The ENTIRE experience was dreadful for me.
The day I went into the Microsoft store to purchase it (Black Friday), their credit card system was down, so I had to wait around for nearly 2 hours until they finally figured things out. That wouldn't typically upset me, but my brother-in-law went through something similar just 2 weeks prior. Aside from that, the reps in the store were constantly trying to up-sell me on different items and get me to purchase other things throughout the store. This is something that is extremely irritating to me and something that I appreciated the reps at the Apple Store not doing.
As far as the actual product goes - I found the trackpad to be lacking. It just FELT a bit buggy and non-responsive at times. I have yet to find a trackpad as solid as the ones that Apple ship. This became more apparent of time after using the product. Aside from the trackpad I don't have too many complaints, except for things that are of personal preference (I can't say I like the design / functionality of the snake hinge). I also realized, as mainly a pro user, that I don't have much use / need for the touch screen or tablet portion of the device.
Needless to say, I ended up returning the device and buying the new touch-bar 15" MBP a few days ago. Aside from how annoying it is to locate / use the touch-based Esc key, it's a really solid device.
Well, my wife has a brand-new Lenovo ThinkPad running Windows 10, which is probably one of the better-quality non-Apple laptops. My five-year-old son recently tried my old MacBook for the first time after using nothing but Mommy's before to watch Minecraft videos, and the first thing he said to me was, "Wow, Daddy! The trackpad on your old laptop is so much better than the one on Mommy's laptop."
This was not prompted by any audible parental Apple fanboyism. Somewhere, Steve Jobs is smiling...
It's not their field of specialization, and they don't want to manufacture the finished components themselves. Apple obviously has taken the time and care to get it right. A lot of others...it seems like they went with the reference design as being good enough.
PC makers are basically copying Apple's implementation of trackpads without consideration to the execution. They spend a lot of time copying the superficial features of the Apple track pads, but no time on the actual functionality of the trackpads.
Acceleration is pretty much a necessity for trackpads to be usable with high-res/multi monitor setups for me, but I cannot stand to use mice with acceleration enabled (probably a relic from my hardcore PC FPS gaming days... I get horribly distracted when my mouse movements don't map 1:1 to movements of my cursor). Not being able to keep separate settings for these different classes of input devices means I simply can't get any decent amount of work done on my laptop without connecting a mouse or going into my settings and enabling acceleration (and of course, disabling it afterwards when I need to use a mouse again, which is a huge PITA).
Having touch alleviates the problem somewhat, but there are still plenty of instances where having the precision of a touchpad is necessary.
Mostly they seem not to bother fitting the newer type.
But I have found with some units, after you move the device the trackpad does have issues. In a few cases (perhaps once every 2 weeks) I have to disconnect and reconnect the base to fix them.
> The day I went into the Microsoft store to purchase it (Black Friday), their credit card system was down, so I had to wait around for nearly 2 hours until they finally figured things out.
Every store's shopping experience on black friday ranges from barely tolerable to unbearable. You know where I had to drop by on black friday to do a chore for my hospital-bound sister? The Apple Store. It was an unpleasant experience.
> I also realized, as mainly a pro user, that I don't have much use / need for the touch screen or tablet portion of the device.
What does this mean? Do pro users not look at or create webpages, mobile apps? Touch works everywhere but IDEs.
I find myself accidentally touching my corporate macbook's screen all the time to click a distant link because it's so much faster than the trackpad travel, and I'm better at home-rowing my hands from a high position rather than a wrist swivel.
Needless to say, I am sick of being "forced" to use OSX. It's slower for my purposes, it's less developer friendly, and the battery life on most of these devices is just atrocious the instant you start doing I/O intensive things like compilation.
My Surface book w/ battery saver mode on still goes 6+ hours doing clojure and kotlin compilations periodically with battery saver on, with only maybe a 10-15% speed loss (which amounts to less than 10 seconds per compile in my worst case). That's substantially better than any mac product I have.
This is true and I would be completely sympathetic to this if the same thing hadn't happened to my brother-in-law (also purchasing a Surface Book) a couple of weeks prior. Note: this isn't a dig on Microsoft or even the product - I was more trying to make the point that I went into the store super excited about a product, and the experience alone completely turned me off to it in the long run. Granted, I probably didn't give the product enough of a chance in the end.
I'm glad to hear you're enjoying yours.
But I absolutely hate going into Apple or iStudio stores.
They try to upsell and add all sorts of crap. When I bought my 12" Macbook I ended up leaving the store and buying it online.
I just went in to the store today to buy a case for my new iPhone 7 and I wanted a flip case just so i didn't need a screen protector and the guy kept insisting on getting a screen protector. Despite me saying no a dozen times. I ended up taking my stuff and handing it to another staff member at the counter.
>The ENTIRE experience was dreadful for me.
Entire list of complaints: found the trackpad to be lacking. It just FELT a bit buggy.
I picked up a Surface 4 Pro on Black Friday as well, and my experience was fine. Then again, I live in the middle of nowhere.
