Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface
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ignorethecode.net
Unusual in a relative sense, the same way artists and musicians and movie makers are unusual in any segment of society. There are millions and millions of iPad users; of course most of them are going to use their iPads primarily for consumption.
Using a Microsoft Surface is in itself unusual. I remember clearly the one time I saw someone using a Surface. It was an usual event. But on my way to work I see tens (hundreds?) of iPads and an assortment of android tablets and kindles.
My point is, I don't believe there is a large difference between the use cases and potential offered from the many consumer tablets currently available (despite Microsoft's marketing that would lead one to believe that a Surface can truly replace both and iPad and a laptop). Maybe the Surface is better for productivity, but I suspect that for every tech blogger who tried the Surface and found it to be a better laptop replacement than their iPad, there are tons of Surface owners who's use case resembles the stereotypical iPad consumption use case.
What you are saying is correct, but does not address the author's point, which is that the subset of artists/musicians/etc. who mainly use iPads for their creative/productive output is still very small.
Using a Microsoft Surface is in itself unusual. I remember clearly the one time I saw someone using a Surface. It was an usual event. But on my way to work I see tens (hundreds?) of iPads and an assortment of android tablets and kindles.
Why was using the Surface unusual, beyond the fact that seeing one was unusual?
I did not think that the tablet would be able to replace a laptop for "serious" work, but it did. There are a couple of things that allowed me to do this. First, a USB port having the ability to hook it up to "stuff" comes in handy. Second, snapping apps side by side. And, the ability to use the desktop. I could have Excel and a browser window open at the same time. Third, I could access all of Google's apps through Internet Explorer.
I was able to create great decks on Powerpoint, manage large Excel files, use the Google Suite, and multitask like on a laptop. The Surface RT was my main machine for the entire summer. And, at home my lady still used it to watch netflix and surf the web in bed.
In August instead of replacing my Macbook with another Mabook, I purchased a Surface Pro. I run Adobe CC, Ableton Live, Microsoft Office on it everyday. It is my all one in solution.
Windows 8 has a learning curve. It took me about two weeks to fully understand the OS, but I came from an Mac OS background. I recently started working in a digital agency, and we use Windows 7. I have to say Windows 8 makes my workflow easier than 7.
Edit: I forgot to mention the pen! This is one piece of technology that makes me giddy. It works great with OneNote and Photoshop. I grew up with plenty of PDAs with stylus input. But, none of those lived up to the promise of an actual digital pen. Most filled the need to tap small boxes and areas on the screen. The stylus on the Surface Pro makes it feel like a different device when I am in a meeting taking notes. It stops feeling like a laptop or "tablet" and more like a digital notebook.
It is a little heavier than the Surface Pro (though I've never seen the Surface Pro with the Power cover, so I don't know what the weight is like on that), but I don't mind, it's still lighter than my regular laptop.
It lets me work without compromise. On my Android tablet or iPad, I can only do certain types of work, and it all basically boils down to "can I make an SSH connection?" With a Windows 8 convertible tablet, I can even have a copy of my database locally and be working completely disconnected from the internet. It's pretty amazing.
Though, after this particular project is done, I might install a Linux OS on it, perhaps Ubunutu (though I'm not too keen on vanilla Ubuntu). I need to do some Visual Studio-centric work right now, but after this particular push I'll be able to move things over to Mono/SharpDevelop/etc., then get off Windows permanently.
And that's the important thing. It's not so much that "my tablet runs Windows and the iPad does not". It's "my tablet runs a full operating system that doesn't pigeon-hole me into a 'curated experience' and iOS never will be such."
EDIT: I should say "iOS and Android never will be such".
I'm no artist, but having a digital notebook would be really nice. I want something that really comes close to the fidelity and feel of a notebook and a pen. For instance, when I'm sketching out a design or an idea, I like to jot down the ideas, connections, etc, and move them around. I like doodling random notes during meetings, and I also think it would be nice to have that while I'm working through math books.
The Surface Pro came up when I was reading the review of it as an artistic tool written by Gabe from penny arcade. Really tempting now, as well, since I need to get a new windows machine to do some side .net work.
