Microsoft Discontinues iMac Rival Surface Studio 2 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Discontinues iMac Rival Surface Studio 2

macrumors.com

Surface Studio introduction from 2017, still looks amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-VvFlwsWic

Having used one for about 18 months put me off the entire surface lineup. It sure was good looking though.

What put you off?

I used the Microsoft Surface as my daily driver for years, the finish rubbed off in the first few uses and looked terrible, the screen broke as well. They do look beautiful and it was pretty fast.

For me? Windows. How can people be productive on an OS that doesn’t allow you to focus.

Hundreds of millions of people manage to be productive on Windows.

do they really, or is windows just what they use to launch excel?

I don't know a single software developer that prefers windows anymore.

Most of the software world is on Windows.

Maybe if you count game development. And, if you’re generous, development environments that run inside a Linux VM hosted by Windows (WSL counts).

It's really bad, though. Like ... objectively abysmal. No other popular platform is more dev-hostile. I think most folks are there because they lack choice or experience with alternatives.

Mac user here, and I think Mac really isn't far away from being worst.

Between only now finally getting tiling[1], menus filled with items I haven't seen anyone use, and since WSL came on Windows it is now the absolutely most clumsy mainstream thing to install a standard tool. Oh, and shortcuts.

I still use it because it is silent, has a good display, just works when I open it, has a battery that actually last all day and because IT departments don't know how to lock it down.

[1]: although I cannot use it because then I would have to re-enable "spaces pr screen" which

Hm. I spend most of my time in iTerm. MacOS is Unixy and cozy. WSL definitely is clumsy - actually, everything to do with containers in Windows is a pain in the ass to deal with. Run Windows in kvm, not the other way around.

Have you tried Rectangle? It's not automatic, but I find it a reasonable compromise. Last I tried, Yabai et. al. were all pretty flaky compared to proper x11 twms.

For my window management on mac os I wrote some javascript and use https://github.com/kasper/phoenix

I will concede that macos default out of the box also has some UI/UX issues for people who are or want to be 'hands on keyboard 100% of the time' but there are a few tools out there that I've found for myself that solve many of the problems. Phoenix being one, but also recently homerow https://www.homerow.app/, when I was back on windows in the bad old days of the early 2000s I ran a lot of software to facilitate my workflows by tweaking the system ui/ux.

But windows in my house is an overly expensive gaming console with occasional web browsing. MacOs is a very 'cozy' as you put it unix. Much of my job is also terminal based so having a standard shell is great (even though I'm still occasionally bitten by the 'i copied this stuff that worked in my terminal onto a linux machine and I forgot my grep/awk/whatever is BSD and not GNU.. fak').

I was excited back when MS announced the Linux Subsystem.. but man fuck ... so hacky. Also why the fuck is no one at MS replacing the standard terminal with something that actually functions properly? I mean sure I upgrade to iterm2 on macos, but using the built in termial is like 90% of the way there. The windows commandline shell (and not like the antique DOS stuff, and I can see that powershell is better, but not better enough that i'm going to bother with it.. like the actual terminal software is my biggest gripe) is simply garbage, no proper support even for the global clipboard as I recall.. different hotkeys than the rest of the system.

Hi, I’m a software developer that prefers Windows. <waves>

I make video games. Most video game devs used Windows. Most video games are played on Windows. In a great twist of irony a majority of gaming hours spent on Linux now do so through SteamOS and is doing so by emulating Windows! (Well, close enough).

Developing on Linux sucks and is bad. There’s no good debugger. glibc is a nightmare of bad design. Linux package management is bad. Linux is fine if by programming you actually mean devops though I guess.

macOS is kinda sorta ok. But might as well use Windows at that point. Apple Silicon is stupid sexy though. Definitely wish Windows ran on that.

Doesn’t this depend on the game engine you use? I’m not a professional video game dev but I’ve dabbled with Godot on non-windows OSes and didn’t find it to be a terrible experience

Godot is cool. It’s currently for hobbyists.

Unity works great on macOS. Mobile devs are probably mostly on macOS and Unity. PC and console devs are all Windows though.

Unreal probably works ok on macOS. But as the games are all PC and console games the devs are on Windows. Debugging consoles is typically done via Visual Studio only. And the adult version, not VSCode.

i would like to highlight, and not discredit, the great work valve has done for the linux ecosystem, namely in getting arch based distros to a quality that hacker news comments can write it off as “emulating windows”

for example, all my non-windows, non-steam gamepad support stems from valve investing in improving upstream compatibility to where devices just work, without needing to go to a vendor website to download an .exe for a driver— now that’s emulating windows.