I am surprised that for all of the online ordering we do in today's society, so many people use bricks-and-mortar stores for their high-tech purchases. I had my Surface Book shipped to my doorstep like most anything else I purchase in my life. I find it unpleasant to go into Apple stores or Microsoft stores. I've had negative experiences with both and prefer to just get things shipped to my home now.
In my experience, the Surface Book trackpad is as good as any Mac trackpad. I'd say both trackpads are about 80%, if a good mouse is 100%.
Overall though I'm a huge fan of my Surface Book, I wouldn't say it's 'better' than my previous MBP but it's definitely better at different things. For example the MBP was a bit nicer to type on and the trackpad felt nicer, but it's screen wasn't as good. I've also found the pen to be a HUGE benefit for me, anything from meetings to note taking has gotten a lot easier.
Plus I'm pretty happy with Windows 10 overall, nice and easy to use and I have to say I like the aesthetics of it a little more than the current OSX.
I use Windows professionally (for .NET development) and I think Windows 10 is still light-years behind, with an unstable, jarring OS experience full of bugs and niggles and unloved and underdeveloped touch interface. I would love the opportunity to move to macOS and iOS professionally. Fonts and UI rendering look awful on Windows compared to macOS, there is just no comparison.
That is Crash Reporter crashing. The following is the last screenshot I was able to take before the system stopped being able to write files: http://i.imgur.com/IK7j98P.png
Sierra has been an absolute nightmare in every respect that I have been forced to reboot on a weekly basis.
Apple's precipitous and continuing software quality decline is not an exaggeration or an illusion. It is flat reality. Professionals with any awareness should be evaluating their alternatives very seriously.
I've had the following problems:
1) They wrote a driver that blew out my speaker and I had to wait 5 weeks for a replacement. http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/11/30/apple-updates-boot... 2) There is graphical tearing and glitching everywhere. http://www.macrumors.com/2016/12/02/new-macbook-pro-graphics... 3) The OS restarts itself randomly. 4) You cannot plug in an external monitor and use a bluetooth mouse simultaneously.
I love macOS. I make software for macOS. The decline is real and people should start considering alternatives.
I've heard a number of people say this, and I'm always puzzled because it is exactly the opposite for me. Running on the same hardware (late 2013 MBPR 15"), Windows 10 font rendering is much more pleasing to my eyes. When I boot into OSX, the text looks terrible to me. (I'm still running El Capitan - has text rendering changed in Sierra?)
One thing I did in Windows that I recommend to everyone: I went through the ClearType tuner and adjusted the settings to my taste. I picked darker and heavier text compared to the defaults. That really punched up the rendering; everything is so crisp and clear, much nicer to my eyes than the blurry text in OSX.
I understand that OSX text rendering may be more typographically accurate, and I have some sympathy for that view. I appreciate good typography, especially after working at Adobe many years ago. (I built the first scalable font system for Windows, Adobe Type Manager.) But OSX text just doesn't look good to me.
And of course I don't disagree with anyone who prefers OSX/macOS text rendering, since this is very much a matter of personal taste.
Windows has had sub-pixel text alignment and LCD-oriented anti-aliasing ("ClearType") for, what, a decade? Text on my 267-DPI Surface Book looks absolutely amazing, and obviously text on a 226-DPI Macbook will look great as well.
For those who are not confused by hardware differences, I suspect the remaining matters are taste and familiarity. Having used Windows for a long time, my preference is for Windows' rendering and I find the rendering on macOS to be odd and uncomfortable. I'm struggling to find the right adjective—perhaps too comical or whimsical? Overall font selections and rendering don't seem as crisp and professional as on Windows.
Windows also supports ligatures and advanced kerning, so text on a web browser with good Windows API support (e.g., Edge or Firefox) looks fantastic. (Chrome was a notable laggard here, refusing to use modern Windows text rendering APIs for a very long time.)
There's an app called MacType which makes the rendering more like Mac on low DPI screens, but I don't think it gets updated very often.
Maybe it's the fact that it has a huge resolution on a 12" screen. Seems very likely that the higher pixel density makes for a crisp and beautiful text.
Again, I am not a pro in this area. I am a programmer. So just speaking intuitively, macOS still wins in my eyes.
However, probably the best test would be to put Windows 10 and macOS side by side on identical 27" full HD monitors?
However, for many "professional workflow" means using the MS Office suite and a browser. For that use, Windows 10 is not only adequate but better than MacOS.
> For that use, Windows 10 is not only adequate but better than MacOS.
"Denny's is as good as any Michelin Star restaurant."
For me it is more important to have a file manager that doesn't lock itself creating .DS_Store files in the middle of an I/O operation (ex. copying a folder from an external drive).
To be fair, Windows has the same issue with Thumbs.db files, but I can't remember the last time it happened to me, in contrast, with macOS it is annoyingly easy to trigger error -36, just connect a clean drive and copy a big folder...
