As usual Microsoft thinks it's Windows everywhere strategy makes sense - it doesn't. Tables are tables and computers are computers and they cross but they don't work the same and need considered and individual interfaces to make best use.
I think the Surface is just not meant to scratch the same itch as iPad. iPad has always had an interface, like the rest of iOS, oriented towards anyone competent enough to point at things. Power users could try to work past that, but it wasn't intended for that.
Surface Book seems to me like it was built for the more tech-competent demographic.
The issue isn't with "windows everywhere." It's that "surface book probably wasn't meant for deployment in a public library."
Your comment shows a very common view among us techies that being a member of "tech-competent demographic", is somehow a badge of honor, or at least of accomplishment. It's an accomplishment to be sure, but an accomplishment of little more than our willingness to sacrifice untold man-hours on learning the intricacies of near-universally bad UI inflicted on us all (usually in our youth, when time we are willing to puzzle out the details in something that interests us is nearly unlimited).
This experience molds our perspective on what is "normal" and "usable" UI, because our minds are already bent into the kitten-bonsai shapes that make it mostly-intuitive to us, and where we can use pattern matching to make a reasonable guess at a solution, iterating quickly with each failure. This process of "encounter unfamiliarity, guesswork, random clicking, reading docs, google other mentions of error, guesswork, final solution" is so quick and natural for us that we forget that most people do not have this mental toolkit ready. When a user with no previous exposure to it comes along and is confused, we tend to dismiss their concerns as trivial, because the answers to their bafflements are obvious to us through previous experience, and the process of searching out unknowns is so ingrained.
The actual fact that "tech-competent demographic" is a reasonable term to use in a conversation at all is in and of itself a bit of a tragic commentary on the sad state of our UX design as an industry.
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I'm exaggerating above, perhaps, but not by much. Apple's accomplishment is that they actually manage to make UI that is intuitive to normal humans at best, and mostly not too terrible at worst. There's still a lot of failures even in their designs, but I think it's unfair to say that Apple's goals are to intentionally frustrate power users, as you seem to say. I would say, when power users hit those limitations, it's really just another reminder that intuitive and powerful UI is a really really difficult problem with no single correct objective answer for any given problem.
It's actually rather amusing how vocal the power users are when they hit limitations of the unfamiliar systems, and how dismissive they are when normal humans hit the limitations of the systems they are already familiar with. The problem is with UI/UX in both cases, they are two sides of the same experience, but it seems difficult for some people to recognize that.
And of course, when new UI/UX is designed by people whose minds are already shaped by the existing UI conventions, it will tend to follow the same patterns. Software UI is a near-monoculture currently, and the huge infrastructure of existing code and libraries makes it difficult for anyone to explore new concepts, and it takes time for any new concepts to grow into their strength.
iOS took many releases to really hit its stride in terms of features and usability, and a lot of the speed of progress is really limited by time and resources available. Throwing more people at the problem doesn't speed it up or make the quality better - most things really do need to be worked out by a small/medium team, so it does take time and experience.
(PS: I think Surface is an awesome piece of kit, and I can't wait for Microsoft to keep making it better and better - but I think it's silly to pretend that the Windows touch UI is good as it is because it's targeted at power users - no, it's just still really really young, and needs to grow and improve more. I'm certain there must be very smart people at Microsoft working very hard on making the UX better)
Heavy use of Ulysses for text / markdown, Safari, Microsoft Office suite especially PowerPoint, Omni suite, Readder PDF Expert w/ Documents manager, Working Copy, Textastic, iSSH, Screens, Citrix, OneDrive, Box, and Good/BB Enterprise.
If your code flow is a Git commit to trigger CI/CD then web or SSH to view, you aren't lacking much if anything.
In a way I'm unhappy about Files, I was fine with paradigm shift to 'per app' view (file workspaces) and ok with ability to see those as 'folders' via iCloud Drive on other devices.
I believe you mean "tablets are tablets..." otherwise the comparison between tables and computers is a bit odd. ;-)
The thing Microsoft still doesn't seem to internalize is that 'wifi only' is a disqualifying feature for many people they would like to convert.
Have you considered an LTE mobile hotspot? It can be left charged (but off) in your laptop bag for days/weeks and only used for travel or as needed. I found it to be super useful and not much hassle at all. Also multiple devices can connect rather simply.
Lastly, a benefit of this sort of decoupling, is it allows for using a different network carrier to the mobile phone, thus effectively increasing one's LTE coverage.
I use the Verizon LTE network on my iPad pro all the time. When I'm on the train, when I'm travelling hither and yon. I don't browse/read/search on my phone (which I use for actually calling and texting people). Not saying that I represent a typical consumer but I certainly represent at least a cohort of 1 consumers :-).