Valve is great! I love my SteamDeck. I just think it’s hilarious that the trick to making gaming on Linux possible was to use exes compiled for Windows.

Is it? When there’s a dominant player that’s practically the only way?

No. Linux just sucks and is bad at deploying proprietary software in a reliable manner.

It's not particularly difficult to target a broad combination of Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox. They're all basically the same. Even x64 vs ARM is largely irrelevant.

In a sense SteamOS isn't even Linux. It's one distribution with no user modifications running on one set of hardware. It's closer to a console than to "Linux".

Meanwhile Linux isn't even a thing. It's many many many different things. Once upon a time I shipped a game that supported Linux. It's been awhile but Linux players were roughly 1% of the audience but they represented 50% of bug reports. And no, Linux users were not "good" users who were simply better at reporting bugs.

> No. Linux just sucks and is bad at deploying proprietary software in a reliable manner.

Yeah this is a feature. Games on Linux are running fine by the way.

Linux just sucks at deploying proprietary software in a reliable manner.

that’s only a tiny aspect of it, which is why i used the word “reductive” specifically

there’s so much more internal plumbing that happened, mostly in the hardware compatibility and device driver layer of the stack.

i’ve been double clicking .exes using wine since 2008. i haven’t been able to use every gamepad under the sun on linux until valve funded device compatibility— not just “steam” or “steamos” or “steamdeck”— the upstream.

I know plenty, devs all over the spectrum. And the data back it up. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology/

This is the question from the survey:

> What is the primary operating system in which you work?

It doesn't ask anything about preference and I wager most people don't have a say in OS for their jobs. Same reason that Microsoft Teams is the most "popular" synchronous tool, yet so low in the "admired" section.

That's not to say you're wrong, just that the data you linked to does not "back it up".

The question isn’t wether they want to use windows but if they’re productive using it. Unless you want to claim that a large proportion of devs isn’t productive, having a proportion of devs use windows proves that it works.

It seemed like "productive" was used in a relative sense. Would all those people be more productive on macOS or Linux? That's not clear.

Also, I thought the parent was replying to the following part, considering they said "I know plenty".

> I don't know a single software developer that prefers windows anymore.

> It seemed like "productive" was used in a relative sense. Would all those people be more productive on macOS or Linux? That's not clear.

I would assume that companies are semi-rational actors and would switch if they could improve productivity that way. Especially since some sectors (graphic design for example) seem to prefer MacOS while others don’t. Of course there are some other factors (support, network effect, purchase cost) but if windows was just plainly unproductive, surely it wouldn’t be as popular as it is.

> Also, I thought the parent was replying to the following part, considering they said "I know plenty".

True, the survey doesn’t prove they actually prefer windows, u missed that context.

> I would assume that companies are semi-rational actors and would switch if they could improve productivity that way.

lol

Indeed, i have never worked for a single company bigger than about 10 people that I could call 'semi-rational' when it comes to maximizing their worker productivity vs costs.

I've seen them be semi-rational on making decisions that actively reduce employee productivity.

At the end of the day, I don't think employee productivity matters much to large corporations.

There’s a ton of other questions, such as about visual studio (on windows, where else), loved stacks (.Net leads a category…likely most of that is dev on windows). Look at C#, Azure, ASP.NET, ASP.NET Core, Teams over slack and all in that category, and on and on.

And calling teams low in the desired section is such an odd assessment. It’s 3rd out about 2 dozen, and you ignore other highly desired items like .Net being #1 in its category, visual studio 4th of about 2 dozen, and others.

So yes, the data backs up that a lot of devs are on windows and that a lot want to use tech that windows devs use. That you so misrepresent one category and ignore others is not a very good way to understand the evidence, which far outweighs any one persons opinion in this thread.

> And calling teams low in the desired section is such an odd assessment.

I said it ranks low in "admired" (i.e., those who use it and want to continue using it). Less than 50% of those using it want to continue using it despite it being the most "popular" by a significant percentage. If everyone had their choice, Teams would drop heavily in popularity.

Regardless, it was just an example of how "popularity" doesn't mean anything because most people don't have a choice in their day jobs.