I guess this may be a case of 'grass being greener' as suggested by someone else in this thread. I just don't seem to remember having any of these issues on my 2010 Macbook Pro running El Capitan. Then again, this is purely anecdotal.
Font rendering on Windows is barely better than Linux.
It replaces a Mid-2010 MBP 17". It's light, fast and has a gorgeous screen.
After a week, I even prefer the new thin keyboard versus the old. My external keyboard feels like trudging through mud. No trouble hitting the ESC-key on the touch bar. The context awareness of it is actually pretty great.
For USB-connectivity I simply bought a few convertors on AliExpress for about 70 cents each. How often do I plug those in? Almost never. Everything is wireless these days.
Except for those two 5K screens coming soon... but I wish Apple would release them for € 200 more with a nice alu bezel ;) or 5K iMacs with target display mode, that'd be fine too.
The touch bar works really well. I didn't anticipate this, but it's really slippery. Feels almost like it's coated in teflon. Your finger just glides on it, moreso than the trackpad. Wouldn't have occurred to me, but the slightly rougher surface gives your finger a better feel for trackpad movement. On the touchbar, it's very wide and 1-dimensional, and the low friction is perfect.
The screen is impressive. DCI-P3 does great reds, and better greens than sRGB (but not quite as saturated green as Adobe RGB's). It's also very bright. I rarely feel like I have to set it for maximum brightness, even when I'm plugged in.
Keyboard is great. It took me maybe a few hours to get used to it, and I like it better than the previous MBP keyboards.
Being able to plug in the power cord on either side isn't the biggest deal, but it's nice to have. When your outlet is on the right side, you just plug it straight in. No more looping the cord around and into the far side.
My previous laptop is a 13" MBA (2011), and the new MBP is both smaller and faster.
Honestly, I don't use external devices that much, and when I do, I'm at my desk 99% of the time. USB-C is no big deal to me. Right now I'm still carrying USB-A cables because that's what my power bank is, so carry a one USB-A to USB-C cable that I can use to connect my iOS things to the laptop, or in case I need to connect to someone else's external drive or something. My personal flash drive has both types of connector.
Probably won't be getting any of the fancy thunderbolt screens, but I may invest in a thunderbolt docking station to get power, ethernet, and my existing displayport screen all running on one cable. Awaiting reviews on any of those, and need to confirm that they handle DisplayPort multi-stream transport for 4K@60Hz.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2388 no more.
However, I wouldn't plug a $.70 adapter into a $3000 computer. Maybe you should splurge and spend $10 on the Apple adapter.
If an adapter, connector, cable, etc. is both "passive" (i.e. isn't doing anything clever in there with ICs that consume some of the power sent along the line) and "digital" (i.e. has transmission semantics which moot RF interference as long as the cable is within a proscribed length and between powered switches) then it doesn't matter whether you pay $0.70 or $70 for it. For example, an HDMI cable is an HDMI cable is an HDMI cable.
If an adapter/cable/etc. is "digital" but "active"—like, for example, a USB-C to Thunderbolt adapter—then it might do the wrong thing, which in extreme cases (e.g. the https://www.usbkill.com) can damage your devices. But, most data-transmission PHY layers (Ethernet, USB, FireWire, Thunderbolt, etc.) are built to protect host devices against most "dumb mistakes" that might be made by a peer device or a piece of infrastructure (and things like lightning strikes, shorted sockets, and chewed-through cables besides.) You really have to intentionally try to make a USB Killer to make a USB Killer.
Now, if (at least one end of) an adapter is analogue, then you're basically screwed and should be very scared of cheap kit. Basically, don't trust $0.70 DACs. There's a reason there's no such thing as a $0.70 USB audio or USB wi-fi receiver: these are the sort of things where the correctness of the DAC is all that stands between your computer and a huge current.
Also, I like that it's just a conversion plug versus a cable: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/LAIXI-USB-Type-C-Adapter-Mal...
What does bug me though after spending over $2.5k (sales tax) for a brand new 'state of the art machine' I can't even play the new Civilization 6 on 1024x768 resolution and lowest possible settings without the computer fan on full blast to stop it from basically melting. It's utterly pathetic.
The build quality was very lacking compared to the new MBP.
The screen wobbled like crazy even when just typing on it.
The model I was using had a really horrible display with active ghosting (not sure if that's the correct term -- it appeared that the refresh rate was just very low, so moving the cursor around or dragging a window would leave a sort of "ghost trail" behind). It's possible this was just a defective display.
The trackpad was nowhere near as good as I was led to believe from online comments. It wasn't horrible, but multitouch gesture recognition felt years behind Apple's. Leaving a finger resting on the trackpad would break all kinds of gestures, but Apple's trackpads handle that just fine. I also didn't realize how nice the Force Touch trackpads are until I went back to a hinge-based trackpad where you can't even click everywhere.
Windows 10 is a big advance over previous versions, and I use it extensively on my desktop at home. However, the experience with a touchpad didn't feel anywhere nearly as polished as on my MacBook. Using trackpad gestures to slide between virtual desktops for instance had a very janky and obviously buggy animation.
