Did we watch the same event? Microsoft introduced a $3,000 desktop PC in an era when nobody uses desktops anymore. It introduced a minor update to the Surface Book that starts at $2,300 with dual-core CPU, only 8GB of RAM, and last-gen graphics hardware.
For the same price as the new Surface Book i7, I can get an MBP 15" with bigger screen, twice the RAM, and a quad-core CPU, and it's Microsoft that hit it out of the park?!
No. Microsoft introduced an entirely new kind of tool for digital artists. I'm not one myself, but the Surface Studio makes me wish I were. And the people I know who are, are over the moon about it. They can't wait to get their hands on one.
Yes, it's Microsoft that hit it out of the park, and made Apple look amazingly weak by comparison. Today's event wouldn't have been particularly impressive even on its own. By comparison with yesterday's, it's just embarrassing.
The Surface Studio may seem impressive, but as far as workflow goes, the Mac with tablet setup really is perfection.
I've never had the desire to look down on the tablet to draw, as the pointer always moves synchronously on screen.
In fact, I feel my hand would get in the way of drawing..
Right now it seems like the Apple products are refined perfection, while Microsoft is still trying to figure out its place.
"The enjoyment of one's tools is an essential ingredient of successful work." --Donald Knuth
It is worth spending the money, if you have it, to buy the tools you will enjoy working with.
Both have their place - pen on screen or pen off. Working with your pen on a screen, especially a smaller screen, means you lose a good chunk of your visible space. Overall opinion -- it is great for artists that two major companies have made a significant effort on getting the pen on display right.
Why would anyone need a desktop in this day and age? Moore's law means the things that desktops used to do 5 years ago, laptops do now.
The compute requirements for photo editing, for example, haven't changed in 5 years. But the processors and systems (IO, displays, etc..) keep getting faster. It's only natural that laptops would cannibalize desktops. And phones/tablets will cannibalize laptops in a few years.
This is what I was responding to.
So we have Blizzard and Source engine, who am I missing?
http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197998185123/games/?...
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition: Win
Team Fortress 2: Win/Mac/Lin
Factorio: Win/Mac/Lin
Rocket League: Win/Mac/Lin
Particle Fleet: Emergence: Win/Mac/Lin
SHENZHEN I/O: Win/Mac/Linux
Oil Rush: Win/Mac/Linux
Castle Crashers: Win/Mac
Tropico 5: Win/Mac/Linux
Literally every game I've played recently except ONE supports Mac
Obviously I'm not a "serious" gamer :)
I don't think you'd argue that a mac is a good gaming rig from a performance / $ perspective (or any other perspective really).
Photo editing can be hugely resource intensive. Camera RAW files have been getting larger over time, and all but the simplest edits demand an SSD, a fast processor, and at least 32GB of memory. 128GB isn't unusual for commercial work.
You can get by with less, but sooner or later - usually sooner - you run out of RAM and your machine starts thrashing.
Many Photoshop features are hardware-accelerated, so having a good graphics card makes a significant difference to editing speed.
3D animation definitely needs a good graphics card. So does video editing.
Audio doesn't, but it needs as much raw processor power as possible. I know DJs/producers who are running dual 12-core Xeon systems for their mixes, and adding PCI DSP cards on top.
Surface Studio looks very nice, but it fails to tick most of these boxes. The reality is there's a significant market for creative power users willing to pay good money for multicore server-grade towers for their work.
Neither Apple nor MS are paying attention to this market. The Mac Pro is an underpowered curiosity now, and Surface Studio has - sadly - been hobbled by greed and penny pinching.
Camera raw files haven't been increasing in size faster than Moore's law.
They can get by fine with a laptop. The Mac Pro is overpowered for them.
Moore's law has slowed down btw and is predicted to end in 4-6 years (2020 - 2022) as it would be physically impossible to shrink transistors any further /unless/ there is a change from the current silicon CMOS technology.
In fact, manufacturers are no longer even targeting the doubling of transistors anymore! Instead they are focusing speeding them up.
It can't be an effective interaction device and a server-level resource at the same time. Anyone who is enough of an enthusiast to require a dual Xeon workstation is clearly not who MS is targeting with a single product. Leave the multicore server-grade towers to HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc. because there's nothing to innovate there - you just throw hardware, bought at market price, into a box. What is MS supposed to innovate on there if all you care about is specs/$ and ignore the design and use-case?
I love to have just as much power I can. I'd love to have a multi-CPU POWER9 loaded with a couple terabytes of RAM and a couple flash cards attached to a fast bus, but I wouldn't know what to do with it.
"Overwatch was fast and fun on medium settings. Civ VI is what I’ve played the most on the Studio and it looks and runs fantastic."
"When I first saw the device months ago in that secret room at MS, they asked me what I thought. I said, “Well I have no idea if anyone else will want it, but you have made my dream computer.”
Nothing about that is, I went out and paid my own money to buy this.
People spreading Viral Videos are often unpaid paid, even if they are a critical part of a marketing campaign. Hand someone some free hardware and they don't think is this worth X, just is X cool.
So, it's not surprising or questionable that his reviews are positive.
Also, pay is not limited to just cash.
