The display has a 3:2 aspect ratio, I hope that means that we slowly move away from 16:9 screens on laptops.
What's wrong with 16:9?
I also prefer 16:10 or 3:2 because 16:9 has a lot less vertical space which is quite important for reading etc.
Introducing Surface Laptop
131–140 of 613 posts
Re: Introducing Surface Laptop
#132They'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…
If this thing could be persuaded to run Linux out of the box with no driver problems, it could be a Macbook killer.
Re: Introducing Surface Laptop
#133I wonder how well Linux will run on this?
Re: Introducing Surface Laptop
#134They'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…
If this laptop can run Linux I'm buying it
Re: Introducing Surface Laptop
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm kind of gobsmacked at that something like Windows 10 S exists. It's like Microsoft doesn't understand that the absolutely enormous quantity of Win32 apps in use is the moat that protects their Windows business from serious competition. Millions and millions of regular people just assume that it's not really safe for their next computer to be a Mac or a Chromebook or what have you, because they're afraid of the ri…
How would you feel if you were a Windows pc maker right now? MSFT commoditized your business and sucked all the profits out of your eco-system until your net margins were 2%, forcing you to cut R&D, Design, etc, and compete in a brutal price war without much hope of unique differentiating features or value. Now MSFT is directly competing with you by so lavishly spending on design that they are years away from making…
>they are years away from making money on their Surface line
Source?
AFAIK they made over $10 billion in revenue on Surface.
Re: Introducing Surface Laptop
#136Installing "Windows 10 S" is like getting one of that ink printers that cost $40, but then you pay $60 for each ink cartridge. To minimize the impact, Microsoft allows for an upgrade to a real version of Windows. It is an smart move, as it lowers the friction to later on remove that possibility completely (I hope that not in this model).
The hardware looks good, but it is another movement towards the "technology tax" where hardware vendors get profit from other company's software development. It is like being a door to door vendor and having to paying 30% of revenue to your car's manufacturer. Internet Service Providers tried this and failed, hardware manufacturers succeeded.
Re: Introducing Surface Laptop
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Handing them a laptop and having them go wild is exactly the way to do it. If they brick it, they have to work out how to fix it. As one of the kids who was lucky enough to get a BBC Micro, I had zero support. No-one else in my family even knew how to turn it on. No teacher at my school could support me because none of them knew how it worked either. If I broke it, I had to fix it. And no Stack Overflow, so no code t…
> As one of the kids who was lucky enough to get a BBC Micro, I had zero support. No-one else in my family even knew how to turn it on. No teacher at my school could support me because none of them knew how it worked either. If I broke it, I had to fix it. And no Stack Overflow, so no code to copy-paste. I had to go back to first principles every time and work out what went wrong and how I could make it go right.
What is this weird obsession that we have with making children do everything the hard way? I understand that we want them to apply critical thinking and for them to grow into self-sufficiency, but why do we suggest these archaic hazing rituals?
We've made strides in many areas of technology. We have the power to troubleshoot a non-working laptop, unsuccessfully diagnose, and then re-image it to a saved state in less than a school day. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be consequences, but I think we can put Timmy's time to better use.
Re: Introducing Surface Laptop
#138Is 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.
That's honestly the route Microsoft needs to stop taking.
Microsofts hardware partners have shown time and time again that they will sell extremely low quality hardware just to hit certain price brackets. Many of the complains people have about Windows is often down to poor quality and low performance hardware.
At least HP would rather sell you a piece of crap laptop that can't actually run Windows, than admit that it's not actually possible to deliver at the price point the customer asks for.
Re: Introducing Surface Laptop
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Handing them a laptop and having them go wild is exactly the way to do it. If they brick it, they have to work out how to fix it. As one of the kids who was lucky enough to get a BBC Micro, I had zero support. No-one else in my family even knew how to turn it on. No teacher at my school could support me because none of them knew how it worked either. If I broke it, I had to fix it. And no Stack Overflow, so no code t…
Which is all well and good until my students aren't able to - you know - do basic educational tasks because their computer 'is broken'. If I - as a teacher - can do an immediate 'restore to neutral state' with core educational files and programs retained then by all means open them up. Otherwise, I have to be curmudgeon and say that the existence of the computer in the classroom is to more effectively complete educat…
The Chromebook 'powerwash' seems to fulfill this requirement nicely[1] - you can even let students drop the machine into Developer mode, play with Crouton[2] and so on, and if (when) things go wrong, poof, a single chord at startup and you're back.
1: https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/183084?hl=en
2: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton
Re: Introducing Surface Laptop
#140They'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…
> You can upgrade Windows 10 S to ordinary Windows 10 Pro for $50.
While the Home to Pro upgrade costs double that? Strange.