheaper, more reliable (having benefitted from refinement over the manufacturing run) and sometimes cooler running than what's new. I use a Mac (for the forseeable) because I'm quite happy to spend quite a bit extra on form and function over just absolute function.
I'm not the only one, just look at Apple's bottom line.
I think what Microsoft are doing here are going after Apple's (previously) target market, the so called pro user. Windows has typically been a value proposition so it will take them time and clearly ruffle the feathers of those who've built their own PCs and put Windows on top (I for one do that on my gaming PC).
This is not a gaming PC. It's aimed at the iMac crowd. Apple's alienating a lot of professionals who value form and function by focusing on purely form and I think props should go to Microsoft for being the only company (as far as I can see) who is not copying Apple and producing some incredibly innovative new form factors in a very staid sector - the pro workstation.
iMac crowd is dropping half of that for a pretty desktop that runs fine - I can see that. I don't see a lot of people buying a 4k$ device because it looks pretty. At that price range I need to be able to use it at least two years down the road and this is already outdated before release. It's just priced waay too high considering how weak the HW is, I would definitely skip this until they do a hardware update.
The problem is that it's not really that big a market. This machine is too expensive for general use, and has the disadvantage of Windows for professional use.
I think a lot of designers are going to be interested enough to look at it, but sales aren't going to be anywhere near iMac volumes.
And sensible people will wait for the inevitable reports of serious flaws. (As I've said before, I have absolutely no confidence that MS can execute competently in the consumer market. I wish that was simple prejudice, but it's actually years of bitter experience.)
I considered that too, that the market might be too small. Dell tried themselves to crack this market with some exquisite kit a few years back (see my links below). Sadly they canned those products and haven't revisited the market.
Whilst there has always been premium Apple kit, there's never really been premium Windows kit. I really do hope Microsoft persever and don't give up on this segment of the market. The first few years can be painful when pivoting but customers do sometimes reward patience.
> As I've said before, I have absolutely no confidence that MS can execute competently in the consumer market. I wish that was simple prejudice, but it's actually years of bitter experience.
Agreed! But I do recall the 90s when people said the same thing about Apple...
No company stays on top (or bottom) of the pile forever. I for one hope and look forward to Microsoft evolving and changing, as they must.
Dell Crystal monitor: http://www1.la.dell.com/vc/en/corp/peripherals/monitor_22cry...
Dell Adamo notebook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Adamo
"I am intimately familiar with how it feels to create things on these sorts of devices and the Studio honestly feels like a generational leap forward. If you are a digital artist and you are currently working on a Cintiq you have to go to a MS store and look at the Studio. I’ve always given you my honest take on this stuff and this time is no different even though I can’t think of anything bad to say. If you draw on computers the Surface Studio is something very special."
If you are concerned with graphics performance, you are not their target market.
I haven't really spent much time with nTrig based Surface models, but the Wacom in my Surface Pro 1 really sucks at the edges.
The closest responsive touch screen you can buy today is a 27" Wacom Cintiq, which is $2,299 without a computer, and both lower-resolution (2560x1440 vs 4500x3000) and smaller (27" vs 28") than the Surface Studio.
So if you assume that about $2,300 of the device's costs go to the display and touch screen, you're paying ~$700 for the actual machine driving that display, which isn't a great value, but isn't bad at all.
A terrible value for people who aren't interested in the display, but not bad for people who are.
I believe it's designed to let you use your Surface as an external monitor with pen/touch support for another Windows 10 PC.
~$700 gets you a pretty basic computer with 965m, you can build a desktop with gtx 1070 for 700$ to power a wacom display. And you will be able to upgrade it in the future, with Studio you are stuck with a 965m for $3000. And if you are getting a 980m for $4200 that leaves you with a $1900 to build a computer for Wacom, which can be way more powerful than 980m...
I think Microsoft should have sell that monitor by itself, but I guess this way they could not shovel win10 updates down your throat so it is not a good option for them...
= 4-5000, with a shitty box and shitty experience and you get none of the engineering that went into the product.
Plz continue dreaming up dev boxes that only devs could love. Feel free to throw in some glowing cold cathode lights, too.
Core i7 PC with Gtx 1080: ~$1750 [2]
= $4050 for a much more powerful machine and $150 cheaper + upgradable
[1] - https://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=&sku=1113...
Also I did not see any mention of pressure sensitivity on that Studio panel, if it does not have it - it's a major point to still choose Wacom.
In before Google releases the "Google Cardboard Surface Studio edition" xD
This is non touch version. Pen + Touch is $2800 which is a better comparison. That Cintiq is 2560x1440 compared to 4500x3000 in Surface Studio.
and here is what someone who actually used both thinks about it:
"Tycho asked me to compare it to my Cintiq, and I told him that drawing on the Cintiq now felt like drawing on a piece of dirty plexiglass hovering over a CRT monitor from 1997"
https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2016/10/26/the-surfac...
I have no idea what do you mean - I've been assembling my own workstation for last 20 years now thank you there is no magic involved in building a nice system. And I don't enjoy glow lights in my case. If you think people will buy 4k$ system just for looks you have to be kidding me.
I'm kind of confused here. You specifically don't have to look at your (other) monitor when using the cintiq, because the cintiq is also a monitor.
Isn't that also true for pretty much every computer except Apple's?
I'm not familiar with latest prices in the US but I would say $700 gets you more something like an i5 + GTX1060 (and it has a much larger form-factor and you have to build it yourself, so probably it's not a fair comparison), but yeah the 1060 or even the new (and cheap) 1050 are still much better than the 965m
EDIT: NewEgg has this one that is prebuilt, 1060+i5, but it's a bit more than $700 (normal price $829, now on sale at $749) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883230... so yeah, to get it within a $700 budget you would probably have to self-build.
I'd buy that monitor.
The easy way to shovel Windows 10 updates would be to make the product only compatible with Windows 10.
As someone owning a full tower I don't think it's wise to cram all that desktop power in a stupidly small box, it's really adding cost and heat for the sake of looking good at the expense of performance, but that's what MS chose to do so comparisons should be kept fair. (I wouldn't buy the Studio for this very reason though, only the display itself).
On slow strokes, you can the tracking between key points looses accuracy as if the signal between points becomes weak.
I have tried everything I can to correct the issue like changing the stylus battery, 100 point calibration and driver updates. I'm pretty much convinced that N-trig just cannot be compared with Wacom (even the iPad Pro does a better job)
However, there are programs (ClipPaint and Mischief are my prime examples) have built-in mouse smoothing which greatly reduces the jitter but means the drawing action lags behind by a second or so.
As for the rest of it, no designer cares about previous gen stuff - if they didn't they wouldn't have gone to macs in the first place.
Re: price - I'm thinking the digitizer and screen is the whole reason for the price. It would be good if the box could be updated while keeping the screen.
Courage.
$2,799.95 https://www.amazon.com/Wacom-Cintiq-27QHD-Creative-Display/d...
It protects from toolbars, addons and other bundlewares of free software.
It is no longer the platform of choice for creative content creation.
Plus most of the interface feels unnatural to use, at least for Apple Music and the Store.
Indeed. iTunes has become so bad I bit the bullet and signed up for Roon - despite its eye watering price. It's a vastly better (and of course in some other ways inferior) alternative.
One thing which I like about Roon and indeed a lot of 3rd party software from smaller companies is that I can talk to the devs and product managers on the community forums and find out where the product is headed or make suggestions and get feedback.