Based on the article (he's been lent this device for the last week or so), I imagine the same thing may well happen if he's happy with it - which it sounds like he may be.
* I think you can reasonably make a case that Windows 95/98/NT were better than MacOS 7/8/9. (You could probably make a reasonable case for the opposite; I certainly wouldn't argue the point).
* The Zune was better than the iPod. Unfortunately for MS not better than the iPhone a few months later. The "Metro" design language it introduced was quite a bit better than Apple's at the time (and started the "flat design" trend that even Apple would end up aping, years later).
* Various areas where MS beat Apple by default, at least circa the 90s-00s, owing to Apple making no or a half-hearted effort. Office suites, gaming consoles, web browsers, the server, 3D graphics, yadda yadda.
* C# is a far better language than Objective-C, and Visual Studio is a far better IDE than Xcode.
* Edge is arguably a better browser than Safari. MS have also made some great tooling for webdev recently, VSCode and Typescript, while we haven't heard much from Apple.
* The Surface tablets have been arguably better than recent iPads, by virtue of running a full OS.
After that I've got nothing.
C# is a nicer language, and VS a better IDE when it comes to language integration but.. the platform APIs are far more productive on OS X than they are on Windows and the GUI toolkit was good from the get go, whereas MS never commits to a toolkit fully (MFC, WinForms, WPF, now UWP which is like a restricted, not fully compatible WPF). Why do you think there's so many great, lightweight alternatives to Photoshop with non destructive image editing on Mac OS X, like Affinity Photo, Acorn, Pixelmator, and none on Windows ? why is it that Apple can dogfood and write everything in their modern platform APIs, even rewrote their file browser Finder, in it, but Windows out of the box comes with exactly zero .net apps? Recently Windows 10 brought some .net stuff out of the box on the desktop, but they're all toy apps no one would want to use, and certainly no equivalent to Apple Mail, Photos, iMovie, Garageband etc. The UWP mail client is pitiful. C#/.net platform in general, on the desktop, as far as commercial, desktop apps sold to consumers come, is a dead wasteland. Whatever few .net apps I've seen as an enduser that made use of .net, I tend to associate with "slow, heavy, not featureful" particularly WPF apps. .net greatest success is the same as Java: on servers, or on the desktop for in-house business software where the well being of the enduser is not a priority and no one cares if the app feels sluggish or has terrible UI.
The lack of dogfooding has been a common complaint among windows developers for a long time, for example :
http://functionalflow.co.uk/blog/2011/09/27/microsoft-please...
> I understand deadlines and priorities, and I know that probably Microsoft just had to ship something at some point, but it really seems that there was a big lack of dogfooding in the WPF case.
> There’s a striking example of this: what was the number one complaint that developers had about WPF since 2006?… Blurry text and images. And when did Microsoft fix it?… Only in 2010, when they started using WPF for Visual Studio.
> Another issue that has been bugging me since I started using WPF was the airspace limitation. It seems that it’s finally going to be fixed in 4.5. Why do I think it’s being solved now? Because they probably needed some native WinRT component to play nice with WPF…
Microsoft still doesn't really use .net outside of dev tools and server apps. UWP apps are just toy apps. UWP OneNote isn't even close to the desktop OneNote. And so on. MS themselves don't really produce high quality desktop apps with C#. If they won't, then who will? Compare to Apple and how everything they make, makes heavy use of their platform APIs such as Cocoa, Core Image, Core Animation etc. How could .net not be a barren wasteland for desktop apps?
Apple always had the better developer platform, dogfooded and thus battletested, and now they're also getting a nicer programming language to work with, with Swift. Their IDE is still no visual studio, but AppCode from IntelliJ fixes that.
Hence why I made no mention of APIs.
They haven't replaced my laptop with anything new. They just released a newer model. Similar to every yearly company announcement ever. Nobody cares about version 7 with nothing new, they care about version 1 of something innovative.
Microsoft just blew Wacom out of the water in a niche product market. Great. What does that have to do with new MBPs?
Does Wacom have an entire suite of comparable products, or do they cater specifically to a niche market? Was their announcement yesterday? Life has context.
> What does that have to do with new MBPs?
I'll go ahead and quote the original comment you originally responded to: "This event was by far the most disappointing Mac event in the history". Apple had an event where they announced not much more than that we are now in late 2016. Nobody is saying MBP itself is bad, the event is comparatively lacking.
Hahahahahahahahaha
Wacom hasn't released an innovative product in 10 years, and much like Texas Instruments and their $130 monopoly on school calculators, everyone is still paying the same $2500 to Wacom that they did decades ago for Cintiq.
The lack of competition for Wacom is criminal and has allowed them to coast on last-decades product line for a very long time.
Hell, the most innovative thing Wacom has done in 10 years is rebrand Graphire into Bamboo. Ooooooh!
I imagine the day the Apple Pencil was announced was a very grim day in what ever is left of the Wacom R&D department.
Have you used Surface before? Asking because when I picked one up about a month ago, I had an awful time with it. Makes me think their announcement won't really do anything but look interesting. I could be missing something, though.
Did you get to play with it at a store or friends house, or actually take it home and use it for some time. Everyone i've met that has a surface (book, 3, 4, etc) loves it.