Windows now has the Ubuntu subsystem, but I immediately ran into serious dealbreaker issues. I couldn't get Haskell or Elm to run on it because a core system call hadn't been implemented yet. The team is aware of it and I'm sure it's slated to be fixed soon, but I still couldn't do my work on the laptop without firing up a VM or dual booting.
I never used the touch screen and never felt the need to detach the screen and use it as a tablet. The aspect ratio of the screen also bothered me.
I'm now using the much hated 2016 MBP with Touch Bar and am extremely happy with the purchase.
It sounds to me like you had a somewhat defective model. That said, the surface book is not the best physical laptop computer and will always be less stable than a standard hinge laptop.
> Windows now has the Ubuntu subsystem, but I immediately ran into serious dealbreaker issues. I couldn't get Haskell or Elm to run on it because a core system call hadn't been implemented yet. The team is aware of it and I'm sure it's slated to be fixed soon, but I still couldn't do my work on the laptop without firing up a VM or dual booting.
Why not just use Powershell and the windows builds? They work fine. Powershell isn't going to kill you.
But it's also weird, because I got GHC to compile just fine.
I'd personally love to try out a laptop that converts. But I guess the use-case in question in this thread is for professional usage where I haven't found utility.
It's going to be great in a year or so, but right now there are some pretty sharp edges.
Again, Microsoft refuses to provide numbers but vaguely claims “our trade-in program for MacBooks was our best ever.”
If you go from 5 trade ins to 7, you can site your best year ever. It doesn't mean you've made a dent. I can see that people are disappointed in the new MacBook, but there are very few I know that would just say "screw it, I'm switching platforms." Admittedly, my friends are mostly designers and developers, so it's a biased sample, but I'm a little skeptical about the numbers.
I don't know if Microsoft has reached parity with Apple with professional development machines, but it does look like they've set themselves up to be a contender for next generations.
With increased internal funding, they may actually achieve that goal.
I assume they are still way off, and may not catch up in the near future. But I also think for Microsoft that's not a problem: when professional developers buy a nice Dell or a Lenovo model instead of a Mac, and run it on Windows, that's still a win for Microsoft. Surface is also meant to show that PC's do not have to suck.
It's not much different from Tim Cook saying Apple Watch sales are breaking records this quarter without actually providing actual numbers.
The Surface type cover is definitely nicer than the keyboard cover for the iPad Pro though. MS did a nice job with that.
Built-in backup system, both to "cloud" if desired or external hard disk if preferred. Application signing that serves to protect users rather than nag them into unquestioningly running anything and everything as administrator.
Fantastic, fully native support for the wealth of open-source software available for UNIX/BSD.
Apple hasn't dropped the ball. You'll realize this once you end up in the Windows world frustrated and trying to do the same things you take for granted now.
Surface is much more flexible and provides a greater degree of customization. It is the perfect hybrid between and tablet and a laptop device. I'm just as comfortable using it as a consumption device on the couch as I am using it as a production device on a desk.
It really feels like Apple has become more and more hostile to the "production" crowd as a means of catering to the consumption crowd. I love their hardware but the company and it's attitude towards customers can take a hike.
FWIW, the 15" 2011 MBPs with the i7 quad cores, GPU issues aside, are still pretty fast when compared to the latest Macs using the ultrabook CPUs.
Which one? Cause anything they discontinued support for isn't really "relatively new".
"It really feels like Apple has become more and more hostile to the "production" crowd"
I absolutely do not buy this argument at all. Usually it's made by people who's definition of "production crowd" is so narrow as to only include what they do.
Windows 10 is much better than previous versions, and I like the direction MS seems to be moving. That said, I feel like in spite of how nice a machine the Surface Book is, QA is still sorely lacking on Windows 10.
"Sleep of Death" (google it) and working in *nix 99.99% of the time is what killed it for me. Trying to make the workflow work, it's just too painful, compared to working from my MBP.
New MBP touch on order. Should get here next week.
Have you tried their Linux on Windows thing? I find that works really well, better than using nix on mac in fact: you have real apt-get and it all just works.
Ruby gems are still problematic, for example.
They're working on it, but it's not there yet.
Oh yeah... and to the part of your comment where you say it works even better than on a Mac? Not even close. The Mac works so much better than WSL, it's not even funny. Like I said... they're working on it but it's not there yet. :)
Users switching from macOS to Surface this year: 150
"Best year ever!"
--
When companies say things like this and refuse to give actual sell through numbers, the above is what I think. I'm sure I'm not alone.
1. The "Start" menu (tiles) have ads in them by default. I do not like this. 2. Connected Standby is still in development. To view advanced power management settings, set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\CSEnabled to 0. If you are having connectivity issues on a Surface device, make this reg change, then reboot and uncheck "Allow the operating system to turn off" under the "Power Management" tab in the Marvell wifi adapter.