As far as iTunes goes, I have no idea where in the hell it's going. It went from a music manager to an eBooks platform, an App Store and now a Spotify clone.
Good time to be a software company specialising in catering to the disgruntled user who wants something a little more sophisticated than what Apple's currently selling.
Not sure if anyone listened to Satya's closing comments but they sounds eerily similar to something Jobs would say.
Either way, good for Microsoft on putting out a product for the high end creative segment.
XCode & iOS development is going to keep me on Apple for now, though, but the Linux subsystem for Windows is really appealing. The BSD Unix environment is the whole reason I went with Apple in the first place. OS X is basically a Unix workstation & perfected anything the Linux desktop wanted to be.
Surprised MS went with nVidia 980s instead of 1080s, & Win 10 still a little clunky compared to OS X.
It's not even 980, its 980m which is significantly slower than 980, nevermind 1080. And the 980m only comes in the $4199 option, that's ridiculous...
iMacs and Macbook Pros (top of the line 15-inch with dGPU) have always used mobile GPUs. Also, illustrators/designers don't need dGPUs. That's why the designers/illustrators at hte tech companies that you work at can use macbook 13 inch laptops and 15-inch laptops without the dGPUs
In theory. To anyone who feels that way, please try it out for yourself before making a leap. I thought it would let me develop Ruby on Rails under Windows like I could do on Linux or macOS. I discovered a whole bunch of unimplemented features that prevented this. After a couple of months of commenting on bug reports and watching and trying, I gave up. I'll check back later. YMMV.
As for soft links, a lot of linux tools create soft links (ln -s from to) and generally that fails on NTFS (I tried installing a bunch of npm modules and all had this specific issue)[1].
[0] - https://mspoweruser.com/ntfs-260-character-windows-10/
[1] - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8232778/nodejs-npm-insta...
With respect to symlinks - NTFS supports them, but there are subtle semantic differences with POSIX. WSL does actually support symlinks (i.e. you can do ln -s), it's various other behavior around them that breaks, like trying to untar a file that contains symlinks.
The team said that they're working on a custom implementation of symlinks that would provide proper behavior (but wouldn't be seen as a symlink from Win32).
Now, Microsoft should be in a position to put something better into their WSL, but that might entail the risk that someone else will hack that implementation and provide good drivers for everyone, something they clearly don't want (or they would have provided open specs for NTFS support by now).
So there's no ext4 driver, and no concept of loopback mounts.
I see that there's considerable demand for this exact thing in their bug tracker already. If they go for a low-hanging fruit here, it'd be FUSE support - and that should give us ext2, at least.
I'd be very interested in a blog post about your problems and I don't think I'm alone.
I couldn't cross compile simple toy kernel (xv6) in OS X (because I needed to have i386-elf-gcc, which need to compile whole binutils , which really cumbersome, and brew doesn't support it -as far as I looked into it ) but in BashOnWindows , it just works, it maybe a little slow (specially file system operations) but it works like charm. I actually tried to compile linux kernel and running it on qemu, It worked, but compilation (which is a lot of file system operation) was so slow it hadn't worth it.
Nadella (MS CEO) aimed perfectly, instead of introducing some limited amount of support for linux apps, his company tries to port whole ubuntu user space. After this project matures enough, rest assured, it will be equivalent of using linux workstation (which is dream of most developers).
> After this project matures enough, rest assured, it will be equivalent of using linux workstation
Didn't Microsoft say WSL wouldn't support graphical apps? That's a big portion of userspace; and without that, it simply can't be a linux workstation
When it works, it's great, but some things just don't work and you're stuck.
I've found the WSL devs to be fairly responsive, but not to everything.
However, I've found open source projects to be pretty responsive to bug reports of their projects running on WSL; it's far easier for them to support that than support a native windows build.
There are often workarounds for issues, but their coverage is certainly not where we would all like it to be yet.
I'm not very familiar with OSX, but I'd be surprised if there weren't differences between it and mainline Linux that needed special care and I see this as similar.
Despite being a software company (or because of it), I think innovating on the internals of Windows and its APIs and cleaning house on the software front will be the real challenge for them - making incredibly beautiful hardware might prove to be the easy part!
Exactly. How do they not know this ? Or, why do they not care ?
There is one big huge reason that "smart people" switched to OSX and the computers that ran it and that institutional knowledge appears to have evaporated at Apple.
When you know your core, core base is here for the UNIX, you don't take away the escape key ... or keep breaking and re-breaking crontab ... or introduce the weird-stuff-I-can't-do-even-as-root.
I thought nobody anymore believed in this after the first versions came out and people actually had a chance to try it in action. There are endless amounts of bugs, unimplemented features, complications between 2 filesystems, permissions, applications etc.
When MS announced this I was pretty hopeful. Not that I would change my dev-computer from way superior macOS to Windows, but that when I'm at home gaming on my Windows PC and I get some cool idea, I could do some small development or create simple prototypes without changing from my desktop to my laptop. After trying it out for real I don't belive anymore this "linux" subsystem thingy is ever going to be anything more than niche PoC.
Unless you need to pass a directory path.
Windows NT has done a good job supporting multiple APIs/subsystems in the past. Windows NT for example does a perfectly good job with the Win32 subsystem - software targeting Win32 for '95, '98, etc. still works on Windows 10, perfectly, despite being a totally different kernel.
People don't buy Macs because they work well with an iPhone as far as I can tell. They buy Macs for all sorts of other reasons, but that doesn't seem to be one of them.
Every corporate office in the world is running Windows. I'm pretty sure people are going to continue buying whatever they use at work, so unfortunately for HN, Windows is here to stay...(sorry!)
While many companies do use Windows, many others do not, including some very large ones. You think they are using Windows at Apple? That's the world's most valuable company and they have 70000 employees. What about Google? It's another huge company with tens of thousands of employees and you have to beg for permission to run Windows there, and very few do so.
I think Windows has a lock on mid-sized businesses that are large enough to have serious information management challenges, but aren't big enough to solve them. Outside of that zone it is by no means universal.
I'd say that outside of your two examples, you'd be hard-pressed to find a Fortune 500 company that doesn't have >90% of its corporate fleet (not servers) being Windows boxes.
See: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/7/8/capitulation http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/11/7/mobile-ecosyste...
Any additional computer purchase is some kind of conscious choice, and people will default to what they are familiar with. I.e. iOS and Android. This is a big hurdle for microsoft to overcome to convince anyone to buy a computer from them. That's my point, and I think it will be very difficult for them to accomplish at scale.
1: https://affinity.serif.com/fr/windows/ 2: https://www.figma.com/downloads
That is what I came here to say (as a mac user who uses only apple computers, currently[1]).
See this animated gif from the article:
https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/kFQXkfWYVYCRnSfXpAhRBTVXH4M...
Now ... I don't know what that's about and I am pretty sure that's an action I will never use, but that's something new and interesting. That's innovation.
[1] 11" macbook air, mac mini HTPC and 2009 mac pro as primary desktop
Obviously video editors use them, but I know of professional photographers who find them really useful in moving through a catalogue while editing photos too.
Quick, someone page Apple because Mac sales are declining even faster than the market. Surely they have to do something, that's the only possible motivation /s
Their mistreatment, lack of support and quality assurance of the mobile side of the platform has been dismal. It's very weird, obviously they can do hardware, they have the ecosystem to back them up and the API teams have been doing some great stuff when it comes to w10, yet they've seemed to given up on mobile.