In your opinion, does it feel as good/natural as others have said for hand-writing notes?
I've got an ipad, which I love for a lot of things, but even with the various pens/stylii, the writing experience is pretty bad, for me.
I also plan on keeping the iPad around. lstamour mentioned this in another post, but weight-wise, I'm assuming I'll still prefer it for reading pdf's and such. That's actually the main reason I got an iPad to begin with. I wanted to be able to read tech books, pdf's, papers, etc on something electronic and iPad beat everything else I tried.
Agree 100%. The only catch is that the pen tracking can go a little wonky near the edges. There is, however, a fix: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2171198
If you don't need handwriting recognition (I don't personally, but it is nice to have), I've found that Stylus Labs Write to be better than the App Store's version of OneNote (http://www.styluslabs.com/). It seems to have a little less lag than OneNote for note taking also. FWIW, Write is cross platform, and I imagine it would work great on something like a Galaxy Note.
The full version of OneNote, however, is worth the cost of admission. Works fantastic with the Stylus and is way better than the Win8 App store version.
Landscape vs Portrait will also cause issues, because the angle of the pen is different, and causes tracking issues. It's imperfect, but I still love how good the pen is on the Surface compared to all the tablets that don't have a Wacom digitizer.
Also, oh my god is OneNote wonderful with that pen. It is so good.
Mac laptop, Windows tablet, Android phone. My digital ecosystem is confused.
Is it though? I know a lot of pundits like to use the phrase "Post-PC", but I think of it more like "Post-OS". I am in the exact same boat as you, except that I have a Nexus 7 in addition to my Surface Pro.
Contrast that to 2010, when iOS was much more compelling at the tablet and phone level. Android, Windows Phone and Windows have pretty much caught up, and I love how all this competition has created consumer choice. I can pick the device that best suits my use case for computing, tablet and phone.
In 2010, I was all-in on OSX, iPad and iPhone. Today, just like you, I'm using three OSes. Moving data between the devices is painless. In my mind, there's really no need to go all in with a single company's ecosystem any more.
You can get away with any hodgepodge mix these days if you want, but it's still more convenient to match.
I know a lot of Mac users who would beg to differ.
I use Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive across all my devices, and I don't have many complaints at all. YMMV, of course. My use case is probably much simpler than yours.
Also, of course iTunes isn't greased lightning & a buttered dream on OSX, it's just "less awful", or so I hear.
That said, one benefit to a mostly homogenous ecosystem around apple devices, at least for me, airplay and streaming media across devices with less work (I get lazy about home it issues)
So don:'t get me wrong, I kept the surface, but my dream tablet is 13-15" with a pen that runs OneNote on Mac ;-)
Oh and for Android dev, turn off Hyper-V and install Intel HAXM to speedily use Intel simulators. That said, for testing on device, it's really fast with Android, no signing issues as with iOS, though they're easily overcome too.
I would like a bigger tablet, but I run all my Retina Macs at max resolution so 1920x1080 at 10" isn't really a big deal for me, you know? The biggest complaint I have is the idiotic DPI controls on Windows. They're stupid, and Photoshop is extra-bad at them.
Source: We've developed a business app for Win 8, development was co-sponsered by MS and Intel. We have a very succesful iPad app in our vertical, it allowed large swaths of our customer base to switch to iPads for their fieldforce.
MS themselves acknowledged that if you want to handle "large Excel" files, the RT is the wrong device.
The Surface Pro 2 finally has the performance.
I understand your enthusiasm, switching from a 2005 MB Pro to any device in 2013 is mindblowing. Just hold back with a little bit too much hyperbole, the RT was an underspecced consumer device, Office support on it was an afterthought and a paniced scramble for the dev team (as documented here on HN a while ago).
I guess if you're using pivot tables or vlookups on massive datasets you might have a point. But I use Excel every day on my Surface RT and it performs very well.
Tbh, if the video performance was a little faster and it had an extra GB of RAM, she'd be perfectly fine with it as her day to day...and it fits okay in one of her larger purses.
It's absolutely amazing how overpowered our machines are these days, there's almost no sense to it.
