Microsoft Surface vs. iPad and Linode
yieldthought.com
yieldthought.com
You come across as someone that went into the Surface not wanting to like it and you found a bunch of reasons from reasonable to erroneous not to like it. Does it seriously bother you what other people think about the devices you use?
Word doesn’t save your work unless you click on a 3.5” disk icon regularly.
This is an example of one of your contrived reasons. Word auto-saves at a user-definable interval. It also creates AutoRecover files at a regular interval. I've had situations like power outages hard shutdown my computer and AutoRecover restores them up to the second.
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/help-protect-you...
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/107686
Some things are saved on SkyDrive, some on the local disk, which isn’t automatically backed up either. So now I am forced to be aware of this leaky abstraction, to manage the remote and local state and at this point I might as well just have a MacBook Air and be done with it.
Just buy a MacBook Air because that's obviously what you want. This is another contrived reason. Backing up the local and remote (Skydrive) data on your Surface RT is pretty darned easy to set it and forget it:
http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/support/music-photos-...
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/set-drive-file-...
> but it is not beautiful, nor do I enjoy using it - or being seen using it.
If you gave this guy a non-iPod mp3 player he's likely crap his pants with shame.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_different
To quote Steve Jobs:
When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is - everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will, you know if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it. That’s maybe the most important thing. It’s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.
I think that’s very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, cause it’s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
Would Jobs roll over in his grave knowing that Hipsters were embarrassed to pull out a device in a cafe because it's not the Hippest device?
You have to admit how silly the following exchange between you and a nearby cafe patron would be if your scenario were actually articulated:
You: "Pardon me, would it bother you if I check my email and casually browse the web with my tablet?"
Cafe Patron: "Sure, go right ahea... oh, my mistake, I assumed that was an iPad, I'm sorry but that sort of device simply has no place here."
Word autosave isn't good enough. Here's what happens regularly: I leave Word open without manually saving for days in the background without realizing. Eventually the Surface decides to reboot itself for an update or runs out of power. The next time I open a Word document from an email attachment during a conference call some stupid side bar pops up with a number of revisions of documents that I instincively ignore. Cancel, go away! I'm busy! Oh, now I've lost that work.
I've retrained myself always to save the 'recovered' copies now, and then manually check whether it's newer or older than the last 'saved' copy. I shouldn't have to do that.
I really, really wanted to like the Surface. Just check my previous posts and tweets about it. I still use it, but I am also disappointed.
This is your own hangup and has nothing to do with the tablet.
Also, I'm entitles to my social hangups. We live in a social environment, not a vacuum.
Be your own person, because half of your "critiques" are based on how you think other people perceive you.
A few things.
First, that's rude, especially to someone who's taken the time to express an honest view.
Second, he never claimed to be speaking on behalf of some objective viewpoint. This is clearly an opinion piece, and it's redundant to say, "Well, that's your opinion." Of course it is!
Third, and this bears repeating: his opinion is valid and useful in-and-of itself. It doesn't need to be "correct", and you don't need to agree with it for that to be so. What you did there was attempt to invalidate his viewpoint, his reaction. It is a form of control, of bullying, and you should be ashamed of yourself for trying it.
It IS his own hangup if he feels uncomfortable using a laptop in a cafe. Millions of people do it every single day and see no issue.
You are mixing up Auto Save with Auto Recover. In Word, your first line of defense is explicitly saving the document. Perhaps if clicking the button is too difficult you could hit Ctrl-S? That's what I do.
Failing explicitly saving your document, you could program Word to Auto Save your document every minute if you wanted to. This doesn't bring up (or even create) different revisions of the document. It literally is just as if you clicked the Save button (or hit Ctrl-S).
Failing the Auto Save - maybe you have it set to 10 minutes and you typed for 9 minutes when your computer crashed? You have Auto Recover. That's where Word automatically detects that Something Bad happened and shows you the last few times it made a copy of your Word environment for you (which includes your document).
So, three levels of protection that work pretty well for most people.
some stupid side bar pops up with a number of revisions of documents that I instincively ignore. Cancel, go away! I'm busy! Oh, now I've lost that work.
Perhaps you would be less busy if you weren't ignoring popups that were attempting to help you save your work.
My honest assessment is that you want your real work on Surface to be as easy and fun as your Subway Surfers on iPad.
In Pages, or Google Docs, it's just a document. It's always saved, always up to date, it just works.
That's the future.
I have a friend that uses Google Docs. He once sent me a link to a Google Docs spreadsheet.