I had a MiFi for a while (company purchased), but found it consistently had lower performance then the native networking of my iPad and it was easy to lose if I wasn't paying attention. Twice I encountered times when it wasn't charged when I needed it. On analyzing it overall I found that because it wasn't forced to be charged when I charged my laptop/tablet, it suffered from sometimes being missed when it needed to be charged. That the radio is by definition charged when the iPad is charged avoids that failure mode for me.
When travelling with my SPro4 I would sometimes 'hot spot' it to my tablet. Awkward but it works. In the inversion that I still marvel about the software availability on the iPad has always been better than the availability of software on the SPro4.
The SPro4 has a better (to my taste) drawing experience than the iPad Pro does. And both the iPad Pro and SPro4 are way better than previous stylus attempts on capacitive screens.
The iPad has a much better 'tablet only' experience for me, and a much worse 'docked' experience. SPro4 with a Surface Dock and a couple of UHD monitors is literally indistinguishable from the NUC i7 box I use as a desktop. There is nothing (yet) that I can attach to my iPad Pro to make it work like a Macbook Pro (I know I know, different OS, processor etc.)
As a result I create more in general on my SPro4, consume more on my iPad Pro. I travel with my iPad in my hand and my SPro in my backpack.
Clearly I have been unable to leave one behind and just use the other so there is some more convergence to go :-)
But for me my company pays that anyway so I can get a new phone every year with basically free surfing in the whole EU, which is really nice.
This is another limitation of the iPad — like a computer, but with arbitrary limitations like non-standard ports.
This will definitely become a must-have feature in future machines for me. I would no longer have to worry whether or not my local coffeeshop's internet is running slow or takes 5 minutes to properly connect to some random public wifi at a new place.
Public WIFI is prevelant but still very hit/miss. A consitent fast LTE connection would be quite the luxury.
It'd also totally kill SMS and telephone plans which I'm looking forward to the most. Encrypted E2E crypto for both voice/text will be a great incentive for this too.
That decision alone made them not viable to buy for our company. We rely heavily on Thunderbolt 3 Docks in our new offices that work for Windows and Mac. No such thing possible with the Surface Products.
It's such a game-changer to be able to just plug in your device wherever there is a free spot and have a full featured 2x 4k + Gbit Ethernet + Charging Workplace via one cable.
I suspect that the choice of whether or not to include Thunderbolt 3 is constrained by the available chip sets from Intel rather than a design intent from Microsoft. Looks like Intel is going to make that an option however (https://liliputing.com/2017/05/intel-thunderbolt-3-will-inte...) so I would not doubt to see it brought out on laptops that use chip sets that incorporate it.
We're eyeing the ones from OWC/Elgato/Belkin too, but they are simply not available until later this month.
I wouldn't be so sure regarding the design constraints, the Dell XPS 13 has very similar parts to the Surface Pro, but has been offering the Thunderbolt Port ever since Skylake.
The XPS 13 is a nice laptop, it isn't "all in the display" though, which when you talk about volume and battery time it counts. Currently from what I can see from teardowns (https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft+Surface+Pro+4+Tear...) there isn't enough space for the current Intel discrete solution (but there is in the XPS 13 and there would have been in the Surface Book if they put it in the keyboard half.)
You are probably right now when I look at the teardowns. It makes one wonder what the custom Surface Docks use to push all that I/O out. The ASUS Transformer 3 Pro T303UA somehow managed to cram it in though.
We need more compatibility, not less.
Thanks for pointing that out!
Now I have a dilemma: I'm forced to retire my SP2 and the SP5 is any day going to be debited unless I cancel.
This hiatus looks like just how I'm going to be reviewing the new HP Spectre tablet instead. I was seriously intrigued, especially by the 3000 * 2000 display. I guess I will find out soon enough. Something tells me that I have room for disappointment plenty here, tho'...
Sprint / T-mobile network, so not as good coverage, but $6 a month and just pay for what you use for data.
It doesn't add much cost. You can get an entire smartphone with LTE for less than $100. So maybe the LTE costs $20.
iPad Pro, even with iOS instead of a full-fledged OS, looks waaaay more appealing.
I really want to use my surface more, it is really nice. Just it straddles the worlds between PC and tablet too much.
If you want to 'get work done', sure you'd have to take Windows over iOS. But then Apple users would be reaching for a Macbook instead.
I get why people want 'both' from the Surface, but to an Apple user like me, Windows doesn't appeal for either use-case. I'll take macOS for work and iOS for casual use, and put up with separate devices for now.
