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Introducing Surface Laptop

blogs.windows.com

61–70 of 613 posts

Re: Introducing Surface Laptop

#61
post #33

Is this really a Chromebook competitor with a price starting at $999?

"New Windows 10 Education PCs will be coming out soon from partners including Asus, Samsung, Dell, and HP, starting at $189." The Surface Laptop isn't meant to compete with those. Like everything else in the Surface line, it's more of an example to the rest of the industry of what kind of devices they could/should be building for Windows to run on.

189 will be low res & atom based but I guess you get what you pay for.

Re: Introducing Surface Laptop

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though it's unlikely they'll want to maintain another distribution for Windows while most Windows users are still on Windows 7.

I'm not sure how easily win32 apps can be ported to the store, might be worth the trouble.

As long as your app doesn't do anything too esoteric, it's easy.

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/bridges/deskto...

Re: Introducing Surface Laptop

#63
Really, really disappointed by the lack of Windows on ARM news. All the rumors were pointing to it, but it looks like we're stuck with Intel.

Not that Intel is bad, and its gotten better on mobile, but still, legitimate choice would be nice.

Re: Introducing Surface Laptop

#64
This seems like a couple years too late. Just from specs alone there are better laptops coming out of China today from Xiamo, Chuwi, etc. Stuff like the Xiaomi Mi book (https://www.engadget.com/2016/07/27/xiaomi-mi-notebook-air-l...) or Chuwi Lapbook (http://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-laptops-chuwi-prices...) that are thinner, lighter, have high resolution displays, etc. and that cost significantly less than $999. This just looks like something forgettable that will be lost in a sea of middling Windows ultrabooks.

Re: Introducing Surface Laptop

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you put Electron apps in Windows store so they could run on Windows 10 S?

The Windows Store already supports HTML/JS-based apps, but not using electron. (It uses Microsoft Edge's engine IIRC)

Let's be honest though, no one is going through the trouble to port their app to Windows 10 only HTML and JS. I don't think MS has even talked about that stack at their recent developer conferences.

Re: Introducing Surface Laptop

#66
post #30

They're now demoing the Surface Laptop. Thinner than a MacBook Air. Faster than a MacBook Pro. Longer battery life than either. The downside? "Windows 10 S", which only runs apps from the Windows Store. The upside over Windows RT from the Windows 8 era? You can port Win32 apps to the Store today, don't think you could back then. Edit: You can upgrade Windows 10 S to ordinary Windows 10 Pro for $50. Laptops that run W…

Given the target market (schools) I think not being able to install downloaded software is only a good thing. Also, did you see the performance demo? 10s was significantly faster than 10 Pro. Not sure about the $999 for the cheapest model however. Does it include an Office 365 subscription?

> Given the target market (schools) I think not being able to install downloaded software is only a good thing.

Except that giving kids unfettered access to their computers allows them to flourish. See: BBC Micro, Raspberry Pi, Apple ][, the list goes on.

Re: Introducing Surface Laptop

#67

They're now demoing the Surface Laptop. Thinner than a MacBook Air. Faster than a MacBook Pro. Longer battery life than either. The downside? "Windows 10 S", which only runs apps from the Windows Store. The upside over Windows RT from the Windows 8 era? You can port Win32 apps to the Store today, don't think you could back then. Edit: You can upgrade Windows 10 S to ordinary Windows 10 Pro for $50. Laptops that run W…

Can you put Electron apps in Windows store so they could run on Windows 10 S?

There's an automated packager for the Centennial/Desktop Bridge: https://github.com/felixrieseberg/electron-windows-store

Slack in the Windows Store is packaged by that. It packages the Win32 executable, so it only runs on Desktop environments.

If your codebase is adaptable enough, you can often run directly on the Windows 10 Native HTML+JS stack and cross-compile to that, either directly or maybe through Cordova if you want mobile platform reach.

(I'm wishing there were more convergence between the Electron and Cordova stacks, but writing portable code that mostly runs on both isn't terribly difficult. Every now and then it would be great to have a Cordova plugin in Electron or vice versa.)

Re: Introducing Surface Laptop

#68
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the target market (schools) I think not being able to install downloaded software is only a good thing. Also, did you see the performance demo? 10s was significantly faster than 10 Pro. Not sure about the $999 for the cheapest model however. Does it include an Office 365 subscription?

> Given the target market (schools) I think not being able to install downloaded software is only a good thing. Except that giving kids unfettered access to their computers allows them to flourish. See: BBC Micro, Raspberry Pi, Apple ][, the list goes on.

Except that having each kid able to brick their computer leads to significant problems for IT in debugging everyone's computer. As well as letting them move away from educational material extremely easily.

I agree that great things can happen when kids can truly explore their computer and take away the 'magic', but just handing all kids a laptop and having them go wild is not the way to do it. I don't what is, to be fair.

Re: Introducing Surface Laptop

#69
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the target market (schools) I think not being able to install downloaded software is only a good thing. Also, did you see the performance demo? 10s was significantly faster than 10 Pro. Not sure about the $999 for the cheapest model however. Does it include an Office 365 subscription?

> Given the target market (schools) I think not being able to install downloaded software is only a good thing. Except that giving kids unfettered access to their computers allows them to flourish. See: BBC Micro, Raspberry Pi, Apple ][, the list goes on.

It allows some of them to flourish. The rest of them just wreck the computer.
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