481–490 of 613 posts
Only one question for Microsoft: touchpad. I have a Macbook and touchpads are just vastly superior to anything else in the market. If they nailed this, they have a new customer.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/pc-oems-ditch-the-cu...
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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.
It's not a "sexy" stack to talk about, but I don't think it is going anywhere. There are quite a few Windows Store applications built on it, including several first party applications from Microsoft themselves. It's a quiet workhorse stack that does the job and gets out of the way. So quiet I don't think people often realize when an app is built on it.
But why not?
The singular issue with electron is how fucking huge the simplest of apps have to be. I see desktop HTML/JS as a RUNTIME being a very near-future standard.
I'm sure electron has thought about it. It couldn't possibly be any bigger of a hassle than the java runtime.
Do any of you have children at a school using Google Chromebooks and Google Drive? Calling Windows S a Chromebook competitor completely misses the point. Chromebooks are instant on, and your profile/data is 100% cloud based. You can grab any Chromebook from the rack in the back of the classroom, open it up, log in and immediately get to work on your report or whatever. I got an original Chromebook from Google I/O yea…
Is Google drive still free for only three years? Are you past three years yet, and, if so, what is the monthly cost per user / per Chromebook?
A surface pro/book is a fully functional laptop which could eliminate the need for carrying around large piles of papers/notes.
Take that away and what you have left is just a regular laptop (with a touchscreen that's rarely used).
There's probably a market for this but it's not going to be college students.
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…
If this thing could be persuaded to run Linux out of the box with no driver problems, it could be a Macbook killer.
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>they are years away from making money on their Surface line Source? AFAIK they made over $10 billion in revenue on Surface.
Outside of the startup world, "making money" generally is understood to mean PROFITS not "revenue".
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This is purely personal, but I don't buy laptop solely for its form-factor. What sells the MBP to me is the operating system and frankly that is what keeps me from buying a windows laptop too. In the end I'm ok with paying a premium for a laptop that just works 90% of the time. MBP usually last very long (I still use a early 2011 machine), so the cost is amortized.
> a laptop that just works 90% of the time That sounds horrible...
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I'm not sure how easily win32 apps can be ported to the store, might be worth the trouble.
Note that Google Chrome was previously available with a "Metro app version" during Win 8 but they retired it.
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HS student (15) here. Occasionally use chromebooks when we have time in class to work on the assignment.
What is the overall sentiment like for them? I recently interacted with a high school kid that was given a school-provided chromebook that had the most inane website filters following him around, the USB ports literally disabled, and tons of hoops to jump through to accomplish simple tasks. For such a locked down platform, you really would think they wouldn't have to pull this shit.
The web filter is minimal (porn, pretty much), but that's just the district wifi (opendns), not the chromebooks themselves.