God, where I work makes me use a Mac.

Absolutely terrible functionally, but I'm sure it looks pretty enough to some people that the papercuts don't matter.

Even after using one at various roles over the past 10+ years or so, I'm far more productive on my Lenovo with Fedora.

You're not making a great case for Windows.

Wasn't trying to but I may have accidentally replied to the wrong comment.

Windows is god awful, Macs at least have virtual desktops that mostly work. Windows sort of has them, but its really an afterthought. Hopefully you don't get an application trying to grab focus on an alternative VD, at best it will switch, but I've seen it lock interactions until you find it.

You can rip Windows from my cold dead hands. It just works.

Most of the time.

60% of the time, it works every time.

Easy, I just spend a few minutes every morning disabling all the new notifications, and the forced full page Microsoft ads, resetting all the settings that changed in an overnight update, write a quick powershell script to uninstall the new programs and features I never asked for, and then disable edge and omedrive again and I am ready for the day.

Then I do it all again at lunch..

And after all this when you finally get to work continually dismiss every window / popup notification that is somehow allowed to steal the focus from the window you’re working in.

> resetting all the settings that changed in an overnight update

how to track those? I'm on the way of applying 24H2 update right now and laptop's uptime is 28 days, I may have many such settings changed, if I follow your idea correctly

I use Windows at home (with WSL), Hackintosh and by extension macOS at university, and Linux at my company (bare metal, not WSL) alternatively almost every day with Linux and Windows being the dominant one.

In fact, Windows is my dev workstation, game battle station and media consumption all in one. And with WSL I can easily have the best of many worlds. So that why I'm the most productive on Windows. While it being a jack-of-all-trades may mean it is indeed a master of none, but it doesn't mean it is not capable of being productive. So, I'm very confused why you'd find Windows unproductive at all.

And on the contrary, there is a lot of little bugs and stuffs in bare metal Linux that almost got me infuriated all the time and I tunnel visioned on fixing them...Bluetooth mysteriously doesn't work for one. Hyprland (and by extension Wayland) clipboard doesn't work with Vivaldi and VSCode under flakpak sandbox is another that I hate, plus RustDesk does not support Hyprland too...I use Fedora Silverblue btw, and distrobox let me a little bit off when I'm trying to setup podman when things didn't work as intended.

While macOS...while it just works, well I don't appreciate the eye candy and people often claim to have the most productive on a Mac but to be honest I just don't see the appeal at all...but having every app "containerized" and using Zsh by default is nice tho

Is Hackintosh even usable these days after the transition to ARM? I've been wondering if that will kill it or if the new Windows on ARM machines from Qualcomm will revive the market.

Just feels like too much special magic in Apple's hardware. But who knows?

If you don't want those "AI" features then Hackintosh is still pretty much alive until Sequoia

Hackintosh is basically dead in ARM because they have custom ASIC and DSP chips and accelerators on package that does not present in Intel Macs. And emulating them is super inefficient at the moment.

Interesting, mind giving couple of examples? For myself I cannot say I have problems with focusing by using Windows OS - it's my daily driver over the years.

Hard to believe Surface kicked off 16 short years ago

https://youtu.be/Zxk_WywMTzc

That surface was unrelated to the tablets and computers that reused the name afterwards. Still, that was an awesome tech at the time, multi touch and multi user, I made some great demos for it.

I remember how proud I felt to work at Microsoft when that video was unveiled. The company had made something so beautiful, and then done an amazing job showing it to the world.

An amazing marketing video in every way that counts, except apparently in regards to sales!

then they ignored the line, had to make a special build of windows 11 to run on it...

I have no idea why they keep doing this shit with hardware over and over.

I bought one! It was a breathtaking piece of hardware that I wanted so badly to be useful. Unfortunately my work can't be done in Windows and it wasn't powerful enough to virtualize everything (the slow HDD was the worst) and I ended up selling it. But wow, what a form factor and gorgeous screen.

Microsoft has terrible pen technology for artists, still jittery slow lines years after it hurt the first Studio and other surface products.

This is sad consider they have been doing research on this for 15 years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4

Indicating that they could make it amazing if they wanted to, they just don't want to. Likely due to cost.

They organized their entire product line around premium artist products for the adobe cloud type spending professionals and it just doesn't work for them. It was a crazy strategy. They're still putting out new surfaces that have the same fundamental problem and burning their brand. They came out before Apple Pencil and made almost no improvement to it since then. Even the old windows ink laptops from the early 2000s had better stylus support (Wacom).