I must say I don't understand it, how can such a big player as Microsoft abandon such a strategic area of their ecosystem? I understand that it's hard to be a profitable in the harsh reality of consumer electronics and that the money is in business... but yet, if you're not in mobile you're leaving a gaping hole in your ecosystem that leaves the other parts vulnerable. I don't understand why they don't simple pour resources into mobile with the same enthusiasm as tablets/laptops and gaming.
Something must be off with the leadership or I'm missing something
I think their strategy so far is good. Get Windows working well on various form factors, move from Desktops to Laptops to full PC tablets. With those in place, they'll see developers writing UWP apps that will work not only on big screens, but can be scaled to smaller screens, giving them the apps they need to move down into the small tablet and phone spaces.
I so wanted it but waited and waited for a waterproof Nokia and then ended with a Sony Z series and later a Samsung something waterproof flagship.
Others waited for instasnapsomething but I almost can't care less I think as long as the platdorm has a couple of good alternatives for notes and calendar + Whatsapp and Telegram.
Now I almost feel bad for not supporting them. Who would have thunk for someone who used to despise all their products until some 4 years ago :-/ (since early 2000s).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlpftPSuXe4
If they had managed to get something like that out that would have helped them a lot.
https://www.cnet.com/news/the-inside-story-of-how-microsoft-...
When you get down to it, at the more extreme ratios, split screen is just like a really, really tall phone, and developers are used to dealing with tall UIs on short screens (scrolling).
OK, so they still had a long way to go before they displaced Android. But iOS only has ~30% of the market, and nobody is suggesting Apple give up on mobile because they're not the dominant player.
In the 90s, Microsoft were notorious for entering existing markets, usually with a substandard product, then grinding their way to a leading position. Even if it took years, even if they lost a lot of money at first, and even it took a few product cycles for them to become competitive, they stuck at it, and it eventually paid off.
This strategy worked for web browsers, office software, and console gaming. Would it have worked for smartphones? Maybe, maybe not. But I'd argue the signs were positive, and that they gave up before we really got a chance to see for sure. I mean, they've kept Bing alive for years, despite only having made minor headway against Google, and web search being a far less existentially vital market to them than operating systems.
Now, the problem with Microsoft's current strategy is that consumer IT is heading towards smartphones being the only device most people ever own or use. Desktops, laptops and tablets are becoming niche devices in comparison. It doesn't matter how great your UWP apps are if 90% the market doesn't own or use a device that can run them.
Bing is necessary for their AI efforts. They need the knowledge graph to back up everything their AI touches (Cortana, Office, probably LinkedIn soon).
Late? They were among the first. I also remember Danger OS. Oh - and the Palm Treo.
I don't buy that, despite how much I hear it. there are a few situations I'd agree that if you don't have the first-to-market advantage you're basically fucked (social networking being a prime one, any system where network effect dominates). And while people cite apps as being the "network-effect-esque" factor in this case, I'm not sure I buy that. Looking at data of how many people NEVER use a single app, how many domains/specialties could use a "professional" phone without a broad app base, how many niches are untapped (constant laments from myself and others about how there are no small, robust, non-feature-obsessed "working mans smartphone") I truly believe there are ways into the market that are just fine to grow a sufficiently profitable business if you're simply OK with not trying to be the next iPhone RIGHT NOW. Maybe this ties back into the whole "vc doesn't want companies that _just work_, they want growth" mindset, but I fundamentally reject that as a philosophy so perhaps I'll never see eye to eye with the decision makers in this case.
(to clarify something for responders, all of the above is aligned as well with the implicit statement that you can't let investment slack; because then you lose your grassroots/what little mindshare you could have had to grow, take the above as "why I think a company should continue investment even in the current scenario")
I can kinda understand them wanting to stay silent until they have something substantial to announce after the Nokia transition... but they've been too slow and have almost lost all the momentum they had. And again, I see now reason why they should be acting like this except for short term gain over long term strategic benefits.
But the market didn't seem to care -- at least, not enough to justify Microsoft's spending. Perhaps now is different than 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015. But it sure feels like Microsoft already did exactly what your asking for, for many years before giving up.
Disclaimer: not a Microsoft employee, but owned and used a LG Quantum, Dell Venue Pro, HTC 8X, Lumia 900, and a Lumia 640.
I would emphasize my point re: less viable competition for the niche I'm describing though, since as you say "perhaps now is different"; I'm certainly having a much harder time finding my next phone upgrade that fits my criteria now than I felt like I had in 2009~ and in 2012~.
People were excited about it, it was making forward/upward progress for a few years. Microsoft bought Nokia, and people got even more excited.
Then what happened? Years passed with no flagship phone, literally no reason from me to move on from my Nokia 1020 because there was no hardware to move to. Then they announce that older models weren't getting the Windows 10 update, which was another nail in the coffin (not to mention a big "fuck you" to the fans that have stuck with Windows Phone this long). Now we're hearing basically... nothing at all about anything.
I loved Windows Phone 7 on my HTC Titan II, and I love Windows Phone 8 on my Nokia 1020. But unless a really killer new phone is in stores before January 1st, there's basically no way I can stick with Windows Phone for my next phone.
You've inflicted too many false starts, bad products, update nightmares, u-turns, and unplanned obsolescences on the consumer market.
MS as a consumer brand has mostly negative/indifferent associations. You could build the best product in the world, but unless you can sell it in reasonable quantities and prove you're committed to supporting consumers no one - literally - will be buying it.
My experience of MS is that MS products are always broken in major ways. This has been true from MS-DOS onwards.
The most recent example: I've been using Office 365 on the Mac for more than a year, and there hasn't been a single release that doesn't have at least a couple of obvious problems.
Right now I'm looking at a handful of Word windows that are supposed be that corporate MS gray-blue, but which have random bright red corruption in the title bar.
I mean - how do you even do that? How do you, as a multibillion dollar company, have such amateurish QA that you can't produce a flagship business and consumer product without these kinds of spectacularly stupid bugs?
Very simply, incentives are not aligned to produce the results you seek. There is some writing that explains the dynamic far better than I can (would heavily recommend Dan Luu's writing, especially normalization of deviance) if you want a window into some of the pathologies.
I can promise that engineers are "fighting the good fight", and I would encourage you to keep calling out when shit is broken despite the negative reception. This is one of the few paths I see to getting the needed alignment of goals to actually start internally prioritizing the stuff you call out.
(Aptly to this topic, I really loved the "errorsazurethrows" blog, it was a moment of brilliant vindication for someone who has both liked the underlying platform but railed against its often esoteric error/failure cases after years of having to use it as a primary tool)
But companies are not people and we can't trust them as such, the larger the company the more that's the case. It's naive, unfortunately , to think differently.
Microsoft has taken some of the wrong lessons from Google though, between forcing cumulative updates and collecting telemetry data. I really hope they figure out that they're losing out there. Being able to claim how many million minutes people were using Edge isn't worth losing so much customer trust.
Well, Microsoft is actively chasing consumers away. Proof: reneging on OneDrive offer to Lumia phone buyers, current lineup of two phones nearing end of production.
They want to be Oracle in place of ORCL, milking those big fat enterprise cows, and the stock market is nodding approvingly.