The fact we consider such uses to be stretching the abilities of a 5-core 32-bit 500 megahertz processor coupled to half a dozen gigabytes of RAM and attached to gigabytes of blazing fast storage, that displays data using a multi-core SIMD supercomputer just for pushing pixels speak a lot about how ludicrously inefficient our use of computing resources is.
With this kind of computer power, our parents designed Hydrogen bombs, ICBMs, supersonic fighters and spaceships.
Now we make great Powerpoint decks...
You can still write bare-metal code and run it on modern hardware with a thin OS that has functionality on par with the ones from that era.
Question is, why would you want to? What specific tangible development cost/time (or other) benefits do you get out of it?
>Now we make great Powerpoint decks...
Powerpoint is also a vector art editor, a word processor, a spreadsheet tool, a multimedia player, a language translator, a restricted web browser, a script engine, etc, etc.
My developer coworkers — whether on Linux or Windows — multitask by ALT-TAB'ing between maximized windows (so, basically fullscreen). If they have multiple monitors, they use each one with a full-screen app. They never use Aero snap, they never have floating windows. The first thing they do when opening a program is double-click on the titlebar (possibly putting it on the monitor of their choosing before).
Conversely I can't work without Mission Control, and use Moom liberally (~ Aero snap on steroids)
Consider a creative task that almost everybody has to do: writing a job application.
Like responding to a business email or writing a Perl script to process network log files, there tends not to be some app that facilitates the work and iOS by design intent does not facilitate mashups.
Historically this divide between Windows and Apple's in house operating systems might be said to go all the way back to the development of OLE and Apple's proposed long-dead OpenDoc.
What it all adds up to is that Apple created their usual walled garden for the iPad, and in this instance the walls eliminated much of the value of the product, even for such elementary uses as reading scientific pdf's, and watching scientific lectures online.
I will say that the Surface also had some restrictions on Flash originally, which I quickly discovered when I got it home, leading to a rather testy email from myself to Steve Ballmer. This was very quickly answered by the head of the appropriate department, and they have changed their Flash site approval model in IE to be much more open.
But if you do find yourself in an iOS world - the killer app for file management on iOS is actually Dropbox. Organise your dropbox account on another computer -filing everything as it should be, then it will sync up to your iOS device, and you can access everything as required, including pdfs, images, word docs, etc. It's not perfect but it does work well.
I also have another file management app which allows me to connect to my NAS via the iPad. This is also very useful.
Of course, neither are necessary for the Surface, but I prefer a lot of the consumption features of the iPad. Web browsing on the iPad is superior because of screen quality and the browser being much more adept at gestures.
The story goes that Gabe Newell was doing market research for Microsoft, collecting data about which programs were installed on business users' PCs to get a feel for the installed base of programs like Windows (which, at the time, was not standalone and sat on top of DOS).
Turns out Windows was pretty widely deployed -- the second most installed program on the DOS machines they surveyed.
The first most installed program was Doom.
That's what prompted old Gaben to reassess what business he should be in. :)
On a tablet, you swipe it out from the left edge of the screen. Makes sense - so much sense that Apple copied the idea in iOS 7.
On a PC, you bring out the charms bar by frustratedly wiggling your mouse against the right edge of the screen for a few seconds before remembering that to make UI widgets appear out of the middle of the screen's edge, you inexplicably need to move the cursor all the way up or down to one of the corners.
You can also swipe from the right edge of your touchpad as if it were the screen.
On my monitor, the charms appear really far from the corner of the screen. It's true that it's an easy target to hit. That isn't the only way in which I find interacting with the charms bar to feel like throwing hatchets at the side of a barn. The arm motion's remarkably similar, too.
Moving it up and to the right. You may remain seated.
Opening the charms bar on a desktop computer is a rare event anyway. The buttons it exposes are primarily touch interactions used when holding a tablet running a Metro app. In a classic application, you wouldn't be using its search/share/device buttons, and it's faster to just press the Windows key to do a system/web search.
His mistake or just UI design so bad even a techie can't figure it out?
The amount of "you're doing it wrong" when it comes to addressing Windows 8/Surface UI issues is mind boggling.
It is nearly impossible to hit the charms hot corner inside a windowed RDP session when the window is not full screen.
