Microsoft Surface Book 2 15-inch Review | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Surface Book 2 15-inch Review

anandtech.com

63 pointsbhauer90 comments

Very interesting bit about power draw:

> The 100-Watt AC adapter included with the Surface Book 2 is not quite powerful enough to keep the system fully charged under a high load such as this, so you can see there is some power draw from the battery (the green line in the chart) which is leveraged to make up the difference. Over time, the battery drops to about 95% charge, at which time the system drops the GPU clock a bit to prevent draining the battery any further. Not all games are going to run into this issue, but certain games will require more power from the GPU and CPU than the power input can handle. However, the battery will never completely be drained, as the system doesn’t let it get out of control.

Dishonest designs like this should be punished by consumers, in particular, considering that the Surface Book tablet battery is already a critical part of the laptop (it's comparatively small, and it's hard to replace).

Many, if not most, desktop-replacement laptops with 4+ cores are thermally limited on compute, and will throttle back under extended high load. I see it as a compromise of the form factor rather than dishonesty per se.

This isn't a case of thermal limiting - this is a case of the power supply being literally unable to supply enough power to run the system at its full capacity. If I can't use that 1060 at full power for more than 5% of the battery capacity, even while plugged into the wall, isn't that misleading?

The limiting factor might be different but the effect is the same. A rose by any other name would leave you just as disappointed.

(I'm not certain that the limiting factor is actually different, FWIW. Dissipating 100W from a laptop isn't easy. Macbook Pros limit at 80W AFAIK. If the power supply could keep up, I'd expect it to get too hot anyway.)

Dissipating lots of heat from a laptop isn't that hard, it's just that the tradeoffs take the form of gaming laptops because the laws of thermodynamics are not shaped by consumer preferences.

Yep, my 2016 15" MBP (2.9 GHz version) will lock the CPU clock down to 1.2 GHz after about half a minute of running some compilation on all cores. It makes for a staggerng difference in comparison to even old i5 2500K desktop CPU, which can easily outperform the laptop.

The main problem is not the thermal limiting - it's the tablet battery draining while being connected to the AC, which is counterintuitive and undesirable.

> Dishonest designs like this should be punished by consumers

This needs to go one step further because consumers don't generally care about the design of the device until something goes wrong, at which point they get burned and lose their investment. Retailers then misinform them of their repair or replacement rights intentionally. Either the retailer should warranty it for the reasonable life of the device which has to be quoted on the front of the packaging with no questions asked or they have to meet certain repair criteria with a full refund no questions asked if they can't repair it under a certain amount of time (critically a short amount of time like 2 weeks)

Consumer Rights Act in the UK is the nearest thing to this and gives you a position to argue for fitness for purpose over the span of 6 years from purchase. But it doesn't go far enough.

With the above, the Surface Book wouldn't even make it to market which is how it should be. It's disposable and nothing in that price range should be disposable.

>This needs to go one step further because consumers don't generally care about the design of the device until something goes wrong, at which point they get burned and lose their investment.

I literally got burned once when a badly designed laptop overheated (the plastic around the fan literally melted off), and I'm sure I'm not the only one to whom something like that has happened.

Is artificially lowering down the performance of iPhones to keep the battery for a day the same thing?

The technical mechanics are similar, but that seems to be the extent of it.

Apple (silently) changed the "failure mode" of batteries from reducing autonomy to lowering performances. Ars shows their power mode as "Recommended", I would guess the observation is a side-effect of that, with the laptop switching from "charged" to "charging" power mode (lowering components performances to charge faster). I saw no note about that, I'd like a re-do with a laptop configured for "best performances".

Of course Microsoft kinda shot themselves in the foot by limiting power input to 100W and designing a laptop with more peak draw than this.

No; in the SB case, tablet battery is being drained while connected to the AC. This is counterintuitive and undesirable (imagine you have a gaming session, then commute).

The whole "Apple slows down old iPhones" silliness now seems a bit different in retrospective :) :) We have a laptop that is not fully charged when... plugged in!

As far as I know, no battery, including iPhone’s, can achieve 100% charged. The concept of 100% charged is a software concept. It is hard to measure when exactly is 100%.

iPhone’s 100% is roughly around 97-98% of its measurement by the hardware. So why is that dishonest?

