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Comment by geerlingguy | Hacker News Reader

Actual product page: http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/products/surface-3

And buy now page with tech specs: http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/productI...

Looks like $499 for 64GB storage and 2GB RAM, $599 for 128GB storage and 4GB of RAM (WiFi models; 4G LTE model pricing wasn't showing for me).

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That 2 GB, 64 GB model just looks painful to use. I've seen a lot of Windows installs use up more than 64 GB, in particular as WinSXS grows as more updates are installed (thus more duplicate DLLs are stored). If anyone asked me, I'd describe 128 GB as the "minimum" storage needed for Windows. And even then you aren't storing much if any user data on it.

4 GB is the minimum I'd run anything newer than Windows XP on. The SSD's speed might be able to "save" the 2 GB from being completely unusable, but it is still going to be damn slow with the amount of paging that's going to occur.

Honestly, I get that Microsoft wants to hit that magical $500 figure, but that device is going to give a really poor use experience in my opinion.

It feels like the Surface 3 is coming out a few months too early in some respects, as the disk space improvements in Windows 10 are going to make it a lot more palatable on the $499 model:

http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/03/16/how-wind...

This is my feeling as well. I just don't want a Windows 8 machine. Its clear it was a transition OS full of compromise, half cooked ideas, and a "lets just ship" mentality, which MS had to embrace considering it was practically a non-player in the mobile space in 2012.

I'm hoping 10 comes out with a more refined understanding of modern OS expectations, especially when your OS is both a desktop and mobile OS. I find it amusing that 8 came out with this large install size when SSDs were becoming the norm. I guess Redmond can't move fast enough to avoid this outcome. They saw 1TB drives being the norm in 2009-2010-ish when they started this project and couldn't pivot fast enough to stop it. Now things like the sxs folder being 20gb is the norm. Or still defaulting to a 1996-like "make your swap file twice 2x your RAM size" mentality. I have 16gb of RAM. I sure as hell don't need a 32gb swap file.

The only reason I have a swap file is because DirectX seems to expect one for many games, so I have a token 512mb one just for gaming. No other application expects one. MS really needs to contemporize with Win10. There's just way too much legacy cruft in 7 and 8. Win8 on that sexy Surface hardware is like driving your Ferarri on a dirt road.

The Windows memory model is different. With some OSes, you can happily over allocate and everything's great. Malloc won't fail, and so long not every page ends up being touched, you're fine. But as soon as you go over, bam OOM killer.

On Windows, every allocation gets reserved by actual memory, so it's easier to run into a situation where you would start failing malloc. So having swap is more important.

Also, I think that anonymous mmap is backed by the pagefile. So anything using mmap without specifying a file is going to increase your pagefile needs.

> especially when your OS is both a desktop and mobile OS

I'm curious: does anybody besides OS developers want this to be the case? I don't want the way I interact with a tablet to be the way I interact with a laptop or a desktop.

I really can't even use a computer that's less than 4 gb these days, especially once chrome gets it's grubby hands all over my RAM. Just running baseline I find that most windows systems take up about two GB of RAM, and after you load up chrome, word, whatever; it hits the 4GB+ range. I mean, we're starting to see phones with 2GB of ram, it's completely unacceptable for a modern tablet.

>> I mean, we're starting to see phones with 2GB of ram, it's completely unacceptable for a modern tablet.

I run Chrome with a lot of tabs open on my Asus Vivotab Note and I don't really feel the pain of having only 2GB. I'm one of those guys with bad habits about closing tabs.

The thing you have to remember -- Atoms are serviceable CPUs, but they're nothing like the Core series. If you're looking to do heavy lifting, you should probably go for a Surface Pro anyways.

I really think this comment is overblown. Until 2-3 months ago, I was using a T400 from 2009. It had 4 gigs of ram. I could happily hum away with Firefox with like 30 tabs open, Chrome with like 10 tabs open, IPython notebook chugging away, and Grooveshark/Flash burning up my cycles. While it certainly was not as smooth or as fast as I would have liked it, it certainly never really held me back.

> especially once chrome gets it's grubby hands all over my RAM

Have you considered switching to Firefox, which is a bit more conservative with memory usage? :)

How much RAM does the Ipad have?