I like iOS on my iPhone. I like OSX on my Macbook. The only thing I'm pushing back on is the idea that iOS (via the iPad Pro) is set to consume my Macbook.
Also I don't agree with 'over priced hardware'. I tend to find if you look for comparable hardware from other manufacturers the prices are similar (e.g. Samsung S8 vs iPhone, Dell XPS vs Macbook).
https://www.amazon.com/Dell-XPS-15-15-6-Inch-i7-6700HQ/dp/B0...
The screen resolution is much higher, they come with double the ram, not a "home OS" (whatever that is), and I'm not sure how an AMD 560m stacks up against an Nvidia 960m.
Not to say the MacBook will be cheaper, just pointing out discrepancies in your comparison.
Dell is $1,000 cheaper than a comparable MBP.
Edit typo contract-context
My mobile office has been reduced to a 12" iPad Pro with a 13" MB. All files are kept in iCloud and shared between the portable devices, a MBP, an iMac, and a custom PC.
The two portables together - inside a shared soft case with plastic protectors on each - weigh a lot less than my 15" 2015 MBP, and vastly less than a 17" Dell laptop I tried to use for a while. Having two big screens and one real keyboard is hugely more productive than trying to do everything on a single device.
The MBP gets hauled out for anything that needs more power or a bigger screen - not often in practice, because the battery life isn't anywhere close to being good enough for a full day of work.
I moved to this setup from the MBP about six months ago, and it's been a big step up in productivity. With two fairly light devices I can do almost anything I need to do almost anywhere. It's at least as productive for coding, research, and social as my old non-portable dual-screen Mac Mini setup from a few years ago.
It's not powerful enough for content creation, but that needs extra music hardware and bigger displays, and for now I'm happy to leave the tools for that at home.
As a bonus, the big iPad on its own is also the best ereader I've ever used.
Not to mention, the knife in a Swiss Army knife is going to be way worse than a similarly priced knife. There's a number of things you can do with a $60 knife you can't with a Swiss Army knife.
Majority of OS X users outside that UNIX crowd, barely know where the Terminal.app is located.
My Surface 3 came with support only for Chinese without even an English option. I had to buy and reinstall a totally different SKU to make it functional for me (and this was an employee purchase program, grumble).
I get what you are saying, but when iOS can manage to support more languages than Windows, well, we are in a totally different world these days.
(which is to say, iOS 11 makes Surface look archaic, IMHO)
The only thing I came away with was an amusing question about how Apple is going to reconcile iOS with Mac OS someday, like Microsoft has already been working on / done for years
Should MS reconcile the XBox with the PC?
I think because the overlap between the usage of a tablet and a PC is so great, people think there should be some sort of convergence.
So long as everything uses the same methods of communication, file formats, protocols etc everything will be ok.
For most people, software is also solved. Everything is a web app. So what's really missing?
Uhh. We have. A while ago. The Xbox One ran Windows 8 until IIRC last year when it got upgraded to Windows 10. UWP apps are just that, universal across PCs, phones, Xbox One and HoloLens.
You don't buy an Xbox and then write essays or do your taxes on it do you?
You play games and maybe watch some movies. Doesn't matter that Excel will launch.
Case in point: I'm an IT guy meeting another vendor in the field mid-day. He pulls a dead surface from his bag and is now looking for an outlet, I pull my iPad, which hasn't been charged in a week, and it's at %20 but still good for the rest of the day.
What good is a mobile computer with a dead battery?
Not to mention, the surface takes weeks to die while hibernating
Then, in June 2004, Steve Jobs announced that Apple was releasing its new operating system, called “Tiger.” And inside Microsoft, jaws dropped. Tiger did much of what was planned for Longhorn—except that it worked.
E-mails flew around Microsoft, expressing dismay about the quality of Tiger. To executives’ disbelief, it contained functional equivalents of Avalon and WinFS.
“It was fucking amazing,” wrote Lenn Pryor, part of the Longhorn team. “It is like I just got a free pass to Longhorn land today.”
Vic Gundotra, another member of the group, tried out Tiger. “Their Avalon competitor (core video, core image) was hot,” he wrote. “I have the cool widgets (dashboard) running on my MAC right now with all the effects [Jobs] showed on stage. I’ve had no crashes in 5 hours.”
That's like a parody of what a Microsoft hater would say, yet it's an actual quote from Microsoft. Makes me feel sorry for them in retrospect.
It looks pretty similar. There will be people that will think that the Surface is a Microsoft's copy of this device.
Seriously though, Surface is built on Windows, iPad on iOS, so two entirely different approaches to a tablet device.
