This was after the launch of the iPad Pro which is xbox-huge. I was imagining a product which was a MacBook "Base" which you could connect an iPad to as the 'screen' - except you'd have two different OSes that you'd have to cover. It's not exactly a product that fits anywhere in Apple's lineup.
This Microsoft thing is exactly what I was envisioning. You have a solid base which can include a GPU and more battery life and a detachable screen that works as a tablet. Brilliant!
Microsoft is the one that is closest to what I think the future should be: only one device you dock and use.
Not sure I'd want a Windows phone either (I'm currently on Android) but I might rethink that in the future as well.
IME, the OS and associated MS apps are fantastic, the phone is solid, and I have no complaints. If that's all you cared about I'd say switch today.
But there is definitely an app gap. I was never a huge app user, and most of what I used was there, but I'm pretty sure that's not true for most people. It's pretty hit or miss. You can find Facebook, Teamviewer, Netflix, and Plex, but if you want Snapshat, you're SOL. There aren't even any third party Snapchats around, because Snapchat demanded they be removed from the Windows Store.
There's no first-party Google apps, no doubt a big stumbling block for a lot of people.
I believe the idea of Continuum is targeted to light Office users, people who work on basic spreadsheets and word. It has a target market but I am not sure how big it is.
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/50755EA6-A75...
Im surprised it took over a decade to get a device that doesn't suck in that form factor, but im glad it happened.
Will be preordering one tomorrow! edit: this post was written on an MBP :)
A family heirloom!
It was actually a pretty good standalone MP3 player, for its day. (Just forget about the fairly useless sharing functions, and the marketing.)
iOS was originally cut down for performance reasons. Then large parts were locked for security - especially carrier network - security.
Performance isn't an issue, but carrier security is. And I don't think mobile users are going to be happy about having to download a constant stream of unlabelled Windows updates.
Where Apple went wrong was with iTunes, and especially with the horror show involved in getting information into and out of an iDevice. If you have an independent collection of music and books, it's just too clunky.
I bought an Android Galaxy Tab recently, and not only is the screen better than the screen on any iPad, getting books into it is trivially easy.
Either way, I'm glad Cupertino has competition. There's been more than a whiff of complacency from that part of the world in the last year or so, and I hope this makes Cook and Co sit up and stop taking the high end laptop market for granted.
Although gotta say - I'm still amused to see the MS presentation design following the Apple/Jobs presentation style so closely.
Maybe both companies should just merge? That would be interesting...
So, to me Apple are out if the game. It will not be Apple who will give us the mobile workstation quality OS in a pocket device that can hook up to a screen around you and allow you to work like you do today on your desktop.
Edit; that said; bring on the competition. I would buy a Surface Pro just to experiment if it had more battery life. I hoped the 4 would be (a lot) better in that department but it is not. So then I'll just run my MBP with El Capitan instead for now; http://i.glui.me/1GuUc4H
CE was also the base for Windows Automotive.
The OS was way ahead compared to what else existed out there, and I do think it got some stuff from OSX, but now it's clearly on a very different state rather than merging/
It seems this would either double the system weight (due to counterweights) or require an extra stand in the back.
A quick comparison, Microsoft cites 1.6 pounds as the weight. I'm assuming it's the screen only as the Surface 4 Pro (the tablet computer) alone is 1.73 pounds, and the Macbook Pro is 3.48 pounds. If the stand held the GPU, a battery pack, keyboard (and possible counterweights) and weighed as much as the screen, it'd be 3.2 pounds and still a fair bit lighter than the MBP.
Starting at 3.34 pounds (1,516 grams) including keyboard
I like to pull the keyboard off my surface 3 and lean it up against the wall and watch movies on it while still having mouse control from a distance.
What we really need is for every device to have an embedded Logitech controller so I no long need the usb nub dongle
my big worry with the MS hardware is its flimsy plasticky nature.
However, I suspect we're talking at cross-purposes here. I don't know about the Surface Book keyboard. I watched the webcast but have not had a hands-on....
http://www.technobuffalo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Micr...
Most tablets are content consumption devices only. The SP3 allowed you to be a "little" productive on the go with a type keyboard, and a "lot" productive in the office with a dock and a real keyboard.
If you want to be fully productive on the go, then I'd agree that buying a full laptop (e.g. Thinkpad, MBP) makes a lot of sense, and even then I'd still plug in a real mouse.