Gestures and multitouch carry over RDP in Windows 8.
The problem is that on a laptop people are used to both visual and kinesthetic cues for their action. Just as much, any mouse "gesture" effect has to leverage our intuition about physical things... when a gesture in one place (a corner) causes something to happen elsewhere (a side), it feels unnatural and is going to keep feeling unnatural no matter how many fan boys wiggle noses and say "you're doing it wrong, this is really easy no matter hard you're claim to find it...".
Edit: The point is the bar appearing on the side cues the user to go to the side, regardless of their great dexterity at going to the corner if they happened to remember to do that (as the gp actually implies).
It's a bit weird when you use a computer via VNC, though, because you have to move the mouse more precisely.
For the record, I despise all the Metro stuff and would cut it out if it were easy to do so.
Called it! In fact, I called it right here from before the Surface existed as a tablet when Microsoft put out the vaporware tablet commercial!
Split screen is one of those things like cut and paste. It might seem inelegant to some, but it's powerful and widely understood and can be used to share information between tools in very useful ways.
For a system to be powerful, it needs facilities like this.
Which is why Android has a full-range systems of Intents, BroadcastReceivers etc. to deal with this.
The blog post talks about how the iPad does not solve his problems, but Android is only mentioned once in a footnote.
It's a honest comparison, it's just completely useless.
OneNote actually already does this! Try searching in OneNote for things you've written in pen and it will show those notes.
[Update: maybe the Metro version of OneNote doesn't support all of the features of the desktop version?]
If you open the same notebook in the Win32 client and allow it to index and sync back to Sky/One/WhateverIt'sCalledThisWeekDrive you should be able to search through previously handwritten and Win32-client-OCRd notes in the Metro app.
It's vastly superior, but on the plus side, if you're using OneDrive or Office 365, you can edit existing notes either one depending on your needs for a given situation.
Syncs with an audio recording as well....
I'm not sure why people continue to believe this; they've shown no real signs of doing so in the past seven years.
> the App Store could be seen as another sign on the road to a more closed consumer system.
Well, could be, perhaps, but highly speculatively. It's not like the app store on MacOS was an amazing world first, or anything; notably, Ubuntu had a paid app store before the MacOS one.
Some of the criticism is just plain wrong, like the "install software for USB booting install media." Yeah, I can write quite a bit too, about how hard it is to use the operating system, when I'm the one who randomly downloads crapware and tries to install it, instead of just doing a search and using the build in commands to make a bootable usb stick.
Then the whole thing about how the disk manager looked? I mean really? I'm a sysadmin and I probably stare at that UI likely more than any of you here (even when I have 90% of repeating work scripted with diskpart - do you notice the difference in usage scenarios here?) and it never even occurred to me there was something wrong with it? What do you want, a couple of flowers along the edges or something?
In short, he wants that any os program looks like something created expressly for that version of the os
This seems to indicate the author actually actively goes searching for the entry. Which is nowadays not the 'correct way' of reaching it but instead by far the most ineffective way of navigating. I honestly have no idea where the Disk Managment thing resides (well, I do know) despite using it often. Just open the control panel and start typing 'disk' and click the item.
A couple of days ago, I played with a Surface 2 at my local Staples and was pretty impressed by it and its type cover. The touch interface, which isn't particularly nice on a desktop computer, was pretty cool on a tablet. I also liked that is has a micro-SD slot for storage expansion.
Perhaps the only thing I don't care for it that Microsoft is only allowing Metro apps for ARM into their app store. That seems a bit one-sided considering that they are bundling non-Metro Office apps with the device.
The battery life is fantastic (and comparable to ARM), and you'll be able to run traditional desktop apps in a pinch.
I have a feeling the 11" Venue Pro would be the same way. The Windows touch keyboard is really awkward, it's hard to select small things like browser buttons, and there aren't a lot of apps. But hey, it's pretty cheap, and it's great for watching Netflix or preparing a simple document.
In terms of productivity, what kills my efficacy on iOS versus OS X (and even locked Android versus desktop) is the inability for platform devs to build things that reach outside of the app sandbox. TextExpander and LastPass on iOS are near useless compared to their desktop counterparts, but are even more powerful for getting work done with a slower typing speed.
