> The most versatile laptop.
> The most versatile laptop.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/23/15674254/microsoft-surfac...
> Microsoft is planning to release a dongle that will plug into the new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop devices and provide USB-C support. It’s like any dongle you’d expect, and it simply slots into the Surface connector port on the device. “If you want to charge a device with a Type-C charger, you can. If you want to put data back and forth with a Type-C peripheral, you can,” says Panay.
And of course I would prefer to have a magnetic charging connector over USB-C all day. Makes even more sense if your USB-C is from this very same connector.
Jesus christ this is insane.
What would you even plug into it? It's not like USB-C accessories are readily stocked everywhere, I'm still carrying around dongles all day for my TouchBar MBP.
If the laptop shipped with USB-C people would be whinging they need dongles, literally can't win.
I have a 4k monitor with a USB hub and it connects via USB-C. So I can just plug in one cable for power, video, keyboard and mouse. On the surface that means three cables coming out of both sides of the thing, and one of the cables going to a USB hub since there is only one USB port. But I guess you could use the dongle, assuming it supports HDMI output.
That monitor is 2 years old now, I bought it with my 2015 macbook.
The transition to USB-C has begun. For most of the life of the device, you'll probably want USB-C.
I'm sure Microsoft will get to it in the next release.
USB-A.
> five years
Both—not having either will mean tons of dongles.
> 10 years?
USB-C.
[EDIT] actually the 10-year will probably be "some other stupid new connector, with USB-C dongles"
USB-A was two years ago.
We're currently in the "having tons of dongles" state. In a year, it'll be 50% USB-C 50% other stuff. In 3 years, it'll be 100% USB-C, with high probability given the current market trends. Even Apple is adopting the USB-C standard. That speaks volumes to the coming trends, and how fast they're coming.
I'm guessing that many of the almost 400 million Android phones that ship this year will have USB-C. Chromebooks? They're going USB-C.
You're just telling us that you'll be happy with legacy. That's fine with me. Not everyone has to plan for the future. It's coming with or without you.
[EDIT] I'd add: yeah, we have some USB-C Android phones at work. Most of them have... USB-A on the other end of the cable that came with them (there's one exception).
The point is that market is starting to adopt USB-C, and everyone should be ready for the transition. I want a future port on my new computers, which will have a 5-10 year lifespan. USB-A would be nice too, but if I can only have one type, I'll take the future port.
> What connector do you think you'll need in two years, five years, 10 years?
And my answers were USB-A, both, and USB-C (but probably also whatever replaces it), respectively.
Your response to my answer was to tell me that lots of host devices are shipping with USB-C, which has no effect whatsoever on my answer (which I expect is typical, even of people on HN). I thought you must not understand that a bunch of host devices supporting USB-C barely has any effect on what I'll be plugging into my computers for the next few years, since you responded that way, so I gave an (incomplete) list of my USB-A devices which will almost all still be working in 2 years, and most of them in 5, and also, incidentally, a complete list of my USB-C devices (none).
USB-A is hands-down the more useful port to me for the next few years. USB-C is a nice bonus for future-proofing but has zero immediate utility, and will still have little or none in 2 years. Just answering the question.
If I'm not mistaken, save from the flash drives and non-bluetooth dongles, all of those can be converted with a simple cable switch. Wired KB+mice may unfortunately be cabled into the device but it's still practical enough to just keep an adapter on the end or there's some soldering for a cable swap to be done. Unless you plan to change all of your gear at once, you're in for such a transition anyway, one way or the other.
I have to agree with melling here, such a pricey device that I'd plan to keep for at least 5 years should have the new port.
A $2000 device should have the new port.
lets just let it die and move to cables that won't need a dongle and aren't thicker than almost everything in a laptop from this generation
I have no intention of replacing any of these things until they break, that could be a long, long time.
USB came out it 1996. Peripherals stick around a long time.
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/why-your-next-phone-or-laptop-sh...
You'll soon need adapters to use those peripherals for laptops and Surface type devices.
I've only seen the joystick port appear on sound cards, which themselves are pretty much dead, and the AT connector was all but extinct by the mid 1990s.
New motherboards seem to fall into two camps: Legacy ports of all flavours, or ridiculous numbers of USB 3.0 ports. I saw one recently with 12 USB3.0 connectors on the back.
I could HotSync my Treo over Bluetooth 10 years ago and it was an effortless two-way sync with reasonably good conflict resolution.
It amazes me that nothing quite gets that right these days.
No. USB-C will soon dominate.
How about multiple USB ports, say 1 USB-A and 1 USB-C?
That's what I'd plug it into.
Additionally, it has the great feature of elevating the heat source off the ground. This comes up any time I want to sit it on, for example, my couch. With my old laptop, the fan exhaust was largely getting smothered in upholstery, but with my surface pro it's sitting 6 inches above the table/couch/surface.
