Tolerating the Surface Pro
ozar.me
ozar.me
People who work on the go need their 8h+ battery life, the more the merrier.
Surely you don't just carry a tablet in your hand when walking to the office? Once something's too big for pockets I resort to a messenger bag over my shoulder, in which it's just as easy to include the power. Given that tablets don't seem to come with cases, how else would one transport it?
If you're going from home to the office and back, I don't see the point in carrying anything other than your smartphone. Talking about the general case, obviously, there are justifications for bringing a medium-sized laptop.
Introduces an extra dependency.
True, but I wouldn’t call the Surface Pro ‘tablet portable’. It’s fairer to compare it with a notebook. With TypeCover, the Surface Pro is 2 centimeters thick, while a MacBook Air 11" has an average thickness of 1 centimeter. The Surface Pro is also a little heavier than a MacBook Air. Curiously, both devices have the same CPU, GPU, SSD, and RAM – but a MacBook Air 11" is $30 cheaper and has 5,5 hours of real world battery life.
If we were to compare Surface Pro with a 10" iPad, it would look even worse. The Surface Pro is twice as thick, 3 times as heavy, has one-third of the battery life, has a screen with a lower resolution, and it’s $300 more expensive.
It gets the same run time per charge.
It weighs less, not more; less than 2 pounds versus 2.38.
The difference is that you can snap off the optional keyboard in a split second if you really care about thickness -- well, that and the fact that it's a tablet with a touch digitizer behind the glass too.
No, it’s not: “Height: 0.11-0.68 inch (0.3-1.7 cm)” http://www.apple.com/macbookair/specs.html
The body has a wedge shape, on average 10mm thick: http://imgur.com/Ung7IQ3
> It gets the same run time per charge.
No, it doesn’t. The Surface Pro gets 3,75 hours of battery life. http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/05/microsoft-surface-pro-rev...
Along with length, width and depth, that’s what determines the volume of the object (=portability). The Surface Pro has 60% more volume as a MacBook Air 11". And yet, it gets hot, has loud fans, and has less battery life. That’s just bad engineering. As a replacement for a notebook and a tablet, it really should have at least as much battery life as an iPad. Given its volume, that would’ve been possible.
Surface Pro: 10.81 x 6.81 x 0.76" = 55.95 cubic inches
MacBook Air 11": 11.8 x 7.56 x 0.39" = 34.79 cubic inches
EDIT: in an earlier version I mistakenly wrote 'mass' where I meant 'volume'.
I'm not going to make this valueless discussion thread any longer, so to your reply: those numbers are made up. Larger screens make things less portable, not more.
I get 6 - 7 hours on a low brightness with normal usage (web, email, visual studio, sql server, etc.)
>I bought the Surface Pro to use as a backup laptop: a secondary presentation device in case my main laptop bit the dust. I make a living teaching people via PowerPoint. For a long list of reasons, I can’t really switch presentation tools, and the iPad doesn’t cut it as a secondary presentation device. The Surface Pro does.
This isn't a typical situation, and if this is the only justification one can have (or perhaps one of the few) in owning a Surface Pro, MSFT has a whole lot of issues on its hands.
For instance, Metro lacks a file chooser where you can easily find files anywhere in your system. If the Metro interface had a good file chooser, you wouldn't have to drop out to use the file desktop chooser to find a file on any filesystem.
If Windows 8.1 adds a good file chooser and if Microsoft addresses a few specific problems like that, life in Metro could get much better.
I hope Microsoft can get its branding straight -- I find it weird that I click on a music file across the network and it pops up in a pretty Metro app with the tag line "Xbox Music". There's also some thing (which has never quite worked for me) called "Xbox Games" which I'm not sure will do anything for me if I don't own an Xbox.
Or is everything that runs Windows 8 an "Xbox" of some kind? And how come I see tiles for all kinds of music except for the music that I've got in my own collection?
I'm having trouble coming up with a use case where I'd need the file chooser to do any of the things you'd want to do in the touch interface.
I can't speak to the music file thing because I haven't dealt with music files in years, it's always been an annoying and tedious experience for me (as is working with any large number of files with wonky metadata), so I switched to streaming and haven't looked back.
EDIT: That said, videos on my NAS just show up in the metro "Videos" app and I can watch them without issue. I haven't tried it with music but I can't imagine why that would be any different.
A good file chooser enables that scenario and generally, maximizes the benefit that Windows 8 brings to a tablet OS, which is the Windows desktop. If Metro can stream, read from memory cards, view files from Desktop apps, etc. the high purchase price of these systems would be justified.
I never switch modes unless I am switching tasks.
Desktop tasks (writing code, workign with office apps) all mouse/keyboard/trackpad
Consumption tasks (news, video) all use touch with keyboard folded out of the way
Drawing and taking notes I use the stylus.
I see this as having the right input mode available for each of my tasks, not some sort of "nightmare".