For my part I have a 17" laptop that is almost exclusively for home office use, a 11" chromebook for meetings or light work away from home, and an 8" tablet for entertainment and the odd emergency ssh session (I can fix servers over ssh from my phone too, but it's not exactly a fun experience).
The way I see it, there's no single form-factor that'll keep me happy, so I'd rather go for multiple.
I don't think people will ever agree on a single screen size or what other specs actually matters (e.g. I do have an SSD in my laptop, but quickly realises it doesn't really matter what type of storage I have, because I boot, I start Chrome and a bunch of terminals + ssh sessions, and then I rarely touch disk again; meanwhile other people load and store massive files regularly)
I don't think we'll ever see a single form factor dominate as such, but a single device that can shift between form factors simplifies things a lot, I think that's the future.
15" is perfect for all-around use. Plug in an external monitor or two and you won't notice the difference between 17", and it's still plenty portable in any bag that holds more than a tablet.
I wouldn't be able to use the 11" chromebook, especially coming from a 17" screen.
I'm rather puzzled that even with this complete lack of data, which The Verge seems also skeptical about, they still decided to write an article about it.
I miss the old days of being able to play with the hardware, buy new video or sound cards, overclock the CPU and so on.
Years ago when I was using Windows 7 it seemed the best OS Microsoft has put out so far (and I think since).
But after years of working on a mac, I have to say that Windows feels like a huge hack in comparison. There are countless UIs you have to access in order to configure the OS, all kinds of voodoo utilities, registry editor hacks and so on.
Should I also mention the daily blue screen of death ? Probably my fault somehow, but still..
Yes yes, I remember.. this used to be the Windows experience - I used to liked that.. It was what made me an 'experienced' user.
But I don't anymore. I'm not sure what the Windows experience is today, but I'm not eager to spend a lot of money to find that out...
Of course I'm curious about the Surface hardware - but not as much as to accept an inferior OS experience.
After all, these little things, the details, the polish, the smoothness ... they trickle down into the creative work that I do, they do influence me subconsciously.. all the time.
Curious though: Who was the OEM for your PC and how much did you spend on it? How much was your Mac?
But this past couple of years they've just improved their offerings, particularly those for devs, incessantly. I was kind of on the fence about VSC vs Atom a year and a half ago. Now it's not only far faster but also a significant boost in productivity. Ubuntu tools are available from inside Windows. Office, the very program I most used to love to hate, is killing it.
I still have a macbook, but it's been gathering dust. The iMac 27" was my favorite computer I've owned but the Surface Studio has leapfrogged beyond it. Especially as a creative dev, it's hard to justify staying with Apple at this point.
What made me switch was the realisation that using my iPad for productivity reasons would've been useful - even just for typing a document with a keyboard - but actually trying to use it was like a sick joke perpetuated by Apple.
So I got an SP3 to fill that gap, and within a week my iPad, MBP and desktop were all useless to me.
When I looked into the actual spec difference, the biggest upgrade for me would have been going from 8GB to 16GB of RAM, since the integrated GPU (Iris Pro) is the same, and the CPU performance upgrade is minimal. The idea of spending $1100ish on a used MBP and then having to sell my current laptop (probably spending $500-600 total) just to upgrade my RAM was so offputting, so I held off.
I ended up building a mini-ITX hackintosh instead. It turned out great -- the new UEFI method is so much better than the old way, since you can update with no risk of breaking your drivers, and upgrade without a full reinstall. I also just found out we're all getting loaded 2016 15" MBPs at work, so I'm glad I didn't go through with either of my first two considerations.
I've seen/used the Surface and honestly it's a lot like the iPad Pro in that it feels like the sort of computer I'd happily hand to someone who doesn't actually need a PC, but I'd hate to have it be my development experience. The Surface is a bit more full-featured due to it having less of a sandboxed app model, but it's underpowered for the stuff I do with a computer. On the other hand the new MBP is pretty good. It has some annoyances (USB-C annoys me once every couple weeks so far, and the keyboard takes getting used to), but it's fast, light, and has a beautiful display. And I can run everything on it that I need to.
I'd switch back to Mac given the choice, but the embarrassingly bad hardware specs make it a complete no-go for game development.
Edit: I also use Cmder to give me a very capable console window.
https://gist.github.com/justonia/caf8c8a794d5252e8dbc149d457...
I also added a .reg file that lets me right click on an .ahk file and get a menu item to run as administrator.
On one hand there's Windows' horrid display scaling issues. Hooking the Surface Book into an external HD monitor means dealing with blurry fonts and inconsistant scaling on some apps. Not entirely Microsoft's fault but its still a concern.
On the other, I really like marking up documents and drawing sketches on the screen. The machine is fairly solid and a joy to type on and use on a day-to-day basis.
Like others have said, the trackpad has taken some getting used to. It feels less "solid" than my 2011 MBP's, and it's definitely more limited than the MBP's. It doesn't handle palm rejection as well as I'd like, and the swipe to go back gesture is inconsistent across applications.