Am I confused here?

Well in this case, the 95% that the review mentions is what the laptop software (e.g. Windows) reports. So even if 100% is never achieved in all devices, here we're talking about not even the "perceived" 100% is achieved.

Macbooks used to do the same. Someone here remarked about this behavior.

I've been using MBPs daily for over ten years and haven't noticed anything like that </anecdote>

Each time anything Microsoft Surface I link #nailer's comment from 7 months ago [0]:

>One import thing with all Surface laptops that most people don't know:

>> Support is limited to the country you purchased the device in.

>Eg:

>- If you buy an Apple laptop, and need a repair, they'll fix it if it's in warranty, regardless of where you are.

>- If you buy a Microsoft laptop, and need a warranty repair done in a different country, Microsoft won't help you.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14400873

If you buy an Apple laptop, and need a repair, they'll fix it if it's in warranty, regardless of where you are.

In my own experience this isn’t the case, unless you mean AppleCare.

Anecdote: bought mbp in Shanghai Apple store and was informed that it was only covered in China unless I bought applecare, so I bought AppleCare.

Similar experience picking up some gear in Hong Kong one time ...

Not that my mbp ever gave me an ounce of trouble tho!

China might be an exception: I bought an iPhone in SF 1 year ago and had it repaired in a German Apple Store after calling the French customer support 1 month ago.

Maybe this is one of those things where they’ll do it for you but don’t make a contractual commitment to it ...

Maybe a way to boost AppleCare sales too :-J

They did it for me (Slovenia, UK) and I've never bought AppleCare in my life. In my case they even once made an exception to cover my defect when I was two weeks late after deadline to report it.

Edit: I think I misunderstood your comment. Yes, good service like this would make me more likely to buy AppleCare to extend it (even though I haven't yet).

Correct, my relative tried to trade in their iPhone in US but rejected because the phone's origin was HK.

Parent is definitely correct (from experience). Although they have given themselves some wiggle room for "keyboard products" (though, again, from experience, I didn't have any problems):

Apple may restrict warranty service for keyboard products to the country where Apple or its Authorized Distributors originally sold the device. Apple may restrict warranty service for keyboard products purchased in the EEA or Switzerland to the EEA and Switzerland.

P.S. - Unless you want to be familiar with Apple's warranty, I suggest you avoid macbooks with the butterfly keyboard (1st or 2nd gen).

I am wondering why MS is kidding their customers with this. I was let done so many times by MS that I lost count.

This is not my experience with Apple.

I had to fight incredibly hard for them to fix something that was under warrantee because I bought it online in HK and then wanted it fixed in the UK. It was one of the most painful support experiences I've ever had.

I had my HK iPhone serviced in the UK, but this may be down to different bands for different models?

Heya. I'm typing this on the Surface Book and this still occasionally happens.

Every time Microsoft says "wow, that's awful, I'm really sorry about this, let's get it sorted out" they then redirect me to the US team who say they can't help me or the UK team who say the US team has to help me.

It's really frustrating, everybody at Microsoft I speak to seems to agree it's really bad, but doesn't have the power to escalate support cases.

And yes, my US-purchased iPhones, MacBook Air etc have all been serviced in the UK without question.

Sorry to hear about your ongoing problems with Microsoft.

How do you remember old comments? I remember that one now, but would've had no way of referencing it.

All I do is favorite the one's that I want to remember and then look back through them.

I have a Surface Book from last year (performance base, i.e. dedicated GTX970 GPU). It is a wonderful machine from design to the incredible amount of hardware they manage to pack into it.

A big issue everyone should be aware of though is that it is limited in its ability to drive external displays. I bought it (and use it) as a desktop replacement, but I was quite disappointed to find that to drive even two external displays at 4K it is necessary to drop the refresh rate to 30hz on both. It would be interesting to know if this has been resolved with the new iteration.

I ended up buying two DisplayLink devices, and am now running three external displays at 4K (and 60hz), with only the main monitor being run by the Surface Book GPU.