You can barely use it in your lap if your legs are crossed, and the keyboard can't be used if you're holding the device in mid-air. Other than that, my complaints are all about heat dispersion/generation, not the form factor.
I can see some people not digging the kickstand, but I'd say give it a try before dismissing it.
I don't have experience on a car, but I routinely use it on my lap in the public transport, on airplanes, and on "small coffe tables", as long as I accept "90% of comfort".
Of course, the SP is a hybrid, so if the laptop form factor is a requirement (or "100% comfort"), then no hybrid is an appropriate choice (except the Surface book, which is arguably overpriced).
Regardless, it's definitely wrong to state that it needs more space; it actually needs less than a laptop, as it only needs three contact points - the kickstand, the screen bottom, and the top/lower side of the keyboard.
I will agree it was awesome on plane tray tables, but that was about the only "oh cool! obvious advantage!" location.
i found myself wanting a normal laptop that could hold itself up repeatedly, and kept switching back to my macbook pro
It's common to run several types of server in production, these all need to be run on localhost for development purposes. Also virtual environments so server architecture can easily be scripted.
16GB works for me, but is far from ideal. I was hoping MS would one-up Apple here, but not yet.
Furthermore, I found that solutions which couldn't be successfully worked on with <16GB RAM were basically architecturally unsound. Not being able to scale the workload on demand or control peak demand. Extra RAM just hid poor developers from their non-scalable solutions - or just increased their downtime till they got an OUT OF MEM error. The issues were only exacerbated at scale - failing even with 128+ GB in RAM.
Basically, when the difference between a dev sample and a prod sample is 3+ orders of magnitude, your ability to scale the process up/down, fail gracefully, even battery life, etc. are far more important than having large swathes of memory to fail on. Especially on the go.
If you do deal with production (big) data, you're ssh'ed in to some always-on, process-maintained hardware if only for the sake of latency and interruptions. And you better have the toolset to do it. How much memory does a terminal take?
For graphics, I understand - but then you're definitely not working on a surface pro or on the go at all really.
ie I'm running Rails, MySQL, Elastic, Redis, Nginx, Memcached, and in some cases, multiple instances (dev, test, and multiple shards)
And then the usual OS requirements - Vim, 250 browser tabs, Slack, Hangouts, etc.
I'm sure there are all manner of optimisations and assumptions that could cut things down, but I'd rather the big manufacturers upgrade their RAM capacity every few years so I can focus on a dev environment that's a good approximation for prod.
Also, 250 tabs? dayum. I don't know how anyone could effectively use that many tabs. I don't think thats what browsers/laptops are designed for. My mind memory of just the tabs would be saturated long before the laptop's.
I do work in graphics/rendering, I work on laptops often and plan to get a surface pro, 16 GBs is the most painful part of working on a laptop for sure. It is the primary reason I spend most of my day on the 128GB ram desktop whenever I'm close. But even 32GB would go a long way for me.
AFAIK, the reason ultrabooks have LPDDR3 is because it is very low profile when soldered. If thin is your thing, you want LPDDR3. My t460p has a smaller footprint than a MBP, but it is as thick as a whole stack of them.
The difference between LPDDR3 and DDR3 isn't dramatic in actual operation; LPDDR3 uses about 70% of the power of DDR3.
It becomes a bigger deal when the machine is in standby, however; LPDDR3 uses 10% the power of DDR3. This would be a big deal for Apple, which also insists on using LPDDR3, and has historically sold machines with standby times measured in weeks or months. Not sure if people have particular expectations of standby times from Surface Pros, but if they're used like tablets you'd want it to be decent. Keeping the memory powered is nearly the only power used when a computer's in standby, so 10x the power usage would be a huge deal.
Longer device life and usefulness comes come from additional ram than a beefier processor.
Apple mentioned somewhere the 32 GB laptop jump involves dealing with a battery usage hit. While 32 GB arrives, a few vendors like Lenovo seem to have the 32 GB offering available in laptops, but not their Surface Pro clone.
What's the point of the question?
Lots of end users want a laptop with 32g.
Windows overhead, Visual Studio, Linux VMs, multiple docker containers, local dynamodb, sql database, queues, etc. If you're developing locally against a workflow with a few VMs in the mix, 16gb can be an incredible constraint. I'm not trying to simulate hundreds of users, just one across a stack.
the demand for 32g in a laptop was greater than the demand for a touchbar, I can tell you that.
Fortunately, there’re some ultrabooks on the market with user-upgradeable RAM. This article says Intel CPUs supports 16GB DDR3L modules since Broadwell, i.e. you should be able to install 32GB yourself: http://www.techrepublic.com/article/16-gb-so-dimm-ram-module...