Unfortunate that Microsoft never did much with this, because it’s a cool concept.

That said, one could probably produce something to a pretty similar effect with an external pen display (like Xencelabs 24"), VESA arm, and an M4 Mac mini, and it’d be more powerful, upgradable, flexible, and maybe even cheaper to boot.

> That said, one could probably produce something to a pretty similar effect with an external pen display (like Xencelabs 24"), VESA arm, and an M4 Mac mini, and it’d be more powerful, upgradable, flexible, and maybe even cheaper to boot.

Sure! What's the number to get this working?

You mean the price? Minimum spec Mini and a Xencelabs Pen Display 24” (which comes with a VESA mounted pivot stand) gets you reasonably close and would cost $2500, where the Surface Studio 2 (as per the article) started at $3k. Screen size is a little less (24” vs 28”), but digitizer quality is better (on par with Wacom) as is pixel density. Setting it up is just plugging the display into the Mini with USB-C.

Haha, remember some time ago many people were like

  > Are you crazy, don't buy an iPod, just get an iRiver and use your imagination!
  > Use Gnome instead of OSX, it's *exactly* the same experience
  > "Mom, can we buy an iPad?" - We have an iPad at home (iPad at home is a Toshiba Handybook running Windows 98)

How the turntables...

Microsoft's problem has never been their hardware. You can argue their Surface and Surface pro line up is far far a better feat of engineering (stuffing a full blown desktop grade processor into a mobile tablet) than any iPad Pro. However, their achilles heel has always been their software. Though Windows has improved a lot over the years, its shitty data collection and privacy practices and changing around of UI elements randomly, unpredictable updates that may kill entire industries and bring the world to a halt [1] are actually what is stopping people from adopting their hardware in my experience.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike-related_IT_ou...

That desktop grade processor is probably basically a pup compared to a modern Apple silicon processor. M4 / similar vs some poor Intel chip throttling at 2GHz?

> You can argue their Surface and Surface pro line up is far far a better feat of engineering (stuffing a full blown desktop grade processor into a mobile tablet) than any iPad Pro.

Can you clarify this point? iPad Pro has an M4 processor, just like Mac desktops do.

imo ipad is held back by it's OS. Until they make significant changes it's a one app at a time box to keep you kid busy w/ movies or roblox. The multi app features they have added feel like a straight jacket.

I'd like an option for a real pro ipad running macos instead of ios.

Sure, but that’s beside the point; I’m addressing the “full blown desktop processor” claim.

If you want a macOS device that runs the same M4 processor that’s in an iPad Pro, it looks like your options include virtually every macOS device.

With W11, they seem to really gung-ho about creating that achilles heel. As for myself I am tired from having an unstable OS on my devices which may or may not bork without any intervention from me.

Thanks to this (and Steam Deck for a great deal) I jumped to Mac and not regretting it. The system boots in seconds, has great eyecandy and just works for me. My work pc uses Windows and its taskbar behaves weirdly, right now, and its quarter shows the desktop image. Update breaks the soundcard and I will need to install it again. Oh and I see another update queued in - which may or may not be a false alarm.

I am not sure which was the most stable one, Windows 7 or 10. But 11 is a mess and nobody dares to admit it because sunk-cost fallacy and with the invention of recall it will act as a data collection agency for AI - as far as I followed the discussion.

How does an iPad Pro not have a “desktop grade processor”? It literally has the processor that Apple puts in their desktops.

> Microsoft's problem has never been their hardware.

The Xbox 360 says hi.

I am glad many on HN starting to show and appreciate Surface the Hardware. It was perhaps the most important thing in the PC industry where M$ push the envelop on Hardware design and parts where other OEMs get to benefits some of those R&D.

And yet they are let down by their own software which should have been their bread and butter. Considering they no longer rely on Windows as a major source of revenue but more as a market moat. They should have simply asked how do you make Windows the best operating system.

Oh no!

Now what will every near future executive, analyst, detective, spy, or content creator in "cool" TV series (that isn't using a Macbook) use on their desk?

// And let's not even touch on (ahem) tablets:

https://9to5mac.com/2014/11/05/microsoft-surface-cnn/

awwww. ive been hoping for a 3 to replace my current book 2

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