Surface Laptop 4
blogs.windows.com
blogs.windows.com
3:2 screen ratio, I really wish the whole PC industry including Mac moves towards it. Even 16:10 is not enough when we increasingly clutter the vertical space with OS menus, controls, dock. And then Browsers address bar, tab bar, then we have the WebSite layout which is also taking vertical space at the top for navigation.
1.3mm Key Travel. Which is the same as the old perfect MacBook Scissors Keyboard. Instead Apple went to 1.0mm Key travel in their magic keyboard just to save face.
Sane size precision trackpad, no more absurdly large trackpad that has easy false positive when you are typing on it.
Replaceable SSD, Keyboard, and Monitor for easy repair. Wow.
Surface Connect - Is that Microsoft version of MagSafe?
Larger sensor for better quality HD Video Call. They even compare it to MacBook Air 2020 LoL.
I haven't looked at PC Laptop hardware for quite some time, but in mid 2010, Dell or HP's motherboard and Laptop layout just aren't anywhere near as good as Apple. But this Surface Laptop definitely took lots of clues from the old MacBook ( I am wondering if they have ex-Apple MacBook Engineers on their team ).
Ignoring the Software, this Laptop looks exceptionally good!
By far the biggest selling point for me! I wouldn't even consider apple products for this reason.
Unlike Apple who seems to like to solder everything onto the board, such that to fix the SSD would require an entirely new logic board and a trip to the Apple Store.
That alone makes the Surface 4 'look' like a good deal, but at the price of $1000? No thanks and no deal (For now).
In the case of "Courage", Apple branded their decision to remove the headphone jack as "courageous".
"A sense of pride and accomplishment" is from the Battlefront video games, when marketers were talking about some features that either cost hundreds-of-dollars, or literally hundreds of hours of gameplay to unlock.
(Talking about the audio jack change, no idea how making easy-to-maintenance parts is not the safe choice).
Can't comment on whether the decision makers were being courageous or not in any way. Not sure any of us could.
It's just that they're a joke compared to the M1.
I see what you did there: https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/7/12838024/apple-iphone-7-pl...
In 2012, 4-5 days after the purchase of my first and last MacBook Air, they gave me a quote that was half the price of the new MBA when a key cap just popped out. I literally was using it and it popped out.
Their reasoning: physical damage + (this is the kicker) in Air there’s no provision to repair the key or key cap, entire lower board/chassis needs to be replaced.
Yes just a key cap! I shouted to customer support. It was replaced. I decided I am not paying for another fruit company laptop. (In their defence they tried to pull this off in a country with pretty much no or no accessible consumer protection)
Was it Apple who told you this? Or a 3rd party service center? A reseller? What country did they try to pull this off in?
Is this the same Microsoft whose original Surface Laptop got the lowest repairability score that iFixit has ever given?
>According to iFixit, the Surface Laptop isn’t repairable at all. In fact, it got a 0 out of 10 for repairability and was labeled a “glue-filled monstrosity.” Ouch. That’s never happened before. The lowest scores previously were a 1 out of 10 for all previous iterations of the Surface Pro
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/251046-ifixit-labels-s...
I feel weird using my MacBook Pro, knowing it's essentially a ticking time bomb, with its slowly degrading battery that can't be replaced.
[1] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft+Surface+Laptop+3+(...
You can see [1] that they are using multiple cells essentially taped together to make their "battery". This isn't uncommon, especially recently in smaller devices, as it lets them fit unusual shapes and other size issues, and saves space because you don't need a shell around them. The biggest (only?) issue is that you have a very delicate batteries taped together, if ripped/torn they may explode. To add to this, because they aren't riggedly attached, they are more prone to movement (and thus tearing). Their solution was to use adhesive across the bottom to make sure they are all firmly in place [0].
From a repair perspective this isn't great. It's not hard to remove if you have a heated plate, isopropyl, and patience, but not very user friendly. The best thing they could do to fix this would be to give the battery a rigid enclosure, but that will of course eat up valuable space, and I have no idea how that would affect the rest of their design. They could also use different tape that's easier to remove, but they may see the taped-together battery as something they don't want to be liable for people replacing (in case they tear it), so I really think the best solution is a rigid shell for the batteries.
tldr; This appears to mostly be a design limitation instead of a purposeful decision. I wish they'd change their design instead though....
[0] https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/FkZHQOAv2sPqKSBE.med...
[1] https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/VJBBLeHLWsRBQeIS.med...
I suppose planned obsolescence is not the best term to describe it however engineers do certainly factor in product lifetime (as much as they can) into their designs.
If Apple is in the business of early or planned obsolescence, they're fucking terrible at it.
What the hell has to happen for you to realize corporations are not your friends and 'mah free market' becomes mafia without law enforcement.
They just don’t provide products full of modular junk. They mostly try not to serve the junk market altogether. And sure, that skews their prices higher, and limits what you can do after buying the device. But they’re serving mostly mid-high end markets who would rather pay more than repair or replace. People who voluntarily accept the limitations they place on their devices.
A better criticism of their place in the market is how they distort “externalities”. Manufacturing labor costs and treatment, mining impact. The places they are renowned for outplaying every competitor.
