First, this is a business for me. And I suspect it's a business for anyone that Apple or Microsoft expects to sell this stuff to. And having to pay $3000 for outdated hardware is a tough pill to swallow. The hardware in the Macbook "Pro" is simply inexcusable. (REALLY???? 16GB RAM MAX!?!?!?) But the hardware in the Surface Studio is equally galling. They give you an NVidia what? 965 for $3000??? And the BEST I could even POSSIBLY get would be a 980??? And for that magnanimous gesture on their part I would be obliged to pay a MINIMUM of $4100??? For LAST GENERATION graphics cards???? On a machine purportedly about graphics???? (A 1080 would run both faster AND cooler using LESS power Microsoft. And at this point in time, for a business investment 64GB of RAM should really be offered by anyone NOT trying to screw you. What's the deal Microsoft???)
I think to objective observers who were waiting for these presentations... both proved SEVERELY underwhelming considering the pent up expectations. I mean... OK... if you put a gun to my head, I'll probably buy the Surface Studio. But don't expect me to pretend that I don't know that both Microsoft and Apple are robbing me.
Sorry for the rant.
Let's call high-end graphics cards for what they really are: gaming console graphics hardware stuffed into PCs. Apart from a relatively small number of professionals who work with 3D rendering, high-end graphics cards are an even greater waste of money (unless of course you're buying the machine for gaming, which doesn't really fit the "digital artist" target of these machines).
Microsoft and Apple may still be pricing these products too high ("robbing you" as you say), but that's a separate discussion.
I can't help but notice that you are equating that 99% of "digital art" that can be handled by mobile graphics cards, to the 1% of "digital art" that anyone's going to actually PAY someone to produce. As I said, this is a business. If I could make the living I currently make retouching photos, then I'd gladly pay $3000 for an underpowered machine...
but I can't.
because no one is going to pay us that kind of money to retouch photos are they?
Look, these machines, to a business, are INVESTMENTS. You invest for the FUTURE, not to take advantage of the past. A 1070 or 1080 is not too much to ask considering Pascal's MANIFEST superiority in efficiency. Additionally, I was being kind, I think MS should OFFER 64GB in the Surface Studio, but a 128GB option would really be necessary to future proof this thing.
I'll tell you what MS and Apple are going for here... it's a money grab. And they are setting themselves up to come back to guys like me every 18 to 24 months for another mandatory money grab instead of just giving us a 60 month machine from the outset.
Offer me a 60 month Surface Studio at the $3000 price point and I'd update every workstation here. But that's not what they're offering is it?
Up until this year, I have never owned a machine with more than 8GB of RAM, and never a video card with more than 1GB of RAM until now either.
Are you perhaps talking about video editing or CGI rendering?
Yes. Video editing and CGI. The workflow normally requires the use of MASSIVE memory mapped files. Additionally, a given artist may do several "lo res" renders before shipping off to the farm. ("Lo res" being a relative word. Because in most cases we're talking about 2560x1440 or 1080p minimum.) I really don't see how your tech guys are able to get that to work for you on cards that have 1GB memory. But if they can, then you'd better NEVER let those guys go because they are worth their weight in gold. (Unless you don't do any CGI or video editing???)
Source: I was a system engineer for VFX and animation for a number of years.
Then again, with Chrome taking up >4GB of RAM, they probably could have gotten half that performance just by closing their browser or using Safari.
Can confirm. Got up to 15GB RAM usage today, before closing 30+ tabs to get back down to 7GB. Maybe it's ridiculous, but based on the information I'm needing from those tabs--100% text--it's infuriating.
Oh, and also sitting awfully comfortably in that 7GB area is Dropbox, which is doing who knows what with all of its RAM...I do like the Linux command line tool though.
I'm probably an outlier though so can understand why it doesnt exist.
That's completely realistic for pro and semi-pro users.
The cost of making a laptop that could take 32GB or even 64GB of RAM must be tiny. No one would care if Apple only supplied 16GB but left a couple of slots free, or even if the stock overpriced 16GB could be swapped for 32GB.