I am overall really happy with the machine, as a portable development machine it is a monster that looks and feels fantastic.

Can’t help they missed a trick by not including Thunderbolt 3/USB-C ports on this (plus a few regular USB 3 ports). Seems like a strange omission, and would have smashed the MBP... as long as you can get past not having MacOS.

I used to own the really annoying MacBook Pro mid-2016, and after 11 months I've still had to find something to connect via USB-C.

Do a lot of people use it?

My phone (Oneplus 3, 18 months old now).

I guess it's me, then.

In this case, the USB-C port is where you connect an external display

https://www.amazon.co.uk/CHOETECH-Thunderbolt-Compatible-Mac...

edit - random USB-C to HDMI cable :)

Sure, but mini-displayport can do that just as well. The promise of USB-C is the ability to have a generic docking station, but I've not seen a lot of Macbooks using docking stations, and the Surface Dock is really nice.

My screen at home plugs in via USB-C. It also charges the laptop and functions as a USB hub. Audio out is integrated as well. It's the only cable plugged into my laptop (Thinkpad X1 Carbon), which is really convenient.

Yeah, strange for an expensive premium laptop to not have Thunderbolt or USB-C gen 2. It has just one USB-C gen 1 and two USB 3.0. Yet, it's much more expensive than similar spec machines (Dell XPS, HP Spectre x360, Lenovo Yoga), but without the necessary ports. I'm guessing Microsoft is targeting a different (creative market) audience.

Microsoft's Surface kit is the stuff Apple should be making. The Surface Studio is a better iMac than the iMac.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-stud...

Implying that the operating system does not mean anything to users, that is obviously false.

Implying that Windows 10 is worse, that is obviously false.

Actually it is if you like non interrupted UX on a OS.

On word: FreeDOS.

One more word: Windows.

FreeDOS was released when it didn't matter much any more as action moved up the stack (and soon enough off DOS).

There's no technical reason you couldn't run OSX on it, but I am really talking about the hardware.

The Surface Studio is probably fantastic if you actually use pen input. But as a programmer, I'll gladly take the better display resolution and fantastic trackpad of the iMac. They're both AIOs, but I don't think they target the same market.

I love Mac screens but i am pretty sure the Surface Studios screen would come out ahead. Also, a huge high-dpi 3:2 screen sounds just perfect for programming!

The Surface Studio has a resolution of 4500x3000 vs the 5120x2880 screen of the iMac, that's definitely fewer pixels to look at.

Anyway, my point is not that the Surface Studio is worse than the iMac, just that it's a different machine. The iMac is Apple's all-rounder, the Surface Studio is called Studio because it targets a smaller market of professionals. The entry price point reflects that (iMac: $1,799, Surface Studio: $2,999).

> The Surface Studio is a better iMac than the iMac

I'd argue that is a different iMac than the iMac. The Studio is not what the iMac aspires to be.

The Studio is a very expensive all-in-one tailored to a very specific few use cases or industries. It's impressive, it shows Microsoft has design chops but it's not quite the same machine and I'm not sure the market is addressing is that big (sales have not been stellar AFAIK)

As a Surface Pro 4 owner, the design is great but the drivers are awful and the entire thing feels hacked together software wise. I need more convincing. A colleague with a Surface Book suffers the same fate. Sadly I won't be buying Apple either, as two new touchbar Mac Pros I've had have reliability issues (sticking key on one, crashes from the Thunderbolt driver on another).

Can't beat the previous gen Macbook Pros for reliability, user experience and ruggedness.

Hmm. I own a Surface Pro 4 too, and I have a completely different experience. I love it and use it very often. It already almost replaced my "big" Lenovo laptop as my working machine.

Doing everything on the Surface Pro that I also do on the bigger laptop - Programming, writing, image editing, ...

What problems are you having? I've used my Surface Pro 4 as my main laptop for almost a year now, and not run into any problems.