I got lost in the user interface at one point and ended up seeing the list of all of his documents. I clicked on one thinking it was the correct one and loaded what appeared to be on quick notice a journal of various medical problems he's been having.
That's the future.
You're right. The future is people using technology that they don't want to be bothered to learn and thereby having it do things that nobody (especially them) intended. I'm sorry you lost a document but you fell through 3 failsafe levels and did it to yourself. Pretending things like that don't happen to Google Docs is ridiculous and shows your true bias.
Also, it obviously doesn't "just work" for you because you couldn't even use Google Docs in your place of business.
There's no reason it can't be "easy and fun" like on an ipad apart from years of "this is how it's always been".
Unfortunately for people who don't like Office - there'r no good alternatives if you want to conduct business in the environment where Office is most widely used.
Better tell my girlfriend. She's a nanny. I just knew she should have bought an iPad.
It sounds like he has lost work several times, which would mean that it's a valid complaint. If there is a setting to auto save then either it's not on by default, or for some reason it doesn't work for him. Both reasons would still make his complaint valid.
I would've thought so too until you read how he purposely clicked Cancel on prompts attempting to help him save his work because he was "too busy".
If there is a setting to auto save then either it's not on by default
There is such a setting, and it is on by default.
for some reason it doesn't work for him
Unfortunately when you're a Device Hipster it's easier to find things to dislike about Surface and like about iPad.
That might sound childish, but you can't dismiss it. It is one thing to be seen with a device that other people like. The original iPhone was a conversation starter, just like the iPad when it came out. You can pull out a Thinkpad from 10 years ago in a full Starbucks if you like, but most people wouldn't enjoy doing it - and even apologize for it, if they got curious stares.
It is human nature and cannot be avoided. Kudos to the author for even daring to mention it.
Besides, if it is not "cool" and "trendy", there will be (and already is) an effect on sales.
What on earth are you on about?
http://www.thinkwiki.org/w/images/8/8a/ThinkPadT30.jpg
Yes. I'm sure people would "apologize for [daring to] pull it out in a Starbucks".
Seriously - what are you on?
"Kudos to the author for even daring to mention it."
No. Nor to you.
-- signed, someone who owns an iPhone 5, an iPad 4 and a RMBP.
But they didn't, and here we are. It's like having a set of drawers where the third one down needs to have the second draw pulled open half way and the bottom all the way in to work properly. It's totally liveable, but you'll always resent it.
Completely agree. Microsoft can't win for losing. They have some great products and the cash to really make a dent, then they completely flub the opportunity. I feel like they're trying to cast too wide of a net and in doing so miss the important details.
They have almost the polar opposite approach of Apple, who will happily give up features in order to have other features work solidly (in my opinion). A former boss of mine once said that users will forgive a lack of features, but not a lack of stability/usability. I agree with that. I'd rather have a limited set of features that WORK than a larger set of features that "sort of" work. I don't know if this comes from Microsoft's background of working with corporate partners (and delivery dates are important to fulfill a contract, bugs or not) or what.
But yeah, the save thing, the lack of automatic cloud support... that seems anachronistic. The disconnected, versionless way people still handle their documents is incredibly haphazard and it's staggering that we've allowed it to persist like this so long. You can't really blame MS for this - everybody has a blind spot with office documents, even people who try to compete with MS - It's not like LibreOffice avoids these problems.
Ironically, you saying that is anachronistic because it shows you've never used Office 2013.
It's a real shame, there's so much potential here. I know people with Windows Phones love them; do they also do things like screw up the screen rotation, force a reboot with 15 minutes warning and update every few days? I'm guessing not; if only the Surface division had made the same choices.
I feel as if a tablet really needs to be a magic slate first, a general purpose PC second (if at all).
Have used WP8 though, and that was quite an amazing experience (probably partly becuase I expected it to be crap, but definitely also because it's just pretty good).
Though it's a shame this option is absolutely non user-friendly in my opinion.
Word doesn't have autosave anymore? It's had it since like Office 95!
Did the machine really power itself off, losing your work, every week even if you had it in hibernate or sleep mode? That would really surprise me, I haven't seen my tablet do that. Windows Update is a troublemaker, for sure, though...
Why is the keyboard behavior you describe such a problem? For me, I consider the Windows 8 behavior the only optimal choice: Windows software in general is designed on the assumption that screen geometry will not change constantly every time you tap. The android/iOS behavior of keyboards popping up at random as the focus moves around can be a real pain when trying to precision target objects, scroll around, or highlight content. There are certainly cases where it's unambiguous and the keyboard could just be popped up, but at most I found that a minor nitpick when interacting with W8 on a daily basis - and you've got a Surface, where you can just attach a keyboard and start typing. Is it just something that really annoyed you, from a friction perspective, even though it doesn't have a big workflow impact?