The Surface's niche is that it can be a content consumption device, semi-productive device, and a fully productive device when you need it to be (with no cover, type cover, and full keyboard/mouse respectively).
I will say the SP3's four biggest issues in my view:
- Touchpad on the cover is just terrible. Totally unusable.
- The Surface itself is too slippery without the cover.
- Some overheating issues when the GPU is utilised.
- The magnetic power cord fails too often/easily. Replaced it twice already. Look on Amazon for reviews/pictures to see what I mean.
Now that they have increased the size of the touchpad and made the keyboard better, I actually have a bit of a dilemma. You can customize the SP4 preorder with an i7 and 16GB of memory for cheaper than the Surface Book i7 with 8GB memory. I'm not sure how necessary the Nvidia card is for my purposes.
In fact, I think it's actually a problem for MS! :) The reason why the Surface Book was so appealing was partly because the keyboard/trackpad just wasn't that great with the SP3. Now that they've improved the type cover so much, the SB seems less necessary.
I'm amused to see the 'OS/X' typo still lives on, more than a decade since OS/2's been relevant :)
On topic, I've just upgraded to the latest version of OS X and it really seems rock solid. Fastest, most stable, and most secure version yet. Still a bit of an evolutionary dead end though, in that there have been no moves to add touch support beyond multitouch trackpads. I admire their vision with keeping iOS and OS X separate, but given touch is so ubiquitous elsewhere, I can't imagine it'll be long before Windows users are genuinely surprised and baffled by the lack of touch screens in Apple laptops...
The really annoying thing is that these days a late-model iPad probably has most of the horsepower needed to pull it off.
I'm with you in that I'd like a local terminal, but I could live without if I had Xcode on the box and some sort of full-screen editing mode. Working with storyboards would indeed suck, though.
Yes, the issue was eventually fixed, but I'm done with Apple. They have lost my trust.
I was considering buying an MBP myself but after seeing the issues she is having I am changing my mind, especially after this reveal from Microsoft.
But yeah, it's mindboggling. The internal hardware is largely the same anyway, why are companies throwing away a chance to get ahead of the competition and use the same shoddy keyboards/touchpads everyone hates?
I don't understand how anyone can state that, OSX has always had shit-show releases as a rule with a few exceptions (spit and polish cycles like Mountain Lion), and "never buy a v1 of a new design" has been the community's mantra since before I bought my first Apple device 15 years ago, it's one of the first things I was told.
It used to be that your computer was faster with every release of OS X. It hasn't been true for a few releases now. Oh that and my niece's iPhone 5c (not even a year old) was bricked by an iOS update. And the only thing Apple offers is a discount on the purchase of a new one...
Thinkpad Ts series? Dell's XPS/Latitude 7000 lines?
---
I was using ArchLinux from within an Android setup using a chroot. The X server ran under Android an was called XSDL, which handles keyboard and allows me to simulate rightclick. I was using Awesome. I bound volume keys to right click and Super (my WM controlling key).
The setup wasn't particularly ergonomic. Problems included the clumsiness and limitation of the X server's controls, the keyboard oriented nature of my Awesome setup, And the general lack of benefit from using a TWM. As far as I was concerned, there was limited merit in having multiple windows active at once when screen space was limited, and other WM with touch in mind would probably work better.
---
It was around 10 inch, but the resolution was about 1280 or lower, and touch wasn't that accurate. (1280x800)
---
Note that this was a while ago, and XSDL has undergone changes.
I completely understand why Apple doesn't put touch-sensitive screens in their laptops, but it's such a shame. I'd love to be able to use a pen with a MacBook like this. The iPad Pro would be ideal except it lacks a proper Unix terminal, so that's pretty much out of the question for me (ssh doesn't count).
The hinge is the only thing that bothers me. Close the book and it seems like you'll have a thin area of metal on metal grinding on itself and end up with a rather thick profile for putting it in a laptop bag.
Also, at one point they showed the internal structure of the hinge and it looked like the Yoga's hinge that's covered with some sort of articulating plastic (god I hope not).
I'm impressed with everything else though.
It's not even just the OS. I've switched to Safari because losing 1.5-2 hours of battery life to use Chrome or Firefox isn't worth it. I'll just open Chrome when I really need it, use it for a few minutes, and close it.
There's also a "no one got fired for..." factor. OSX refuses to work with the client's projector in a meeting? Apple sucks. Arch Linux refuses to work with the client's projector? You suck.