Good luck, godspeed, and thanks for the nice phones. Didn't last long, but was OK while it did. Designers never got any props, too.
10 years ago there where a number of articles about how MySpace won the social media war. The current king of that particular hill did not have first to market advantage. Your argument is invalid.
http://www.devlounge.net/webapps/why-myspace-won-the-social-...
I'd argue myspace is a perfect example of this, largely due to when you look at when it was finally dethroned, it was VERY sudden, and came after years of the platform languishing from a user point of view. It took a hell of a lot of pain to push myspace past the point where the network effect could be overcome.
Windows 10 Mobile currently does have all the apps I need, but it seems very few people are willing to give up Google's apps (particularly Gmail and YouTube) to switch, and Google refuses to allow another competitor into the mobile space. As long as Google's monopoly persists, they'll decide who has a successful mobile platform.
For example, I cannot get around without using Uber and Lyft. I need to carry a phone on me with these apps at all times. Windows doesn't support either of them, so I can't use a Windows phone until it does.
I'd love to use Windows on a phone -- I'm actually starting to fall in love with the new MS -- but I simply can't.
And it's not "Windows doesn't support either". It's "They don't support Windows". The platform does not have to do anything to support them, they need to choose to make apps for the platform. ;)
As it stands right now, I can fire up Visual Studio and write a UWP app that'll run on phone, tablet, and desktop.
The problem is that hardly anyone is using Windows Phones, and the smartphone market is one that MS hasn't had much luck with. Maybe the rumored Surface Phone will help if it ever materializes, but I'm skeptical.
I was looking around for netbooks on the 300 € price range, on the shops around me they are all tablets with detachable keyboards running Windows 10.
Besides the Apple section with the iPad Pro, there were almost no hybrid notebooks with Android on sale besides a few Samsung models, all the other ones have been wiped out by such Windows 10 devices.
When I think of something that has a web browser and a keyboard, the low end of the market seems to be the current crop of Chromebooks, and schools seem to agree - they've been phenomenally popular in education.
Typical Win10 netbooks don't have a lot of CPU+GPU grunt, so it doesn't seem to me (maybe you'll correct me) like they'd be very good for running most Windows apps.
Is this a big market?
I keep seeing references how the low end is using Chromebooks, but that seems to be an US phenomenon.
Here in Europe on the area where I live, I only ever seen Chromebooks on sale on a specific chain, and they are seldom there.
When they are, they always follow the pattern of being on sale with the usual Google price, people play with it, never being thrilled by it, the price slowly goes down every few weeks, it goes into shop "product of the day" offers, until eventually they get sold.
The market is the one of anyone that wants to use a tablet with keyboard, with a desktop experience when they need to.
Basically anyone that a few years ago would buy a netbook.
We don't use Chromebooks, but we don't end up using win10 netbooks either - it ends up being a combination of ipads and windows desktop PCs in classrooms.
I only saw them there, until they eventually get sold out on those campaigns where they put products on the containers at very discounted prices.
But I only saw this happening a couple of times.
I guess that makes sense, although I think we have a very different idea of what a "desktop experience" is.
Basically anyone that a few years ago would buy a netbook.
The conventional narrative is that tablets killed the eeepc/netbook. I didn't even know that this market still existed - I knew about Surface, but those start around the $900 mark.
* I don't think they call the netbooks anymore, but effectively that is what I consider the HP stream devices. 32GB of non-upgradable solid state storage is all they have, and near half that is the OS install.
They might need iTunes/Office/tax software/... in the future and Windows will have them covered, without buying another machine in the next 5-10 years. It's like a Swiss army knife for computing.
Right now you need to drop back to the "old" desktop file explorer (though ribbon seems to take some pain out of it once you bump the font size a bit), complete with all its UX gotchas thanks to the mouse assumptions.
This because UWP apps can only manipulate certain folders by default, and you have to authorize others (via the age old file picker dialog no less) manually. On top of that you can't launch a exe or similar from inside a UWP app.
But I am an edge case and broadly speaking, people want much more glamour from their mobile phones. At some point a few years ago, I think Windows Phone was up to about 5% share but it seemed Microsoft's work on mobile was put into slow motion. It's no wonder share has decreased since.
Continuum is a very good idea, but the progress on making it solid, reliable, and high-performance is astonishingly slow. I don't know the technical realities of the Broxton cancellation, but that really put a big kink in the notion of a real, solid Continuum experience. For the time being, it seems Microsoft is just hoping that HP can explore Continuum innovation with devices like the Elite x3. Virtually no one has even heard of an Elite x3.
Windows phone fans have been absolutely clamoring for an ultra-high spec glamorous phone. I think this is an artifact of everyone knowing one of the key drivers of phone adoption: make devices that catch other peoples' eyes and force them to ask, "What is that?" Word of mouth is a key part of adoption. I know when I purchased one of the first Lumia 920s (you might remember them as the very colorful Windows Phones from a few years back), many people would ask me about it. The 920 was hardly a success compared to iOS and Android, but it was probably the most successful Windows 8 phone, and I think that's in large part to it being something that people noticed.
Evangelists of the Windows platform have been eagerly awaiting a Surface Phone because they know it would be such a device. It would be a conversation starter. And frankly, despite it being a hard hill to climb, Microsoft hasn't been trying on mobile for years. They're not even interested in starting the conversation.
And that's a bit boggling and frustrating. I know several people bored of iOS, uninspired by the iPhone 7, and similarly disenchanted with Android devices. These people aren't vocalizing the words as such, but they are open to something new. If by some magic you could drop a Surface Phone onto the market with a rock solid Continuum experience, and put serious marketing effort into it, I think you could earn back that 5% share, and then work to grow from there.
Now W10/W10m is basically everything we want it to be, I mean there's some amazing stuff in the new API's and composition API stuff but no one is using them. Continuum in theory could be a game changer. The concept with tiles despite being several years old now is still something that feels fresh and ahead of the curve compared to iphone and android. but Microsoft can't launch and market a flagship phone that pulls everything together.
Just make one gret flagship phone that says "We're in it to win it" and a budget phone that'll mop up the budget/mid-tier. We'll see, maybe that's what they're working on but time is running out
Well the big obvious thing is that this shows how the efforts put into making the UWP truly Universal seem to be playing out. Certainly a lot updates and improvements benefit every device and the low overhead benefits a "low usage" platform like mobile.
That said, I'm still kind of weirdly optimistic and I think this quiet, continual improvement really is a good sign. I know some criticism existed that Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 and Windows 10 Mobile were "half-baked" early/at launch, and there's an interesting question about how much Microsoft just wants the platform to "catch up" and "feel solid" before a bigger marketing push.
For instance, one thing that I think has unfortunately been under-cooked has been Windows 10's efforts in the People hub, especially given where Windows 8.1 eventually built up to before some of it getting broken up in 10. The new "My People" functionalities shown at today's event seems to prove that a lot has been going on that space and is due for the Creators Update. I was hoping they'd at least give us a small glimpse of the mobile experience for it, but I realize the gee whiz factor of showing it off on a desktop taskbar.
There was a definite signal in Microsoft only using an HP mobile device on stage. Could be Microsoft is confident in deeper OEM support for Windows mobile devices.
Without the mobile operators pushing the platform in their stores, MS won't get any traction. And they aren't going to do that unless MS both fills the phone with bloatware, and makes the changes they demand.