Making it easier for people to skip Metro will only result in fewer developers writing Metro apps, not more, so it's hard to see 8.1 as a positive for Surface users. They need the Windows world to be more Metro, not less.
One example was at launch, Chrome's build didn't work well with touch. If you touched a dialog, the on-screen keyboard would not come up automatically. Scrolling with your finger was near impossible unless you flicked up first... which made no sense. The desktop side of Chrome has gotten better, but I'm not sure who to praise for that.
My only gripe about the RT is that even though I like the UI better, it's every bit as useful (and useless) as an iPad.
If you are using an SDXC card to supplement your storage and don't intend to eject it on a whim, you can get better performance by going to the device manager and changing the removal policy and the write caching.
Options for 256gb or 512gb SSD would have made this an easier choice for many.
My primary development box is a fully loaded 17" laptop. Tablets are too small screen wise and performance wise when doing real work either in the OSS or Redmond realm. (I deal with tons of Data and run a few VMs as well.)
1) It's a great tablet when you want a tablet. With no keyboard attached, it's a joy to read reddit and play games on in bed.
2) I throw it in the car with me whenever I leave home. I'm always on-call if a site/server goes down. The SP is a full computer with a hard keyboard, so there won't be any situation I need to drive back home to handle, even if it takes several hours to resolve.
3) It's a suitable desktop replacement for anything but hard gaming. I stick it on my desk, plug in a big monitor, and pair a bluetooth mouse. Now screen size and DPI scaling don't matter, and the Core i5 has all the power I could need for compiling software, photo editing, etc.
Add a good quality wireless mouse and a USB 3 hub, leave the keyboard at the desk and you've got a docking station as good in practice as anything on the market.
One thing I found with Windows 8 is that it is even better to use keyboard shortcuts to access the shell. Instead of groping for the 'Start' button, I hit the Windows key and the same thing happens if I am running Win7 or Win8. So Win8 didn't cause me disorientation at all, it just trained me to do the right thing.
The other angle is to consider that Surface is but one choice. Other manufacturers make excellent tablet/hybrid Windows 8 devices. They are probably a far better choice for general business use.
I don't really get people who complain about, for example, not being able to use Excel with your fingers. I'm sorry, touch is not the best solution for every application. Using touch absolutely sucks for a wide range of applications. A on-screen keyboard is the simplest example. It sucks. Functional, but it sucks. I can't even think of the idea of using Excel with mi fingers on the screen. It would be ugly, cumbersome and slow, very slow.
Tablets have their place. Please don't complain if you try to force it into a non-ideal application.
I still own a ten year old little Sony mini notebook with a nice 10 inch display. It's about the size of an iPad and twice as thick as an iPad 3. I still have XP on it. It is absolutely wonderful for travel, even in the most cramped aircraft. It has a great physical keyboard. It is fantastic for PowerPoint presentations. Battery life is 6 to 12 hours. I have written tons of code on this thing in flight. I can run a Linux VM. And do web development, etc. I could go on.
Tablets have their place.
About Excel with your fingers - you'd be surprised. The touch experience is surprisingly compelling once you get used to it. I'm always surprised at how often I reach out to touch the display on my laptop after I've been using my iPad or the Surface, even just for a few minutes. (This is especially true when using the Surface because the Type Cover's trackpad is laughably small.)
Anyhow, for business travel I would nearly always buy laptops in pairs. Really easy to clone them just before a trip and have true backup.
Two laptops and a Wacom are not going to be a significant departure from one laptop and surface. You can easily fit all of it in a laptop bag with room to spare. For convenience I eventually migrated towards wheeled laptop cases. You don't have to lug them around and they offer lots of room for gear and sometimes even a minimal overnight set of clothes, etc.
I am sure that eventually some tools will develop usable parallel touch UI's. I guess my point is that I can do everything I might generally have to do during a typical business trip on a ten year old notebook. Newer notebooks are far cheaper (I paid $3,000 for the Sony ten years ago) and far more capable. A tablet would be my absolute last choice as they are still really cumbersome and inconvenient to use.
I know it's not exactly on topic, but please do elaborate.
This was my first time going to Amsterdam, about twelve years ago. Last minute business trip. I had no choice but to carry about 400 pounds of equipment with me. I think the excess baggage bill was about $2,000. It consisted of a set of anvil cases and pelican cases with all manner of equipment, even FPGA prototyping boards. I effectively had fully finished product as well as prototype hardware in order to be able to work on code based on feedback and demonstrate it.
The ordeal started in Los Angeles when I didn't have all of the right paperwork, including the necessary carnet, etc. Mad rush to get it all sorted the week of the trip.
I planned ahead and designed a custom heavy-duty dolly out of 80/20 extrusions to be able to move all of this stuff at both airports and within the city/hotel. The dolly had large wheels and could be taken apart and stored in the pelican case. Pile it on with the gear and a couple of ratchet straps held it all in place. Great plan.
