New Surface products, built for Windows 11 | Hacker News Reader

New Surface products, built for Windows 11

blogs.windows.com

45 pointsitsme-alan71 comments

Fuck that noise Jack; I recently updated my home computer and had to install Windows 10 from scratch - Even its setup seems to have changed for the worst since I originally installed it on my now defunct PC. I have the Pro edition (that I paid $200 for) - using the latest ISO, the whole setup just felt user and privacy hostile. I remembered that it would try to make me use my Hotmail account as a user account, but when I tried to go the old way of using a local account, it just kept telling me I was limiting my new system's capabilities. It kept trying to put me back on Hotmail account path. There were a few other things, like trying to get me to sign up for Office with a dark (well maybe gray) pattern, forcing Edge on me, which even though it is Chromium based and I would use it, they were so aggressive about it, it turned me off it completely. Don't get me started on the fact that I seem to be signed up for something called Bing rewards now and that there are ads in my start menu and in the new task bar weather widget. They also seem to have by default installed something called MeetNow in my taskbar and while you can hide the icon, you seemingly can't uninstall it. I have to say, as a .NET dev, I've been so happy with all the .NetCore stuff and even Azure is growing on me - but this Windows business is extremely disconcerting. If that's how even Windows 10 has evolved, I don't want any part of 11, even from just what I have seen so far.

Apple doesn't look so bad now, does it

Apple requires signing in and registering a credit card to do almost anything on an iOS.

That's not true, don't spread FUD.

Create or use an Apple ID without a payment method: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204034

What about without Apple ID?

That isn't what the comment I was replying to said.

However, you need an Apple ID to use the App Store. It's not needed for any of the built-in apps, though.

(It might be needed for iMessage or FaceTime? I'm actually not sure. I think you can use iMessage without it, but it doesn't sync between devices.)

No, it doesn't.

I understand that you're angry and feel frustrated, but you're writing about your Windows 10 experience in a thread about new Surface devices and Windows 11. That just feels off-topic IMHO.

Do you honestly believe that Windows 11 will not do any of that stuff? That would be a sudden shocking reversal.

We will have plenty of time to complain about it when Windows 11 is released. I would personally prefer to see discussions regarding the actual Surface devices in a Surface thread.

I see your point but the article is about the Surface and how it is made for Windows 11. As a consumer, what do I have to base it on today other than how they've changed Windows 10 for the worst. To me what you're saying is like telling me I can't form on opinion on Police Academy 6 based on what I thought of Police Academy 5,4,3,2 and 1.

That’s not my point. You can form the opinion you want. On HN submissions related to Microsoft or Apple have a very strong tendency to drift to a list of personal complaints people have regarding the company. Over time that’s a pain for people who want to discuss the actual topic of the submission, here a release of new devices, and not an operating system from 2015.

I'm on the same boat. While .net development is a breeze, the Windows ecosystem is a drag. I wish they could provide a Windows for Devs edition that would be stripped down to the bare minimal. The problem with Windows is that it's trying to be everything for everyone. One OS for multiple devices, instead of separating mobile/tablet from desktop as Apple did. Thus every stupid idea they come with is embedded in all versions of the OS. I'm serious contemplating the idea of moving to Linux, and the only thing that's holding me back is Visual Studio.

The one thing I can't stand about Windows is that they've added a bazillion of settings. It literally took me 6 hours a day just to go into every freaking setting in Control Panel, and I can't even remember where is everything. You have menus on the left, menus on the right, extra links on the bottom, a clusterfuck of UI design. For fuck's sake Microsoft, I just need an OS to do my work.

The last time I worked on a .NET Core (v2) project, I was able to do everything that I needed to on my Manjaro workstation.

One thing that I missed was SQL Server Management Studio, but Azure Data Studio was more than good enough and it even had some nice features that SSMS lacked, like project folders and GIT integration. SQL Server itself ran just fine in a Docker container.

A peer of mine is doing the same thing on the Manjaro desktop that I setup for him and he's using .NET Core v5.

Yeap, Azure Studio is good, and also fast. The latest SSMS is so sluggish.

Which IDE did you use to replace Visual Studio?

not comment Op - but vscode is great and portable. I've also used Rider but find myself going to vscode more and more, especially with ssh to folder to develop. That's a glaring omission in Rider - last I checked, they had this funky workaround but nowhere near as good.

VS Code

The surface duo is just such a great concept, compared to the folding screen phones. They avoid all the tech risk and expense of the folding screen phones, and the two screen form factor is just a legitimately good way to organize apps on a screen, like having two physical monitors.