That’s where their abuse lies. They don’t care if you swap out a battery, they just don’t care if you can either. They care about offering consumer-luxury products no one else can. If you follow that money, it’s their supply chain who hurts, not their clientele.
https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/936268845/apple-agrees-to-pay...
But this about more than just Apple. It is about corporates in general. I don't think a "corporates are evil" mantra explains everything - or even anything useful.
Product Designers are humans, CEOs are humans, all the employees are humans.(Unless ... Aliens ... :-) ) Some humans are better at whatever task than others, but all are operating under their motivational influences.
Get enough people together under one banner, someone will do something poor under that banner's name.
...which if you bothered to read even the article you linked, you'd know had to do with ensuring that battery voltage wouldn't drop low enough for the device to randomly shut itself off, a result which itself became a problem due to the actual longevity of their devices.
You can certainly argue that they should have communicated this with their customers, though I'd argue that the vast majority would not notice nor care, while a lot more people would certainly notice their devices randomly shutting off.
>If you're among those affected, your phone will randomly shut down and completely die, even though your battery indicator might have said you had plenty of juice left. It's not a simple system crash, because your phone will stay dead until you connect it to a charger
https://android.gadgethacks.com/news/nexus-6p-battery-random...
Instead of fixing the issue, Google's solution was to tell you to buy a new phone.
My point was that Apple is a corporation and so deserves the same suspicion as all the rest.
You've just added another data point to "corporations can't be trusted". Yep, Google is a corporation and can't be trusted either.
You seem to be saying Apple is better than [insert other corporation here] in some way. I see that as irrelevant.
I am saying that corporations - in the larger picture - can't be trusted.
Apple, and in this case Google, behaving poorly reflects that.
Google, on the other hand, lost it's court case after refusing to fix a known defect that had Nexus phones die while reporting they had more than a 50% charge remaining, and staying dead until you connected them to a charger.
>Nexus 6P owners eligible for up to $400 from Huawei and Google in class action settlement
https://www.androidcentral.com/nexus-6p-owners-eligible-400-...
Apples approach to "assuming everyone's device behaves the same way" (quotes because I don't honestly think any qualified engineer would make that assumption.) was wrong.
Some people use their phones less. My father doesn't turn his phone ON unless he wants to make a call.(Frustrating though that is...)
This makes a difference to battery performance as they don't just age out sitting in a box but through use as well. But here's Apple's take: https://www.apple.com/au/batteries/why-lithium-ion/
" For instance, you might use 75 per cent of your battery’s capacity one day, then recharge it fully overnight. If you use 25 per cent the next day, you will have discharged a total of 100 per cent, and the two days will add up to one charge cycle. It could take several days to complete a cycle. The capacity of any type of battery will diminish after a certain amount of recharging. "
Some people used their phone a lot and had batteries replaced - either through Apple or not.
And some human within Apple signed off on a solution to effectively make everyones older phone worse.
What else could they have done? Well, from my original NPR link: "Starting in 2018, iPhone users have been able to better control an iPhone's battery life and check on the health of the battery, along with allowing users to turn off iPhone battery throttling"
Make no mistake, Apple acted poorly. But they do better now. Whether that is because they were caught or not, we will never know.
I like many of the things Apple does. I have a lot of respect for their trailblazing. Screens seemed stuck in 1920x1080 hell until Apple unplugged screen development again.
But they are a corporation like any other and can't be trusted.
There is plenty of things to be critical of Apple and any corporation for and you don't need to spread misinformation in order to do so. You can even be critical about how they approached this, but your original claim that you doubled down on is simply false.
With yourself and a coincidental comment making such reasonable corrections I investigated further.
Posted below for posterity, not necessarily you.
The reddit post that started it all: https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/7inu45/psa_iphone_s...
Finally, from the horses mouth:https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208387
"iOS 11.3 and later improve this performance management feature"
and
"iPhone 8 and later use a more advanced hardware and software ..[snip].. As a result, the impacts of performance management may be less noticeable on iPhone 8 and later."
My conclusion: It is true that Apple was only targeting phones with dodgy(to a degree of approximation) batteries.
OTOH, Apple does a better job now. Both in execution and communication.
Whether Apple would have reached this achievement without batterygate is unknowable.
My apologies for spreading misinformation, thank you for your patience.
You've literally just proved the point the parent comment was making.
The same outcome is not always equal to the same behaviour. The devices throttled themselves because worn batteries could not handle the sudden power spike needed by the CPU. You can very easily verify this by turning off the software fix on an affected phone—start pushing it and it literally just shuts off.
Apple still behaved deplorably here: as soon as this software kludge was triggered, it should have popped up a warning saying "hey your battery is no good, go get it replaced. Your phone will perform way slower in the meantime".
They undoubtedly sold more iPhones by not doing so. But they didn't slow down perfectly functional old phones, they slowed down phones which were effectively faulty.
Apple was held up as some kind of paragon exception to this. It isn't.
1. slowing devices without telling anyone what they were doing.
2. assuming all their older devices were in the same state or had the same use cases. Replaced your phone battery recently? Who cares, you go slow anyway.
The combination of 1+2 combined with a loyal fanbase (or trapped in the ecosystem depending on your views) does seem awfully suspicious regarding manipulated obsolescence and worth investigation.