I have one small suggestion, if you don't mind: How about making the input box increase in size (maybe double in size) so you don't have to write so small? The resizing wouldn't need to reflow the rest of the page; it could turn into a modal textbox in the same location as the original textbox. It would make it easier for children, the elderly and people who aren't native speakers of the language, etc.
And of course, there is still the option of scaling the page overall. It's possible the audiences that would want bigger input boxes would also want the text and images to be bigger as well, but it needs research to confirm.
As the OP points out, the pop-over handwriting "keyboard" is far from ideal. So far, in fact, that I feel it neuters the appeal of the pen on my Surface Pro. I don't want to lose half my screen real-estate to a special-purpose input area, be it a virtual keyboard or a special handwriting panel. Losing half the screen for input reeks of the iPad.
The real problem is making inking work with any arbitrary control! That is what the current input panel is for. Remember it has to work anyplace anyone could ever enter text, wherever a cursor appears. So that includes Bob's Janky Control Factory DLL version 1.32a last updated on October 3rd of 2008.
If you search MSDN, there are plenty of examples of some really awesome ink enabled controls! Designing a system for ink first would be a lot of fun! I remember controls published for web pages that supporting inking, forums you could just draw right into the reply box on. Really cool stuff.
There is also usability concerns, not everyone has hand writing small enough to fit inside of a single line input box! Increasing the area to outside the box only works until the tip has been picked up, if you make the user always start the inking inside the box maybe something could be worked out, but that'd be a very unnatural way of writing.
Perhaps Metro apps were an opportunity to change the behavior and shed legacy compatibility requirements. Another possibility is to target just the web browser; the web has a defined set of controls which allowed Apple to define touch behavior for just those. I agree tackling compatibility for everything that has ever been created in Windows is not feasible, but I think there are alternatives.
Regarding size of input box, remember how small people write on typical ruled paper. It's much smaller than the handwriting recognition area! The reason I thought just letting people wander outside the box might work is that most of the time, it's for letters like 'g' or 'j' where part of the letter hangs 'below the line'. Characters don't typically start below the line.
In general, yes, there are many potential usability concerns. However, the bar is low, as most people don't consider the current system usable to start with.
I recently ordered Lenovo's ThinkPad 8 and can't wait for it to arrive. I think this is the first good alternative to the Windows Surface (it's lighter, higher res, better battery, smaller bezel, usb 3.0, sd card slot + hdmi out). There should be more to come after this as well.
I really think the tides will start to turn in favor of Windows' mobile devices if they continue to improve they way they have recently.
Maybe when Windows 9 is released next year something like that would be available.
Well it's hard for them to get worse so I guess 'improve' is the only option.
What I'm saying is if they continue to improve their tablets at their current rate it will be to their benefit because other manufactures (i.e Apple) have been slacking in the specs department as of late. If this keeps up Microsoft will be able to close that gap.
I know that the Asus Vivo Tab Note 8 has the Wacom digitiser though but has a much lower res.
Also wish that these 8" devices had seperate ports for charging and USB.
With these two you just move very fluidly to where you need to be on a Win 8 machine.
Start - username - Lock. But yes, Win+L is faster.
In the end I bought a MBP13 because the TPY has a lead time of 6-12 weeks, and Lenovo are extremely bad at telling you this. So far I'm happy with the Apple, but I can see myself picking a TPY up at some point..
The Surface has a USB port. And that makes it an uncontrolled environment.
For example, the article complains that Windows is "technically terrible", because "I suddenly started getting an error message about some DLL every time I restarted the Surface (which you sometimes have to do when you get updates, which you get often). "
If you look at the screenshot, the DLL is C:\Windows\System32\LogiLDA.dll. This DLL is written by Logitech. That means he must've plugged in a Logitech device at some point.
If the Wacom driver fails, that can clearly be blamed on Microsoft. The Surface ships with a Wacom digitizer, so it's up to Microsoft to test the drivers thoroughly. But the Surface doesn't ship with a Logitech mouse. If a Logitech driver fails, then there's very little that Microsoft can do about it.
