The popularity of Microsoft’s Surface is the least realistic thing on TV | Hacker News Reader

The popularity of Microsoft’s Surface is the least realistic thing on TV

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32 pointspmcpinto66 comments

Over the past year and a bit, I've seen far more Surface Books than before, and I put that entirely down to the delay in Apple releasing the new MBP model. A lot of people wanted a new model, and Apple took their sweet time, so they went for a high-end alternative from Microsoft. Five years ago, most developers at the .NET user groups I attended were either using a MBP, or whatever shitty cheap laptop their company gave them. Now, it's either a Surface Book, a Surface, the odd older MBP, or the cheap work laptop.

In the Linux world, I've only seen a handful of Surfaces, and one guy using a Surface Book with a VirtualBox VM for Debian (my preferred setup too). The average dev still seems to be largely on the Apple train, which is understandable as the MBP is still a fantastic device.

Outside of the development world, I see a few Surfaces in the wild, but nowhere near the amount of Macbooks I see. It's definitely grown/growing though, probably because the Surface is a legitimately good machine in a sea of alright to mediocre machines. I'd say that for every twenty Macbooks I see in the wild, I see one Surface, which is pretty good. In terms of TV, that's probably about the same too, since Apple machines seem to be everywhere on TV and in the movies.

Disclaimer: Proud Surface Book owner.

I own a Surface Book as well. I'm also a developer on KDE Plasma 5, and wrote quite a bit of the core UI of that product on the SB over the past 2 1/2 years.

It's not been a ride without bumps to run Linux on this thing (though it's quite easy now) -- but the uniquely wonderful display made the struggles worth it for me. Meanwhile Apple just doesn't really offer anything that sets them apart.

Out of interest, what distro do you use? I tried to run Ubuntu on mine a while back, and ran into nothing but issues, so I stick to a VM with Debian nowadays.

Fedora. During the first year I built my own kernel that was Fedora's with some patches applied (I published it in a COPR for others to use as well) - it was needed even just to get a working keyboard and trackpad at the time.

Around maybe the start of 2017 this became fortunately unnecessary, with the stock F26+ distro kernels driving everything but the touchscreen these days. So up to that point it's install and forget.

Currently I build jakeday's kernel source tree (which he builds binaries from for Ubuntu) on Fedora to have the touchscreen working as well, as Intel never mainlined the driver for it. If you're running Ubuntu, just throwing jakeday's kernel PPA in there should do the trick.

r/surfacelinux is probably the best community resource for this enterprise.

Anecdotally I seem to be seeing them quite a bit too, particularly within the business world, and within that, particularly within larger enterprises. I seem to see fewer iPads. Product placement aside, anecdotally it seems like Microsoft is on the right track.

Disclaimer: I own no Microsoft products.

I've definitely seen this shift, mainly because a lot of people seem to be coming to the realisation that the iPad is a fantastic tablet, but a shitty work device.

I like the iPad, and I like the idea of using it as a basic client for cloud-based work, but I think a lot of people take for granted how complex the tooling they use in day-to-day work is.

> The average dev still seems to be largely on the Apple train, which is understandable as the MBP is still a fantastic device.

Other then ruby devs who uses macs?

I'd think Lenovo would be far more popular

iOS devs, because they have to.

I've seen a few Clojure and Java devs on Macs recently.

Most webdevs that I know do. JS stack for sure appears to favor it.

Same goes for Python and JavaScript in my experience.

A lot of people see Mac as "close enough" for any Linux based development, and will build on a Mac and deploy to a Linux based server.

In terms of Lenovo, they were usually pretty popular, although I lumped these in with the "cheap devices" as I would often see far more Ideapads than Thinkpads, because they were cheaper for the employer.

Actual mac devs targeting Apple operating systems.

As mentioned, JS devs seem to favor Macs heavily and the majority of popular JS-related tools seem to be built for *nix first. As a Windows user, I frequently ran into annoying friction. Like some step in a complicated build process failing because someone used `&&` in an NPM script.

That said, I've switched to a WSL environment (native Linux on Windows) and it has handled everything I've thrown at it so far, including make scripts, GUI apps, etc.