The article linked has Apple losing a court case in this regard.
So the point still stands, don't trust corporations, including Apple.
If you want to say that Apple is better than other corporations. Well that is a different point. You still can't trust them.
Sorry to be nitpicky, but this is actually not the case.
The whole reason this was initially discovered was because someone on reddit ran Geekbench before and after a battery replacement and got a huge performance increase. Not telling users is inexcusable, but phones where the battery was fully functional continued to run at full speed regardless of age.
> You still can't trust them
On this point I 100% agree!
Posted below for posterity, not necessarily you.
The reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/7inu45/psa_iphone_s...
Finally, from the horses mouth:https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208387
"iOS 11.3 and later improve this performance management feature"
and
"iPhone 8 and later use a more advanced hardware and software ..[snip].. As a result, the impacts of performance management may be less noticeable on iPhone 8 and later."
My conclusion: It is true that Apple was only targeting phones with dodgy(to a degree of approximation) batteries.
OTOH, Apple does a better job now. Both in execution and communication.
Whether Apple would have reached this achievement without batterygate is unknowable.
My apologies for spreading misinformation, thank you for your patience.
Edit:snipped some bits for conciseness.
Battery life vs speed vs reliability. Different people cut it different ways.
I think the issue was that everyone got the one solution without Apple telling them. So for a lot of people, it was perceived as worse.
> Apple offers a battery replacement service for all MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro notebooks with built-in batteries.
https://www.apple.com/batteries/service-and-recycling/
A glued in battery on any laptop/tablet/phone is awful. My sister replaced her battery on her 2011 MacBook Air and used it just fine for a decade. Didn’t need to replace any of the other parts.
It's meant to make end user replacement of the battery as difficult as possible.
No but I use it next to glasses of water?
> Do you use your phone in the rain ?
When I have to. I walk my dog in a rainy city.
Edit: do you use your desktop in the rain? Maybe I’m missing a use case I don’t understand. Because so far we’ve ruled out any water-tolerance cases I can think of.
Also, the keyboard and chassis in a Macbook are neither water resistant or waterproof.
I know that but don’t understand the point of distinguishing here. Waterproofing a battery achieves water resistance. In either case the claim was that it isn’t applicable for their portables.
> Also, the keyboard and chassis in a Macbook are neither water resistant or waterproof.
I’m still not understanding how this distinction matters. You claimed waterproofing wasn’t applicable to these devices. How does saying it’s not done well enough support that? Are you just arguing to argue?
You still need to waterproof the circuitry, the connectors, the components like the screen.
The original point was thus:
The argument for making a battery non-user-serviceable and glued into the device (as it is on the iPhones) was to retain waterproofing/water resistance.
THIS DOES NOT APPLY TO MACBOOKS YET THE BATTERIES ARE STILL GLUED IN.
If I understand, you’re saying the inconsistency of waterproofing one part and not waterproofing others suggests insincerity of the stated waterproofing motivation for the battery.
There are two (related) things wrong with that reasoning:
1. It assumes that any kind of water protection must be holistic to be sincere. This rules out any notion of prioritized iteration. It’s like saying (sorry, car metaphor incoming) seatbelts aren’t a real safety measure because other parts of the car haven’t been revised for the same kinds of risks seatbelts prevent or mitigate.
2. The batteries we’re talking about are substantially more fire prone when exposed to water than the rest of the device. That alone justifies prioritizing water safety measures for the battery ahead of any other component.
Any difficulty they add is additional difficulty for the thousands of Apple employees they hire to replace the batteries, so they definitely don't add it just to make it harder.
More vertical space is a win in my book.
>>> 4/3
1.3333333333333333
>>> 3/2
1.5
>>> 16/10
1.6
>>> 16/9
1.7777777777777777
Also, if one is complaining about the dock, move it to the side.
Also if you often do multiple things at once.
I find most of the time, I'm looking at one or two long documents (web page, source code) and running shells on my landscape laptop monitor so the combo works perfectly for me.
However I must note that superwide monitors are absolutely unusable in windows without PowerToys FancyZones functionality.
On a Laptop it is different though.
Actually come to think of it, a perfect window manager would be something that allows for overlapping windows in the central region, and lets you have adjustable left/right regions as tiling window areas. Combined with something that can tell an application which region it is in, so it can adjust the interface (optionally) to fit that region's purpose and limitations.
(Microsoft has still not yet released one for SL3, to the best of my knowledge.)
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/driver-api/surface_ag...
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/hid/hid.git/...
Well at least it is HID inside I guess.
Meanwhile Apple used a custom simple protocol over SPI for the Broadwell-Kaby Lake generations (and now Apple Silicon), but the few "T2" generations went back to USB… over some truly cursed custom T2 USB host controller https://github.com/MCMrARM/mbp2018-bridge-drv (WTF)
---
Also many Surface devices used awful Marvell Wi-Fi :/ At least the "Laptop 3" generation switched to Intel on Intel models and Qualcomm (seems like ath10k) on AMD ones.
Basically. I was disappointed to see it on my 2nd or 3rd generation. I thought we were past the days of proprietary connectors.
I'm disappointed they've still stuck with it. I'd MUCH rather have another USB-C port on the other side so I could charge it from either direction. I carry around a USB-C charger that charges all of my devices. I never want to have to carry around a proprietary brick again.