First, this is a business for me. And I suspect it's a business for anyone that Apple or Microsoft expects to sell this stuff to. And having to pay $3000 for outdated hardware is a tough pill to swallow. The hardware in the Macbook "Pro" is simply inexcusable. (REALLY???? 16GB RAM MAX!?!?!?) But the hardware in the Surface Studio is equally galling. They give you an NVidia what? 965 for $3000??? And the BEST I could even POSSIBLY get would be a 980??? And for that magnanimous gesture on their part I would be obliged to pay a MINIMUM of $4100??? For LAST GENERATION graphics cards???? On a machine purportedly about graphics???? (A 1080 would run both faster AND cooler using LESS power Microsoft. And at this point in time, for a business investment 64GB of RAM should really be offered by anyone NOT trying to screw you. What's the deal Microsoft???)
I think to objective observers who were waiting for these presentations... both proved SEVERELY underwhelming considering the pent up expectations. I mean... OK... if you put a gun to my head, I'll probably buy the Surface Studio. But don't expect me to pretend that I don't know that both Microsoft and Apple are robbing me.
Sorry for the rant.
Edit: afaik the only moving part in the Surface Studio are the fans. Replacing a fan is an annoyance but at least it won't lead to data loss!
As for having "outdated" cards, that is more a function of the production timeline. I am sure the Studio has been in the works for a while and those were probably the best in class cards around the time.
And the video is outdated, period, no air-quotes. There is simply no argument there. Making an excuse for it is nice and all, but it simply is a case of charging a premium for old tech.
Using the Surface as a tablet for drawing has been a huge use-case for visual artists from day 1. Just see this positive review of the original Surface Pro by Gabe from Penny Arcade: https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2013/02/22/the-ms-sur...
Most of those artists ended up buying iPad Pros to replace them with.
This is a weird complaint to me. So what if the display hardware is dated if it is perfectly up to the task it's presented with? Maxing out the specs on a machine for no other reason than to max out the specs seems to me to be nothing but a waist.
And even if it is perfectly suited the the rest of the hardware and any additional RAM/performance would be wasted[1], that's not a good excuse to overcharge for old commodity hardware.
[1] I would be extremely surprised if the rest of the system were designed around the video card. Actually, designed twice, since there are two video card options.
I wonder why ms didn't stick with AMD (like the xbox one) if they weren't going to use a 1080 (or 1070, might make more sense).
As someone that used to enjoy drawing/doodling but never made the leap from mouse to a digital pen - sketching and doodling on the surface 4 was eye-opening. Any number of programs paired with the pen/screen feels a lot like ink drawing without the mess and with multi-level undo.
The combination of a decent pen and great screen makes for a very satisfying and immediate drawing experience.
980M - 100W / 1060 ~ 80W / 1070 ~ 120W / 1080 ~ 150W
If they started out with the max TDP of 100W for the cooling system - upgrading it to 150W in that small space it sounds like too much of a change to meet their DL?
Clearly this does not excuse the reengineering but it might explain why they went this route.
The other was that they have already crossed over the "luxury" threshold from "just another PC" to "special hotness" sort of territory. So unless Nvidia is giving them a smoking deal on "old" GPU's it seems that from a marketing perspective you would want to check off all the boxes. Its reported that it would use less power and generate less heat, and Nvidia says it is 20% faster. That seems like it would be a "no brainer". But I clearly don't know.
That is why it surprised me when I read the high end Studio only had the GTX980 in it.
Really? First thing I thought when I saw it was how cool it would be for 3D sculpting. There are more uses for high end GPUs than gaming.
Not even just that, it's the last gen mobile cards, which means you have to spend 4.2k just to have 4GB of VRAM on something that, at the end of the day, is really a desktop. the 980 desktop version is ~$600 with 6GB VRAM.
you are paying for a digital drafting table.
As mentioned in another thread, purchasing the lcd panel itself ala-carte would cost more than the entire unit.
Maybe the thing you want to pay for is the screen, but there's no avoiding the outdated GPU tax that you have to pay to get it.
What counts is the time it takes to perform an operation like a Camera RAW import or a blur. If that goes down by a significant percentage, productivity goes up by a significant amount.
For drawing, good acceleration is the difference between a distracting experience that's laggy and unusable, and a smooth experience that gets out of the way of the work.
Besides, there are people with an interest in art and machine learning. Good luck with a 980M if that's your area of interest.
70% faster, they could just as well write "new recipe".
Let's call high-end graphics cards for what they really are: gaming console graphics hardware stuffed into PCs. Apart from a relatively small number of professionals who work with 3D rendering, high-end graphics cards are an even greater waste of money (unless of course you're buying the machine for gaming, which doesn't really fit the "digital artist" target of these machines).
Microsoft and Apple may still be pricing these products too high ("robbing you" as you say), but that's a separate discussion.
I think you're right that artists largely don't need what high end gaming PCs might require to play the newest steam titles at full graphics settings, but for what Microsoft is asking here, they do at least need enough GPU/CPU strength to have a very responsive UI when editing very large and complex graphical projects at 2560 x 1600 and beyond.
My worry about the Surface is simply that the minority report-style advertisement isn't really possible with a real-world PSD or 3dsmax scene.