Why cut corners and make "pro" machines that can't be used for professional work?
It's counterproductive. It may increase margins in the short term, but over time it alienates users and erodes the appeal of the brand.
It seems "Think Different" has become "Don't Expect Much."
I think people are imagining that a better computer will improve its performance, but it won't. There's a sleep statement in there or something. (Their blog post says something like "a cloud industry-leading innovation in picking-your-camera-out-of-a-list user experience story flow." Really? Just suck the files off my memory card in the background as soon as you detect one.)
I don't know if you saw this posted elsewhere in the thread but this is a pretty solid endorsement: https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2016/10/26/the-surfac...
I think you're right that artists largely don't need what high end gaming PCs might require to play the newest steam titles at full graphics settings, but for what Microsoft is asking here, they do at least need enough GPU/CPU strength to have a very responsive UI when editing very large and complex graphical projects at 2560 x 1600 and beyond.
My worry about the Surface is simply that the minority report-style advertisement isn't really possible with a real-world PSD or 3dsmax scene.
High end graphics cards are usually much better than a gaming console, in that they offer much better frame-rates, and a lot more resolution, and at the same time even a single card can be more expensive than a complete gaming console.
So, yes, they are for gaming 99.9% of the time. But please don't compare them with consoles.
Look, I'm sorry - I'm with you for most of it, but you have this stick held by completely the wrong end. Gaming consoles are closer to APUs than discrete high-end GPUs.
As for having "outdated" cards, that is more a function of the production timeline. I am sure the Studio has been in the works for a while and those were probably the best in class cards around the time.
And the video is outdated, period, no air-quotes. There is simply no argument there. Making an excuse for it is nice and all, but it simply is a case of charging a premium for old tech.
Using the Surface as a tablet for drawing has been a huge use-case for visual artists from day 1. Just see this positive review of the original Surface Pro by Gabe from Penny Arcade: https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2013/02/22/the-ms-sur...
Most of those artists ended up buying iPad Pros to replace them with.
This is a weird complaint to me. So what if the display hardware is dated if it is perfectly up to the task it's presented with? Maxing out the specs on a machine for no other reason than to max out the specs seems to me to be nothing but a waist.
And even if it is perfectly suited the the rest of the hardware and any additional RAM/performance would be wasted[1], that's not a good excuse to overcharge for old commodity hardware.
[1] I would be extremely surprised if the rest of the system were designed around the video card. Actually, designed twice, since there are two video card options.
Not even just that, it's the last gen mobile cards, which means you have to spend 4.2k just to have 4GB of VRAM on something that, at the end of the day, is really a desktop. the 980 desktop version is ~$600 with 6GB VRAM.
you are paying for a digital drafting table.
As mentioned in another thread, purchasing the lcd panel itself ala-carte would cost more than the entire unit.
Maybe the thing you want to pay for is the screen, but there's no avoiding the outdated GPU tax that you have to pay to get it.
980M - 100W / 1060 ~ 80W / 1070 ~ 120W / 1080 ~ 150W
If they started out with the max TDP of 100W for the cooling system - upgrading it to 150W in that small space it sounds like too much of a change to meet their DL?
Clearly this does not excuse the reengineering but it might explain why they went this route.
The other was that they have already crossed over the "luxury" threshold from "just another PC" to "special hotness" sort of territory. So unless Nvidia is giving them a smoking deal on "old" GPU's it seems that from a marketing perspective you would want to check off all the boxes. Its reported that it would use less power and generate less heat, and Nvidia says it is 20% faster. That seems like it would be a "no brainer". But I clearly don't know.
That is why it surprised me when I read the high end Studio only had the GTX980 in it.
Really? First thing I thought when I saw it was how cool it would be for 3D sculpting. There are more uses for high end GPUs than gaming.
I wonder why ms didn't stick with AMD (like the xbox one) if they weren't going to use a 1080 (or 1070, might make more sense).
As someone that used to enjoy drawing/doodling but never made the leap from mouse to a digital pen - sketching and doodling on the surface 4 was eye-opening. Any number of programs paired with the pen/screen feels a lot like ink drawing without the mess and with multi-level undo.