I wish they made it open.
I'm sure the issue is that I have it plugged in while it's on my lap a lot of the time, but barrel plugs and USB-C have not given me any issues under the same conditions.
I use the dock for my Surface Book. With the dedicated GPU it comfortably drives two extra screens through the dock. If you don’t plan on using the dock though, it’s just another proprietary power plug.
For example, with 16:9 → 16:10, you're often just gaining some vertical pixels (like 1920x1080 vs 1920x1200), so everything that was comfortable on 16:9 is equally workable on 16:10.
I realize that making a replaceable battery is not easy this days, but I would like to see manufacturers at least not make it absurdly hard to replace. Here's hoping MS didn't use too much glue and tape to secure the battery in place on the Surface Laptop 4...
Making the battery removable would compromise on other parts of the design. Personally, a replaceable battery is very low on my list of wants.
[0] https://www.ifixit.com/Store/Mac/MacBook-Pro-15-Inch-Retina-...
Laptops should have replaceable batteries. Period. If you get a new laptop every 2 years and don't know what it's like to have a perfectly good MacBook with 30minutes of battery life, then maybe you can just imagine being in that position and consider how globally impactful this anti consumer practice is.
What the heck, all MacBook batteries are replaceable! Apple will do it for you in the first 6 years or so, and after that there are still 3rd party shops who will happily replace it.
Yes & No; its Microsoft's proprietary version of Thunderbolt 3, which does have magnetic connect/disconnect.
I almost never use the dock on the bottom anymore. I find this a lot more useful, and it fits with the aspect ratio of the screens that are being shipped.
Paying attention to the software, WSL2 is one of the most convenient ways to run nix. No more messing with homebrew, you get real apt-get (and the breadth of packages and speed of updates that come from running real Ubuntu or Debian) or whatever else you want.
What are you doing to get those? I've never had issues with that, and I absolutely love the large trackpad on my MacBook
>I’d still prefer a smaller trackpad to avoid accidental input. And it looks like the edges and indentation in front of the trackpad remain sharp, as if you aren’t supposed to put your hands near there [1] .
You are trading absolute best for some people at the expense or annoyance for some people. The older trackpad isn't small either.
Which is exactly the same thing with TouchBar and Keyboard.
Some loves the butterfly keyboard, but they dont hate the old scissors keyboard. There are lots of people who hated the butterfly.
[1] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/11/14/the-16-inch-macbook-pro/
I hated the 16:9 popularity of computer flat screens. Definitely agree about needing lots of vertical space. I was content with 1600x1200 for years, and then 1920x1200 (1.6 vs 1.5 ratio) was available that was acceptable. Amazing how much smaller 1920x1080 felt, and is just a joke for anything other than watching videos (maybe games? i'm not a gamer) in my daily usage. Never tried one of those rotated 90, but it might be more useful as 9:16.
Last week I watched a review of the LG gram and the reviewer said he liked the new 16:10 screens more, because they are higher and this new [sic] trend was promising.
Meanwhile I'm using one of the last reasonably priced 16:10 screens I could get 10 years ago before the whole industry decided people only want 16:9.
Same goes with glare and non-glare
It's like display creators lost their minds in 2005.
For larger desktop screens, I definitely prefer the aspect ratio most closely matching full screen video. And for my comically large (43”) monitor, I couldn’t use the extra vertical space if I tried. Reducing the width would just limit my usable horizontal space and shrink video for my dual purpose TV use.
> Same goes with glare and non-glare
On this I’d also distinguish portable/desktop use cases. And weirdly they’re the opposite of what I’d prefer. It’s almost impossible for me to find large screen glass-front monitors with the contrast and color space benefits that come with that. And portable usage definitely benefits more from glare protection.
It's actually pretty hilarious if you have a monitor arm that allows rotating the monitor, the amount of vertical space is ludicrous. You can fit a side by side diff with over 200 lines of code visible.
It's not very practical, though.
It's a bit silly though, since the keyboard is far too low for typing comments on a diff. And if one raises the desk so that the keyboard is at the right height, it's a good workout for the neck to put it mildly.
I used (and still have) the original Chromebook Pixel in my closet with a 3:2 screen. amazing for browsing documents, but YouTube videos always felt off.
At home with TVs, I'm okay with the letter boxing to watch 1.85,2.35 type content on my 1.78 screen. It's the trade off as making a movie buff 2.35 screen would force majority of 1.78 content to be window/pillar boxed.
My Pixel was mostly used as a portable school laptop for web browsing and development, so for those tasks it did a great job. But there was always that nagging feeling when viewing videos and seeing even more black bars on top/botton than even my 16:10 monitor at home.
I didn't see 1920x1080 as worth the upgrade. Although I have recently had to tweak/mod a few games as they didn't support my screen resolution.
Now, I want 2x 4k screens: - play games at 1080, I have not the money for 4k gaming at high refresh rates.
- and desktop productivity at 4k, with one screen portrait for reading.
I do sunburn far easier than I'd like though! :-P
You can probably use it without scaling so high dpi compatibility won't be a problem.
Don't settle for 32 inch get a 40+ inch one.