Maybe that's an indication that stock Windows as a tablet OS is a mismatch. When you have to compromise the user experience to support legacy software (or any non-tablet software), then maybe that's a bad sign. Or at least a sign for where Microsoft's priorities lie. When you're competing against slick iPads and Android tablets, that you don't want to compromise the user experience for backwards compatibility.
Now, if you aren't competing against iOS/Android [1], then maybe you can make that choice. But, as least for the author, that was the comparison.
[1] Which I'd argue they shouldn't be...
The last Microsoft Word version with Autosave is 97[1], from 2000 onwards it was changed to Autorecover (from crash)[2].
[1] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/77535 [2] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/107686
I personally would like a tablet to be a view on personal applications whose state exists on a network-connect compute environment that runs for my use--to host my applications. I call this "personal application omnipresence" and would prefer it across all my devices. It can be approximated with various trickery, but no systems exist that were purpose-built to perform this way out of the box.
I want a singular instance of my Twitter application, a singular e-mail application, a singular IRC client, a singular Office suite, etc. And I don't want to ever synchronize state because with a singular application, there is no synchronization.
With that in mind, I strongly agree with your sentiment that the Surface isn't the zen-like device I want. I don't actually want another first-class computing device. I don't want it to persist state when I close it because I don't want a tablet to have state at all. I also don't want my phone to have state, nor my desktop PC. I want a singular state for all of my applications hosted on a compute server I operate.
I'm not sure what you mean by a "magic slate," but when I use words like those, I mean a view on applications that run elsewhere. Something analogous to the tablets seen in the film Avatar, where views are just present on a pane of glass (of course, a transparent display makes for fun sci-fi scenery, but isn't very practical).
I think Microsoft is the best situated of the titans to attack a computing model like PAO, but so far I don't see them moving in that direction. Instead, they seem presently fixated on the plain cloud model that has--to-date at least--been successful for their competitors. Perhaps in time.
My own rants on Microsoft: http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft
That notion of singular applications that you yourself control comes up a lot on HN, and it does seem like a great future. A whole ecosystem of supporting services (and maybe standards) would probably need to emerge were this to be the norm for how people compute, but it seems like it could be for the best, pushing the cloud all the way down to the user.
I strongly disagree with this view unless you are talking about this server you operate being within your own office network. For anything outside the office/home having to rely on network access, if we are talking about business, simply isn't smart.
Traveling teaches this very quickly. You can't assume the network will be reachable when you need it. I've traveled extensively within the US, Europe and South America. Things are always getting better. However, if you are there on business and the files and data you need to access are critical to your mission you'd be well advised to not rely on being able to access the network.
I do agree that the idea of having, at the very least, a secure, centralized and reliably accessible data store would be fantastic. At the same time, there are huge holes in the viability of such an approach for a number of use cases. For example, applications such as SolidWorks, the Xilinx FPGA development suite or a number of 3D rendering/animation packages are not going to do very well if both the sometimes massive amount of data they require is remotely hosted. Running some of these applications over a remote desktop type environment (both app and data hosted remotely) just doesn't work very well at all.
If the opinion is that a tablet is simply a window into a server and nothing else things are very different. I am not sure that is the best use for the form factor. As an example, I am tending to purchase technical books in electronic form now rather than paper. As such, my iPad has now become my roving bookshelf. I don't have to worry about having network access in order to read any of my books. They are always there.
I've had a love/hate relationship with tablets. They are great for browsing the web, reading a book (although it is a far better experience on a multi-monitor desktop with large screens) and, yes, playing games. I have failed to identify any real work I can do on a tablet. A short email here and there, yes, anything more complex than that is a pain in the ass. Even sending a bunch of attachments with an email on an iPad is an absolute pain. Until the advent of Windows 8 (notice I did not say "Surface") I saw tablets as entertainment systems. Sure, there are verticals where they can and are being used in business. Cash registers, for example.
For me Windows 8 changed everything. Not that W8 is thrilling. I think they screwed up quite a few things. I was really critical of it at first. However, when you look at it in the context of a hybrid tablet/laptop machine you've arrived at almost the ideal business machine (or multi-use) paradigm in many ways. Nothing is more frustrating to me than trying to type on something like an iPad. It's crap. Even something as simple as cursor control for selection and editing is horrible. Not much work has gone into improving this. If you look at a W8 hybrid you, all of a sudden, have the possibility of operating it as a tablet for a bunch of use cases --from reading books and browsing the web to making presentations-- as well as switching to "real computer" mode to run Excel, Solidworks or anything else you care to. You can run desktop class software while having a tablet available if needed. I won't go as far as saying that is genius, but it is really neat.