I can't help but notice that you are equating that 99% of "digital art" that can be handled by mobile graphics cards, to the 1% of "digital art" that anyone's going to actually PAY someone to produce. As I said, this is a business. If I could make the living I currently make retouching photos, then I'd gladly pay $3000 for an underpowered machine...
but I can't.
because no one is going to pay us that kind of money to retouch photos are they?
Look, these machines, to a business, are INVESTMENTS. You invest for the FUTURE, not to take advantage of the past. A 1070 or 1080 is not too much to ask considering Pascal's MANIFEST superiority in efficiency. Additionally, I was being kind, I think MS should OFFER 64GB in the Surface Studio, but a 128GB option would really be necessary to future proof this thing.
I'll tell you what MS and Apple are going for here... it's a money grab. And they are setting themselves up to come back to guys like me every 18 to 24 months for another mandatory money grab instead of just giving us a 60 month machine from the outset.
Offer me a 60 month Surface Studio at the $3000 price point and I'd update every workstation here. But that's not what they're offering is it?
Up until this year, I have never owned a machine with more than 8GB of RAM, and never a video card with more than 1GB of RAM until now either.
Are you perhaps talking about video editing or CGI rendering?
I think people are imagining that a better computer will improve its performance, but it won't. There's a sleep statement in there or something. (Their blog post says something like "a cloud industry-leading innovation in picking-your-camera-out-of-a-list user experience story flow." Really? Just suck the files off my memory card in the background as soon as you detect one.)
Yes. Video editing and CGI. The workflow normally requires the use of MASSIVE memory mapped files. Additionally, a given artist may do several "lo res" renders before shipping off to the farm. ("Lo res" being a relative word. Because in most cases we're talking about 2560x1440 or 1080p minimum.) I really don't see how your tech guys are able to get that to work for you on cards that have 1GB memory. But if they can, then you'd better NEVER let those guys go because they are worth their weight in gold. (Unless you don't do any CGI or video editing???)
Source: I was a system engineer for VFX and animation for a number of years.
Then again, with Chrome taking up >4GB of RAM, they probably could have gotten half that performance just by closing their browser or using Safari.
Can confirm. Got up to 15GB RAM usage today, before closing 30+ tabs to get back down to 7GB. Maybe it's ridiculous, but based on the information I'm needing from those tabs--100% text--it's infuriating.
Oh, and also sitting awfully comfortably in that 7GB area is Dropbox, which is doing who knows what with all of its RAM...I do like the Linux command line tool though.
I'm probably an outlier though so can understand why it doesnt exist.
That's completely realistic for pro and semi-pro users.
The cost of making a laptop that could take 32GB or even 64GB of RAM must be tiny. No one would care if Apple only supplied 16GB but left a couple of slots free, or even if the stock overpriced 16GB could be swapped for 32GB.
Why cut corners and make "pro" machines that can't be used for professional work?
It's counterproductive. It may increase margins in the short term, but over time it alienates users and erodes the appeal of the brand.
It seems "Think Different" has become "Don't Expect Much."
I don't know if you saw this posted elsewhere in the thread but this is a pretty solid endorsement: https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2016/10/26/the-surfac...
Look, I'm sorry - I'm with you for most of it, but you have this stick held by completely the wrong end. Gaming consoles are closer to APUs than discrete high-end GPUs.
High end graphics cards are usually much better than a gaming console, in that they offer much better frame-rates, and a lot more resolution, and at the same time even a single card can be more expensive than a complete gaming console.
So, yes, they are for gaming 99.9% of the time. But please don't compare them with consoles.
Not only that- it's a mobile processor, 980M, so it would lag some distance behind a 980. That is cutting serious corners for a desktop at that price point.
The machine is not "purportedly about graphics", it's about 2D artists, and they made that clear in pretty much every presentation I've seen on the device.
I'd bet that one could make a revolutionary stats program with the new form factor/interface possibility.
SURE! Except, of course, you're not going to be allowed to code it in Python, R, or Octave. Instead, it will be Microsoft(TM) Visual(TM) R#(TM) with the new NetDNA/DCOM/.NET/CloudyMcCloudface Framework (TM)!! (now, with 40% more Cortana!(TM))
1: https://github.com/Microsoft/PTVS
2: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-de...
Actually I believe they introduced a competitor to the Wacom Cintiq that comes in a variety of sizes and does not require you to use a desktop or Windows 10.
Calling it 'an entirely new kind of tool' is really over stating it.
if they are serious about art creation, they should only use wacom technology and nobody else.
Not really, you could buy a Wacom Cintiq since about forever. I'm glad they're giving wacom some competition though.
It isn't an entirely new tool, it is an HDR, higher res, larger version of a Cintiq, with a built in slow PC with last-generation mobile graphics. The hinge and stuff was definitely an improved industrial design.
Those screen improvements alone are probably enough for lots of professionals to switch from cintiq, even if they lose support for professional-tier desktop hardware, but what about the pen? As far as I can tell the pen doesn't even have tilt detection and from videos you have to use the dial/puck to simulate rotating or tilting the pen.
In spite of that, it was definitely more innovative than anything Apple showed.