So in order to get crisp DPIs, 32'' with fractional scaling might still make sense. At least to me, it's like reading crisp sharp paper online.
Hellzyeah! Where can I get one of those bad boys? And how many arms and legs plus first born children are needed to give up to get one of those mythical beasts?
Can't decide if you mean 40" display or 4K display? Or did you combine 40" + 4k into 40k?
The increase in vertical space is exactly what I was missing while coding: that alone is a significant and worthwhile upgrade, and for that the fact it's 16:9 is kind of irrelevant. Because it's 16:9, YouTube, games, etc still work the way they always did.
Compared to my monitors at work (1920×1200 / 16:10), the benefit is I can run two browser windows side-by-side with a comfortable 1280px width that most sites work great with. 1920px is too narrow to run 50%/50%, but I find also usually wasted at 100% width.
There's not that many other options.
I can't actually find many 16:10 on the market.
4K is usually 3840x2160, which is 16:9. For me this doesn't make sense: either the monitor(s) end up being too massive, the text is too tiny, or I have to scale up and basically have the same vertical space as 1080p 16:9 just with sharper text.
21:9 3440x1440 is probably the next most popular aspect ratio, but two are just way too big for my desk space and I didn't think I'd be happy with one (it's only a tiny bit more area vs 2x 1080p).
The 32:9 "ultra-wide" 5120x1440 look pretty great, but in practice seem to have some challenges. As an example, you can't really do full screen sharing anymore because no one else can see it. Window management becomes a constant pain because "full screen" most apps/websites are just not going to be useful at 5120px wide. And for games it seems to be mixed: when they work it looks pretty cool, but many don't work properly. And on top of that, going fullscreen gaming means you don't get a second monitor to keep an eye on something else, even if your game is running in 16:9 with black bars. For video editors or people working on stupidly big spreadsheets it might make sense, but not for me. (Doesn't help it's 4x the cost of a 2560×1440 display, either).
But the sharper text is the whole point. That's why I abandoned the idea of getting a 4k 43" monitor, the DPI is the same as on a FHD 22" one. Even a 32" is "pushing it", as in the DPI isn't that high.
However, note that not all text needs to be big. In my case I run a 4k screen at 100%, which allows me to have tiny title and toolbars, which means more actual space. I don't need the UI elements to be huge, and since I mostly use terminals and web browsers, adjusting the "content text" is enough. Of course, YMMV on Windows and Mac OS where you have to click a lot of buttons, so their being tiny might be an issue.
Of course, if for your use and / or preference "sharper text" doesn't matter, you can save a bunch of money by staying with lower-resolution screens and / or get a single giant one if that's your cup of tea.
I only have a 21:9 ultrawide but this is definitely a drawback. I have a second monitor that is just 16:9 that is used for all of my screen sharing
I work with text all day. I want it as sharp as I can get it.
My home (and home office) setup is 14" 1920x1080 laptop + 24" 2560x1440 screen (1x scaling), and I like that a lot, too. The WQHD screen is wide enough to have two things open side by side, which can feel cramped on FHD, while also having sufficiently many vertical pixels.
That sort of made sense for desktop monitors, for a little while, but the overlap between laptop/monitor and TV offerings has almost completely disappeared-- 17" and smaller TVs are not mass market items.
I wonder if part of it is just as a penny pinching gimmick now: a square monitor of X diagonal gives you more square centimetres of panel than a wider screen does.
No way, the unibody MacBook Pro (2008-2011) had the perfect keyboard. I still have my 17”. The Retina’s keyboard was a painful downgrade that I never got used to.
16:9 on a desktop seems to be unavoidable these days, and indeed there's the whole popular trend of ultrawide/ultrawide-and-curved monitors now which go way beyond that.
And scrolling vertically for anything is painful on a small 16:9 screen. The macbook happens to have both 16:10 aspect ratio and a higher quality LCD.
1080p and 4K are both terrible choices for 13-14" screens, yet that's all you see anymore, and even on higher end models trying to get accurate info on panel quality and color accuracy is a nightmare.
Former surface firmware engineer, opinions are my own.
Edgium now allows the browser tab to be a vertical column, rather than a horizontal row, which is nice. I hope other browsers copy that.
I never got used to butterfly keyboard, even though I had one for more than 2 years. The new ones might not be the same as the old school, but feel amazing from the get go.
Using a Surface Laptop 3 right now and everything except for the display is pretty much a dumpster fire. The display hardware is incredible in every way. 3:2 is the correct aspect ratio for laptops if you care about running visual studio or other apps which gobble up vertical real estate.
I have reloaded this thing from official image 3x and it will still randomly fuck up important things like hardware accelerated video playback and WiFi, both of which require a hard reset to resolve. There is also some really annoying bullshit with the ambient brightness adjustment feature where I have to manually disable it in the registry every time a driver or windows update hits.
The most painful problem with the machine is that WiFi is entirely unusable if you are simultaneously using bluetooth. I have had to get external dongles to resolve this.
All of that said, I have had few-to-no issues with the Surface Pro product line at work, and my sample size is 1. Might be bad luck or just really demanding expectations. I have been debating going back to Apple, but there are some HP/Asus machines that look compelling now.
