Once a machine gets old, I usually donate it to somebody who can use it further. In that regard, my Surface Book 2 is one purchase that I wholly regret. Once the battery dies there is no way it can be replaced - not even by Microsoft. They just send you a refurbished piece for $500.

This expensive machine contains high quality components. For the sake of the environment, it should be illegal. I will never buy Microsoft again.

The other thing Surface does wrong is no Thunderbolt. I wouldn't buy a laptop without Thunderbolt ever again because being able to attach a new GPU extends its usefulness by years. I can still play games on my 2013 13" MBP using Thunderbolt 2, anything with 6+ cores and TB3 is going to be competent for a very long time.

Absolutely agree here. However the change from surface laptop 2 to surface laptop 3 made it a lot more repairable. Hopefully this years model will have an easily replaceable internal battery.

The Surface Book line is more akin to a tablet than a laptop as the guts of that machine are still in the screen, much like the Surface Pro. I don't think it's unreasonable that there isn't in the way of repairability given its tablet form factor.

Don't get me wrong, I'm disappointed myself in this product, but it doesn't take away from the successes elsewhere in the Surface product line.

when i bought my laptop, foremost on my list of features to look for was actually having the ability to open it up and replace parts (RAM, HD, Battery, etc).

Unfortunately, Microsoft went the same direction as Apple with the Surface Book (minimal to zero repairability).

It’s frustratingly hard to find a modern laptop with a replaceable battery. Which laptop did you get?

unfortunately, I was unable to find one with a replaceable battery. I, at least, got one with other replaceable parts, though. I got the HP ENVY 15z (Ryzen 2500u).

Thanks for letting me know. It’s so frustrating that laptops don’t have replaceable batteries these days as the batteries will last for much less time than the rest of the laptop. Plus, if you use your laptop plugged into the ac socket most the time like I do, this is not good for battery life and this could also be avoided if the battery was removable.

Oh even better, the Surface Book. I much prefer that form factor over traditional ones.

The Surface Book 3 is expected to be announced shortly, but early rumors and leaks point to Intel. But a boy can dream!

I get a feeling that was the plan all along.

With AMD processors in the next Xbox, they'd have pretty good visibility already on the AMD offerings coming.

I think ARM based Surface RT was a similar plan, getting in early on ARM to be ready for when their performance matched Intel. It's a shame of course that Qualcomm never got there, and it was only Apple that kept ramping ARM processor performance.

Yes. This would also make me consider moving from a Mac.

Are you on a Mac just because of the CPU?

What do you do that solely depends on the CPU and would improve so much by moving to AMD, at the cost of a completely different OS and software?

It would still be beleaguered by Windows, the main reason most of us moved to Macs. :)

I mean honestly the only reason I would stay with Mac would be the 4 TB3 ports, the heat and performance of MacOS pales in comparison to their Windows software production counterparts.

macOS' thermal management of macOS appears to be better than Windows': https://youtu.be/LGOmbNRlZdM?t=495 (8:15)

It also gives a better battery life on average compared to Windows on the same machine.

And the new Mac Pro is apparently a beast in performance and cooling.

I will say I consistently get better benchmark scores on CPU in macOS than Windows, but anything that involves the GPU is hilariously poor on macOS compared to Windows.

> but anything that involves the GPU

Even on Metal?

> It also gives a better battery life on average compared to Windows on the same machine.

Only if you have a dedicated gpu. Because OSX can easily switch between integrated and discrete.

On my Macbook 12" I get 2 extra hours out of Windows 10. But on my old Retina Mac Pro I get almost half the time out of Windows 10.

It's a shame that Apple wont go AMD because the battery life would be awesome on OSX with discrete gpu.

> It's a shame that Apple wont go AMD

I think they're probably just gonna go with their own custom ARM processors, which may have even better battery life.

I feel like going to ARM will alienate the customer base of developers that Apple has, won't it?

The developers that use XCode with Objective-C probably won't feel any difference as XCode will likely just silently compile the code into ARM (or both a la universal package from PPC days). It's too early to tell though.

there are a lot of programmers that use mac OS that don't even touch Swift or Objective-C. I'm in the web development industry, and I'd say 50% of the developers I know use apple computers for their job. Java, Ruby, even C#.

After Java/Ruby/C# runtimes are recompiled for ARM, these guys not gonna feel any change as well.

that seems a little simplistic. It isn't just the runtimes, but also all the tooling that goes with it. There would be a lot of work involved with recompiling all tooling and runtimes to work on ARM, and would probably alienate a large portion of developers currently using Apple products as a result.

This was already done twice in the past, once on transition from Motorola 68000 to PowerPC, and once on transition from PowerPC to Intel. All arrived with updated versions of interpreted language runtimes. We'll have to see what will they do this time.

I thought MS Surfaces use ARM chips?

Surface Book uses Core i5/i7.

Surface Pro uses Core i3/i5/i7.

Surface Laptop uses Core i5/i7 or AMD Ryzen 5/7.

Surface Go uses Pentium Gold.

Surface Studio uses Core i7.

They experimented with that on a few models in the early days of Surface machines, but quickly gave up.

They tried again with surface pro x:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/6/20950487/microsoft-surfac...

The Surface Pro X that was released last year uses an ARM64 processor.