For the desktop, if you think people don't use desktops you're out of touch with reality. Microsoft introduced the Surface Studio primarily targeting what Apple has started to abandon, creatives & creative professionals.
A 27" Cintiq tablet costs $2800 on Amazon, and that's without the stand, which is an additional $600. This is what video editors, audio engineers and graphic artists use in their studios. The Surface Studio replaces all of that -and- it replaces the computer itself. What are you missing here?
Which means Microsoft has introduced a dual-core low-voltage part significantly less powerful than the one in the MBP. Let's not kid ourselves here, Apple was not going to use 15W LV KL in either MBP, and the 45W parts are will 4~6 months from release.
True. I wasn't talking about the red-headed step-child but you've got a point here. The hold-up there might have been that there's no Iris KL (incidentally I'm pissed that they've apparently gone with the non-iris pro on the 15", what the fuck)
I'm seriously considering getting a PC instead, even though I've written http://taoofmac.com for 14 years.
(I do happen to work for Microsoft, by the way, but would very much prefer to keep my home setup on a separate tech stack for the sake of keeping an open view. I'm now ogling the Skullcandy NUC and wondering how well it will run Elementary OS)
As long as you have no plans to play games, it's a wonderful machine for development. It's really fast for its small size, noticeably faster than the Macs I'd been using before. I spend most of my time with the NUC doing Ruby development in Fedora, with some Clojure and Node.js on the side. I've done some office type stuff with LibreOffice. I've dabbled in OpenSCAD while working on a 3D print. The NUC is more than enough power for all of that. I haven't played with Windows 10 too much, but it's also snappy when I need to boot into it.
It's a very quiet machine. On full blast, you might get a blowing sound similar to a stressed MBP. But usually in normal usage it's no more than a low hum; I can't even hear it unless I listen for it. You can throttle down the processors in the BIOS to make it nearly (totally?) silent if you like.
The most annoying thing about the NUC was installing the BIOS updates before getting started. The NUC6i5SYH had a lot of problems at launch that needed to be patched. Once I got beyond that, everything was smooth. The NUC is basically a laptop board shoved into a small box instead. If the things you want to do are possible on a laptop, they'll be possible on the NUC no problem.
I mostly access the NUC via SSH (and rsync my codebase between the two computers). The NUC is also connected to a monitor and I use the MacBook keyboard and mouse to drive both computers with Symless Synergy.
I would guess that just here on HN there are tens of thousands of us who could describe ourselves as "Unix-centric pros", who want powerful unixy client machines that match our unixy servers and who also want all the client-side stuff everyone needs (excellent video, audio, wifi, battery mgt., etc., drivers perfectly matched to hardware and working out of the box) plus a full range of apps. We can get the unixy client from Linux, BSD, or Mac. We can get the reliable, everything works consumer client stuff from Windows or Mac. The only overlap is Mac.
Unfortunately for us, this power user unix workstation stuff is just a historical accident for Apple, not a corporate objective. They're trying to get out of the computer business so they can focus on fashionable, high-margin, designer "lifestyle" products and services for the hip ones who consume stuff, not the old drudges in the back room who make stuff.
Microsoft holds their Windows legacy so dear that they'll slap more layers on the papier-mache balloon that is Windows but never put unix at its core, and all the nifty client-side Linux systems out there seem to have the motto "before you complain, realize that how much of it ends up working depends on how smart you are".
I would wish for Google to develop a line of powerful Linux-based workstations, but they would just spy on me until Google canceled the project altogether.
I wish Apple would create a wholly-owned subsidiary called "Apple Computer, Inc." that would have access to Apple's manufacturing expertise but would build a line of computers for power users who produce stuff--computers that weren't "thinner".
Look into it, Microsoft released it earlier this year specifically for unix developers.
But they just did, with Bash on Windows.
I do appreciate that they are trying to do as much as they think they can without throwing away the thing that they believe is the most valuable corporate asset they have: the mountain of stuff built over the years for Windows. They have carefully preserved this asset by making huge efforts to ensure than anything that worked on Windows in the past will keep working forever.
The thing is, what I wish they would do for me (which might not be what they need to do for themselves) is to take the equivalent of my Linux server and wrap a Windows API around it, the way a Mac is like a Linux server inside with a Mac API wrapped around it for client software usefulness. I'd be just as happy with a Windows GUI/API as a Mac GUI/API, but what I want is for it to resemble my servers under the GUI, so I can leverage whatever unixy skills and tools I may have.
Having a simulation of a unix shell on top of an NT core makes Windows more useful than it would otherwise be, but it's not the same as a Windows shell on a Linux kernel.
No, Darwin is Mach with BSD welded to it; it is not a pure Unix design. Likewise, WSL is the NT kernel with the Linux syscall interface on top, via the Pico Process interface. The NT kernel was designed for portability; in fact, POSIX compatibility was a design goal from the early days, in contrast to Mach where the idea of mashing together Mach and BSD was never considered.
In many ways, WSL is a much cleaner design than Darwin is.
Many that went Apple when they showed OS X to the world, never really understood Apple, or for that matter, NeXT culture.
The POSIX layer never mattered, what mattered were the Objective-C frameworks on top and a workflow based on Xerox PARC ideas, that Steve Jobs brought to Apple and NeXT.
