New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft • Hacker News Board

Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

#481

Post by nogridbag » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 7:00 PM UTC

pcunite wrote: post #363

MatthiasP wrote: post #276

That's what the OEMs get for not being able to put out a laptop that could compete with Apple in all those years, they always managed to introduce some fatal flaw in their premium laptops, from weird keyboard layouts to bad fan management software. Let's hope the Surface Book will be succesful and Apple finally gets serious competition in the premium laptop market.

Exactly this ... outside of ThinkPad, many Windows hardware options have been pretty embarrassing.

I'm relatively unfamiliar with ThinkPads and happened to be looking at them yesterday. Here's my problem with ThinkPads (as well as most other Windows laptop vendors):

http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/?menu-id=laptops

Which ThinkPad are you talking about? ThinkPad X, ThinkPad T, ThinkPad W, ThinkPad Yoga, ThinkPad E, ThinkPad L, or ThinkPad Helix, or ThinkPad 11E?

Let's say we're talking about ThinkPad T.. Which model?

T440p, T450, T450s, T540p, or T550?

And ThinkPad is just one line of Lenovo's products, they also have: Y Series, Z Series, Yoga Series, 500 Series, Flex, Edge, U Series, Lavie, B Series, 100 Series, S Series, G Series, and finally Chromebook.

As a consumer, I have a hard enough time deciding between Surface Pro 4 or Surface Book... or Macbook Air vs Macbook vs Macbook Pro. When presented with so many options from one company I simply close the webpage. After all, how can they possibly make the product as good as MS's offering if they have so many models?

Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

#482

Post by shinji97 » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 7:01 PM UTC

liquidise wrote: post #397

aresant wrote: post #366

Wow, this page is a mess - here's an element based breakdown of the switching elements in their presentation: MSFT: - nav 1 - nav 2 - header with what sounds like a call to action, but no button to buy? - hero image with text overlaid that has terrible contrast nobody will read - inter-page menus with some insane zooming function that scared my browser - another hero image - 3 columns - maybe buttons? no not clickabl…

Page on a full sized browser on a 13" screen with ublock: https://www.dropbox.com/s/gmyi3jjwq25w0d1/surface_book.png?d...

didn't find out why but resizing the browser (from fullscreen to something smaller) fixed this issue. Of course you can resize it back to fullscreen afterwards.

Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

#483

Post by eru_iluvatar » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 7:01 PM UTC

Did anyone notice that this site is rather sexist?

There's not a single image on that site of a woman using the laptop. The closest image is of a person who looks like they could be a woman under the "Key Features" > "Ultimate performance" text block, but since they don't show the person's face there's no way to know.

The only women on the page are at the bottom, being the support woman and the woman sitting next to the man using the laptop.

This is part of the problem that women in STEM have, and as a guy, it's really disappointing to see such a major player in the tech sector do this.

Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

#484

Post by kuschku » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 7:02 PM UTC

ypcx wrote: post #468

MatthiasP wrote: post #276

That's what the OEMs get for not being able to put out a laptop that could compete with Apple in all those years, they always managed to introduce some fatal flaw in their premium laptops, from weird keyboard layouts to bad fan management software. Let's hope the Surface Book will be succesful and Apple finally gets serious competition in the premium laptop market.

Weird keyboard layouts. Shifting the keyboard off-center to include numeric keypad which no one uses anymore. (Gamers? Please stop.) This alone makes one question what exactly they are "smoking". There wasn't a single big Windows laptop on the market that wouldn't fall into this hole of a flaw.

No one uses numeric keyboard? WTF? How’d you enter numbers then, using the number row?

A huge issue with non-standard keyboards are international layouts. German layout is already requiring 2 or 3 keys combined to reach {[]}, but on some laptops you need either 3 or 4 keys combined, or often can’t reach it at all. Equally on most mobile bluetooth keyboards.

It’s as if no one thought about languages using more than US keys.

Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

#485

Post by bcoates » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 7:02 PM UTC

dogma1138 wrote: post #197

creshal wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So they managed to let you hot-plug the GPU while the OS is running? Is that news? I think I've seen similar setup with ExpressCard-based PCIe adapters for desktop graphics cards for a few years now. Thunderbolt also has had hotplug PCIe connections from the beginning. (Less elegant, of course, but the same engineering challenge.)