As for their being a gaping hole in their ecosystem? How so? Their focus is on their cloud, they don't need to own the mobile device for their cloud to succeed. I would imagine 90%+ of the fortune 500 have iphones and droids happily grabbing email from office365 all day long.
I suspect the "Surface Phone" will be announced next spring, and I'm sure Panay and his hardware team will knock it out of the park, but without Windows 10 Mobile catching up there's no point in releasing it even if it's the greatest phone hardware ever created.
Once the proper software that can set Microsoft apart is in place, it will strike. The smartphone market is so saturated right now they could catch everyone off guard and make a dent.
One more thing, Microsoft will never be able to use the Google Play store unless they make an Android device that passes all of Google's requirements.
Other than games, what's the last interesting consumer-focused Windows application that's generated buzz and revenue for anybody but Microsoft?
Microsoft feels like they are headed out to the same (incredibly lucrative) pasture that IBM and Oracle inhabit.
However I think Microsoft has a lot of synergy good both on the gaming side with Xbox and on the business side with Office/Sharepoint/Outlook etc, not to mention that Windows still is the most popular OS.
Now I tend to agree with Nadella's "be everywhere"-strategy but that doesn't mean they can put everything into Microsoft services and software being the best on their own devices. I think the fact they're doing xbox games that are free to use on PC's is a good example of such synergy.
In the end selling hardware is never going to be what they earn money on, but rather they need to be a hardware actor so that they profit off their app store/software/services.
As for Microsoft "striking" when they get the software right - I couldn't tell if you were joking or not. There's nothing that Microsoft could ever announce that would ever make them relevant in mobile.
Whether they can successfully get mind / market share for mobile is probably another matter entirely, and I have no idea how that works.
Some random thoughts- for recent software development stuff, I have use of a iphone se / sony xcompact, and then I have my personal phone (lumia 950), so I think I can give a good cross-platform comparison for recent models of ios/android/windows.
1. Security / privacy: Lumia feels best for security then ios, don't feel that great about the android one, just based on reading the news. But you know, I guess the point of android is that you can root it and do crazy things if you are that kind of person - I personally used to enjoy this, but just prefer security recently. (Note that the fingerprint scanners on Sony / iphone are way more convenient than the iris scanner). See also point 4 w'r't' flashtool I had to use for android.
2. Ease of use: lumia is the easiest organization-wise, with the tiles, and I have trouble finding things on the other two- (screen size may play a factor)
3. Search: android (with homescreen search bar)/ lumia (cortana button) are about tied, se requires navigating to that left hand screen to search which takes a few more taps / swipes.
4. Configurability: for me this is somewhat backwards, although android is way more hackable / configurable, I actually like the Lumia's defaults, and the fact that I don't have to fiddle with them to get good results (e.g. it took me a while to find a good keyboard on android, including lots of installing / etc, and then find the right launcher, not to mention the incredible pain of installing UK firmware to get the fingerprint scanner working, which included downloading some sketchy flash program to my computer which I would normally never do). Ios also ok defaults, though I did spend a while trying to find a good keyboard (settled on wordflow lol).
5. Camera: megapixels actually matter- I can take a picture of mount Hood on both the Sony and Lumia and take one from the SE from the same location where it's completely impossible to see the mountain. Sony / Lumia about equivalent- I would say the sony has a 'tiny' bit more bright pictures, but I also have dropped the lumia in a river and the camera lense was all fogged at one point, so who knows if that had an effect.
6. Developers: Honestly I mainly use vs.code (react-native) for all of them and the experience is about equivalent. Maybe android gets a point since android studio works on both (edit: windows) / osx if I for some reason need to use it.
7. Maps: windows is a tiny bit more glitchy than the other two, but speed alerts make me prefer it (maybe there is a way in google/apple maps that I just need to fiddle around in some menus)
8. Apps: I'm not the best person to ask as I prefer browser for all things other than maybe enpass / skype / shazam / instagram / spotify which seem to be about equivalent on all- actually spotify is a bit smoother on android than the other two. There is one fitness app the iphone has that the other two don't have a good equivalent.
9. VPN (not sure if counts as apps or system function) but android / ios have apps for the VPN's I use while lumia does not (and I've only been able to get l2p working for these)- this surprises me, given that this is a business function.
10. Battery: (in use) xcompact + battery saver definitely wins here, iphone / lumia about tied. (Off battery saver, the xcompact is tied). However, the iphone definitely loses less battery overnight. I must note though, I've used the lumia battery far longer and more intensively at this point, and it is also replaceable compared to the other two.
11. Build quality: iphone obviously feels very premium with whatever material they use for the case. Lumia with plastic back feels more durable (indeed it has survived some abuse), also screen is beautiful. sony usb-c port already loose, but did buy it used.
12. Browser: overall I like edge navigation and browsing better (possibly an outlier that I use the swipe to go back), but certain transition effects (in web-pages I've created no less) do render noticeably better in chrome/safari: example, try something like a react animated side menu with a bounce effect.
As for the "how can they", the answer is remarkably simple: it's hurting their bottom line and there's no indication that a better strategy exists in the markets they're active in. If you don't understand why they don't just pour resources into mobile: resources are finite, and Microsoft is not the powerhouse it once was. Budget is allocated based on return of investment, why invest in a segment that you can see failing year over year. The best call is to wind it down and make new and exciting things that people didn't even know they wanted instead.
This new Surface Studio is a remarkably good step in that direction.
Anyways, I'm really glad where they're headed with the Surface Books/Studio. It's been a little slow getting the next generation of windows apps/store going and this is a step in the right direction
I think it's important to note the distinction that they are seemingly ignoring this generation of mobile. Windows Phone has been a disaster and not for lack of trying on their part. The phones themselves have been mostly solid but it's hard to overcome the ecosystem problem. That said with the moves Microsoft has made over the last few years they are well positioned to be a major player in whatever the next iteration of mobile is. We've seen companies become major players and then all but disappear in the 10 years since the first iPhone kicked off the smartphone revolution. It's not to think that crazy that Microsoft might leverage some of their new input device knowledge to craft some new device that allows them to be major players in Mobile 2.0 or whatever you want to call it. If you believe that the current state of mobile HCI is the zenith then yes you are right to be concerned. But if you think we are going to keep pushing pass the status quo then Microsoft is probably is good shape.
I think Windows Phone has been a disaster in many parts, but the actual ideas and UI has actually been one of the bright spots, especially considering iOs is still stuck in an icon springboard paradigm.
For sure it's a bloody fight but I don't think it's a battleground MS can surrender until the next thing comes around
However, the same problem that plagues the Mac App Store, UWP code is sandboxed in weird ways that make it hard to just recompile your existing IP into the new environment. Plus Microsoft developer relations pushed C# as the defacto way to write apps targeting the platform, something that doesn't scale when you also need to support Android and iOS.
As far as mobile's concerned, it was continuously mismanaged, release after release.
* First they paid Seattle contractors to rewrite top-tier iOS apps for the original Silverlight C# version of WP and then dumped the resulting code onto the companies hoping they would continue the effort. I took a look at that code at the startup I was at at the time, and it was a mess, full of proprietary dlls that we couldn't even inspect.
* Second, they moved the kernel to Windows NT-lite from CE, meaning all the early adopters essentially got fucked over and it crushed early momentum.
* Third, Microsoft would go a year before announcing relatively inconsequential updates. (Oh that's nice that the same software will run on 512mb devices, is that what you spent the entire year working on?)