The UNIX compatibility was there, because NeXT was competing against Sun and Irix workstations, so it needed to be compatible to a certain extent.
Later Apple trying to promote the same compatibility because after the Copland failure, they needed to sell computers or close shop, so the UNIX with nice GUI was a way of doing it.
For those of us that develop native applications, it never really mattered.
"a 28" desktop PC" is a bit of an understatement. It's a huge low-latency touch display which works like a drafting table.
> nobody uses desktops anymore
There's a desktop on most desks in our office. A Macbook is certainly an alternative option but not if you're looking for a large touchscreen display.
> For the same price as the new Surface Book i7, I can get an MBP 15" with bigger screen and quad-core CPU
If there was really a performance problem I think a lot more people would be upset with what was announced. Last gen means more stability and likely cooler temperature hardware. Also, does the 15" MBP have a detachable/touch screen? Does it come with Windows? These are real considerations for potential Surface adopters.
The Macbook is simply a laptop. There's no problem with that, but Surface is selling more than that, so a direct comparison on cost and performance isn't really fair. Or are you suggesting Apple is the only company capable of putting newer hardware into a computer?
The fraction of desktops vs. laptops shipped (~40%-~60%) has been holding steady for years. https://www.statista.com/statistics/272595/global-shipments-...
The target market for this is people who buy a $1,800 wacom cintiq and pair it with a $1,000 computer.
The price is reasonable for the people it targets.
So for 1,100 you are getting half as much ram, half as much storage, and a lesser gpu.
I'm sure you could spec out something similar to the internals for a few hundred less with a little bit of work.
[1]https://us-store.wacom.com/Catalog/Pen-Displays/Cintiq/Cinti...
> 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.
A bit hyperbolic, but you get the idea. https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2016/10/26/the-surfac...
If they just push the specs up, increase battery life..."Apple isn't innovating anymore", "So what's new?", "It looks just like my old MBP" etc.
Now that they actually bring something innovative you'll get this kind of complains.
Now no matter if people liked this event or not I find it hard to believe anyone seriously though yesterdays MS event was any better. Overpriced useless last gen crap for insane price.
That perfectly fits my opinion of Apple. ;)
I jumped off the Apple band wagon years ago, but an important point here is: Apple events used to be exciting. They would announce something interesting and worthy at every event, which is why so many even started watching life streams.
The iPhone is still a really great phone, but iOS has been playing catchup with Android for years. And apart from mobile Apple hasn't done much that's innovative or interesting for quite some time.
That's why opinions are so harsh. People have come to expect more.
Apple products usually have top notch latest specs and are most powerful products out there. Both in laptops and in smartphones. So definitely not last gen crap.
Overpriced? Expensive maybe, but probably one of the least overpriced actually. Unlike most manufacturers who just throw in Windows or Android on top of their generic hardware, Apple design a lot of HW and SW and their integrations in-house and they actually have costs to cover. (I heard Silicon Valley engineers aren't exactly free)
I don't know what is "much that's innovative". I guess it's subjective. If we look at the last few years: 3D Touch, TouchID. That's not so bad.
If we look at the whole history of Android...eh...well...hmmm...Samsung Edge...maybe?
I agree that Apple isn't innovating as well as they used to back in the days of Jobs, but nobody else really didn't innovate back then and they sure as hell don't innovate now unless you see putting unnecessarily high specs on a smartphone as an innovation.
You mean low-spec RAM? Slow SSD's? Obviously soldered in, lel...
A GPU that is apparently is on par with last, severely slower (compared to 1000 series nVidias), generation of GPU's? 2GB of VRAM, lel again
A CPU that is nothing to gawk at? (2.6~2.8 GHz nominal)
Crappy sound, crappy cooling, zero moisture resistance, all for ~2800 bucks
Meanwhile Lenovo I've got in order to work with Autodesk Inventor has the same CPU, 1TB 7200rpm HDD + 128GB SSD (replaceable), up to 32GB RAM (I've got 16GB in 2 slots out of 4), 960M with 4GB VRAM, SD card reader that is amazing to have, bitching sound that kinda surprised me, full size keyboard, all for a whopping ~1000$. (And I'm fairly certain it will not die to humid air - I'm guilty of sometimes using it with water dripping off my fingers even)
Sure, it only has a 1080 screen and I don't care about battery life (since I use it as a mobile workstation that is plugged 99% of the time) and it obviously comes with Windows 10 (THE HORROR)
The point is: stop spreading bullshit about how amazing Apple hardware is. For the price you are paying it is a joke.
Then you are not in Apple's market, period. For a lot of mobile users, wicked specs are pointless if you are tied to an outlet.
I used to be Thinkpad hardcore too. I switched to Mac when my x200/x201 hybrid that I built died (fell off the top of a server rack) and work bought me an MBPr. I'm pretty firm in the Apple camp now. I used to be a hater and holy shit was I wrong.
Now that my workflow is mostly photography and 4k video editing I couldn't imagine being back on a Thinkpad with Arch/CentOS. Windows is dead to me and has been for years, I'd go back to Linux FAR before Windows, but the workflow on OSX is just so damn sweet that I'm not even thinking about it.