Current iPads have 1GB of RAM. They also constantly evict background applications and even backgrounded tabs in the web browser. Switching browser tabs on iOS is always a gamble as to whether it'll reload the page or not. This makes it impossible to, for example, write a comment in one tab while referencing some material in a different one with any kind of reliability.

iOS is extremely memory efficient but it comes at a cost which can be quite high for some.

The iPad Air 2 is the first iOS device with 2 GB of RAM, I believe.

Whoops, clearly I'm a bit behind the times. Thanks to both of you for the updated info.

The iPad Air 2 has 2 GB RAM.

Does it matter? The normal usage patterns for Windows (and OS X) is very different and requires more RAM than the typical usage patterns on an iOS devices

Indeed. I currently only have Chrome, Outlook, and Lync open and am using 4.2 GB of RAM. Over half of that is Chrome alone.

Now, granted, the OS does use more RAM has availability increases (I have 16 GB) however Chrome is a beast no matter what.

Do you use adblock? Chrome's extensions can eat up more RAM than chrome itself, and you don't always see it as a separate process. I keep my extensions minimal, and can use chrome just fine on a 2 GB system.

8 GB is absolute bare minimum in 2015 (I'd say 2012 but the world seems to disagree). I'd be very hesitant buying something today that didn't have 16 GB. Unfortunately that is quite hard to come by in the ultrabook range.

But 2 GB? And maximum 4 ? Just kills me inside. Way to ruin the device.

I don't have anything with more than 4GB. I use Linux often, but my main driver is a Windows tablet (Acer Iconia W700). I used many applications at a time, including stuff like Eclipse, and occasionally a Debian VM with 2GB assigned. I have no trouble with 4GB of RAM, although I was forced to switch away from Chrome. IE11 and Firefox work great though.

Depends. My development machine is a laptop with 4G of RAM (but a terabyte hard drive). Then again I rarely even fire up X11 when I'm programming, so my needs are pretty sparse.

Minimum for doing what?

My home workstation has 32GB and I can remote into that anytime I want from every device that I own, so I tend to lean on that.

Most people don't have 2 computers. Also, most people that do have two computers don't know how/don't want to know how to log into their desktop remotely.

Surfing the web or doing any form of multitasking.

But of course, the sad reality is that the only reason there is a 2 GB version is so that they can have a ridiculous premium for the 4 GB version yet still lure customers with the low starting price point.

I wonder if, when the market has matured enough, that there will be honest companies making products that tries to make good mainstream products rather than trying to get away with whatever they can. There is no reason what so ever that there should be any high-end smartphone available for purchase with less than 64 GB of storage. But now we have 16 GB and, for a $100 GB premium you get, gasp, 32 GB!

Phone storage has not gone up, in many cases down, in the last five years... And that's like 120 years in the tech world.

But hey, 2 GB of ram is certainly enough for the 5 min demo you get in the store...

$100 more for 2x RAM and storage, that doesn't seem like a "ridiculous premium". Unless you mean ridiculous in some other way than the actual dollar amount.

Considering that $100 easily buys you an 8GB so-dimm or an 80 GB intel m.2 ssd at retail prices, I think it is pretty steep for an increase of 2GB of ram and 32GB [ed: whops, 64GB, but still] of storage...

I'm running Chrome, Excel and Outlook right now on my 2 Gb, Win8.1 Pro x86 Atom tablet and it's great. What kind of problems are you imagining?

I love having full control on a tablet that lasts 10 hours and fits in most of my pants and jacket pockets.

Windows' use of WinSXS and RAM scales with the available capacity. That behavior with WinSXS particularly irks me as it implies acknowledgment that most of those files are unnecessary, yet there's nothing you can do to combat the cancerous tumor that grows in a 128-256gb partition.

I've found 2gb to be perfectly usable with Win7 and 8, Chrome's voracious appetite for memory would be a sticking point, except I've noticed that it does a better job of managing itself when RAM is limited. Chrome runs just fine on 1gb Chromebooks despite having just 768-512mb available most of the time. I will say that the Atom processor is a concern with Chrome even though I know the latest versions are roughly 2-3x more powerful than the Pineview dual core I had in my old Dell netbook. Chrome routinely maxed out the processor on every page load while Firefox and IE never needed more than 25% of the available CPU horsepower. Tripling the available power would eliminate the 5 second lockups I experienced but it could still be a slow, stuttery user experience.