Let's hope the screen holds up better than it's little brothers http://flickergate.com/

I wish I could find a laptop with:

- a none-nerfed NVidia GTX 1080 GPU

- more than two hours of battery at full load

- not a complete piece of garbage otherwise

I could deal with absolutely everything else on my own. Weight won't be a problem, as I'll be putting the thing in a backpack. The actual screen won't be a problem, I'll be plugging in a VR headset. Keyboard and trackpad aren't an issue, I'll be using VR controllers. I just want a max-spec VR rig that I can wear on my back for more than 2 hours. And if I'm not in VR, everything comes with USB-C now, so I should be able to setup a dock to my 4K monitor and good keyboard and mouse.

Hell, forget the battery. I'll hack together a DC powerbank on my own; it's not that hard. I just want full power and not-garbage WiFi and audio drivers.

But I've yet to find this computer. I've found a bunch of VR-ready laptops that creak under their own weight if you lift them by the corner, or they throttle the GPU even when plugged in, or they can't stay connected to a WiFi network for more than 4 hours, or they pick up EMF over the speakers from all over everywhere. I'm sorry, but if I'm going to be spending more than $3000 on a computer, I expect it to work and not break itself.

Have you looked at the HP Omen X17. I've only looked at them in the store, but it should fulfill your requirements and while the build quality isn't Apple quality, it is the best build quality I've seen in a gaming laptop.

I'll check that out. All the lights in the keyboard and angles in the case are not encouraging, though. I've generally found that "gaming laptops" are the worst-built pieces of crap on the market.

True. Unfortunately so far only "gaming laptops" come with gtx 1080 graphics cards as far as I know. Another option would be to get something like an HP Zbook with a Quadro P5000 card. That should give you performance in the same ballpark as the GTX 1080, but with a much better built laptop. Unfortunately we are then talking quite frankly stupid amounts on money.

> non-nerfed NVidia GTX 1080 GPU

Surely that would be larger than most laptops on its own..

How are you planning on wearing this on your back? You need to exhast more than 200W of heat, you can't just put that into a backpack!

The battery required would be larger than the FAA will allow on an airplane; the limit is approximately 100 watt-hours and not surprisingly the largest battery I've ever seen in a laptop is 99 watt-hours.

Backpacks are easy to customize with sharp knives and duct tape, and you're assuming one battery.

Below 2kg 15" laptop with a 1060 6GB? Hot damn impressive.

If only it had come with a 32GB of RAM option then this would be my dream laptop.

It's easier for me: the ThinkPad 25 was the only laptop I could purchase since 2012 so I did. Dream or no dream, there's no choice. And while I don't have an 1050 even (pity!) I do have 32GB and TB3. And, of course, I have my keyboard.

Check this guy out, trying to run Slack AND Atom.

Hey what about Chrome? I usually need another whole machine to run it properly.

My laptop runs fine for development and all I need on 8GB. 16GB would be a waste.

What are you guys doing making you need 32?

I do a lot of 'small data' analysis. Being able to simply load my datasets into R or Python and start playing around with them is very important. Even if my initial data set is only ~4-5 GB in memory I can quickly end up with 4 or 5 different copies in memory when testing different approaches. Obviously I can work around memory limitation by using on-disk data structures, avoiding copying data and being careful with only keeping the most important data in memory, but the less I have to think about that sort of stuff the faster and easier it is to work.

Might be making games. UE4 for example can eat up quite a lot of memory when doing things like building lighting and whatnot.

Let me add: what are you guys doing that requires 32GB off line? For 34 USD a month you can rent an i7 4770 w/ 32GB RAM, for 64 USD an i7 3930 w/ 64GB.

It has only 16GB of RAM like the MacBook Pro!!!

Microsoft and Apple don't want to use power hungry regular DDR4 RAM, they use low power DDR RAM. LPDDR4, which supports 32GB, has been repeatedly delayed by Intel. We probably won't see 32GB "thin and light's" until 2019.

https://macdaddy.io/macbook-pro-limited-16gb-ram/

http://appleinsider.com/articles/17/09/20/delays-in-intel-ca...

haha, Apple was blasted to pieces by this in the threads, not here though.

Because Apple's laptops are the only macOS machines you can buy, whereas the Surface line is just a small part of the Windows(/Linux?) world.

Yup, it's easy to understand both sides.