Does Docker work on WSL?

Not as far as I know, but docker on windows will spin up a HyperV VM so you still get a pretty good experience

Yes! Sort of. You need Docker for Windows and have to have the DOCKER_HOST of your Linux subsystem be connected to it. But volume mounting doesn't work :( As such, I use an Ubuntu Vagrant box.

Meh. I guess I'll continue with my current setup (Arch Linux on Virtualbox) for the time being.

`&&` works in my NPM scripts on Windows 10.

Here's one line from my current project:

    "build-intl": "npm run build-intl-translations && npm run build-intl-locales",

Perhaps this is something that didn't work early on. I've been using Node.js on Windows since before v0.10 and I have had some issues here and there but these days it's a dream.

IIRC, Powershell and CMD have different chain syntax, so it depends which one you're running from. If I'm using CMD I can use &&, whereas | works on PS.

I might be wildly wrong on this one, but I'm a big fan of writing "git add . && git commit -m "Commit Message" && git push origin master", and I noticed that in a Powershell window I had to use the vertical bar instead of double-ampersands.

Wow, I have to try that out later. I have always avoided powershell in favor of CMD because I wasn’t sure of what powershell extras would get my way. Seems like this would be one example of that.

That new 2018 X1 Carbon is looking uber sexy. Light as a feather, proper quad core CPU, great screen, track point & proper keyboard etc.

My 2011 one is still working fine but the minute it breaks, well, prepare to be replaced. The Macbook Pro is a heavy behemoth in comparison. And no function keys. Do not want.

A lot of the languages I like don't work well on Windows. A world without Haskell isn't a world I want to live in.

Of course, you could always install Linux, and then things would be fine. I've tried it in the past and I've always run into annoying driver issues. I'm not the sort of person who wants to spend hours trying to figure out why my laptop won't go to sleep when I close the lid. It takes too much time away from playing with Haskell.

> Five years ago, most developers at the .NET user groups I attended were either using a MBP, or whatever shitty cheap laptop their company gave them. Now, it's either a Surface Book, a Surface, the odd older MBP, or the cheap work laptop.

Anecdata: While most in our team are using Macbooks, I'm seeing an increasing amount of people using a Lenovo X1 Yoga. I made the switch as well last month. However, that might just be a consequence of what our employer offers: The X1 Yoga is simply the best dev machine one can buy in the internal store (not counting Macbooks, I'm not aware of their current lineup).

> The average dev still seems to be largely on the Apple train, which is understandable as the MBP is still a fantastic device.

Warning: I didn't count, the following is just what I think I see. In my current job a little more than 50% seems to be using Windows on decent hardware. The rest seems to be split equally between Mac and Linux (again on decent hardware) with coding PMs and backenders preferrimg Linux and coders with design responsibilities preferring Mac.

Product placement. Used to be Apple products for such a long time. We notice it more as it comes to electronics/computers, but every other aspect of TV/Movies is also sold in this way. Notice how some TV series almost resemble a car commercial? Drinks, food, grooming products, wardrobe ... if it's on screen it's all paid for.

Remember how a few years ago, good guys would always use Macs, and bad guys would use PCs?

Here's an article from 2002 about this occurrence in 24:

https://www.wired.com/2002/05/24s-good-guys-do-use-macs/

Apple were responsible for one of the worst product placements of all time: the iPod scene in Blade Trinity. I still squirm when I watch it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rv0ZPj0JLQ4

Solid contender for me were the Beats headphones in The Book of Eli.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t2EFDtWxBc

It seems like the author is confused about the notion of cause and effect here.

1. Everyone in movies uses <thing> 2. People in the real world are using <thing>

Hamfisted? Sure. Effective? In a world where many people think that tablet=iPad, probably. The author, who is aware of Surface and its capabilities, just wrote another ad for Microsoft, after all. I learned about some features from this piece.

Gets old fast once you notice it? Well, getting noticed is the whole point. If you are spotting Surface in movies, you probably know enough already to buy it if it suits your needs. The whole point of giving it screentime is for the rest to notice that this shiny thingie is one of the thingies they saw at BestBuy the other week.