The combination of a decent pen and great screen makes for a very satisfying and immediate drawing experience.
Edit: afaik the only moving part in the Surface Studio are the fans. Replacing a fan is an annoyance but at least it won't lead to data loss!
What counts is the time it takes to perform an operation like a Camera RAW import or a blur. If that goes down by a significant percentage, productivity goes up by a significant amount.
For drawing, good acceleration is the difference between a distracting experience that's laggy and unusable, and a smooth experience that gets out of the way of the work.
Besides, there are people with an interest in art and machine learning. Good luck with a 980M if that's your area of interest.
The machine is not "purportedly about graphics", it's about 2D artists, and they made that clear in pretty much every presentation I've seen on the device.
Not only that- it's a mobile processor, 980M, so it would lag some distance behind a 980. That is cutting serious corners for a desktop at that price point.
70% faster, they could just as well write "new recipe".
The Surface Studio may seem impressive, but as far as workflow goes, the Mac with tablet setup really is perfection.
I've never had the desire to look down on the tablet to draw, as the pointer always moves synchronously on screen.
In fact, I feel my hand would get in the way of drawing..
Right now it seems like the Apple products are refined perfection, while Microsoft is still trying to figure out its place.
"The enjoyment of one's tools is an essential ingredient of successful work." --Donald Knuth
It is worth spending the money, if you have it, to buy the tools you will enjoy working with.
Why would anyone need a desktop in this day and age? Moore's law means the things that desktops used to do 5 years ago, laptops do now.
The compute requirements for photo editing, for example, haven't changed in 5 years. But the processors and systems (IO, displays, etc..) keep getting faster. It's only natural that laptops would cannibalize desktops. And phones/tablets will cannibalize laptops in a few years.
Photo editing can be hugely resource intensive. Camera RAW files have been getting larger over time, and all but the simplest edits demand an SSD, a fast processor, and at least 32GB of memory. 128GB isn't unusual for commercial work.
You can get by with less, but sooner or later - usually sooner - you run out of RAM and your machine starts thrashing.
Many Photoshop features are hardware-accelerated, so having a good graphics card makes a significant difference to editing speed.
3D animation definitely needs a good graphics card. So does video editing.
Audio doesn't, but it needs as much raw processor power as possible. I know DJs/producers who are running dual 12-core Xeon systems for their mixes, and adding PCI DSP cards on top.
Surface Studio looks very nice, but it fails to tick most of these boxes. The reality is there's a significant market for creative power users willing to pay good money for multicore server-grade towers for their work.
Neither Apple nor MS are paying attention to this market. The Mac Pro is an underpowered curiosity now, and Surface Studio has - sadly - been hobbled by greed and penny pinching.
It can't be an effective interaction device and a server-level resource at the same time. Anyone who is enough of an enthusiast to require a dual Xeon workstation is clearly not who MS is targeting with a single product. Leave the multicore server-grade towers to HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc. because there's nothing to innovate there - you just throw hardware, bought at market price, into a box. What is MS supposed to innovate on there if all you care about is specs/$ and ignore the design and use-case?
I love to have just as much power I can. I'd love to have a multi-CPU POWER9 loaded with a couple terabytes of RAM and a couple flash cards attached to a fast bus, but I wouldn't know what to do with it.
Camera raw files haven't been increasing in size faster than Moore's law.
They can get by fine with a laptop. The Mac Pro is overpowered for them.
Moore's law has slowed down btw and is predicted to end in 4-6 years (2020 - 2022) as it would be physically impossible to shrink transistors any further /unless/ there is a change from the current silicon CMOS technology.
In fact, manufacturers are no longer even targeting the doubling of transistors anymore! Instead they are focusing speeding them up.
This is what I was responding to.
So we have Blizzard and Source engine, who am I missing?
http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197998185123/games/?...