128GB minimum storage? You'd have to be installing like a lot of software then? Even my main development machines (2 Visual Studio versions, 2 Matlab versions, 2 Labview versions, Office and utilities) only take 70-80GB. I think a more typical user like my mom who only uses a browser, office and some utilities would be just fine with 64GB for Windows and software. Also a bare Windows 10 install uses about 1 GB of ram after startup so there is some room to play with. Not that I'd ever buy something running full Windows and only has 2GB of ram, nor ever recommend it, just pointing out that depending on who is going to use it this machine might effectively do the trick.

> 128GB minimum storage? You'd have to be installing like a lot of software then?

Nope. Windows grows over time. So a Windows install that fit into 40 GB would grow to over 100 GB over a two or three years.

Heck we had to pull an entire rack of servers because the idiots that set them up partitioned the drive into a 100 GB C: and a massive D:, and Windows consumed all the space on C: just through Windows Update and then started falling over.

We had to rebuilds the machines with a 200 GB C: and they have been running fine ever since.

Err I'm running Windows 8 on a 32Gb HP Stream 7. Heaps of music, and 3 movies, and the recovery partition and still have 17GB free. What causes your install to grow so much?

Windows Update mostly.

And you can clean that stuff up with the disk cleanup app. You don't need to retain those old install files forever.

That will clear out Service Packs and some uninstaller files, it won't clean up WinSXS.

Have you gone through these commands? AFAIK, windows will do it automatically on small disk systems.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn251565.aspx

That certainly has not been my experience. My windows install (minus user folder and my own dev/game/application folders) has not grown appreciably since I initially set up the box.

Obviously user folders can grow quickly, but I wouldn't put the blame on Windows for that.

Not with Windows 10, that was a specific focus of it, and they've introduced new compression for OS files.

> I've seen a lot of Windows installs use up more than 64 GB

Windows installs themselves or with other software installed? The latter makes sense but I've never seen anywhere close in the former. 32GB would be a bad idea but 64GB I think is fine for the majority of people.

I find it a bit disturbing that giving an operating system 32GB would be considered too small. I've not played with win8, but my win7 install started out at 20GB, and damned if I can figure out what consumes all that space out of the box.

> I find it a bit disturbing that giving an operating system 32GB would be considered too small. I've not played with win8, but my win7 install started out at 20GB, and damned if I can figure out what consumes all that space out of the box.

I just don't think 32GB is big enough in general minus some space for the OS but I don't think I've had the same type of issue as you. The majority of my OS installs have been roughly 10GB which isn't far off from iOS and might include some restore stuff. But it's also been a while since I checked.

>> That 2 GB, 64 GB model just looks painful to use.

That really depends on your use case.

I've been using the Asus Vivotab Note 8 for several months (2gb/64gb), and I haven't even come close to feeling a need to put an SD card in it yet. I use it as a complement to my laptop. Mostly for consumption, communication and note-taking with OneNote. I don't think you'd want to do any heavy lifting on an Atom-based machine -- you'd be better off with a Pro in that case.

I'd love to see Microsoft release a Surface Mini with that Surface Pen. Having a Wacom pen on my Vivotab is great, except at the edges.

I have a 32 GB asus t100, with a 32 GB SD card, and have about 15 GB free overall despite a full complement of software. 64 GB is doable, especially now that they've changed things so you're not losing space to a recovery partition. Doable, but not great, just like the 2 GB RAM.

I may end up replacing my t100 with the 128 GB surface 3, especially given the small price difference.

If I recall correctly, the memory reported as being used by the OS includes disk caches. I'd also want at least 4GB, though, if I'm running a full windows install and want to multi-task.

I would rate this as a simple-use tablet, not to be used for complex tasks like development with 20 apps open. So if you need it for office apps, email, web surfing, and then a few simple-use apps, you're going to be okay. And the SD slot allows you to add 64gb more space. It's pretty much a student machine. Not Pro.

If you're a Pro, then buy a Pro or get a MacBook Pro and VM Windows.

But as just a tablet, this is _close_ to a great deal (I think they can do better and probably will drop the price by the holidays).