Anyhow, I'll be the last person not to kick MS for marketing. The lack of marketing is what killed Lumia, which I adore (still holding a grudge for that). But this, to me, looks like them finally figuring out that they need to actually try marketing their products before throwing the towel. Good news if you are an MS user. Gives hopes that they'll not abandon this ecosystem soon.

There was quit a bit off product placement for the lumia phones, I remember them appearing quite often on Hawaii Five-0, a show with quite a lot of MS product placement, including one off the most cringe-worthy product placement off al times "Lets bing it"

> Let's bing it

No wonder they need a whole hour to solve the case. :)

This article might sound interesting at first but it's really just grousing IMHO. Some of the ad deal details are interesting to note.

The real claim isn't actually that Surfaces aren't realistic; but rather that their usage is: "My friends are all nerds. They have every device. Some of them even own Surfaces. But nobody just casually… pulls out a Surface."

Not a killer conclusion to me. I work in corporate IT sales, and I see them everywhere in offices, and/or with execs today. Most meetings I go to have at least one being used, and they're actually hard to keep in stock.

It would be an equally appropriate factor to say..."this is what the [movie|tv] execs are using, lets get some on set" (don't forget you often get to take things home after shooting!)

At my son's school which is heavy on engineering, a lot of the students were sporting Surface Pros. My son opted for the Yoga fully decked out. The IT department doesn't recommend Apple in their one-sheet recommended specs. I think it is because of the prevalence of Windows-based software like AutoCAD (I know it's on Mac, but not the same. I used it on my PowerMac PC many years ago). At our engineering firm, nobody uses a an Apple even the marketing department for presentations and graphics. I see a lot of Surface Pros at meetings with architects too, drawing on photos and brainstorming ideas. I am in the Entertainment Engineering industry.

Same could be said for Macs in movies and TV in the 90s

And 2000s, and 2010s...

If I remember correctly, I noticed seeing the Apple logo upside down on Mel Gibson's What Women Want (2000) but I didn't know all Macs were like that (my first and only Mac was the 2006 MacBook). I hadn't seen the movie until much later.

And Dells in the early 00s

If you come to my office, you'll see dozens of Macs.

A couple Android tablets, one iPad. A variety of phones (yesterday I came in with a Blackberry, just for the anachronistic fun).

And I still want a Blackberry Passport.

Yeah and an office like yours is still in the minority.

Saw my second Surface device 'in the wild' yesterday. This was on an hour commute into London which I take every day: draw whatever conclusions you want from that.

I conclude that you spend a hell of a lot of time commuting

An hour on a train is a lot less unpleasant than an hour's drive. (Particularly if you have a Surface with you!)

I can't find it right now but I saw some research recently that showed blood pressure increased more when commuting by train vs by car.

In London too, I frequently sit beside other people in coworking spaces and libraries using Surface kit (I use a Surface Book, 3 previous laptops were Macbooks).

It's not quite to the point where you could, say, expect someone else to have a charger to lend you. But they're definitely more popular and they've got a good rep.

Wow. I see them all the time.

I'm in London in a coffee shop and reading this as I'm sitting in front of a surface

I am in the Army National Guard and we all pretty much use personal laptops for unclassified administrative tasks. I didn't like taking my expensive laptop out to the field so I picked up a Surface Pro and rugged case on eBay.

It is awesome for the field. It's way more mobile than a toughbook, and still pretty resilient with the rugged case on. I can hand it to others to review documents with ease. I wish the Army would contract Microsoft to replace all of their laptops with LTE surfaces that could connect to a secure base station. The signal units would have to setup and operate the secure base station.

‘Product placement’

For a long time, Apple paid to get Apple gear in so many movie screens. Now Microsoft is doing the same thing. No big deal.

It obviously upsets some people's distortion fields to see non-Apple products positioned as such.

> Big company does product placement in movies and TV shows.

Saved you a click. Not much else you didn't already know.

Mac user doesn't believe that people don't use Mac's.

News at 11.

The whole play is that after seeing it repeatedly associated with aspirational/likeable characters, people will want the surface more more.

This so what happens when a famous person uses a Mac, iPhone, wears a certain brand of shoes, drinks a certain brand of water, etc.