Apple don't want to ruin their reputation of having fantastic standby times, which actually is a revelation when you get to experience it (it's fantastic to basically always be able to just grab your laptop and keep going where you left of).

A lot of (real) pros don't care about things like battery life and size, they just want something powerful and semi-portable running macOS they can do resource intensive work on while away from their desktop/something so powerful they don't need desktops.

As I understand it, and I may be wrong, the power usage of DDR4 compared to LPDDR3 under load is not that much higher, but the standby mode power draw is a lot higher, so the real reason is standby time and thinness.

Anecdata: I have a 32 gb RAM laptop (thinkpad t460p) and battery life is excellent while actively but lightly using it, but I charge it every day so I don’t know what standby time is like. Also, while it is light and compact it is absolutely not thin.

Yeah, according to the article I linked to regular DDR4 RAM uses around 30% more power while in use and totally destroys standby time.

Still no word on availability outside the US I'm guessing?

The 15" SB looks like a stellar machine, but given MS's non-worldwide support and the history of variable reliability of the Surface line, it doesn't look like a good idea to import it when you don't live in the US, the only country where it's currently available.

It's available from the Microsoft Store in Europe, probably will take time until it's available from third party retailers as it was only released last month:

UK from £1499 https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/store/d/surface-book2/8MCPZJ...

DE from €1749 https://www.microsoft.com/de-de/store/d/surface-book-2/8mcpz...

> It's available from the Microsoft Store in Europe

No. The links you provide are for the 13.5", notice they all specify a 1050 and make no mention of a 15" option unlike the US store[0].

The article and my comment are about the 15" machine, which is literally only available on the US storefront (not even the Canadian one[1]) with no word whatsoever that I could find (so far) as to its eventual availability outside the US.

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/d/surface-book-2/8MCPZ...

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/store/d/surface-book-2/8MCPZ...

PS: comment formatting on HN is a pile of garbage.

Have only skimmed the article, but it reads as something people would write about a MacBook Pro 5-7 years ago.

Is it time to switch back to Windows?

No, because Microsoft does things like this:

"For about eight days, some versions of Windows 10 quietly bundled a password manager that contained a critical vulnerability in its browser plug in, a researcher said Friday. The flaw was almost identical to one the same researcher disclosed in the same manager plugin 16 months ago that allowed websites to steal passwords." [1]

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/12/micro...

As opposed to this?

Anyone can login as "root" with empty password [1]

[1]https://www.wired.com/story/macos-high-sierra-hack-root/

Everybody does things like this.

Yes. Or at least, try using a Surface Book and see what you think. It's a really nice machine.

I've been on the WSL track for a while. I've found that when I live in a Ruby/Node/JVM/Clojure world, you'll run into all kinds of problems related to shelling out and handling paths that are bugs caused by all the developers and most of the community running on macOS or Linux. And I don't blame them, you can't test on all platforms, and all the languages seems to have APIs that allow these kinds of bugs to happen (representing a file system path using the fabulous data structure "string", for example).

I ended up selling my Surface Pro 4 after a year.

WSL is an amazing piece of tech, but due to the issues with windows compatibility of the software I use and run, I had to run it inside WSL. And since I use IntelliJ, that means the IDE has to run inside WSL, too. This worked fine, by running vcxsrv (an X server) from Windows. But then, after a windows reinstall, it suddenly stopped handling high DPI (retina) properly, and all the xorg apps where tiny. That's when I decided that I'm not gonna embrace a platform where I have to hack and slash to get the basics right.

I hope Microsoft works on bringing an official x server implementation to WSL. It's amazing tech, and I want to use it, but for now, it's too premature.

I was hoping it was going to not have a keyboard, to be detachable. This is what I am in the market for, since I carry a bluetooth keyboard and mouse and use 'Synergy', the ideal is to have a high end i7 machine that is just a big tablet. I hoped this product would be it, to compliment my main laptop and be a secondary screen that has its own CPU.

> I was hoping it was going to not have a keyboard, to be detachable.

You were hoping for a device to be an entirely different device with no connection to its name whatsoever? The Book line is a laptop series with a low-autonomy detachable display.

What you're looking for is the Surface Pro, or an HP Spectre.

Still no 4k display. :(

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