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition: Win
Team Fortress 2: Win/Mac/Lin
Factorio: Win/Mac/Lin
Rocket League: Win/Mac/Lin
Particle Fleet: Emergence: Win/Mac/Lin
SHENZHEN I/O: Win/Mac/Linux
Oil Rush: Win/Mac/Linux
Castle Crashers: Win/Mac
Tropico 5: Win/Mac/Linux
Literally every game I've played recently except ONE supports Mac
Obviously I'm not a "serious" gamer :)
I don't think you'd argue that a mac is a good gaming rig from a performance / $ perspective (or any other perspective really).
Both have their place - pen on screen or pen off. Working with your pen on a screen, especially a smaller screen, means you lose a good chunk of your visible space. Overall opinion -- it is great for artists that two major companies have made a significant effort on getting the pen on display right.
"Overwatch was fast and fun on medium settings. Civ VI is what I’ve played the most on the Studio and it looks and runs fantastic."
"When I first saw the device months ago in that secret room at MS, they asked me what I thought. I said, “Well I have no idea if anyone else will want it, but you have made my dream computer.”
Nothing about that is, I went out and paid my own money to buy this.
People spreading Viral Videos are often unpaid paid, even if they are a critical part of a marketing campaign. Hand someone some free hardware and they don't think is this worth X, just is X cool.
So, it's not surprising or questionable that his reviews are positive.
Also, pay is not limited to just cash.
Based on the article (he's been lent this device for the last week or so), I imagine the same thing may well happen if he's happy with it - which it sounds like he may be.
They haven't replaced my laptop with anything new. They just released a newer model. Similar to every yearly company announcement ever. Nobody cares about version 7 with nothing new, they care about version 1 of something innovative.
Microsoft just blew Wacom out of the water in a niche product market. Great. What does that have to do with new MBPs?
Hahahahahahahahaha
Wacom hasn't released an innovative product in 10 years, and much like Texas Instruments and their $130 monopoly on school calculators, everyone is still paying the same $2500 to Wacom that they did decades ago for Cintiq.
The lack of competition for Wacom is criminal and has allowed them to coast on last-decades product line for a very long time.
Hell, the most innovative thing Wacom has done in 10 years is rebrand Graphire into Bamboo. Ooooooh!
I imagine the day the Apple Pencil was announced was a very grim day in what ever is left of the Wacom R&D department.
Does Wacom have an entire suite of comparable products, or do they cater specifically to a niche market? Was their announcement yesterday? Life has context.
> What does that have to do with new MBPs?
I'll go ahead and quote the original comment you originally responded to: "This event was by far the most disappointing Mac event in the history". Apple had an event where they announced not much more than that we are now in late 2016. Nobody is saying MBP itself is bad, the event is comparatively lacking.
* I think you can reasonably make a case that Windows 95/98/NT were better than MacOS 7/8/9. (You could probably make a reasonable case for the opposite; I certainly wouldn't argue the point).
* The Zune was better than the iPod. Unfortunately for MS not better than the iPhone a few months later. The "Metro" design language it introduced was quite a bit better than Apple's at the time (and started the "flat design" trend that even Apple would end up aping, years later).
* Various areas where MS beat Apple by default, at least circa the 90s-00s, owing to Apple making no or a half-hearted effort. Office suites, gaming consoles, web browsers, the server, 3D graphics, yadda yadda.
* C# is a far better language than Objective-C, and Visual Studio is a far better IDE than Xcode.
* Edge is arguably a better browser than Safari. MS have also made some great tooling for webdev recently, VSCode and Typescript, while we haven't heard much from Apple.
* The Surface tablets have been arguably better than recent iPads, by virtue of running a full OS.
After that I've got nothing.