It's not rwaliric now, they are just trying to create that reality. FWIW I'm in Cambridge (MA) and usually see one or two surface products at coffee shops (latest waa the new 15").

Really? I though the least realistic thing on TV were the people given the perfect hair, make up and just genetic beauty.

Its pretty obvious that Microsoft made a deal with the studio and Broadcasting companies. Just like the popularity of auto bots to pick Chevys and the Decepticons some how fine de-badged fords or the fact that Marvel is full of Audi's. If you open your eyes you will find brand placement everywhere.

Now to the Surfaces, Currently I have switched over three departments to Surface Pros last year (2017). Each employee has a docking station hooked up to duel monitors, keyboard and mouse. So far I have been surprised how well they worked out, mostly that no one has dropped them. I have had few complaints. They run good, they can be used off site and are easily portable. I have also used in with the kick stand on my lap with no issue. Maybe we have different body types. Overall was not a big fan when they decided to do the first department upgrade but I would deploy them with no problem now.

I noticed that Windows Phones seemed over-represented on TV too - UK and US shows. And they still pop up despite being mothballed by MS. I noticed one on a recent show just a month or two ago although the show escapes my memory.

Now Windows Phones are really rare beasts, in the UK at least.

Not a Windows user but I’m certainly excited about PC users moving to a better form factor. Shouldn’t we all be using this form factor 50 years after the idea of the Dynabook:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook

I held a Surface, but didn’t use it, at the Intel booth at CES. It felt good in my hands.

Any major drawbacks? The iPad feels a little better but it’s not a fully functional computer (e.g. No Photoshop, Xcode, etc)

I love my Surface Pro 3 but they have notorious cooling problems. I'm looking at getting a near Surface or one of the competitors from HP or Lenovo.

Aside from that quirk of the SP3, I can't really think of any issues. I come home and plug it onto a dock where I have a Bluetooth mouse & keyboard as well as a 27" screen & webcam. It's pretty much a regular PC at that point. On the go, it's a touchscreen tablet but running regular apps and browsers. Some apps aren't touch friendly on Windows but they're rare.

I tried it for a while but returned it because it felt compromised in both roles, it made a poor tablet and a poor laptop.

> My friends are all nerds. They have every device. Some of them even own Surfaces. But nobody just casually… pulls out a Surface.

Except - they do. If you work in the corporate world, they're increasingly taking over from laptops.

I have a Macbook Pro at home and a Surface Pro at work, and I am quite happy to casually pull out either depending on where I am.

Surface Pros are WAY more popular than they were years ago. Surface Books are less common. However, if I'm working at a coffee shop, I'm usually the only one with a Surface.

Well, they finally got the NFL broadcast talking heads to stop calling them iPads, and the scourge of instant replay has thrust that Surface logo in our faces much more this season.

Got myself Surface Pro 4, it. was. a. mistake.

why?

This is all just a symptom of a product that isn’t very good, or for whatever reason people just don’t want.

Macbooks are everywhere on TV, and they used to be before they were popular, too. I think both the Macbook and Surface just look nice. They don't want an ugly Thinkpad except when they try to go for the hacker type.

I don’t know about other people but I’m really unhappy with my surface. I’ve bought it with a hope that I would have one device for everything - a tablet and a laptop and ability to do handwriting but all I’ve got is constant annoyance. I wasn’t expecting it to be very performance, but at least basic stuff could be covered.

OneNote for example keeps bringing up screen keyboard when I’m using my pen. At the same time screen board sometimes doesn’t appear when I tap on an edit field in Edge or other UWP software - it flakes, sometimes I need to tap it twice or triple to bring screen keyboard, sometimes it doesn’t work at all I need to reach for button in start panel.

In tablet mode, window decorations appear on slightest mishap on the edge of the screen and hide important controls in windows and there is no gesture or button to hide it back, you just sit here for like 5 seconds waiting for that thing to hide and allow you to switch to that tab you wanted in Edge/Chrome.