* Fourth, updates never seemed to hit devices, and the only way to get updates was with actual firmware. Android solved this problem by moving most of the interesting bits to the Play store.
Ultimately for a platform in 3rd place, Microsoft never gave the impression they were busting their butts to catch up. Everything seemed to move at a glacial pace and felt like run by a tiny greenfield team.
Actually, our company has an Android and iOS App written in C# with a 80-90% shared Codebase using Xamarin. It has been pretty awesome so far.
Also .NET Core now runs on Mac and Linux for the server OS code written in C#.
Then if you add Unity supporting C# on top of that for game/dev and I really can say that we're in a cross-platform world now :). But I am a bit biased since I work on these teams.
I agree completely that a big problem was the constant reboots between Zune/silverlight/NT/Win10. They ended up where they needed to be but it certainly made things difficult for both developers and consumers, and lost them a lot of momentum
Supporting 512 mb devices was one of the biggest mistakes they ever made, the impact on that the development side was just devastating, for what, saving a couple of bucks in RAM memory?
I think it's hard to generalize the speed and pace of Windows Mobile overall, they put a lot of money and effort in it, and still is, but something definitively changed with the Nokia acquisition and/or Nadella taking over from Ballmer
As for updates I always got frequent updates (europe), the problem was more that their QA seemed substandard. Might be an american problem with providers like Verizon. They had an interesting strategy with their insider updates... which is nice in theory but it sometimes felt like they fired their QA team and put the burden of testing on their consumers, resulting in major bugs frequently getting through
Microsoft lost Billions in mobile and never were able to gain any traction with their platform. There comes a time when you need to stop the bleeding and move on. Only a fool would continue pumping resources and money into a venture which has never returned a profit or market share.
Though we'll never know for sure, there's some conjecture that that Intel's cancellation of the Broxton smartphone chip in May torpedoed MS's plans for an x86 Windows Phone this year.
5/3/2016 - "Late on Friday night, Intel snuck out the news that it’s bailing on the smartphone market. Despite being the world’s best known processor maker, Intel was only a bit player in the mobile space dominated by Qualcomm, Apple, and Samsung, and it finally chose to cut its losses and cancel its next planned chip, Broxton."
http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/3/11576216/intel-atom-smartph...
It even has a version of their ergonomic keyboards, something that I cannot really understand with Apple, how can one even manage to program in such flat keyboards.
Apple, one of the first companies to introduce ergonomic keyboards to the world.
Aren't keyboards that allow your hands to rest flat more ergonomic? I thought keyboards that slope upwards cause potentially harmful bending of the wrist?
You'll also notice that the keyboard's wave shape raises it in certain places to match the hands, this is to allow your wrists to relax more, because the karate chop position is neutral, whereas hands flat in front is actually using your muscles to hold that position - the slope helps to relieve this by allowing the wrists to be 30deg or so closer to neutral.
The split in the middle of the keyboard prevents the hands from having to pivot outwards at the wrists on the horizontal axis to align with a straight row of keys, again allowing them to remain in a neutral position instead because the two halves of the keyboard are aligned with the natural arc of your reach.
I've had "ergonomic mice" for a while before and, yes, they felt perfect in my hand. The issue is that I move the mouse with my fingers and not with the whole arm, so my palms stops touching their _oh so ergonomic surface_ pretty soon, defeating its purpose.
However I actually use a vertical mouse by Evoluent and in my opinion the vertical position is the real benefit. It really reduces wrist pain for me. However it still comes with the same limitations as any other non-Apple mouse: No touch scrolling, not even horizontal scrolling. Which is why I use a touchpad as well.
Product Page: https://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/Surface...
*Surface Dial included
edit: as pointed out below you do get a Surafce Dial with the purchase of the studio. I originally looked at the "what's included" section where the dial was not listed.
This really just shows you what a bargain the 5K iMac is.
Microsoft has plenty of partners to compete with the iMac. Now those partners can look into the Surface Studio as something to aspire to.
Not refuting your implication necessarily, but worth knowing their flagship (standard and high-end) devices have been 3:2.
Most games and movies are widescreen these days, and I see those as consumery activities. I think a significant amount of consumers would be annoyed by letterboxing in those use cases.
All the creative people I know said Cintiq set the bar, looks like MS is making a square aim at that market.
some artists just absolutely cannot get used to it and so moving off to surface is not something they can do yet.
that's just the value prop of cintiq. the display may be crap but the drawing experience is by far and away the best in its class.
However then I jump into the Microsoft store and check it out...
$4,199.00 for the high-end option gets you a hybrid drive, probably connected over an older SATA bus and a graphics card from last year? USB 3.0 only and no Thunderbolt?
Is this a system that was designed last year and it took a full year to get to production?
Sorry if I'm being bitchy, but to me this is typical Microsoft only going the 80%.
Definitely very expensive, but actually price-competitive vs alternatives.
I'd want a USB-C port before I'd want a thunderbolt port!
edit: if you asked me 5 years ago if I would ever be happy with Microsoft, I would have laughed.
This is highly subjective, but my experience running Windows on Mac hardware was that they felt snappier than OSX on the same machine.
I only wish Apple would open source BootCamp and allow others to try and fix the few issues that it still has, namely around battery consumption. Highly unlikely they would ever do that, but one can dream.
That said, ever since the Intel firmware fixes addressing the power management issues, the Surface Book has been the perfect general purpose mobile computer for me. Crisp screen, solid keyboard, long battery life, lightweight, and the stylus has been sufficient for replacing good ol' pen and paper when I need to scratch out some math for my occasional graphics programming hobby work. (I have a dedicated GPU model.)
It's the first new computer I've bought in 4 years, so despite paying over $2000 for it, I'm quite happy with the value I've gotten.
DPI oddness (moving between low DPI external monitor and high DPI internal one triggered it) seems much less now.
But I still feel Windows itself is not a productive OS. I'm big on keyboard shortcuts but MS is very much mouse based. Being required to use my pinky to try and hit CTRL instead of my thumb to hit COMMAND to do simple things like copy and paste is HUGE to me.
I didn't use a Windows machine for 3 years and when I did need to use Windows again it was extremely frustrating. I remember switching from Windows to OSX and it felt more natural.
Anyway, MS is definitely making some cool stuff and I like the direction they're going. But I'm still not ready to go back.
I rarely use the mouse on windows, I think it's just a matter of familiarization on both OSes.
Incorrect. You can operate the entirety of Windows with just the keyboard.
Please tell me what you cannot do with the keyboard in Windows and I'll straighten you out.
OS X/macOS is definitely worse with regards to keyboard acceleration. For instance, here's a glaring omission on Apple's part: try opening any window from the menu bar (e.g. the BetterSnapTools preferences dialog) then switch away from it with ALT+TAB and you'll be unable to switch back to it.
FYI, I'd never heard of this shortcut before but just tried it in the Finder and it worked just fine (to toggle visibility of invisible files).
IMO they were fewer and less consistent than Windows and Linux shortcuts at the time and a huge disappointment.
(Example: no consistent way of selecting from cursor to end of line - there was no end button and which modifier to use varied with the application you used...! I have joked that the superior touchpad on the Mac is an adaptation to make it usable despite its inconsistent keyboard shorcut handling.)
cmd+shift+right-arrow. I've once had to use an app in which it didn't work - the developer was using the shortcut for cycling between tabs. But it definitely works in all the apps I use right now.