The tech seems too early for the folding screen phones, and they unfold into something which is an awkward shape. There's nothing I want to do on my phone with a really big square of content.

I wish the surface neo could have gotten a chance to shine.

While we're on the subject, I wish the surface band had been given a little more time. Google has really dropped the ball with android wearables, it would have been a huge opportunity for microsoft.

Having watched the video of the phone I agree, it actually looks like quite a good concept. I do think the integration with Windows is excellent as well, if I am at my computer realistically why should I need to pick up my phone? All of my notifications, features and settings should be accessible from my Windows laptop/desktop.

All of them are accessible from your Windows machine using the Your Phone app.

Yeah if you're using an Android device

I agree, it looks great. But the price is way too high! Starting price: 1599$?! Who can afford such a device, and what to do you actually do with something that expensive that you wouldn't do with a one-screen phone? If I sell my arm to buy something like this, which is basically the price of a good laptop, I expect a really, really special experience, I'm not sure the custom Android ROM Microsoft is using will be up to the task.

Yeah, it still sort of has "early-adopter" pricing. It doesn't have the same market as, say, an iPhone. It's also working pointing out that the Galaxy Z Fold3 is $1799

I was holding off and waiting for a new Surface laptop or 2-in-1 until recently when:

- Windows 11 was announced and proves to be another Vista-like misstep.

- I have learned about Framework laptops and repairability and being able to upgrade one has become a killer feature.

> Windows 11 was announced and proves to be another Vista-like misstep.

It's not even out yet?

Yet they have been advertising its problems I think. I'm not that into Windows though.

I have to say that I do not understand the bad press around Windows 11. I'm using the dev channel since it's available and while things have been unstable (expected from a dev release), the user experience is clearly an improvement over the mess Windows 10 is. My machine doesn't feel slugish anymore, the Start menu and settings panel are finally usable, the new windows snapping features work quite well, managing external displays isn't a nightmare anymore, etc.

I was even able to update my old Thinkpad x230 after enabling TPM from the bios, it feels usable again.

> the user experience is clearly an improvement over the mess Windows 10 is

To me, it looks like another coat of varnish haphazardly and thoughtlessly painted on top of multiple layers on a crumbling, dry wall. A mishmash of ideas added on top of Windows 10, not an evolution and revolution and refactoring of what Windows is. Ah, and more telemetry and ads.

Yes, that’s not false. But it’s a nice coating, to continue your wall painting analogy. It’s way more coherent than Windows 8 or Windows 10. but it’s still fundamentally the same windows mess.

How about scaling? Did they fix it because in Win10 it was horrendous.

What are you scaling? I’m not sure I understand your question without more context

Scaling is when you change the size of fonts, apps, etc. In Win10 if you chose anything above 100% everything becomes blurry. There's also a problem when you use multiple monitors with different resolutions. You move a window from one screen to the next and it doesn't scale properly. It's a known issue for some years, and I'd wish they solved it in Win11.

Ah yes! scaling of the UI has been fixed for me since Windows 11. I use a laptop with a 4k display, and an external display with a 2k resolution. That was really a mess with windows 10, since windows 11 I’m very happy with the scaling and external display support. Even the Win+P menu to change how the external display is being used is not as buggy as it was with Windows 10.

I only have issue with Telegram’s client, and that’s due to their use of Qt, which doesn’t support native UI scaling without relaunching the app.

But I would guess that may vary depending on your setup.

The preview for it is available so in a way it is already out. The general release is also very soon -- October 5th -- so the latest previews are likely fairly close to the final version.

The TPM and general older platform incompatibility problems have been advertised for long; not sure how it'll play out, but I'll avoid it like the plague.

It's out for people on the Windows Insiders program. I happen to be on it and got stranded because they enrolled me for Win11 despite my machine not meeting the specs and now they've decided to no longer provide updates to that cohort an downgrading requires a full wipe.

That said, from what I've been seeing Win11 is mostly just Win10 with some minor incremental changes, some good, some bad. The default centering of the task bar is certainly a thing but you can set it to align left as normal although I miss having the task bar moved to the top. Only thing I find a bit tedious is the new right click menu in the file explorer, which I can understand the reasoning behind but still don't think was the right move.

I think the new widgets thing is a misstep like the charms bar but it's just another icon you can ignore. The built-in MS Teams chat feature is interesting but just adds to the redundancy of having to have separate Microsoft and Microsoft 365 accounts, which is getting silly.

Or another Windows 8 misstep. They seem intent on releasing the product with a crippled start menu (zero customization and half of it seemingly reserved for ad space), the integrated teams chat is not compatible with work accounts, the widgets do not allow you to disable the news widget.