After recent update the camera stopped working in UWP, so no video in skype anymore for me. Both of them, front and back “Some app using you camera”. Not there is no such app. If I turn it off and turn it back on in BIOS then it works once, that back to “Some app already uses you camera”

No CalDAV/CardDav for 5 freaking years even though the protocol is implemented - you can hack you way around by creating iCloud account and changing server addresses, but it’s flakes too - doesn’t work for mail, only for calendar and contants, so I need to have two separate accounts for my fastmail.

260 characters limit for path length in file system is just a joke in 2017. I can’t install node - installer fails because of the path length limit. Well, I can if I install it into C:\ but I don’t want to install it into C:\.

No decent terminal emulators and yes, I’ve tried Hyper.js, yes this is the best you can get, but it’s not even close - it doesn’t allow me to have keyboard shortcuts I want to and this breaks my workflow badly. After years of WSL being in work they could have invested sometime into making standard windows ConsoleHost or whatever it is a bit more usable.

When it comes to WSL the situation is “it works until it doesn’t”. Doing simple stuff - yes, it works ok but try to build large java project in it with maven. IO performance is so awful then it takes 1 hour and a half to build a project that builds in 10 minutes on my mac. Ok, my mac is more powerful but not to the point of 9 times difference.

Explorer. Boy, do I have to say stuff about this crap. That thing gets laggy for no reason. The latest thing I had was that whenever I play DRMed music through Groove Music it just kills Explorer performance. All animations get laggy, alt tab takes couple seconds to redraw the screen, resizing explorer window lags like Linux with 3D thing enabled back in 2007. I’m not using Groove anymore and things improved a bit but it still gets a bit choppy and I need to restart explorer and restart sound system for some reason in order to fix that. I even have written a script “makeWindowsGreatAgain.ps” which does restarting of explorer and sound service.

Dock. I don’t know what is wrong with that thing but when I have my 4K Dell (not that Dell that they have on they Q&A site) connect it blinks. SOmetimes quite often, sometimes it doesn’t blink for hours but it keeps blinking.

Power saving settings in windows. Boy, is it peace of crap. The setting is “You block me, I sleep for 15 minutes then I hibernate”. Oh, you wanted to quickly use me? Nope, wait for me going through POST and all this shit. CHange settings? Nope, no change, gotta hack the registry.

Updates - well, many people have said a lot about SUDDEN reboots in most inconvenient times.

AutoHotkey - I wanted to automate something and bring keyboard shortcuts I have for managing windows in my mac and Linux. Well, it can do it except that sometimes when it brings window it doesn’t bring it but just highlight the icon on taskbar and you need to press it twice.

Having said all that, the hardware is a marvel. The cooling system keeps it as low as 70 under most hard load without visible throttling. THe sound system is better than my mac - at least I like the sound in headphones better. Speakers are awesome and done in a right way - they are facing listener so the sound is much crisper and louder than in those iPad Pro speakers which are facing back - I don’t understand that solution at all. Pen is awesome and for writing feels much better than Apple Pencil. I do miss eraser on other side of the pen when I use my iPad with Apple Pencil.

So whenever I use my Surface I feel like I’m fighting with a system instead of using it. I need to hack registry here and there and don’t forget to hack it again after certain updates. Here and there are bugs and it behaves in a wrong way. Palm rejection in OneNote sucks, backend devtools suck a bit less now but still suck and the most important things is all of this quirks are flaky, they are not stable. If they would be constantly broken, I’d write a script or find a workaround but not, it works until SUDDENLY it doesn’t. WHenever I with my Surface I feel constantly stressed because I don’t even no will the certain hotkey work or not, will it do what I want right now or will it flake. I can’t work on a machine like that.

So I’m typing it from my iPad Pro with Logitech keyboard case right now. I’ve bought Notability app for handwriting and boy, is it good (APple Pencil still sucks a mile compared to MS pen). I do all my life tasks on iPad now and for development I run T25 with Linux with i3 as my personal machine and I have mac from my employer as my work machine. Those two set in a way that they have same keyboard shortcuts for windows manipulation and other stuff. The dream to have one device keeps being just a dream (And I had soooo much hope for Windows Continuity back in the WinPhone days...)

Ah, sorry for all those typos, it's really hard to re-read a thing in this tiny 'Reply' window. I promise I'll write a comment like this in separate editor next time.

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