Now, you could certainly argue that Microsoft should've caught this in exhaustive backcompat testing, and put a workaround into Windows. On the other hand, I also have a Logitech device plugged in. When I upgraded from Windows 8 to 8.1, it didn't throw up a LogiLDA error. (I don't even have a LogiLDA.dll file in my System32 directory.)
Windows automatically installs drivers supplied by the manufacturer.
If Windows didn't do that, then you'd get antitrust complaints from Logitech, because Microsoft sells keyboards that compete with Logitech's.
A lot of the problems with the Windows ecosystem are not technical problems at all, but legal or market problems.
I used the Newton was a productivity device.
I used the P800 was a productivity device.
But I'll pass on buying it - it's spendy and I don't have any other Windows tech to interop with it.
But here's why I hate the iPad and hope Windows RT never wins in the marketplace, as it shares the same problem with iOS - it's defective by design. Personally I can't use or recommend to other people platforms on top of which Firefox or other alternative browsers cannot run.
And btw, both Surface and Surface 2 are Windows RT devices. Only Surface Pro isn't. And the reason for why Windows 8 for x86 was spared for the moment is because it replaces Windows 7, so because of market forces, but I hate the direction in which Microsoft is moving.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57432435-92/why-mozilla-bel...
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57431475-92/google-agrees-w...
It's very easy to arrange 2 windows side by side, or 4 windows in all 4 corners. And besides using mouse interactions that would work with screen touch gestures, it works with keyboard shortcuts too.
I'm also not convinced that having windows that can overlap is not desirable. Personally I like having windows that I can move around. Works great with multi monitor setups too. Have a window opened on this screen and you need to move it to the other screen? You just drag it from here to there.
The only problem with draggable windows on mobile devices is that you don't have enough screen real-estate, so having a top border for dragging is wasteful, or if that top border is too small it's painful to target it with your finger. But touch gestures can work - as in, a two or three finger swipe could mean a drag, or whatever.
I'm all for wheel reinvention and new UI paradigms, but when introducing something new, it has to be better and not inferior to the old UI paradigm.
I doubt that. I think Windows on ARM was a backup plan because x86 processors weren't good enough. To reduce the amount of things needed to be ported and to reduce confusion (x86 apps not running on ARM), they limited WoA to WinRT.
Multitasking gestures on iPad and Macs let you slide back and forth between adjacent full screen apps.
Your CV probably includes a picture. Maybe you went to a photographer who gave you a CD with copies of the pictures she took. You can’t easily copy them to your iPad.
Can't easily copy CD to my current computer either. But I have both a USB adapter and card reader adapter for the iPad.
Once there, you probably want to touch them up a bit, and crop them. It might be inconvenient to move the image file between all of the apps you’ll use to work on it.
You're unlikely to need more than the pretty amazing version of iPhoto on an iPad. If you prefer, there are multiple alternatives from the free SnapSeed to relatively expensive pro options.
Finally, you might want to export your letter and CV as PDFs, maybe combine them into a single PDF, or maybe ZIP them. You want to attach the resulting file to an email. It’s reasonably simple on a Mac or PC, but I’m not sure if some of these things are even possible on an iPad.
Check out Documents 5 from Readdle, along with PDF Expert, and you don't have to leave the apps.
I use iPad for contract work (round trip MS Word with track changes) all the time, and when not doing Word, PowerPoint, or Excel using iWork apps, I'm importing and editing and posting pro-size photos from a Nikon D3.
From your article, I'm guessing you're missing the excellent Logitech ultraslim keyboard case, have multitasking gestures turned off, and aren't that familiar with the productivity applications available.
I agree that productivity is possible with an iPad, but perhaps it requires "being familiar" with a lot of stuff before you can be very effective with it.
The only issue is that such training does exist in large parts in the PC world, and is less readily available in the iPad world.
The first cuts across a wide range of applications from consumer to business. The lack of multiuser capabilities (with permissions and all the things modern multiuser OS's can do) seriously limits usability.