C# is a nicer language, and VS a better IDE when it comes to language integration but.. the platform APIs are far more productive on OS X than they are on Windows and the GUI toolkit was good from the get go, whereas MS never commits to a toolkit fully (MFC, WinForms, WPF, now UWP which is like a restricted, not fully compatible WPF). Why do you think there's so many great, lightweight alternatives to Photoshop with non destructive image editing on Mac OS X, like Affinity Photo, Acorn, Pixelmator, and none on Windows ? why is it that Apple can dogfood and write everything in their modern platform APIs, even rewrote their file browser Finder, in it, but Windows out of the box comes with exactly zero .net apps? Recently Windows 10 brought some .net stuff out of the box on the desktop, but they're all toy apps no one would want to use, and certainly no equivalent to Apple Mail, Photos, iMovie, Garageband etc. The UWP mail client is pitiful. C#/.net platform in general, on the desktop, as far as commercial, desktop apps sold to consumers come, is a dead wasteland. Whatever few .net apps I've seen as an enduser that made use of .net, I tend to associate with "slow, heavy, not featureful" particularly WPF apps. .net greatest success is the same as Java: on servers, or on the desktop for in-house business software where the well being of the enduser is not a priority and no one cares if the app feels sluggish or has terrible UI.
The lack of dogfooding has been a common complaint among windows developers for a long time, for example :
http://functionalflow.co.uk/blog/2011/09/27/microsoft-please...
> I understand deadlines and priorities, and I know that probably Microsoft just had to ship something at some point, but it really seems that there was a big lack of dogfooding in the WPF case.
> There’s a striking example of this: what was the number one complaint that developers had about WPF since 2006?… Blurry text and images. And when did Microsoft fix it?… Only in 2010, when they started using WPF for Visual Studio.
> Another issue that has been bugging me since I started using WPF was the airspace limitation. It seems that it’s finally going to be fixed in 4.5. Why do I think it’s being solved now? Because they probably needed some native WinRT component to play nice with WPF…
Microsoft still doesn't really use .net outside of dev tools and server apps. UWP apps are just toy apps. UWP OneNote isn't even close to the desktop OneNote. And so on. MS themselves don't really produce high quality desktop apps with C#. If they won't, then who will? Compare to Apple and how everything they make, makes heavy use of their platform APIs such as Cocoa, Core Image, Core Animation etc. How could .net not be a barren wasteland for desktop apps?
Apple always had the better developer platform, dogfooded and thus battletested, and now they're also getting a nicer programming language to work with, with Swift. Their IDE is still no visual studio, but AppCode from IntelliJ fixes that.
Hence why I made no mention of APIs.
It isn't an entirely new tool, it is an HDR, higher res, larger version of a Cintiq, with a built in slow PC with last-generation mobile graphics. The hinge and stuff was definitely an improved industrial design.
Those screen improvements alone are probably enough for lots of professionals to switch from cintiq, even if they lose support for professional-tier desktop hardware, but what about the pen? As far as I can tell the pen doesn't even have tilt detection and from videos you have to use the dial/puck to simulate rotating or tilting the pen.
In spite of that, it was definitely more innovative than anything Apple showed.
I'd bet that one could make a revolutionary stats program with the new form factor/interface possibility.
SURE! Except, of course, you're not going to be allowed to code it in Python, R, or Octave. Instead, it will be Microsoft(TM) Visual(TM) R#(TM) with the new NetDNA/DCOM/.NET/CloudyMcCloudface Framework (TM)!! (now, with 40% more Cortana!(TM))
1: https://github.com/Microsoft/PTVS
2: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-de...
if they are serious about art creation, they should only use wacom technology and nobody else.
Actually I believe they introduced a competitor to the Wacom Cintiq that comes in a variety of sizes and does not require you to use a desktop or Windows 10.
Calling it 'an entirely new kind of tool' is really over stating it.
Have you used Surface before? Asking because when I picked one up about a month ago, I had an awful time with it. Makes me think their announcement won't really do anything but look interesting. I could be missing something, though.
Did you get to play with it at a store or friends house, or actually take it home and use it for some time. Everyone i've met that has a surface (book, 3, 4, etc) loves it.
Not really, you could buy a Wacom Cintiq since about forever. I'm glad they're giving wacom some competition though.
No. Microsoft introduced an entirely new kind of tool for digital artists. I'm not one myself, but the Surface Studio makes me wish I were. And the people I know who are, are over the moon about it. They can't wait to get their hands on one.
Yes, it's Microsoft that hit it out of the park, and made Apple look amazingly weak by comparison. Today's event wouldn't have been particularly impressive even on its own. By comparison with yesterday's, it's just embarrassing.