Strangely enough tho it says my battery is 87% good. Tho the laptop is like 3 years old now.
Is this the same issue that I'm having where video and audio become increasingly out of sync as playback continues?
My issue is that the video is completely black (or green in VLC). Disabling hardware acceleration resolves, but then it runs like garbage and cant resize with high quality interpolation.
I had a pre-M1 MacBook Air for when I'm not working and I hated its fans constantly whirring and the industrial design that hadn't been updated in years.
I dived deep into different Windows laptops having spent 10+ years away and been really pleased with the purchase. The design is very simple, aspect ratio great, and the keyboard better than the Mac I was transitioning from.
I didn't like the Dell XPS's keyboard or display, and I tried the Razer Blade Stealth 13 but it was overkill.
Having not really used Windows for years and given that lots of Windows laptops still had shockingly cheap industrial design or weird quirks (webcam at the bottom?!), the Surface Laptop 3 was unfussy and a delight to use.
whoa!! what? i can't believe that someone did that, but then, yes I can. i guess that's useful if you have to look at the keyboard while typing. in that case, the bottom based cam is just a glance up???
I have this XPS and use an external webcam when I need one.
Fortunately, the replacement Lenovo Legion 5 moves the webcam back to the top.
Wouldn't that be a problem of Windows itself? For me bluetooth has been a mess on every Windows machine. It's a miracle if something works and to get something working you even need to buy a dongle with a specific chip on it...
I've definitely experienced what a bad Bluetooth adapter on Windows is like though. Things just failing to pair for no apparent reason, things randomly disconnecting, the thing seeming to forget all previous pairings, etc. I think that's usually been due to poor drivers. Earlier versions of Windows didn't really have much Bluetooth support out of the box, most of the stuff seemed to be implemented by each hardware vendor at the time. Compatibility issues were so common. This has largely seemed to go away especially when using modern Intel WiFi/BT chips and modern Windows.
I mostly use Bluetooth with Apple AirPods. I tried running Ubuntu on the ThinkPad but it had the same problem I've seen on other Linux machines: the AirPods would only pair as headphones, not as a full headset with microphone.
I like Windows better anyway on the hardware, especially its support for different scaling factors on multiple monitors. So I run Linux in a VM or use WSL2.
As with all things tho, YMMV.
0: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/189347/...
Bigger reason is uncertainty about the Windows platform. ChromeOS and macOS both run mobile apps, which bring a vast library and a level of integration (especially macOS + iOS) that seems increasingly hard to overlook. Add to this Microsoft's goal of switching to ARM and fragmenting its ecosystem, it becomes an even harder buy.
In general, the Surface lineup seems to be ~1 year behind in hardware compared to the rest of the industry, e.g. only now switching to TigerLake and Ryzen 4000 series CPU. Hardware itself is well packaged but a hard sell for its premium price. Furthermore Microsoft is delusional to sell RAM and SSD upgrades from 8GB to 16GB and 256GB to 512GB respectively for +$200.
Of all platforms to be worried about, I feel like Windows is the last one here (Web aside perhaps). It wouldn't be unreasonable to try running a program from Windows XP era and have it run fine in Windows 10.
As for the ARM fragmentation, fair enough but doesn't macOS face the same challenge? Windows 10 on Arm also supports running x86 apps without recompiling too.
Right now it seems Apple has a better track record when it comes to the risk of ARM fragmentation - bolstered by their Rosetta translator is pretty good and the M1 hardware. For comparison, the Surface Pro X just received x64 emulation but its performance remains generally poor (not helped by the Qualcomm SQ1 SOC).
I thought Surface devices are built well, but after seeing my sister struggle with her Surface Pro, I have decided to not take the risk.
I agree that it’s incredibly bad (and I generally like Surface devices otherwise).
They are so good.
I have the M1 Macbook Air - I can't wait to see what the more powerful machines are like, but even the Air (without a fan) is a noticeably huge leap.
Not sure I could live without mine.
The tablet mode is decent, although a USB port would have been nice. The display is fantastic, although a bit too reflective.
Using the machine is another story, battery life isn’t as exceptional as it’s made out to be, and it’s slow (even web browsing on Edge or Chrome is janky on anything other than “Better performance” mode).
Maybe the SB3 is better but the 2 has put me off.
Using a Surface Laptop 3 to write this, have had it since it came out (I guess maybe a little under a year now?). It's one of the most reliable laptops I've ever used.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/surface-laptop-4/946627fb1...
Up to 19 hours of battery life on 13.5” with AMD Ryzen™ Microsoft Surface® Edition processor
Up to 17 hours of battery life on 13.5” with Intel® Core™ processor
Up to 17.5 hours of battery life on 15” with AMD Ryzen™ Microsoft Surface® Edition processor
Up to 16.5 hours of battery life on 15” with Intel® Core™ processor
Shockingly with the M1 Apple's battery life claims were quite conservative. I have been able to get an hour longer than Apple's claims without having to resort to any extreme measures.
I'd strongly recommend resetting the system, and perhaps getting a warranty replacement if you continue to experience poor battery life with email, chat, couple browser tabs. That absolutely should not be happening.
I bought my daughter an M1 Air for Christmas, she is a university student that mostly does written work in Word, research (so mostly web and PDF stuff) and obviously video conferences right now. She has no trouble getting 13-15 hours of uni work done (a little less if a lot of video calls).