I'm running Word, Outlook, and several chrome tabs on Win 7 and I'm at 2.7gb. This is a tablet, not a desktop replacement.

The WinSXS bloat has been fixed in the latest versions, so the disk space required for an OS is more or less static now, barring any new functionality that requires new files.

For $500 I can get a real ultrabook.

Like Dell XPS 11

2560 x 1440 display

4GB RAM

128GB SSD

http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/665236/Dell-XPS-11-XPS...

With a shorter battery life, more than twice as heavy, and cumbersome to use in the "tablet" mode. The deep discount on the $1200 ultrabook also seems unusual, like they're having a fire sale just to get it out of stock.

Considering the reviews I found[1], I suspect "fire sale" is exactly what this is.

[1] http://www.engadget.com/products/dell/xps/11/

Not a very fair comparision since at this point that laptop is EOL'ed and its original price is 1199.

Oddly, I ventured out to find the current price of the XPS 11 and Dell doesn't even publish it. You have to call for pricing (oh how Dell has changed). The XPS 12 starts at 149 so I'm assuming the 11 is a bit lower?

http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-11-9p33/pd?p=xps-11-9p33&view=p...

XPS 11 is end of lifed and discontinued from what I understand.

EOL or not, many of its specs are better. Some are worse, I admit.

LOL at using Windows on a high DPI screen. Windows 8 improved a lot, but using any Desktop apps (Photoshop, IE, Chrome, etc.) is horrible, everything is super tiny. They haven't really given much though to scaling yet, even in Windows 10 scaling is still being figured out.

This is so patently false I'm not sure if you aren't just trolling. I use windows 8 on a 150 DPI screen (28" 4k) on my work desktop and a 220 DPI screen on my laptop (rMBP). Both have no problems, and most commercial apps already support it (chrome, IE no problem, I've heard phtoshop is ok as well).

The post you are responding to is a bit hyperbolic, but "HiDPI" scaling on Windows is still pretty hit or miss with lots of major apps. (Chrome isn't one of them, despite its mention in these posts -- since Chrome 37 it has done proper DPI scaling on Windows, and that release has been out for quite a while now).

Photoshop (since it was also mentioned) has very limited support for real scaling (beyond the OS's default of render as if on a low-dpi screen and then bitmap scale the UI up, which looks horrible, especially when combined with an app you are using to do precise bitmap editing) -- the only meaningful option it gives you is to scale everything in the UI up 200%, which is better than nothing (and what I have to do on my 3840x2160 Toshiba laptop to get a usable UI), but not a really flexible solution and even this is considered an "expirmental feature" in the very latest version.

Adobe Lightroom, on the other hand, has effortless scaling and just works great on screens at any DPI.

The point being there is plenty of support in the OS for apps that effectively scale, it is just that there are a lot of Win32 legacy apps out there which would require a near rewrite of the UI layer to scale well, it is by no means something the OS handles for you automatically (beyond the clumsy bitmap scaling default) if your code targets the older UI APIs, and there are (still) plenty of gotchas you do actually run into when running Windows apps on high DPI screens, though things are certainly improving in this regard.

My wife is into Photoshop (as a designer) and Illustrator, but uses them on Macs exclusively, so I can't judge there. It is crazy: Adobe got flack for not supporting macs well enough with GPU acceleration when macs were going out of style....and now, Macs are back with a vengeance and they are neglecting Windows instead :)

I have rMBP too and no I'm not trolling, you must not be using it at the full resolution. If you use Windows at the full resolution for the device, everything gets extremely small, so you have to increase the font/title bar size, even then you have to turn on zoom on IE and Chrome and the UI elements on all Desktop apps is incredibly tiny. Playing games is incredibly annoying because of how tiny everything is. Most Desktop apps do not support scaling in Windows the way one think it would. If you are fine with using one Metro app (or two with one pinned) at a time, then it's perfect.

Even in Windows 10, the new update has issues with scaling. It now caps out correctly (1920 x 1200), but it is blurry as hell.

That's just wrong... what you're saying makes me think you're not having the scaling factor (equivalent of OS X scaling) enabled in display settings.

MS have really low bar for high end laptop. 16G at least of ram or go away ...

Edit: It was about 3 pro ... ignore.

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