I'm using a Sony VAIO Pro 13 with Ubuntu and EVERYTHING, yes everything, works perfect. Touchpad, standby, brightness, wifi, ...
Also a friend of mine is running the Dell XPS 13 with Linux and also has no problems AFAIK.
The next big boost was a GUI and market situation that made it possible to create some neat productivity tools (and profit from them).
The early Ruby on Rails community probably was the epitome of that setup: TextMate as a uniquely OS X editor, easy development on your laptop, then deployment to a Linux server. I think Keynote came out right at that time, too, which was really neat for a rather weirdly conference-driven community.
Then the pretty great Unibody systems came out, combining the aircraft destroyer feel of olden Thinkpads with a more sleek design, and the first of the ultrabooks, the Air… And, of course, you basically have to use a Mac system when doing iOS dev work.
But in the recent years, I feel that Apple lost it a bit. OS X is stagnating (what's the last feature that could compete with e.g. Expose? And still no decent 1st-party package manager). Third party development/productivity software doesn't matter that much these days (it's either webapps or mobile apps; no really shiny single-platform editor anymore). Some of the Linuxens are pretty good with supported laptop hardware, so that's an option for the Unix hardcore.
And as this article is showing, Windows itself is getting more of an option even if you're not buying into the MS stack: RAM and hard drives are big enough to support virtual machines for your development environment (esp. w/ docker/vagrant/etc.) -- if you even need that, as high-speed internet is ubiquitous enough so that you can do remote development throughout.
So, yeah, while I personally still think that OS X is a more developer/hacker-friendly environment than Windows, the incentives don't appear as big anymore. So if they lose their edge in hardware quality, style and solid driver support, they'll lose a few developers more.
Nothing beats having the ability run Unix command line tools.
MS really needs to add these to their base OS.
Having said that though I'm much more concerned with the OS capabilities, user experience, aesthetics, toolchains, etc.
- 256GB/i5/8GB/dGPU: $1899
Don't get me wrong, I have one instead of a regular laptop, but I can see how people used to the latter would feel uncomfortable with them, unless they have a strong motivation to move to the hybrid form factor.
Ultrabooks/Subnotebooks are already a compromise. We've made the transition from massive 30-40W CPUs to 15W-CPUs for mainstream notebook over the last 4 years, where net performance for notebooks stagnated at best (and regressed during the first year or two). Going from there to whatever hardware the Surface Book uses won't a big leap any more.
- I like small tablets and larger laptops (13.3 min, 14 prefered). So an hybrid is either a too big tablet or a too little PC, often both;
- hybrids are top-heavy, and I don't like having an hinge. I really want a LAP-top, and a ultrabook is perfect for this. An hybrid, not so much (I've heard about "lapability", not convinced ;).
Both are intrinsic trade-offs of hybrids. So I stick to small tablets + 14" ultrabook, and just don't bother with hybrids. But to each its own.
Academic definitions aside, there hybrids have to choose a very serious compromise due to the balance:
if you make the base light (surface pro case), you won't really have a laptop, instead a tablet which sits on your legs.
if you make the base heavy, you're making a relatively heavy laptop.
now, there is of course a spectrum of choice, but practically speaking, even they make a very light tablet part (say, 850 grams), with a "heavy base", you will add 550 grams at least (550 being an odd balance).
I'm absolutely happy to have a 1.4 kg hybrid, but it's not going to compete with the upcoming wave of ultrabooks (note that I'm somewhat skeptical it will be 1.4kg, I bet it will be a little more).
There has to be some trade offs? If they pull this off thou.. I'll line up for one.
The problem for me, under Windows 8.1, has been getting the machine to enter a true low power sleep state. If the machine enters the true low power state than it can work like a tablet, and if you use it lightly (say an hour a night) you can get a week's worth of use without recharging.
Unfortunately if any of the hardware components doesn't go to the low power state, the device will likely be dead or close to it if you don't use it for a day. Microsoft has a utility which tells you which component is keeping device from powering down, but doesn't tell you what software is causing this behavior. Windows 10 is supposed to improve this, but you can't turn off windows update so you lose one way to fight the battery drain.
One way you can fight this, besides plugging it in every night, is powering it down when you are finished, which isn't as bad as it seems because the device boots cold in about 5 seconds.
OneNote with pen is just amazing. Coupled with the detachable high quality screen, this thing is all I can dream off at the moment.