There are other issues too. Flux fucks with things; when I use it things get sluggish as the screen begins to warm. I've recently gone ahead and uninstalled it. Sometimes when I press the Windows key to bring up the Start search the search bar doesn't register the keyboard. Detaching and reattaching sometimes confuses the machine and it doesn't know whether to drop into tablet mode or return to desktop mode.
Despite that, if someone reads this in the future, I will say I overall enjoy the machine. I really like what Microsoft is trying to do in terms of bridging the gap between devices like tablets and traditional PCs. My girlfriend and I both like doodling on it, it plays older games good enough with its dGPU, and it's battery life is superb. So I'd recommend it as a great prosumer device.
I've run into the search issue as well, and resolved it by tweaking some options in "Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows". I believe it was the "Animations in the taskbar" option, but I'm not 100%.
Flux also destroys your framerate when it transitions. I tend to just launch it when I need it and set it to always be tinted.
The touch and pen support is fantastic, though, and has become second nature to me for web browsing and note taking.
I've also more or less been able to recreate a Linux-like development workflow with Windawesome[0], cmder[1], chocolatey[2], and qutebrowser[3]. Msys in cmder gives me the unix-like terminal I need while still being able to run Windows-native utilities, and things I install from chocolatey like git, ag, and vim are added to the cmder PATH and just work. Bash for Windows has been quite nice as well.
[0] https://windawesome.codeplex.com/ [1] http://cmder.net/ [2] https://chocolatey.org/ [3] https://qutebrowser.org
>> More people are switching from Macs to Surface than ever before. Our trade-in program for MacBooks was our best ever
You could trade-up with up to $650 credit for your working MacBook Pro or Air. I'm assuming they were giving similar values as you would with Gazelle or another service.
I've been compiling the kernel since I got it, later figured out how to compile only the drivers I needed (specially the keyboard/touchpad) which was reduced over time as more and more drivers were built in.
There was finally a guy that set up an Ubuntu PPA [1] repository from where you can install the whole package, and it was fine until last October when I decided to upgrade to Ubuntu 16.10.
[1] https://launchpad.net/~tigerite/+archive/ubuntu/kernel
For that version there is no PPA, and the kernel patches I had been using for the type cover did not work any more (they compile, just do not work). Then I re-installed 16.04 from scratch, but now the tigerite kernel does not boot because of some BTRFS crash (divide by zero) and the standard one only supports the Type Cover 3 keyboard: I have both the v3 and v4, and the later is much better and was working with both my patches and the tigerite kernel.
There are ways to get the Type Cover v3 touchpad working by configuring xorg, but the patches are better because they work with the multitouch driver.
The result is that right now I'm typing on a Lenovo Thinkpad Compact USB keyboard. :-\
In general I like this computer a lot, and nowadays almost everything works out of the box (including volume keys and both cameras) except the most crucial part, the type cover. The stylus and touchscreen worked fine from the first day. Suspend never worked, although it kind of did for a few months and now it's broken again. Hybernate should work but I did not do it because I would need to work around the encrypted swap.
I had pledged for the Eve V tablet computer [2], a crowd-funded version which has a few interesting improvements, but I think I'll back down before the deadline because they said they can not support Linux, and I will not have time in the coming months to experiment with it.
[2] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/eve-v-the-first-ever-crow...
This is quite a disorganized answer but I hope it'll be of use to you. I like the Surface Pro, but I'm tired of this back-and-forth getting the basics to work with Linux. At this point the v3 is not a cutting-edge computer any more, and it should be effortless to use it with Linux.
Just kidding. I want a Surface Studio so bad its crazy. Just can't bring myself to spend the scratch, though.
Now they are 200.000.
100% increase -- record rates. But totally inconsequential.
(Numbers out of my ass, but without specifics, they are as good as the claim).
Maybe this article would be improved with a little journalism to maybe make an educated guess as to what these numbers might be? Something besides just retyping Microsoft's marketing press release?
Example: https://www.winehq.org/wwn/404#Direct3D%2011%20development
> An open issue with anything newer than Direct3D9 is that wined3d still depends on legacy OpenGL 2 features and many drivers do not expose some features necessary for d3d10/11 in legacy contexts. With the MaxVersionGL key set wined3d will request a core context, but certain blitting corner cases are still broken. Mesa and the Nvidia binary driver mostly work. On MacOS you are most likely out of luck.
I am debating between 13 inch MBP or SP4. I can get SP4 with same specs as MBP for significantly cheaper. But of course, it may not be as productive as MBP.
That said, I had to buy a new laptop last month and after almost getting a Surface Pro + keyboard, I ended up with a MacBook. I decided that I didn't want to change my workflow (writing, programming in Haskell, Java, various Lisps).
However, I will carefully evaluate Microsoft laptops (purchased from Microsoft: signature editions don't have crap-ware on them) in a few years when I need another laptop.
https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/21/phil-schiller-again-breaks-do...