You see, I can USB-plug almost any Android device into any Windows or Linux machine, and transfer any files either way without installing any software. It just works.
Even with Dropbox, what if it's a 10GB file? Are you going to upload and then download it? Do you not see how ridiculous that is?
I don't, but it sounds like my use case is different from yours, so I guess what seems absurd to you is normal to me and vice versa.
Operating file explorer by touch is a right pain, too many overlapping interactions (mark, drag&drop, scroll).
And right now if i want to use a UWP file manager outside of some designated folders require me to fiddle with the win32 file picker, that share problems with the age old file explorer.
for some users.
For this user, who was enthusiastic to finally get a Mac it was tragic.
I have used and liked
Gnome and Mate in a number of configurations including Gnome 2 and 3.
KDE 3 and 5.
Elementary.
Windows 3.1, 95, 98, xp, 7, 8.1 and 10.
Mac OS X was a productivity nightmare to me for three years.
I still belive that others like it and are more efficient with it but
... please stop talking like this is generally established facts.
My criticism is against mindless repetition of the idea that it is somehow always better or more userfriendly than other modern OSs.
[0]: I swap a lot between programs. I swap using alt-tab. I frequently used to/will have some web-based tool running in in one browser window and the docs for the tool running in another browser window. I prefer keyboard. If I hit the mouse or trackpad I often feel I (or the OS) has failed to learn / adapt.
From what I saw people who enjoy Mac OS X worked at a slower pace than me (although possibly more efficient). They had multiple overlapping windows. They enjoyed using the trackpad and didn't feel the pain of the hunt for the global menu bar.
It is either alt-tab-tab or you lost me.
But you smart and patient guys should feel free to continue using whatever you prefer :-)
- Awkward switching between screens. Waiting for the animation reminds me of those spinning scene transitions in the old Batman TV show [0]. At one point I learned to set the screen animation to be almost instant — there was still an annoying flicker — but the hack stopped working, I looked up another hack, then I got a new Macbook Pro and the notes I had didn't work, and realized I should just stop fighting it. I guess the thing about a "snappy" transition is that you don't see what's happening and could get confused. Makes sense, but very frustrating if you know what you're doing. Now I just amuse myself by mentally playing the Batman transition sound when I switch between workspaces.
Funny thing: early film editors initially thought that cuts needed to be extremely gentle, with explicit cues to help viewers understand that one scene had ended and a new scene was starting. They didn't stick with those techniques for long; it turns out that people are smarter than they anticipated, and they get bored with filler that doesn't move the movie forward! Even a fraction of a second of boilerplate filler to show that a cut has happened (as opposed to moments that serve an artistic purpose) decreases engagement.
- Awkward switching between program windows. If a program has multiple windows, and there's one I really don't care about right now, like an email or document I was working on a few days ago, I don't want to see it randomly popping to the foreground just because I switched to an email or document that I've been working on today. OS X occasionally gets really pushy with me like OH YOU SHOULD REALLY FINISH THIS EMAIL TO YOUR MOM or I HAVEN'T SEEN YOU WORKING ON THIS APP LATELY. Shut up, OS X, I know what window I asked for, and that wasn't it.
- No way to avoid collisions between my keyboard shortcuts and application shortcuts. It's really easy in Linux, thanks somewhat ironically to that Windows key that I cursed when it first appeared. Turns out it's perfect: it's a key that you can bind to window manager shortcuts in full confidence that it will never collide with application keyboard shortcuts. It's a logical division that worked really well with my brain: my window operations and system-level shortcuts all used the same modifier key, and application shortcuts used different modifier keys. You'd think Apple would have something equally elegant, but they don't. You set up key bindings, get attached to them, and then the next program you learn might require you to redo them (or customize application shortcuts to something that makes less sense than the defaults.)
- Menu bar at the top of the screen. I admit this is cliche and somewhat arbitrary, but I was a years-long Apple user, using Apple GUI operating systems all the way back to the Mac Plus and Apple IIgs days, and the instant I saw that Windows programs had menu bars attached to their windows, I realized that's the way it should be. I'm sure other people have the opposite reaction, but I'm an Apple "native speaker" who used Apple GUIs for many years before I saw a Windows machine, and who has used Apple on the desktop almost exclusively for the last six years, yet the menu bar thing still seems weird to me. Why is the menu bar for my program so far away? From a productivity standpoint, on Windows or Linux, if I can see program window, I can visually target the menu. On a Mac, first I have to click the program window, then I can visually target the menu and click on it. It's a small annoyance, but the small annoyances add up.
I'm sure I could go on, but I shouldn't invest more of my morning in complaining :-(
That's huge for content creators.