I still love the keyboard shortcuts on macOS. My favourite is alt+<any function key> to open the respective section in System Preferences. Hard to discover (like most shortcuts) but also really hard to forget about.
Cmd-shift-right arrow. There are others, but that's the one I use and I don't recall it ever not working.
I've also seen some keyboard shortcuts not mapped properly in Firefox and Chrome. e.g. in the Chrome console the home and end keys don't work as expected under macOS
I always assumed these were cross-platform library issues but I don't know for sure.
Perhaps it's a question of muscle memory and discoverability? I love spotlight, and installed magnet (http://magnet.crowdcafe.com/), and slowly getting there.
The issue isn't that the MS shortcuts for things are any better or worse, it's just that you're not used to hitting CTRL. As a developer, my pinky basically rests on the CTRL by default when I'm on a windows system. When I'm on a Mac my thumb rests on the Command key.
I've tried it.
Multi monitor support sucks so bad, I have to wiggle mouse few seconds at bottom of monitor before it is taken as active, but boy popup of active window still opens on 2nd monitor.
I minimize Firefox it goes down in Dock, now when I press Cmd+Tab, Firefox is in the applications list but the window doesn't comes back. I have to click on it with mouse to open it.
And maximize screen button now defaults to new full screen Desktop, which looks good if you use trackpad and swipe around, but with keyboard it adds no value, just distracts a lot, and apps like Chrome/Finder if I click option+maximize, they believe I want some sort of horizontal/vertical expansion.
/rant
Edit: Even greater WTF is dialog boxes, I use tab to focus on a button, press enter and viola the default action is taken, ignoring the keyboard focus, so if I don't want to save file, I have to use trackpad :|
http://osxdaily.com/2010/02/26/use-the-tab-key-to-switch-bet...
Space = focused button, Enter = default button. When a dialog is shown, the focus is never on the default button, so there are always two choices that you can make (Space/Enter) without using the mouse or the tab key at all.
Maybe you should read the help file instead of going on "feelings". Every UI widget in Windows can be operated from the keyboard.
> Being required to use my pinky to try and hit CTRL instead of my thumb to hit COMMAND to do simple things like copy and paste is HUGE to me.
Oh come on. You're just making up reasons to dislike it at this point. "The shortcut key is a half-inch further away! THIS IS AMAZINGLY IMPORTANT MIND-BLOWING SUPER-FLAW!"
And that was an example, not an exhaustive list. But honestly, yes the fact that the ctrl is so important to keyboard shortcuts on Windows but is in such a difficult (for me) position to get to is a big deal.
New tab, new window, find in page, open dev tools, and many many more, require using ctrl on Windows.
I think the key you're looking for is the 'Alt' key. You'll find a lot of doors open up for you on Windows when you use it.
edit: just to clarify. If you see a menu or anything with a letter that is underlined, Alt + Letter will choose that target. In addition, pushing down Alt will sometimes show which menus have keyboard options.
I use Windows, OSX, and Linux fairly often (mostly Windows, then OSX, Linux here and there). For me, the most frustrating thing about Windows, a minor point but it bugs me, is that you can't remap the CTRL key without having admin rights.
This is a user-controlled preference the OS has in the box, in OSX and Linux distros I've used. On Windows, you need to edit the registry (!!) or use the SysInternals driver, which requires Admin rights. I haven't found another way to do it that doesn't require installing more software and/or admin rights.
A regular laptop from Microsoft might be redundant, since you can already buy lots of good MacBook Pro alternatives from other companies. (Dell XPS 13/15, Razer Blade / Blade Stealth, HP Spectre, etc)
Apologies to any of you who works for any of these, I understand that a number of you are most likely decent people but I am really tired of seeing new crawling slow pcs that becomes fast once you install a fresh Windows without bloatware.
Seems like it would have died off as a huge blundering $10k per table mess by Microsoft. Or as a badly thought out Windows RT Surface tablet. I would have liked another Surface table (one that actually got better support than a few WPF/Windows widgets) but I'd say now Surface is a huge brand for Microsoft with laptops/desktops.
In fact, there's a fairly close parallel between the broadening of the two brands between the two since Surface was originally the brand for devices incorporating Pixelsense, which was the brand attached to the combination of particular UX technologies, including the camera-based object recognition.
By the way, that presenter is a pretty good actor, but he was trying way too hard in a way that was distracting. The way he called out someone in the audience at one point made it seem like he has standup comedy experience and was trying to connect with the audience but it made no sense.
The presentation was a ton of fluff.
In contrast I've been very impressed with Panos, It's not Jobs level of being a natural but he's getting there. To me he comes off as authentic, passionate and knowledgable... though I agree the part of the presentation you mentioned felt a bit like pandering :) maybe he should dial it back just a tad
That's not an actor by the way. It's Panos Panay, who leads Microsoft's devices team.
Acting != make believe. The dude was hamming it up to the point that he seemed like a caricature of a product announcement.
MS announce this immediately before the MacBook announcement.
Conclusions are that (a) Apple are leaky and (b) rather than _avoid_ Apple announcements, their competitors are now happy to compete with them. A bad sign for Apple.
Yea for me this is a skip until they update the hardware - it's just too expensive to have to replace in a year.
Windows laptops, even on the high end, still tend to screens no better than 1080p and crappy touchpads. My wife hates the touchpad so much she always uses a mouse and has the trackpad disabled.
I just got an HP Elite x2, which is basically a Surface Pro and I really like the pen and touch input. Apple pioneered touch on the iPhone, but continues to refuse to add it to <del>OS X</del> macOS.
e.g.
Dell XPS 13 - can have a 3200x1800 screen
Lenovo Carbon X1 - can have a 2560x1440 screen
HP Elitebook G3 - Can have a 2560x1440 screen
Microsoft surface book - 3000x2000 screen
Microsoft Surface Pro 4 - 2736 x 1824 screen
A couple of years ago, sure Windows laptops tended to have terrible screens, but that problem seems (to me) to have largely been resolved these days, for high-end devices anyway.
Touchpads is true since most manufacturers don't use precision touchpad.
But the screen issue is definitely not true in the high end. Too many touch-enabled 4k displays when you max out a high-end config from dell/hp/lenovo.
Last year around Christmas, I picked up an Asus Zenbook for under $700CDN on sale. 3200x1800 touch screen, 8GB RAM, and a trackpad that works as well (to me, at least) as the one on my MacBook Air.
I was a little concerned that the Skylake Core m3 would be underpowered, but it hasn't felt slow during any of the dev tasks I've thrown at it. Benchmarks aren't always accurate, I know, but the ones I have run on both the Zenbook and my MBA show them to be about equal. It's not as fast as my 8 core, 32GB RAM desktop machine, but I don't expect it to be.
The HP Elite looks pretty neat. I'll have to try one next time I'm at the MS Store if they have one on display.
I would seriously consider buying one, if not for one thing - OS. After recently installing Windows on Bootcamp I can honestly say that I hate the thing. It made me swear constantly for 15 minutes. I wish MS finally wrote a new OS from scratch. They seem to have the right idea about where to go, but Windows looks like a 40 year old after series of plastic surgeries - it's supposed to look young and modern, but after you get passed the surface you can see all those menus that are almost two decades old.