I've test driven a few, but still haven't committed to something. For now, my macbooks are still doing pretty well (though the MBA is feeling low on RAM these days). I know I'll find it tough to give up their trackpads, assuming another vendor has not successfully copied their feel within the next year or two.
For the record, just played with the TouchBar in the Apple Store, and think it's super cool. Also love the humongous track pad, and believe USB-C support will explode in the near future.
So I'm curious to see sales numbers for Surface vs. the new MacBook Pros. Might be more "switchers" to Surface, but also a big increase in MacBook Pro sales overall.
IMO that was a foolhardy decision; Macs are (were?) very popular amongst designers and programmers, why limit the accessibility of the keyboard? Do you realize how many strokes on the Esc key a VIM-using dev does per day?
It's as if Apple doesn't care about the professional audience anymore.
They should've offered a "touch bar" and "normal bar" variants for their laptops IMO.
How bad does journalism have to get before it's indistinguishable from fake news? Surely MS knows how many people are switching from Macs to surface compared to a previous period? Surely a journalist can push for figures?
my proposal is: the basic structure of code is represented visually via an AST, i.e the folders,files,classes,method and public variables and public variables and constants. and they could tie in tests and have test show up within that space.
But wasn't it the first time they ever offered a trade-in for Macbooks? I just googled it and was not able to find old offers.
Currently, the choice at that price point is either full USB-C or no USB-C.
I use every app in full size window, sometimes two apps side-by-side. On windows it was really easy, on Mac it's painful. So I bought an app for that, Cinch.
I want a tiny calendar in the corner with the weeknumber in it, I had to download Itsycal (which is at least free).
The bar can be a real mess so I bought Bartender, worked fine, I could even hide the spotlight icon. Then I upgraded to El Capitan, and guess what, you can't hide the spotlight anymore, so I had to buy Bartender 2 because they claimed you can hide icons without disabling SIP (https://www.macbartender.com/system-item-setup/). But it turned out it's not working for spotlight... Thanks Bartender!
Ah, the mess when you plugin an external display, how fckd up is that! My carefully fullsized windows are all resized and moved around to some random position. No worries, there is an app for that! It's called Stay, it can save the position of the windows, but you have to do it for every possible screen combination. If you have one external display, you have to save the window positions three times: internal display only, external only, both. If you happen to using the same MacBook with two external displays (at work and at home), now you have to do this a total 6 times. And it stores the window position on per app basis, so usually I open everything and save them all. On Windows this whole problem just doesn't exists.
I can't turn off the internal display, there is no way to just do a windows+p and chose external display only like on windows. I have to close the lid (so now I can't use the keyboard) and wake it up because now it's sleeping. Great.
I always turn off every animation, doing this on windows is easy, but it's really painful on OSX, and every time you upgrade you have to do it again, and sometimes the same terminal commands just doesn't work, thanks Apple. And you can't turn off everything, basically this is why I don't use the fullscreen functionality and multiple desktops.
Every time I use my desktop pc, I feel like when I was a kid and we upgraded our old 300 mhz computer to a 1 ghz one with a 3d card.
After mountain lion I regret every single upgrade. So for me El Capitan is the last, my next computer will be an Alienware 13 with 32 GB ram and GTX 1060 and an OLED screen and it will be still cheaper than a MacBook Pro.
Almost certainly untrue. Most iphone users are still Windows PC users. Yes the developer community is important to the iOS app lead, but most of that is due to the self selecting group of people who purchase iphones - people willing to pay for things.
If the implication is that developers will stop writing apps for iPhones, that's highly unlikely because money is still in vogue.
The cloud approach is making it less necessary to keep the PC within the Apple ecosystem. iOS devices already don't have expandable storage, and most data ends up being on iCloud or other internet services.
- The Surface tablet Hardware has a nice build quality, but the Touch Pen doesn't register touches when it touches the screen you need to press down a little (unlike Apple's pencil). The Type Cover keyboard is wobbly when it's folded up so when I'm at a desk/flat surface I leave it completely flat as it's more sturdy. The touchpad is really small but I find myself using the touchscreen more so I don't notice it much. Otherwise the Type cover is usable, not as productive as a laptop keyboard, but more productive than a virtual keyboard.
- It's pretty fast, especially for its small profile
- The display is gorgeous, screen's a little small but it makes the device ultra portable.
- User Account management is atrocious, I bought the Surface Pro as secondary ultra portable for my Wife and so creating a new User Account is one of the first things I tried to do but couldn't at all, it kept failing with the useless generic "Something went wrong" dialog. You're meant to sign in with your Hotmail and I couldn't add another Local or Internet account for my wife for over 36 hours! it kept failing with "Something went wrong". I really hate needing to use an Internet account or requiring an Internet connection to create User Accounts, I'd prefer to completely disable any notion of Internet/hotmail accounts for Windows 10, it "just works" in Chrome OS but is highly infuriating and unstable in Windows 10. It still didn't let me add any Users after a complete reset, I had to wait 36 hours for that luxury.