The other thing W8 does is that it, to some extent, democratizes and liberates the tablet. Apple's choke-hold on the things you can and cannot do with their platform continues to baffle me. I fully understand it in the context of making a device that both grandma and an eight year old can use. No issues with that. If that's their market, that's their market. In exchange for that we can't even plug a USB drive into the thing and grab, move and access files as we see fit. A W8 tablet is simply running Windows, with all the access and flexibility that entails.
Having everything live on the cloud sounds great until a quarter of the country --every business, school, government office and home-- goes down because a cloud service provider had a major problem or one of the myriad of potential network problems causes a major outage.
I mean precisely that. A server you own on your own private network, connected to remote views via IPSec/L2TP or similar.
Such a model would allow people who are not interested in running their own compute servers to lease capacity on a managed host. But for users with privacy or control needs, we'd run our own servers on our always-on networks.
The model would require progress in network connectivity, bandwidth, and latency. My frustration with modern technology is that many feel we have reached "good enough" plateaus with home networks (and other technologies) and these plateaus postpone the emergence of new ways of computing such as this model I've described.
I feel for 99% of my productivity and entertainment needs, today's network connectivity would more or less suffice using an implementation not far from what we today call "remote desktop" paired with RemoteFX. The chief barrier would be transfer limits imposed by wireless carriers.
If Microsoft were to seriously pursue such a computing model, an evolved version of RemoteFX could bring the remote/mobile experience more in line with local computing.
Reading your message, I think you and I actually agree on a great many things. For example, I too strongly prefer (even) consumption on a high-powered desktop with large displays.
(Also, to be clear, I really enjoy my Surface Pro. My earlier point was just confirming the OP's remark that it's not zen-like. For me, zen-like would mean reducing it to a portable view on my persistent, personal, and omnipresent applications.)
I love my 128GB model and I'll probably get the second version when they come out with it.
Also, here are instructions to change the Word auto-save frequency - http://en.kioskea.net/faq/8283-word-change-auto-save-frequen...
What device does that?
The biggest wart on my WP7 phone is the way the Notes were relegated into the ghetto of MS office apps, meaning all the overhead of MS office got in the way... Notes are meant to be convenient.
But mom what if the cool kids see me using it?
Then I thought I would try using splashtop to remote into my home desktop. I thought this was perfect; I could use the power of my home machine and the portability of the Nexus. Worked great on my home network. After going to a conference, I found that it just could not hold the connection. I'm only using vim on a terminal. It just would not work.
Now here I am eyeing an 11 Macbook Air. Great portability and battery life, but the price is just hard to swallow.
- Jump Desktop works _a lot better_ than anything else in my experience (I live inside an iPad hooked up to XRDP) - Android terminal bindings are perfectly OK in https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jackpal.androi..., so I'm curious as to what exactly was the problem you had (I also have an ODROID-U2 which I use as both an RDP client and an SSH/tmux client with extra smarts)
Here are my (hopefully) brief thoughts on the Surface (Pro). I agree with the author's take that it's clunky as a tablet. I noticed the same sort of rotation issues with windows resizing oddly. I find the lack of automatic auto-correct to be frustrating, since typing on the screen keyboard is hard (although in some ways I do like the Surface's screen keyboard better than the iPad's, mainly because it has a fuller range of keys, like a programmer typically expects, and I like having the number pad since you're having to switch the keyboard to get to the numbers anyway).
I also found that scrolling windows in the browser (a common task on a tablet) works considerably less well on the Surface. It seems to be best in IE, but in Firefox and Chrome sometimes my finger will scroll the window with a touch, but sometimes it just seems to select text. Window management is the same old problem as on every windowed device, but now more difficult when trying to hit the small window border with your finger. Of course, full screen is still an option.
I considered buying a MacBook Air, and in some ways wish I had (battery life comes to mind) but I like that the Surface is a real PC as well as an OK tablet, and I really wanted the Wacom pen (something I have a particular fondness for). While I wouldn't recommend the Surface generally to people, it fit my usage pattern well. I can still connect to my desktop, SSH works as expected, but I can also work locally if I want to install stuff. For me, it beats the iPad + ssh pattern, but really only in the way any ultra-portable laptop would.