Compared to the 2018 Air it replaced she says it is "insane". Although battery life is great it isn't a huge deal for her. The thing she loves the most is no fan noise when on video calls. This was actually the reason I bought it for her as she constantly complained about how loud the old Air was as soon as Zoom started up.
I use VMware Fusion a lot on my Intel MBP but haven't had a look at virtualisation on the M1 just yet. Waiting for it to mature a little more.
Hopefully things improve as Apple Silicon becomes better supported over the next few months.
You got all the virtualization and all the emulation.
On Windows side... uhh I am not sure what is Docker using, if WSL or WSL2, or something else. But will probably be better for that usage.
For the 15" you can only get 16 GB ram too, but the ssd goes up to 512 GB.
M1 Macbook Air has larger, 49.9WH battery, and only boasts 18 hours as maximum battery life.
"Testing consisted of full battery discharge with a mixture of active use and modern standby. The active use portion consists of (1) a web browsing test accessing 8 popular websites over multiple open tabs, (2) a productivity test utilizing Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook, and (3) a portion of time with the device in use with idle applications. All settings were default except screen brightness was set to 150nits with Auto-Brightness disabled. Wi-Fi was connected to a network. Battery life varies significantly with settings, usage and other factors."
[0]https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/surface-laptop-4/946627fb1...
> Up to 19 hours of battery life based on typical Surface device usage. Testing conducted by Microsoft in February 2021 using preproduction software and preproduction 13.5” AMD Ryzen™ 5 Microsoft Surface® Edition processor, 8GB RAM device. Testing consisted of full battery discharge with a mixture of active use and modern standby. The active use portion consists of (1) a web browsing test accessing 8 popular websites over multiple open tabs, (2) a productivity test utilizing Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook, and (3) a portion of time with the device in use with idle applications. All settings were default except screen brightness was set to 150nits with Auto-Brightness disabled. Wi-Fi was connected to a network.
I think the key in there is "modern standby." What is the ratio of standby to active use? That and 150nits brightness, though that is common for a lot of battery tests. (I personally like 250-300 even indoors.)
What the hell Microsoft?
> Up to 16GB (AMD, DDR4, 2,400 MHz), up to 32GB (Intel, LPDDR4, 3,733 MHz)
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-surface-laptop-4...
My (now older) T470P personal laptop has 32GB of RAM and it's coming up on 4 years old.
Wintel is alive and kicking it seems.
My 5 year old HP Zbook has 64GB of RAM (I do occasionally use up to 48GB), but realistically 32GB is enough.
I'm in the market for a new dev laptop, and this looks like... except for the RAM that makes it a deal-breaker :(
Compare this with Thinkpad's soft-touch coated magnesium chassis - almost as sturdy but feels so inviting.
People get woo'ed by something made of metal. Yeah, its nice from an engineering standpoint but it is not the "best industrial design" just because its made of metal. IMO, best design is the one that is more human centric than marketing bullshit and luxury quality cliches.
I really think Thinkpad X1 series is the best laptop ever in terms of its industrial design (not OS, display quality etc). Keyboard is so incredible.
As a side note, it's a shame they never made any "true" successors to the x230s, I'd love to see them made with today's technology.
The T480s I had before that was indeed a fine device, if only I could have kept it...
:barf: I upgraded from a T430s (great machine for it's time) to a T460s.
the T460s wasn't very good, the track pad was awful, the trackpoint was a new low profile and incredibly stiff style that had no alternative cap styles for it, if you got the innolux display you where fucked (had to replace it with an after market LCD due to the bad colours and viewing angles on an IPS panel). Ram was also soldered.
The only two good things I can say about the T460s was it was incredibly light and the keyboard was my favourite laptop keyboard, it just felt right.
My 2020 MBP is so hot I hate using it on my lap.
I have an X1 Carbon 7th Gen that I've been using as a laptop pad for my MBP the last few months... MacOS is just so much more convenient.
It's a chunky device and I haven't checked out the lates ones, but if I wanted a portable workstation with a great keyboard I would get another one for sure. Right now I'm leaning towards getting a desktop and a ultraportable I can use to SSH to the desktop when I need to work on the go - but the HW market is a joke right now, I'm probably going to wait it out till Q3/Q4.
You could apply some skins.
I actually like the heat dissipation the metal provides.
https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/wiki/Supporte...
Took almost all of the 14 hours over airplane wifi in which I could not work at all.
Gave it away to charity the day after I landed. Its sister unit a coworker had bricked itself about two years later.
Would not recommend to anyone. A friend of mine has a Surface Book, and he has just as many problems as I had, but with the Surface Books most problems are with the GPU in combination with the bad drivers and horrible external display support.
This is such an odd comment. How is this different from Apple devices or those 1st party Chrome OS devices?
My 5 year old laptop has 3200 x 1800 and it looks like nobody makes this resolution any more.
My laptop is a Samsung ATIV Book 9 [1]. It is getting old and I will have to replace it soon, and sadly no one is making an awesome laptop this good any more, not even Samsung. The display, the backlit keyboard, the general build quality, and the industrial design is better than even MacBooks.