- They have this "Hello" face recognition where it's able to log you in without entering a password which was a nice surprise and works pretty well.
- You now get annoying ads on your Lock Screen
- You also get nagged trying to keep you using Edge when trying to switch default browser to Chrome
- The AppStore is also unreliable, I couldn't install 2/4 Apps on the App Store Home Page (Halo and Planner 5D). Just failed with "Error, see details" with details being an empty dialog saying "Something went wrong". The Netflix App stopped loading after a 2nd restart (just an empty black screen) even after completely killing/restarting the App multiple times, only a full OS restart could get it working again. This experience falls way short of any of Apple's App Stores which "just work".
- Win 10 Apps aren't that great, the Facebook App is fairly polished but lacks feature parity with Website, Twitter's App is worse than its website, Netflix is the only Win 10 App I'm using over their website
- Win 10 isn't a great OS for touch, the icons are too small, took me a few goes trying to open a folder in VS which VS thought I wanted to move the folder, so you'll try using the touchscreen first than if it fails fallback to using the small touchpad.
- Within 3 hours of a new install I got by first BSOD, I installed VS 2017 beta with Docker + Hyper V. Docker for Windows refused to install the first time and crashes on Startup, I also couldn't run an empty .NET Core + Docker template, hand a number of build errors saying it couldn't find "System" namespace. The empty .NET Core Web App worked. In the end I uninstalled VS2017 beta, I'll try again in the next release.
These software issues happened after installing all Window updates. It was surprisingly buggy, I'd expect a hardware/software controlled device to be rock solid but the Surface was the most unreliable computing device I've owned.
In summary the Surface Pro4 tablet hardware is nice, quite thin for being able to run full Windows but also gets noticeably hot after a while (unlike iPad), has great display, Touch Pen isn't as solid as an Apple Pencil also its unproductive switching between Finger Touch and Touch Pen but the finger registration is good so I'm only using the Touch Pen for drawing apps.
Overall it's not as productive as a Macbook or as useful as a tablet than an iPad, so definitely not a Macbook or iPad killer, but has a useful niche as a secondary portable Windows 10 device. It's software unreliability issues and stupid User account management means I could never recommend it as on option to my parents who love and spend most of their time on their iPads and use iMac + Chrome OS for more heavy duty tasks - which are automatically backed up and have both been virus free for years which we're both happy about.
My SP3 pretty much lives in the docking station at home these days. My Google Pixel XL is pretty much a tablet, and my work laptop (XPS 15) covers me for my computing power needs when traveling. I don't even bring the Surface anymore.
I'm thinking my next desktop for home (to replace the Surface) will be some sort of Linux machine. The Surface was my first personal Windows computer. I'm realizing now that Ubuntu fills all my current needs, especially now that I can run some form of Visual Studio on it.
Do people really want to switch from a rock-solid, sandboxed Unix to an inferior OS like Windows? Did people already forget the crazy days of regedit, zero app sandboxing, inconsistent installers, anti-viruses etc?
I wish more people jumped ship to Linux instead of the Apple/Windows duopoly, but if wishes were horses...
Windows has improved considerably over the past decade, while Apple has shifted away from the professional market. It is realistic to believe that at least some people would switch platforms.
Mac fanboys tell me "You idiot, you don't need any of that stuff." Actually I do. They tell me "No you are wrong." No, that's not correct. They don't actually know more about my requirements than I do. The real question is what bedevils the fanatics to insist they know more than the real experts such as myself? They make their claims with no knowledge or information with the insistence and loudness of a fundamentalist religious fanatic. Exploring this strange phenomenon is even more interesting I think than wondering what laptop one should get.
As far as I can tell, only Mac allowing for RAM upgrades is iMac 5k and and MacPro. And iMac 5k doesn't allow disk upgrades.
After owning virtually every Mac from the iMac G3 to the last iMac, with the exception of the new MacPro and the eMac (lol), I will never purchase another Apple product for myself. That said, I am in charge of purchasing computers for an Architectural firm which insists on buying these computers - they claim clients expect to see Apple products during visits to display the company as "avant-garde", which, to me, just confirms the snobbery behind it.
I now use my Windows desktop for heavy work, carry a laptop with Fedora, Android Tablet for meetings, and have an old MacPro which I'm 'forced' to use for Sketch; I would argue that if it wasn't for the popularity of Mac-only design software like Principle and Sketch, there would be no reason to use OSX anymore outside of the GUI.
To be fair, Apple computers are still a good choice for teenagers, senior citizens and/or Interaction Designers, but I can't think of any reason a professional outside of Video Editing or Design would opt for a Mac.
So their totally shit software destroyed itself and they don't have the tools to fix it. Now they're recommending forensic recovery and of course they won't pay the $500-1000 for that.
I think I'll be sticking with Windows from now on.
Backups in OSX are extremely easy. The easiest I've ever seen. I can reinstall from my encrypted USB hard drive with just a few clicks. It comes online exactly how it was when the backup was taken! And I can choose from daily snapshots going back more than a year!