The seamless part is new, very new once a GPU is initiated it's locked, the fact that they can turn it on and off without a full reboot is quite amazing. If you run a hypervisor setup with multiple GPU's you need to make sure that the UEFI and the hypervisor/main OS do not initialize them until they are passed through to the guest VM and after that you can't recycle them easily and usually need to reboot the host if…

Is that any different from how Windows has restarted the GPU and reloaded the driver whenever a the video driver crashes since Windows 7? I think the new part might just be userland software being able to take advantage.

Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

#486

Post by gcb0 » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 7:02 PM UTC

mpweiher wrote: post #172

togusa wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all there, just different. PowerShell = bash, Chocolatey = homebrew, Windows Server Containers = docker, Hyper-V+powershell = vagrant, DSC = ansible etc etc. I don't use Windows 10 for reference though. Still on 8.1 until they fix a few things and release a version-matched server platform.

> PowerShell = bash While a great fan of PowerShell in theory , in practice it seems to be extremely cumbersome. Sort of the opposite of bash and other Unix shells, which suck in theory and are very useful/convenient/powerful in practice.

yeah, powershell is limited on the backward compatibility with dos. the few times i had to do anything on windows more than that one-off time, i end up installing a sshd (there are a few options) and use putty to localhost.

Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

#487

Post by sethhochberg » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 7:03 PM UTC

swah wrote: post #424

fumar wrote: post #80

As a Surface Pro 3 user, who saves a Macbook Pro for heavy lifting (like video) at home, I can safely say the MB is getting replaced with the Surface Book. Depending on in-person use, it might also replace the Surface Pro 3. I typically watch Apple's and Google's product launches, have to to say this event was concise and unveiled products in a great forward moving momentum. Solid work Msoft marketing team!

I thought video people used OSX due to the apps available?

For the parts of the industry who run Apple's Final Cut, yes - but Avid Media Composer, Adobe Premiere Pro, etc also exist and are used by many video pros without the same platform restrictions as Final Cut.

Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

#488

Post by Veedrac » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 7:03 PM UTC

nextos wrote: post #42

Keats wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I can put Archlinux on that (and keep Windows for tablet mode), I think I've found my next laptop

XMonad, or any other tiling WM, would be lovely for tablet mode too, but probably requires some work.

I know someone who uses a TWM on a tablet, and it works fairly albeit as clunkily as you might expect.

Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

#489

Post by gcb0 » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 7:03 PM UTC

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #339

bitsoda wrote: post #154

I'm not crazy about paying extra for the tablet capability and hinge as I'll only ever use it in laptop mode, also curious that there's no USB-C port. However, I'm glad Microsoft is showing its OEMs what a proper Windows laptop should be. The OEMs have been shitting the bed on this for years.

Well ignoring the software, it looks like the specs beat similarly priced Windows Laptops and Macs, so you're probably not going to pay extra, if you do (say compared to a solid Dell XPS 13 2015 which has different price ranges) it won't be much. Either way, while I appreciate some people will never use tablet form factors much, I was personally pleasantly surprised by the form factor despite being a guy who always b…

i will take regular usb over usb-c for the next five years, thank you.

Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

#490

Post by kuschku » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 7:03 PM UTC

nogridbag wrote: post #481

pcunite wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this ... outside of ThinkPad, many Windows hardware options have been pretty embarrassing.

I'm relatively unfamiliar with ThinkPads and happened to be looking at them yesterday. Here's my problem with ThinkPads (as well as most other Windows laptop vendors): http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/?menu-id=laptops Which ThinkPad are you talking about? ThinkPad X, ThinkPad T, ThinkPad W, ThinkPad Yoga, ThinkPad E, ThinkPad L, or ThinkPad Helix, or ThinkPad 11E? Let's say we're talking about ThinkPad T.. Which…

They can make it better than MS's offering because they are providing you with exactly what you need.

Take for example me, compsci student. I wanted to have a sub-600€ laptop with good hardware and good battery life, but did not care much about display. I ordered a thinkpad, replaced the HDD with an SSD, and am now happy with it.

The trick is called customization: Being better because they can deliver exactly what you need.