There's really no company that comes even close to Apple for my use case. That being said I wouldn't pay $2800 either. Let the suckers buy it and I buy lightly used for half the price. The new screen is really, really, tempting though.
That Apple products have BIG margins can clearly be seen in their profits.
People are willing to pay the addition for the ego boost and great design (MacBook is still the nicest looking Laptop imo, iPhones always look great).
But it's not because they use the best, super expensive hardware.
If they replaced function keys with the touch bar and left everything else alone (save for faster components), I don't think half as many people would be complaining.
I would lose HOURS of productivity per week if I were not on a dual screen set up. It's just better for what I do.
That being said, if I need to go mobile, which I normally don't I use my macbook. I think I've disconnected my macbook from my monitors probably 2 times in the last 2 years.
> I would lose HOURS of productivity per week if I were
> not on a dual screen set up.
You're kind of proving his point... even the people who doesn't need a portable computer do get a portable computer instead of a desktop one nowadays. (By the way, I don't agree on desktop computers not being used anymore: I spent most of my day using a desktop computer. And a desktop telephone, another supossedly dissapearing technology.)
Still cheaper than macbook pro btw, which I have that too but mostly use it for ios stuff only.
Mind you, if you totalled up all the staff hours wasted this year with people wandering around searching and asking others for various dongles, we probably could have afforded another couple of MBPs.
You cannot seriously expect anyone edit a 4k video on a laptop with 16 GB or RAM, no matter how hard Apple is pushing their ridiculous onstage demos.
You cannot seriously expect serious developers run multiple VMs, for example, on 16 GB RAM on a laptop.
The list goes on and on.
http://penguindreams.org/blog/msi-ws60-running-linux/
Scala development, and some devs ops stuff that required spinning up VMs. I mean not a lot; like 6 ~ 8.
At work, I use a 16GB ram laptop, Scala development an no VMs (we do everything in Docker and deploy to Mesos/Marathon).
I do have a desktop at home now with 32GB of ram, but it honestly feels like overkill and I may scale down. There is a lot of dev work that does require a pretty beefy workstation, but I've been doing HD video editing, Photoshop/Lightroom and Scala/Java work on laptops for years.
Studies are consistent here.
Time you spend waiting? Distracts you from your tasks, overall focus drops -- you're dumber.
Less screen real-estate? More working memory dedicated to what's not on screen -- you're dumber.
A lot of people have desktops, myself included. I'm not really sure where you got such an impression.
Not just that... If nobody uses desktops, why would Apple waste so much engineering and design resources on something like the iMac if there's no market?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/269044/worldwide-desktop...
Most people don't buy pickup trucks, but 1) people who buy them need them, and 2) it's a profitable market segment.
While they are alike in many respects, the Surface Book is an orange in comparison the the Macbook Pro in three important ways:
1 - It's a convertible
2 - It's got a touch screen
3 - It's got a pen digitizer
Overpriced Microsoft devices, although impressive. I am more worried about the silence from MS on MFC given the world's investment in it. We can't all just rewrite our apps in UWP overnight. The foundation classes were just that - a foundation, and we can't move the giant building built on top.
For the Mac, goodbye MagSafe and SD cards and optical audio in (or any audio line in, actually). What's the point of a super thin device if you have to carry it in a thick bag due to the bulkiness of the 24 adapters to make the device useful or connect it to anything? It beggars belief.
"We've made the thinnest car ever! Steering wheel is an optional extra".
I think we are reaching the pinnacle of computer hardware and software development. We may have even passed it.
In short, I'll stick with my current MacBook Pro for as long as I can. That new giant touchpad looks to make typing tricky.
It is in maintenance mode, only bug fixes are planned or little improvements like they did on VS 2015.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt270148.aspx
For C++ on WIndows the future is XAML, for legacy MFC applications there is Project Centennial.
Thanks in advance.
What I have bookmarked is for Windows Forms ones, where they state exactly that.
https://www.infoq.com/news/2014/04/WPF-QA
Maybe this is already worthy read for you, it also mentions C++.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2013/08/20/atl-and-m...
"MFC can't be used for for Windows Store apps because it uses too many APIs that are banned for store usage. In order to allow MFC usage in your scenario we would probably have to break MFC into multiple DLLs, which would be a prohibitive amount of work."
I don't think that the Surface Studio is where computers should go. It's not relevant for 95% of users.
Gee, I guess that confirms I'm nobody.
The sentiment on Designer News was positive, and most of the people over there are UI designers and front-end engineers. https://www.designernews.co/stories/75964-microsoft-surface-...
Loads of people still use desktops. If you were to say not many people/companies need that kind of machine then you would be right.
The laptop is fine for fooling around, or "working" from home on the couch, but I'd lose my mind trying to do anything that small a screen, that few pixels, and a cramped, irregular keyboard with no travel. Plus trackpads. Fuck trackpads.
That people get anything done at all on these little midget laptops is, quite frankly, amazing to me.
Simply lacking screen real estate reduces available working memory that would be used to focus on a coding task.
Given how this empirically impacts work quality, I'm pretty amazed how younger tech companies have pushed employees in this direction.
It's not all that different from the open office trend.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/251521/when_two_monitors_aren...