I arrive at Schiphol and go to the carrousel. These things were pretty heavy, 60 to 90 lbs per case. This meant that when I saw one on the carrousel I had to be "all in". There was no messing around. Grab and get your whole body into it to pull the thing off the carrousel.
I see the first anvil case come around. I setup to grab it. The plan was to rotate it quickly onto my leg and use that as a fulcrum of sorts to rotate the case off the carousel. When I go to grab the case one of the handles feels really slimy. I mean, imagine if you squirted it with motor oil or pudding, somewhere in between those two. I was committed, so I ignored it. I pulled hard with both hands, put it on my leg, then, supporting it with my chest I got it down. It sounds awkward but it was a very natural move. Think olympic dead lifting but not quite going over your head.
Then I realize I am absolutely covered in yellow slime. Again, think somewhere between oil and pudding. Not quite liquid but not quite solid. Yellow and cold. Didn't smell. A few expletives later I had no choice but to get the other cases. All four of them were covered to some degree with this stuff.
By the time I get my luggage I look like I had gone mud wrestling in yellow slime. I was both angry and laughing my ass off. What are you going to do? Just roll with it.
I literally sat on the floor to take a moment. I was wearing loose fitting exercise clothes to be comfortable during flight. Thankfully the slime didn't go through the fabric.
I couldn't leave all of that gear alone. There was no way to clean myself up at that time. I got my dolly out and assembled it right there. Loaded all of the slime-covered cases onto it and set out to find the Custom's office.
When you travel with a lot of gear like that you need to have this document called a "Carnet" signed just about everywhere you go. It lists what you are carrying so that you don't have to pay import duties everywhere you go.
I soon learned that the Customs office was three buildings away from my terminal. And, of course, the only way there was to use this walkway that ramped up between buildings.
By the time I get to the Customs office I was sweating like a pig and covered with yellow slime. I can't even imagine what I must have looked like.
When I entered the room it was like I was Moses and the water parted. I mean, everyone got the fuck out of my way. It was hilarious. I get to the counter and the customs officer just signs the paperwork without even attempting to look inside the cases. I guess she didn't want to play with yellow slime.
As I go back to the hallway a janitor is making the rounds with his cart. He sees me and takes a look at my pile of cases covered in yellow slime. Without either one of us uttering a single word, the guy grabs to large rolls of paper towels and a full bottle of cleaner (like windex) puts them down on the floor next to my gear and continues walking.
Again, laughing my ass off as the entire thing was surreal beyond belief. So, here I am, windex-ing the shit out of everything, including myself, in front of the Customs office. Of course, when it came to my clothes I got a lot of slime off but also ended-up smearing a lot of it everywhere. I mean, I looked like shit.
Now I had to make the trip back three buildings to get back to my terminal and go through the immigration area. Everyone was pretty nice. I was asked about the contents of the cases, my paperwork was checked but nobody was interested in opening the cases. Also, oddly enough, not one person asked me what happened or why I looked the way I did. Are the Dutch that polite?
Once out I was able to go into a bathroom and at least wash off some of the slime and sweat. I didn't change my clothes because I just didn't want to dirty another set. I did clean the cases to a reasonable degree.
Getting a taxi was a real challenge. Few seemed interested in carrying that much stuff.
When I finally got one the guy took one look at me and another look at the equipment and said "I have a bad back, sorry". So, I had to load all of the equipment onto the van. By this point in time I was absolutely exhausted. Under those conditions humor and a good attitude makes a good situation bearable and you just move on.
When I get to the hotel I found out that the hotel attendant also has a bad back. Throughout my stay in Amsterdam it seems I always managed to find people or taxi drivers with bad backs. Again, it became really funny after a while.
In talking to the airline I came to find out a shipment of some sort of lubricant was ruptured in the cargo area and, wouldn't you know it, all of my cases were located right next to it. They apologized and bumped me to first class for the trip back. Good deal.
It's funny how we don't remember the museum trips or the city tour but stories such as this one remain etched into your mind and actually become the kinds of stories you smile about when you remember and tell them.
Also, every time I think "CEO" I remember myself covered in yellow slime and sweat.
Touch devices were not meant to replace laptops or desktops. In most cases, they were meant to fill a space that wasn't already filled.
It's possible for a program to not register file extensions.
once I got used to the form factor and what it was designed for it's changed how I compute in subtle ways.
Last night for example.. rather then going to my desk .. I watched some lectures on the couch while using the pen to take notes in one note .. then docked it to do some work.
that's just one example of many; but for me personally i feel like i'm doing more with my computer then I was before
though, I've usually docked my laptops when doing any serious work .. and my mobile work is usually restricted to coffee shops for only 3-4 hours at a time ..
battery life I guess could be better .. I usually only get 4hours or so off power when streaming movies off amazon but it's not really bad IMO, but of course I'd like it to be longer .. my main worry when it comes to the battery is that it's not user replaceable honestly