I appreciate the typeface changes, though as a Windows user such things have never been a priority to me.

What irks me is the loss of customization and productivity enhancements of being able to group and size the start menu - all my video editing stuff in one group, coding-related apps in another, etc. That organization is what I miss the most on a daily basis.

Have you considered not bothering with manually going through the start menu but just typing what you want, or otherwise pinning mostly used apps to the taskbar? Both are faster and more convenient than point-search-click and taskbar allows grouping. Only downside: typing in the start menu does not always work flawlessly; can't pinpoint the exact problem but seems like there's some algorithm behind it which takes some time to get the most used things to the top. Also it's not truly fuzzy matching, which is imo by far the best and fastest way for launching/searching anything (think Ctrl-P in text editors like SublimeText/VSCode or using fzf on the command line)

Yep, search is a thing, but far from preferable to menu customization for me - not as hs/ld, in my opinion. Requires more input and more brain cycles to start typing a name with (potentially) both hands than to hit the win key and select the pictograph that’s immediately there in the same spot every time. It’s hardly a process of manually going through the start menu unless you need something unpinned. Having both options is great, but I like my regular ‘work tools’ laid out before me, arranged by activity - a pod of icons for my video/audio editing, a pod for dev work tools, a pod of icons for office apps, etc.

But yeah, in win11 search is more of a focus not because it’s a new feature compared to win10, but because they hobbled the other features, and that seems like an enormous step backwards to me (the loss of customization/options).

Win 11 lets you pin apps to the menu still, but there’s no grouping, half the menu is taken up by a “recommended” section, and there’s no resizing of it. For the unchangeable half of the menu, which so far as I can tell is not an MRU list, it does hold recently installed apps from the store (and nowhere else) and likely will be used to stub in advertised apps (call me cynical). It’s a crippling change, and I suspect we’ll see those features added back in sooner or later. Much like win8.1. That’s about the best I can hope for anyway. MS is intent to release as-is.

I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but Microsoft seems to almost be doing the missteps in a pattern/on purpose.

Win95 vs Win98/ME/etc (? not sure)

WinXP vs Vista

Win7 vs Win8

Win10 vs Win11?

It's like the Intel's tick-tock model almost. On some level I do think that bashing this is a bit hypocritical when most of us nerds are also the first ones to bemoan a lack of innovation.

It's more

95/98 -> 98SE

ME -> 2000/XP

Vista -> 7

8 -> 8.1

Can't say about 10 as the version numbers are harder to track

Thanks, I knew I was getting most of them wrong, haven't touched Windows in years, memory is very hazy

It's a two iteration learning process, and this time they need to learn people don't want ads and telemetry. Windows 12 will be privacy first.

As someone mostly into Windows development ecosystem, I fully agree with the Vista-like misstep (and Windows 8-like as well).

Yesterday they did a community talk about Ink support as if it was something completly new in Windows 11, my feeling was "have these guys ever used UWP Ink?!?".

I've had a notebook like the Surface Laptop Studio - Sony VAIO Flip 15 (2014) - right before Sony sold VAIO.

I've had it send in for repairs because the touchscreen was unresponsive a bunch of times before I got my money back and bought a Thinkpad (T440s). It was a software issue because a reboot always fixed it. But I bought it for school so the main part randomly stops working while taking notes was a deal breaker.

The concept isn't bad. But the height of it while being a tablet on a surface is a pain to comfortably use a pen.

I also like the concept. Did you face issues with heat management, was your device fanless? That's often one of my main concern with those 2-1, if you want a good CPU, you often have throttling issues because it's really difficult to design a good cooling system for such a unique form factor.

I brought a Surface Go 2, and returned it within 3 days. The device was brilliant, but I couldn't get over its operating system, especially not on a mobile device.

I hoped for a tablet I can do light dev work on, but I got a mediocre laptop without a keyboard.

The open/edit/save process is good for desktop, but not for mobile. On mobile operating systems you open and close apps without thinking. On windows you first need to tackle the unsaved change dialogs, find where you save your files, etc. You don't open recent drawings from a gallery, but from your filesystem. It sucks all the joy out of sketching, for example. It becomes work.

The lack if drawing apps was critical. There were Photoshop-like desktop apps, and half-baked mobile one. They were either really complex, or buggy beyond repair. Each handled the pencil in a different way, but never smoothly.

Even media playback sucked. I had to mess with environment variables to make VLC usable with fingers. Windows Media Player was not better.

