With Tablet, Microsoft Takes Aim at Hardware Missteps | Hacker News Reader

With Tablet, Microsoft Takes Aim at Hardware Missteps

nytimes.com

39 pointsmcgwiz26 comments

Surface is already irrelevant, because Microsoft has decided that to placate Windows OEMs it won't be sold in retail stores. It doesn't matter that Microsoft may have scoured the earth for the purest metals with which to craft its case if the average person is never going to encounter one in the real world. Microsoft's real problem that Windows OEMs are incapable of building a decent tablet. Surface does nothing to incentivize OEMs to build better tablets, and crippling the sales campaign ensures it won't marginalize the OEMs either. For their part, the OEMs have already scoffed at Surface and promised to go on with business as usual.

Irrelevant because it's not sold in retail stores?

Companies don't walk into Best Buy to purchase computers for their employees.

From the time I bought my first Commodore until the present day, I've never purchased a computer anywhere other than online.

While I'm sure there are lots of exceptions, calling it irrelevant because it's not sold in retail stores is a bit of a stretch.

Is there a fire risk with MS building the cases out of magnesium? Magnesium fires are intense and difficult to put out.

I can't imagine MS is going to put out a product that oxidizes violently, so how will they prevent it? Can MgO retain the look (everything I've seen of MgO is a white powder)?

I bet the temperature to get magnesium to ignite is much higher than the devices would naturally produce or be exposed to. The only burning magnesium I've ever witnessed was either ground into a powder or in thin strips. It probably wouldn't burn so well in bulk.

This was the first thing that popped into my mind on Monday, though. The original NeXT cubes were built out of magnesium, and after NeXT left the hardware business someone famously burned an old cube. If I recall correctly, it took quite a lot of effort to get it burning.

The tale of the burning incident is here:

http://simson.net/hacks/cubefire.html

As you know, years ago, when NeXT first contemplated making computers, Steve Jobs decided that machines should be in the shape of a cube, and that they should be built from cast magnesium. Although magnesium is a relatively expensive metal, it is remarkably strong and lightweight. No doubt, this let NeXT save on shipping expenses, although the added handling and manufacturing costs was one of the factors which led to the cube's high cost. At the time that NeXT brought their system to market, the only other company to incorporate a magnesium case was Grid, which was making a portable computer. (I am told that Apple also uses magnesium for the inside case of its Duo computers, but I haven't been able to verify this fact...

Thank you for that link. It was a very entertaining read.

It's alloy, not pure magnesium, so it doesn't ignite at the same temperature. The article states that ignition temp is 650 Celsius which is pretty damn hot (compared to 475 or so for mag ribbon). I bet you'd have a hard time getting it to ignite even if you deliberately tried, because the heat is going to rapidly dissipate across the unit.

This quote jumped out at me:

"..., Apple has proved that there are significant advantages to designing hardware and software together."

I'm assuming the NYT is referring to "design" in its high-level context, as used by graphic designers, etc. and not its low-level context, as used by engineers?

Apple has proved is that there are significant advantages to reusing other people's low-level designs, in the form of open-source software, such as BSD, but taking advantage of the source availability to control the high-level design. In this case, the low-level design has not been done in tandem with the hardware, since it preexisted the hardware.

The benefit of designing the hardware is that your driver support can be flawless, since you know exactly which devices you need to support. Things like sleep/wake that never freezes, squeezing the absolute longest life out of the batteries, etc. are all easier when you control the hardware platform.

Apple's industrial design is legendary and goes from top to bottom. In the end, it isn't just that the software is better nor is it just that the hardware is better; it's that both of them just work. That is the essence of good design.

While Mach predates iOS, to say that iOS wasn't designed from the ground up for the environment it is running in would be a gross mischaracterization. The pieces exposed, the services provided, all reflect the realities of the hardware it is running on (eg highly constrained and battery driven).

There's more to design than just "how it looks" and "it's based on BSD". Apple's software is not just a bunch of open source stuff glued together as your post implies. The iOS kernel, for example, is substantially proprietary and heavily customized for Apple's iOS hardware. You don't get any lower-level than that, and that was definitely developed alongside the hardware.

That wasn't meant to be the implication. If I had my time again, I'd add the word "mostly" to the last sentence, but apart from that I'll just clarify.

The point I was trying to make is that using open-source, in the way Apple has, allows the customisation to go beyond the mere gluing together of black boxes. The thing Apple has woken up to is that 95% of the black box is reusable commodity stuff and it's that customised 5% that makes it "sing" with your hardware.

This level of integration just isn't possible without the source code. You can try writing everything yourself, but that blows time to market, and required development resources, out big time.

This demonstrates everything that is wrong with Microsoft. They identified a problem, they couldn't get their products up to par with existing processes. So they go out of their way to copy their competitors.

By following this methodology they'll always be worse or the same as their competitors. Eventually they'll find a way to lock them out, and then the market will suffer from stagnation.

This to me is far more evil than anything Apple has ever done. As long as Microsoft has this culture I can't respect them as a company.

I came here to write basically this. Additionally, I think that Microsoft is making a mistake with this Surface tablet. Consumers want a device that will be easy and fun to use, and that has good access to a lot of content. Maybe the iPad will eventually transition into more of a productivity device, but right now consumers (and Apple) don't view the iPad as a PC replacement.

Microsoft's approach (one OS for tablets and PCs) was a poor choice; the two devices have different needs, and require different UIs and feature sets. They have done so much work on Windows 8 in order to be a competitor in the "tablet market" but I fear that there is no such market. People don't want tablets as MS invisions them. People want iPads.