>"People dramatically overestimate their ability to manage their environment," Meyer says, adding that in some ways, using multiple monitors to keep all sorts of data visible is analogous to using a cell phone while driving.
I've got 6880x1440 worth of curved display on my desk, and obviously, watching Netflix, browsing Facebook, or otherwise distracting myself with one of them would be a net productivity loss.
Perhaps your employees aren't perfectly rational actors whose incentive is to maximize the utility of their tools while at the office?
For example, there seems to be correlation between 1) wanting to keep git work local to a workstation and not push anywhere with public visibility, and 2) wanting to use a laptop so you can bring that local repository state with you.
Neither desires are necessarily aligned with what benefits the company (or the quality of work), but they do drive a laptop preference.
Even just having a physically larger display that fills your FOV appears to improve spatial task and memory performance: http://research-srv.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/desney/pub...
From another study (http://pro.sagepub.com/content/56/1/1506.abstract) on actual satisfaction (not open access, so quoting some key bits):
First, they provide a good summary of previous findings:
"Previous research has demonstrated productivity increases for users performing tasks on larger or multiple screens. For instance, a 9% productivity increase was noted while using wider screens (15” flat panel vs. 46.5” curved screen) (Czerwinski, et al., 2003)."
"Similarly, a 3.1% increase was noted using dual screens over a single screen (Poder, Godbout, & Bellemare, 2007). Task success has been found to increase for tasks performed on 4 – 17” monitors vs. a single 17” monitor (Truemper, et al., 2008). Likewise, tasks were performed faster and with less workload while using 2 – 17” monitors over a single 17” monitor (Kang & Stasko, 2007)."
"Other studies have noted increased window interaction and open windows while using multi-monitor configurations (Hutchings, Smith, Meyers, Czerwinski, & Robertson, 2004)."
"Issues with single monitor use have been well documented. Generally, higher mental workload, more window switching, repositioning, resizing, inadvertent opening, and closing of files have been associated with single small monitor usage (Czerwinski, et al., 2003). Users generally perceive small single monitors as requiring more workload (Grudin, 2001; Hashizume, Kurosu, Kaneko, 2007)."
Second, their own findings:
"Participants felt more rushed, that they worked harder, and were more frustrated [with a single monitor configuration]."
"Participants spent more active time in the PDF reference document while completing tasks on the single monitor configurations"
"Participants were observed to leave the PDF reference document open and viewable (but not in focus) while working with other source documents when in the dual monitor configurations."
"Participants clicked less during tasks on the dual 22” monitors than the dual 17” monitors and single 17” and 22” monitors."
"Participants switched between windows more frequently during tasks on a single 17” and 22” monitors than the dual 22” monitors."
Given that they're using glossy-screened laptops — maybe they care more about looks and hipness than about getting the job done?
Why the hate against glossy screens? The colors pop more and unless you're sitting in a spot that's prone to glare, you're just as productive as anyone else. I've never had an issue with a Macbook's glossy screen affecting my ability to work.
Sure, that's valid. But everyone's eyes are different, which is why I don't get why there are a lot of glossy screen haters out there. I never had that problem sitting in front of my glossy screened MBP for 8+ hours a day for 3+ years (it died but not because it had a glossy screen).
>> If it is about having something pretty as a status symbol, then yeah glossy makes sense.
Aren't glossy haters mocking/judging people basically using matte screens as status symbols? i.e., you must be a hipster or shallow and not a real programmer/{insert other profession here}?
And honestly, MBP is not the best purchase for specs. You can get a cheaper Dell XPS 15.
?? What profession doesn't use -- doesn't absolutely rely on desktop PCs??
This is microsoft making a product that designers love.
The behemoth which everyone considered dead is finding ways to make inroads into apple's old stronghold, with design innovations.
Yeah its going to have to deal with Windows, but this is a huge turn for a creature with that kind of momentum to overcome.
With the internal stack re-orgnization (rationalization), and having to build their own reference PCs, and buying their own pen tech, they are doing what a good firm should do - work hard on improving.
They have far to go but theres lots of signs of them moving in the right direction.
Whereas in sharp contrast you have
the Ipad pro which still runs ios, and the touch bar. And lets not forget their moment of courage, where they decided that they will obsolete the entire world of headphones.
> nobody uses desktops anymore
That's just not true. Maybe you only use computers for social media and youtube but other people need things that can actually run resource intense programs.
Lots of people use desktops. And this is more than a desktop PC, the "studio" functionality makes that clear.
And last-gen/overpriced current hardware is what Apple has been doing for a long time, yet it's easy to see by their success that it's not pure specs but rather the actual experience that matters.
For general computing (e.g. web browsing), yes. But that doesn't cover all the possible uses of a computing device. Gamers, designers, scientists, video/media professionals are some of the people who use primarily desktops.
I'd argue that this isn't true, especially for high-end artists, developers, gamers, and... well, my anec-data (gathered in only the finest biased areas) shows that this is blatantly false.
Any data to support this?
Sent from my desktop PC.
Speak for yourself.
This is why every single company has giant marketing departments and this perception informs so many of our decisions both consciously and unconsciously.
This is the real danger that apple is in - that how it's perceived is changing even if its products continue to be superior.