Then there's Windows Update. My tablet was unusable for a big chunk of the first evening while it installed Bing news in my task bar and messed with my theme.

I heard that these tablets have tons of hardware and software problems, but I didn't get to that.

Long story short, it's really hard to get excited about Surface products when they are crippled by a poor OS and serious reliability issues.

I like my go 1 but I use it more like a small windows laptop with a touch screen, not a tablet. Note taking in onenote is pretty good and about the only tablet-like thing I do with it.

Sadly, they've abandoned the Surface Book. This means that currently, there is no modern big tablet on the market. Besides, aside the outdated design, the Book is a very valid concept.

They've enlarged the Surface Pro screen (now 13", half inch less than the 13.5" Book), but it has a subtly different design (that is, port-richer), which inevitable increases the weight to 880+g - uncomfortable for extended time tablet usage.

From what I understand, the Surface Laptop Studio is a new approach/iteration to the Surface Book concept. Instead of being able to separate the display from the keyboard, which in practice is a bit of a pain as you never know how well Windows and your applications will react, you just switch from "laptop position" to "tablet position". Not sure how well that would work in practice, but it's an interesting idea.

It really depends on the use case.

If the use case is tablet-like functionality, any convertible design simply doesn't work. Using a 700g tablet is already barely comfortable for long usage; a 1.2+ kg one is essentially unusable. In my opinion, it's a great marketing success (in other words, a scam).

For other use cases, I really have no idea what's the user base. I definitely recognize the (relative) innovation of the new functionality, but I have the suspicious that very few users actively use it. The convertible idea itself has been around for a long time, and based on my experience, it doesn't work in practice (in other words, it's a very

Indeed, is it really so difficult to give me a 15 inch tablet that can attach to a keyboard? The iPad is so close, ARM based performance, battery life, cooling, even as many complained about the Book being unable to be powerful because it's so thin. Well, that never stopped Apple. However, iPadOS is a deal breaker, I need to run whatever I need on the hardware, not what a higher power deigns it so.

> there is no modern big tablet on the market.

iPad Pro is a thing.

No new surface book? Did they ditched idea of that hinge?

Surface studio "infinitely powerful" and the best cpu that MS offers is i7-11370H?

There is a good tag line "Microsoft - redefining infinity"

Is it only me whom every of the links in the blog post returns "We are sorry, the page you requested cannot be found.The URL may be misspelled or the page you're looking for is no longer available." ? Normally it doesn't surprise me that links on MS sites are broken but I would expect at least fresh blog posts have it right..

Seems like the links redirects to the Microsoft store for your country. Perhaps the products are not available where you are?

I was looking to see why they didn't go with AMD CPUs and the only answer that I could find in my relatively brief search was that it was due to the chip shortage.

Is that true?

> Introducing new Surface products, built for Windows 11

Surface Duo runs on Android 11 :)

I guess at least the version number is the same.

Sometimes I wonder how marketing department comes up with such statements.

It says built for, not built on. I recall the livestream saying Duo and Duo 2 can connect to Windows 11 and integrate together.

It is a matter of interpretation, one can consider hardware built for running Windows 11, when reading such headline.

Laptop Studio feels like the Windows 8 launch "convertible" tablet laptops no one bought all over again. Ominous!

No Ryzen variants?

Windows 11 seems to be a targeted competitor of iPad OS and just pretending desktops don't exist anymore. Hard to see the thinking in Microsoft's strategy here.

But they are working hard on it. So hard that they ignore all the bugs in Office 365 and just built the latest and (not so) greatest windows.

They ignore all the bugs in everything. Feels like there’s a skeleton crew at MSFT just applying new turd polish and that’s it.

Worse, it seems to be full of new hires (good for the people in question, nothing against them), that management just gets them lose with fresh blood ideas without any background on Windows development.

Especially when there are no mobile replacements available for Windows.

Meanwhile here I am on Windows 11 (via the dev channel) living the best life with my touch laptop that I use both for work and leisure.

Can you explain what makes you think Windows 11 "pretends desktops don't exist anymore"? If it's the product line-up revealed at this Surface event: the Surface line is explicitly a line of touch devices, so the focus on mobility seems on par.

You actually hit the nail on the head. Touch devices do not make up the majority of existing Windows devices. My 43" monitor is never going to be touch.

It is like if Apple decided that a third of all interactions on the next iPad OS would require you to plug in a mouse.

FWIW I very rarely use touch and certainly not for interacting with the OS on a daily basis.

Most of the time I use the touch support for sketching or highlighting with the pen. My pairs of external monitors at home and in the office are also non-touch.

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