[1] https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/windows-laptops/noteboo...
Microsoft picked the lower side of the middle-ground with 201ppi. I'd obviously have to see it to be certain, but I'd expect it to not be perceptibly worse than the ~226ppi that Apple uses on their laptops.
This lack of middle-ground options was actually something that frustrated me last year when I was buying a laptop. It was one of the big motivators for me picking up a MacBook Pro instead of going with another Windows machine.
Lenovo has finally started implementing haptic trackpads like Macbooks have had for almost a decade, so I'll keep my fingers crossed for the Surface Laptop 5.
It's been out for a while, even the "PRO" business lineup is launching with other laptops this month :(
Sometimes there’s a big difference in the PC world between those.
The non-PRO Ryzens (like 5900HX, 5800H, etc.) have been shipping for a while (and you can actually find some in stock most days).
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/surface-pro-x/8qg3bmrhnwhk
Because despite getting clobbered on desktop, Intel is still competitive in laptops and produces more than AMD can.
>Then the Ryzen one is old as well. Why not a new gen?
Because there's not enough supply.
>Why not trying ARM like Apple did?
Because people use Microsoft for backwards compatibility. They tried it before with Windows RT, and it was a flop.
They did. Several times. People turned their noses at them because they couldn't install outside of their app store or their garbage x86 apps directly. The models that did offer x86 compatibility over ARM performed poorly.
Apple can get away with segmentation because people will still buy Apple products because they're Apple products. Microsoft's own brand doesn't carry the same fashionable prestige, so minor annoyances on Macbooks become dealbreakers on Surface.
??? Apple gets away with it because their x86 -> ARM translation actually works. Without it the M1 Macs would be DOA.
Hopefully Windows will soon see an equally as effective x86 -> ARM translation layer.
Apple can get away with an on-the-fly architecture transition, because they're willing to invest a shit ton of resources, and also because Rosetta 2 is the software equivalent of the Top Gear opening theme played by Slash on a guitar that's on fire.
Any in-development products worth following?
I have high hopes for the laptop chip Qualcomm plans to build with the former Nuvia team though.
To compare what AMD can do with 5nm dies we will have to wait since these chips are scarce currently.
At 'least' the SSD is replaceable, so you can upgrade the space after you bought it. Unlike the M1 Macbook Air that has everything soldered.
I just hope its cousin the Surface Neo manages to see the light of day! Or maybe it will be the 2020s version of Microsoft Courier grrrr.
- seemingly last generation AMD (4000 series) when there are 5000 series laptops starting to ship from other vendors
- only option with 32G RAM is Intel and black?!
- seems like no option for discrete graphics at all
At the very minimum, tell the customer the keyboard layout during checkout, because I'm not going to bother ordering it only to find out after receiving it what the layout is (my default assumption is the national layout; e.g. QWERTZ for Germany, AZERTY for France).
Lenovo, HP, and Dell are all guilty of this as well. The laptops are all assembled in SE Asia in the first place, so it's inexcusable that vendors cannot offer different keyboard options on their own web store.
I'll definitely look for reviews of this unit because it really does look great (including ability to repair and replace components). But I'll be carefully optimistic for now.
- 1 x USB-A
- 3.5 mm headphone jack
- 1 x Surface Connect port
So I guess this is their "Macbook Air" equivalent?
It's funny to compare with something like https://us.vaio.com/collections/vaio-sx14 which is still very thin. I guess the main trade-off is battery life.
I am so thankful Microsoft is being rewarded for making quality, sensible devices.
The solution seems to be uh, patch the kernel? https://github.com/jovton/USB-Storage-on-WSL2
I use it with my Surface Pro 4.
I'm amazed that driver troubles chase Microsoft even on their own designed hardware.
https://www.google.com/search?q=surface+laptop+bricked
The last surface book bricking was borderline tragicomedic.
Microsoft has managed to brick on record:
Surface 1
Book 2
Pro 3
Pro 6
* The Win10 "Night light" feature became unavailable about half a year after I bought the device. Had to go back to using f.lux. (Meanwhile, on my 2012 ThinkPad with an old NVS5400M graphics card, Night light works just fine.)
* The front camera would regularly get stuck in a bad state, with the light and IR illuminator turned on but camera unavailable, until a reboot. A recent driver update seems to have mitigated the bug; now the camera just reports an error until I reboot, but at least the lights don't stay on.
* There's no S3 Standby state. Either the computer stays on in "Connected S0", with sounds playing, radios on, snagging my Bluetooth headphones' connection, or I can put it into Hibernate, burning through 16 GB of the SSD's TBW every time.
Just as a counter-anecdote.
I...LOVE...MICROSOFT...EXPERIENCES
- Steve Ballmer, notable Microsoft enthusiast
I think not.
I will probably never buy hw from microsoft again but I must say they make really killer ad videos for their shit nowadays.
Brushed aluminium unibody, polished company logo in the middle, “MagSafe”. You should think there were other possible ways to design a laptop.
But other than that, looks like a pretty great machine. Lets hope it runs Linux.
Although I am happy they are doing this since no one else is bringing a high quality metal laptop with the same "feel" that you would get from a Macbook aluminum Unibody laptop.
The best windows laptop before was a Macbook running bootcamp.