It becomes essential once you start running VM's or Docker etc
Remember, this is a fanless design so thermal throttling will be insane, just like on the macbook and the xps13.
why does this apply here: because I can easily imagine artists using this to modify some assets and trying to run the game to see what they look like, but with 16GB of ram they won't even load the editor, much less the actual server+client combo.
But I work in the same company as Gambiting, on the same game I think. And yes, loading a map that is the size of San Andreas in GTA5 (with more props) is expensive on memory.
You can't "load a region" in the editor, not because there is a design constraint but because you need to generate navigation meshes, collision systems, render objects etc before you "stream" them in, not to mention that "streaming" is a hack that is build for consoles and weak PCs and has to be optimised for to work reliably, you'd spend more time chasing bugs in your streaming than actual bugs you were working with.
So, you load the whole map, you generate your navigation mesh and run your collision detection, and then you can do mapwide things like "find breaks in the world" and other stuff.
In this case, yes, 64G is helpful, because a developers time, especially a tools programmers time who deals in very low level C++/ASM optimisations for AAA games' time is worth more than a studio full of 64G ram modules.
But hey, we're always hiring!
by the way the integrated graphics are real shit in this laptop, better go get a MSI or something. This PC's are clearly not for high end work, it's just Macbook Pro kind of "pro".
PD: I think if you're running the whole map on the RAM you're doing something wrong.
Is it really shocking that dev machines have a lot of ram?
If someone works in full frame photography or edits 4K video, do you tell them to try working on machines with 4GB of ram to see what they come up with, and how it's going to be "beneficial"?
Why would it be any different for games? When a level designer loads the entire map into editor, it's the same as loading a 4K video into Adobe Premiere - it's going to eat up your ram, and you need to have loads of it.
>>Who in hell does run a game server on a laptop, and outside office?
At E3, the answer is - literally everyone. We send one guy with a fully encrypted beefy laptop that runs all servers during the show, and he has to keep an eye on it 100% of the time. You're not going to fly a desktop over the Atlantic just for a games conference.
Because they can travel with people and desktop computers.. kinda.. can't.
Why not fly just an encrypted SSD with the game and buy desktop at the location?
With global inventories, it shouldn't be that hard for major vendors like Dell or Apple to offer an identical configuration to drop a hard drive into.
I work on a pretty complex system myself and every few months somebody comes in,takes a quick look and tells us we just need to use framework X and all will be easy. Guess what, we are not totally stupid and have looked at it already. And it wouldn't solve the actual problem which is that it's just a very complex thing we are doing.
First understand what people are doing before telling them they are wrong.
Because it's impractical, unnecessary and wasteful. There are a number of processes that by their nature require global knowledge. These are not the sorts of processes that need to be done in the client (many of them in fact are done up front precisely so that a client will not need to do them), but they are the sorts of processes that a developer will need to do if they are to be able to make a change and see its effect. Also, there are good reasons to generate assets at a higher resolution than needed in the final artifact.
Just like if you're rendering a 3d animated film you might need a more powerful machine than those who are only watching it, or if you're training a neural net, you need a more powerful system than if you're merely running it.
TEST things under the constraints of machines that people own. Multiple people have given multiple reasons why there are better ways to do things. I read another recently talking about being able to capture all the game state for debugging, too.
"He knew from experience that it was always impossible to cut content down to memory budgets, and that many projects had come close to failing because of it. So now, as a regular practice, he always put aside a nice block of memory to free up when it's really needed."
[1]: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132500/dirty_coding_tr...
For videogames, both latency, bandwidth, and software support ain’t quite there yet.
I've taken to using an external usb fan to get extra speed.
Which, honestly, I might prefer right now since I still use mostly usb 2&3 devices.
This product wouldn't be appealing to me if they'd put Type-C on it instead of SurfaceConnect and Type-A.
I'd say that HDMI would be make the machine a lot more versatile than USB-C (or MiniDP, for that matter). Showing a few photos on a TV, using your client's projector for an unplanned demo, using an absent coworker's screen - I can't remember how often I've envied MacBook Pro Retina users for that port. It's magic.
TVs and projects are not going to switch from HDMI to USB-C either, so waiting won't solve that problem.
Most developers seem to assume their program is the only program running on the system.
This is why my girlfriend can't have multiple browsers open. For a "demanding" workoad (IE; IntelliJ IDE, browser, mail client) windows can easily consume 15/16G already.
Personally I use a stripped down linux machine but I'm regularly over 8G, where's the future-proof option?
Fortunately, in my arena of software we distribute work off of the computer and our programs are more piecemeal. Very few software engineers need a large amount of resources locally.
I run all of that on a 8 GB machine, it works perfectly.