I have the Surface Pro 3, and the recent battery issue[1] (that basically require SP3 to be plugged in all the time) still left bad taste in my mouth. If this was an isolated case, I probably wouldn't be too disappointed, but it affects everyone with the same battery model, and as of today, the problem is only half fixed[2]. Surface Pro 2 also starting to have the same problem[3].
Which is really a shame, because I really like the Surface form factor.
I'm not saying who is better, it's just that hardware products are really hard to get right, especially when quality is the metric. :(
[1]: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/forum/surfpro3-s...
[2]: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/forum/surfpro3-s...
[3]: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/forum/surfpro2-s...
That's why I said "closing". These machines look like they had much more effort put into their design than what people think of when they think "Windows laptop" (a cheap, glossy, plastic piece of crap).
I really do want to get a SurfaceBook. Let's hope they've ironed out the bugs.
I just realized you were talking about the sp4, so that doesn't really apply.
My Surface Pro 3 has never felt reliable. I can't count on it working the same way one week to the next, which is unfortunate. I told a colleague this morning that I was surprised that the last two machines I really wanted were both Microsoft hardware (Surface Book and Surface Studio).
But I also won't invest in new Surface hardware until I see lots of user feedback.
What happened at 2:25-26 with a Mac named Studio Admin?
mean while.. an OLED stripe.. aghem.. a Razer keyboard
- This computer looks very good
- The specs look more than decent (skylake, 32gb ram...)
...but
- It's going to be poorly distributed (at least where I live, in Asia). I'm not even expecting a synchronized worldwide release.
- I'll have a hard time working in an Unix-friendly environment (the only reason why I bought macs so far)
- I wouldn't be surprised if it's insanely overpriced in Asia (like the Surface Book is)
So I'm pretty sure I'll unfortunately have to pass, and so will most people I work with.
The Microsoft buying experience is horrendous, and that's too bad now that their OS sounds OK, and their hardware is probably the best PC hardware you can get.
The new Windows Subsystem for Linux is actually pretty good.
My only complaint is that I had to opt in to the bleeding edge test versions of Windows 10, so my computers keep restarting themselves (often deleting registry settings like keyboard remaps and custom global hotkeys in the process) practically weekly. Anyone know of a way to keep my bash shell without having to (practically) reinstall Windows every week?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzMLA8YIgG0
Looks amazing.
Edit: See also:
Also the videos show it both on and off the screen as users have different needs to work with it.
But what really got my attention was the ruler. That opens up a natural way of drawing lines which just work, as compared to either using an actual ruler on your tablet (which hopefully works), or selecting a line tool and guesstimating the line you want (which you then adjust afterwards) etc.
I'm looking forward to see what other uses for it they can come up with.
Look at the damn thing, shitty (i presume) TFT display, no capacitive touch (i think), and no computer attached.
This is a great value proposition to those kind of people. Though if this had a gaming tier GPU and a bit better specs this would be literally _the_ machine.
I wonder how well VST synth modules work on it? I like my iPad synth toys, but they are not compatible with Mac.
Can we please stop with the comparisons in the other comments to Apple please? :) You'd swear they were the only other tech company in existence. Sheesh, it's like living in a bubble.
I wish Microsoft success with this, and I hope they continue to open source their software offerings and keep opening up their hardware technical specifications. We really need Microsoft to remain an innovative and cooperative part of the community.
Microsoft cannot outcompete Linux, not in the long run, it's impossible. I know it may not seem possible right now but I reckon in the future Windows will have maybe 10% of the desktop OS market, Apple will have 10%, and Linux will have 80% split between different flavours: Google, Amazon, Canonical, Samsung, HTC, Xiaomi, whoever wants in basically. When that happens Microsoft needs to have a lot of hardware/software combos on offer, phones, tablets, laptops, all-in-ones, consoles, media boxes, you name it, with tight integration. It's entirely possible given the direction Google is heading that they'll fork Android/ChromeOS. Don't think it is possible? It'll happen. Chromebooks already outsell Macs in some locales: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/23/chromeboo.... I guarantee within five years there'll be a version of Microsoft Office for some flavour of desktop Linux.
Went on a _bit_ of a sidetracked ramble there. Anywho, neato hardware offering Microsoft!
The copy on the google pixel site and this site are both very obviously apple-ish.
edit: down vote away, doesn't change the fact that these websites scream "we want to be apple". Though I will say, the tides are changing for apple judging by the amount of people hurt by this comment.
The usability portions of the video were awesome though
also there was this 2002 art installation http://www.influx.co.uk/blog/damian-ortegas-cosmic-thing/
When I interviewed at Microsoft I played with one of those tables, and there was definitely a dice roller app.
No lie I would love to own one of those tables.
I have no good reason to expect that and I can't imagine that feature would be very useful at this size, but I still expected it for some reason.
I've never tried a Surface: do they have a special screen technology to avoid the fingerprints?
In all seriousness, pretty cool.
Could I just have that display please?
Thanks.
Edit:
Its mentioned on other site 2999.
I have a marketing filter in my mind so I couldn't care less about the design of the website.
Frankly it looks amazing.
It's a shame because the performance and screen are stellar.
Microsoft has a bad track record with computers. There is no way to whitewash this or to think any other first generation hardware won't be fraught with problems.
My advise is wait.
So, as much as I love the platform, the issues for me are
1. Windows 10 updates are not sane. They do not schedule properly, and do not try to tell me otherwise because I have invested probably 40 hours total at this point trying to sanely schedule them. If you disable them, your build of Windows will go out of date and your machine will reset randomly until you turn them back on. Also, on a surface pro, updates take ~30 minutes to 6 hours. I joke not. So result: I'll roll into work at 8, have a presentation at 9, pop open the machine, and see "windows is configuring your update.... 39%" and know that I won't be working on that machine until after lunch. Maybe.
2. Random, impossible to track, unrelated bugs. Plugging in a second monitor causes all sorts of weirdness. It gets stuck in tablet mode. It'll refuse to go into tablet mode. The task bar will refuse to go away in fullscreen mode for some apps until a reset. It'll forget my office app credentials. Onenote will crash a hundred times. It'll soft-eject the microSD card randomly, but usually in the middle of a file transfer. Keyboard won't be recognized. Pen tip will fall out and they'll charge you 12 bucks for a replacement pack with 3 inside, 2 of which you'll instantly use.
I love the surface because it perfectly fits my needs, but damn do I also hate it.
The biggest issue for me is the battery. After filling it with juice it's down to bare minimum in couple of hours.
The second biggest issue for me is the windows update policy - I put the machine to hibernation, and when I come back the windows update has rebooted the machine and shut down my development environment.
Connections & expansions
4 x USB 3.0 (one high power port)
Full-size SD ™ card reader (SDXC) compatible
Mini DisplayPort
Headset jack
Compatible with Surface Dial on-screen interaction*
1 Gigabit Ethernet port Four full-size USB 3.0
Ultra-High Speed Full-size SD card reader
Headset jack
Mini Displayport
EthernetThat said I love the dial thingy, I think it has some great ideas behind it and is potentially also a nod to the incredibly popular Griffin powermate which I believe is still a popular product.
I would also add that another target market is other Windows PC makers.
In the same way that the Surface and Surface Book showed what touch-based Windows devices could be, I imagine that Lenovo, Dell etc. will probably get some inspiration from this product and produce their own variants for a bunch of different market segments.
How a DLL can go missing while the box is turned off is a mystery to me, but there you go. I don't trust my Windows box.
I trust my iMac much much more.