In my view, the Surface is a step between a laptop and an iPad. Does Microsoft intend for this to unify and replace these? They have produced a product inferior to both an iPad and a laptop, and thus I imagine the Surface will replace neither for most people.

>People don't want tablets as MS invisions them. People want iPads.

How do you know this? What about corporate users and for company owned devices?

>They have produced a product inferior to both an iPad and a laptop, and thus I imagine the Surface will replace neither for most people.

It can do more than the iPad because you can type on it much more comfortably and has Office and it's better than a laptop because it's much more portable. It's a device with different tradeoffs.

Actually I find Surface keyboard a joke. I sometimes use my netbook in positions I don't imagine using Surface in.

Another point: keyboard and Office for iPad is not problem. Here is keyboard http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsIJUiTlrGI and here is Pages http://www.apple.com/ipad/from-the-app-store/apps-by-apple/p....

The only thing that is cool in Surface is pen and again its value is questionable. There are multiple pen solutions for iPad if you really need to.

I'm a person and I want anything but an iPad.

Personally, I can't wait to be able to run a full OS on a 10" tablet.

I'm sort of wondering, when the trend on the desktop is dual 30" (or more) monitors, how many people will feel like they can do anything "productive" on a 10" tablet, keyboard or no.

I can't really imagine doing serious work on a 10" screen. Quick edits, surfing, scanning email and dashing off a quick answer, yeah. But a lot of demand for a "full" OS I'm not sure about.

Depends on the person. For most people, having a 10" screen will suffice, because they use the computer mostly to browse the internet and only occasionally need the full capabilities of a desktop OS, like when they need to write a word document or preparing a presentation.

Most days, I tend to develop on a 30" monitor hooked up to my Mac. That said, when heading to cafes, working on the outdoor patio (like I am now), or traveling, my 11" MacBook Air screen is more sufficient.

To make matters worse (or to prove my point), I'm working on some NodeJS code which I will be deploying to Azure a bit later. So, my setup:

Macbook Air, Windows 7 in Fusion in Unity mode BBEdit on one desktop Powershell and a couple of other Win7 windows on another desktop

This isn't quick edits here.

That said, my iPad is mostly for consuming data because I haven't found a development paradigm that works for me. I think the same will hold for WinRT. What is not clear about Surface Pro is if it will get only the Metro UI or if it will get "desktop" as well, given it is slated to have an Intel processor.

Work can be done on small screens, the question is, does the type of work you do cater to being done on a small screen. For me, the answer is yes on an MBAir, no (currently) on an iPad, unknown on Surface.

What you said doesn't make any sense. First of all, Windows 8 or RT is not really a copy of iOS in the sense that Apple scaled iPhone and its software up from the iPhone with only a bump to the resolution. Android is way more a copy of iOS than anything Microsoft out there.

Tim Cook called Windows 8 trying to merge a refrigerator and a toaster. Someone at Microsoft countered by saying it was converging a oven and a toaster and making a toaster oven. So, there's a fundamental difference between their visions for tablets with Android aligning itself with Apple on this.

>By following this methodology they'll always be worse or the same as their competitors.

There are a whole bunch of people who want a device that goes between an iPad and the Macbook Air and Apple doesn't seem to care. For those people, Windows 8 (on something like Surface Pro with the keyboard) may actually be better than "same or worse" than iPad or other Android tablets.

>Eventually they'll find a way to lock them out, and then the market will suffer from stagnation.

For almost all the products that lost to Microsoft, it has been significant missteps by the rivals while Microsoft concentrated on making the best product(usually by version 3). It was the same with Excel, Word, Windows and even IE (see http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html and http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000027.html )

For the latest example of this happening, see XBox 360 vs. PS3.

>This to me is far more evil than anything Apple has ever done. As long as Microsoft has this culture I can't respect them as a company.

Making better products than their rivals is evil compared to things like charging 30% forcibly for all in-app purchases and rejecting a Android magazine app from the App store?

I was concentrating on their creation process and it's impact on innovation and the technology industry as a whole.

Regarding your example, tablet devices Android and iPad have distinct methodologies, Android being open and developer orientated while iPads are consumer focused. The app stores have both positive and negative points, but to software developers it's been a huge opportunity. It's funny you should mention the stagnated gaming industry. The current consoles are nearly a decade old, and Nintendo seem to be the only ones thinking outside the box.

Android is open source, but that isn't reason enough to rip off someone else's UI. Atleast Microsoft's innovating and not just copying stuff wholesale(which admittedly it used to do a lot in the past).

Regarding opportunity, the MS store will very likely be the biggest opportunity for software developers in a decade. There are more than 500 million Windows 7 users, and assuming that only 20% of those people upgrade, devs will still have a 100 million strong customer base.

Meanwhile, Apple has hidden APIs that nobody is allowed to use to compete with Apple's software, they have stolen ideas from their own developer community and incorporated them into OS X and they are generally unfriendly to developers.

I'm not sure why you respect them at all.

> Apple has hidden APIs that nobody is allowed to use to compete with Apple's software

which APIs do they not let others use (aside from the icon updating thing Calendar uses, siri, and weather/stocks)?

Off the top of my head, 'back in the day,' the transition animations on OSX were private APIs and only used by Apple software. Some smaller software products that did things like hack in virtual desktop support hooked into them, but it also meant that OS updates could break the software (mostly after major revision updates).

Apple's iBooks app used a private API to allow the user to adjust the screen brightness in-app. This API was finally made public about a year and a half after iBooks shipped.

A more visible example is when Apple rejected a third-party camera app for using private API to allow the volume button to be used to take a picture, then not too long after incorporated that exact feature into the OS's built-in camera app.

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