At home I would like to make a distinction between my usage of an iPad, that of my children and that of guests. No, i don't want to buy a separate device for each use case. Accounts for children could have limits set to restrict usage to a pre selected set of apps, time limits, app store settings, etc. Guest accounts would have the ability to setup similar restrictions. A house guest should not be able to open and browse your email, facebook, paypal or whatever.
The same issue applies to business usage. An iPad is a security nightmare in lots of business scenarios. Adding a layer of user management would be a huge step towards fixing this problem. For example, if I use an iPad as a cash register I don't want the cash register user to be able to use any other app. Perhaps i also want them to be able to browse the company website in order to assist customers and that's it.
The Apple "wall" is how I've been descriibing the Apple's control-freak hold on the device and the OS. This goes from the lack of USB and memory card connectivity to the lack of access to a file system, impossibly cumbersome file sharing between apps, totalitarian control of the one-and-only connector (leading to ridiculous hacks such as using the audio port for data communications, something that dates back to the early '80's!).
It's intersting to walk into an Apple store and see the iPads they have locked down to a single app that tells you about the device next to it. Apple themselves understand there are business cases where you need a device that is very tightly controlled, even to the point of limiting it to a single app. They get it. They simply have no interest in letting us through the wall.
Windows <n> and Surface are not and have never been perfect solutions. However, they benefit significantly from your ability to do just about anything you want with them, to connect to and talk to almost any external hardware device in the market and to easily design your own for special applications. You can setup users for your particular needs. You can even install other OS's --replacing Windows-- or simply run them in a virtual machine.
I've come to view our iPads more as toys than as universal machines. They get used for web browsing, playing games and reading eBooks and that's just about it.
I continue to be stunned by how bad Microsoft marketing is. Instead of driving home the point that the iPad is a severely restricted and crippled device they actually spent good money making commercials with people dancing around clicking keyboards on and off their devices. If that's what they trully think is the most significant distinguishing value of their devices they are truly clueless.
I can't take a single iPad and have a decent degree of control over it.
Even just a simple shared folder where all apps can share whatever they're producing would be enough. Those who don't understand file systems are condemned to reinvent them...
Yes, it's not an accident, but not because of the reason you give. Gaming is one of the most popular, if not the most popular and highest grossing category on any popular consumer platform. That's just the way it works. Some of these platform vendors (like Apple), and unlike others (like Google) realized this is true from early days, and they have actively encouraged gaming on the platform, by promoting the use of high-performance GPUs, partnering with game companies, and so on.
> As Joanna Stern puts it, «if I’m writing long emails or working on office documents, I want a larger screen, a roomy keyboard and the ability to easily juggle programs.»
A larger screen, which the Surface doesn't really have either. That's why I can't seriously consider the Surface a "productivity" device. I've used 10" netbooks before, and I know just how cramped they feel.
Metro is "so easy to use", that you used almost half of your article to describe how to use it.
One OS to rule them all - I'm tired of this stupidity and brainless parroting of one line made popular years ago in comments. By definition, you can't "optimize" something for everything.
Yes, it is an execution problem, because it will never work. It's like trying to build the perpetual motion machine. Sounds great in theory, "if you could do it". Will never work.
As for games completely ruling the top 100 list of highest-grossing apps on any popular consumer platform: this is definitely not the case in the Mac App Store.
Microsoft shills are truly the worst shills.
Not everyone is a shill.
I have a thought, though: if your world view only works if everybody who says anything positive about Microsoft is a shill, then perhaps it's not the "Microsoft shills" who are the problem.
I use Linux for like 5 years exclusively now. But I don't go around trying to argue how great it is or something. It is great for me, so much is clear. I'm just very happy that I am rid of all this proprietary BS.
Why do people write blog posts about such topics? I don't get it. It must be hugely boring to write them. And the shitstorm that ensues is probably even worse. Apple fanboys vs. MS fanboys vs. Google proponents vs. C64 veterans vs. Amiga shitheads vs. Atari nuts vs. Gravis Ultrasound!
My car is better than yours!
I've got only just a few years left (maybe) to dig around earth. I write quick stupid comments like this one to let you all know that you suck big time.
You should really think about it. Do you want to waste your time reading this crap? Isn't life more than that?
Ok, spock. Enough tricks played. Let them alone. Good night!