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.
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.
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.