Live data from Hacker News

New Surface Pro

microsoft.com

391–400 of 606 posts

Re: New Surface Pro

#391
post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's certainly true. Apple included the ports that people will use the most, at some point in what they believe to be the justifiably near future (we'll see!), and they naturally support adapters for those who need what are currently the more popular ports. So with the Surface Pro you're probably buying adapters one to two years from now, whereas with the MacBook you're probably buying those adapters today. Whether…

That’s so short sighted. Sure, if we stick with what everyone uses now everyone will be supported. They only way to move towards those greener pastures is to have companies actually support them. MS hasn’t supported the port, and is intentionally taking a swipe at Apple “people who love USB-C love dongles.” To me implies they know what they’re dong and are trying to reap the benefits of the inevitable awkwardness of…

It was only a commentary on whether buying adapters/dongles or converting to new hardware now vs. later doesn't (or shouldn't) matter to users individually, not a suggestion that USB-C adoption shouldn't concern users in a more collective sense.

For what it's worth if I was in the market for a Surface Pro I think I'd have also preferred USB-C, given its momentum.

Re: New Surface Pro

#392
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter-example: I worked in ML research at one of the largest companies in the field (in the billions of predictions per day) and 16GB was more than enough to do anything I would ever do on a laptop/tablet/etc.. Furthermore, I found that solutions which couldn't be successfully worked on with Basically, when the difference between a dev sample and a prod sample is 3+ orders of magnitude, your ability to scale the pr…

I'm not crunching big data in development or doing much with graphics (other than occasional faffing on some image editor). What I'm running is a lot of local servers. Each server has overhead even if you are only storing one byte of data. ie I'm running Rails, MySQL, Elastic, Redis, Nginx, Memcached, and in some cases, multiple instances (dev, test, and multiple shards) And then the usual OS requirements - Vim, 250…

Dev-Prod parity is probably the best reason to want the extra power, but then you're just limiting your software to the lowest common denominator between mobile computing and a server farm. At the end of the day, if you want to take advantage of the big guns, you will have to sacrifice mobility or parity and spend some good time on devOps. And even an extra 16GB won't get you around that.

Also, 250 tabs? dayum. I don't know how anyone could effectively use that many tabs. I don't think thats what browsers/laptops are designed for. My mind memory of just the tabs would be saturated long before the laptop's.

Re: New Surface Pro

#393

I've been using a Surface Pro 3 as my one-and-only for almost 3 years, and it really feels like time to upgrade, so I've been looking forward to this one. My workload is probably something like 40% reading, 30% writing, 25% coding, and 5% running code, and the Surface has been a nearly ideal form factor for this. The new "Surface Pro" ticks a lot of boxes for me: - Supports my existing keyboard, pen, dock, and power…

Why would you even want to upgrade if you don't need the performance?

Re: New Surface Pro

#394
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what sort of coding do you do on the spro? I'm going to be buying a new laptop / ultraportable / tablet in the near future, and I'm curious about this. Can you comfortably run some kind of linux VM on it? What kind of external keyboard does it support? How does the display hold up in moderate lighting conditions? For a lot of work, I've got a desktop, but I use my 2013 mbp at cafes and such. I mostly do node and fron…

Is the i7 a quad-core or dual-core? Java development + a VM really needs a more power than the 13" competition can provide.

Dual-core U series. Really barely higher performance compared to the i5.

Re: New Surface Pro

#395
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you buy an Apple laptop, and need a repair, they'll fix it if it's in warranty, regardless of where you are." This can be misleading. I bought my Macbook Air in Portugal, had 2y warranty there. Then moved to the UK and the brick stopped working. Went to an Apple Store and since it was after the 1y warranty offered when you buy it in the UK, they rejected replacing it for me. Eventually went to Portugal to visit m…

There is (currently) a two-year EU-mandated warranty, Apple was even taken to court for not emphasizing this enough when selling AppleCare.

Detail worth knowing: under the EU warranty the first year is covered by the manufacturer, the second by the reseller. If you buy a MacBook outside an Apple Store, after the first year you're supposed to bring it back to the place you bought it. There is even a difference between ordering it online through apple.com and buying it at the brick and mortar Apple Store as those are legally not the same. In practice though I have never had a problem having it fixed on the spot at an Apple Store but this is mostly because Apple cares about their customers.

Re: New Surface Pro

#397

Look I'm a fan but until I see it running some real heavy artillery (Ableton Live 9 Suite, Massive, AmpliTube, and a half-dozen VSTs) in real-time vs. the competition, then it's just another hollow claim. Sure, hardware and performance are getting better. Sure, the Surface Dial is a massive game changer in the long term. But, look, the problem with marketing to creative people is that they take it sort of as a challe…

I'm a fairly professional creative myself and have been using Surface products to do my work for the last 4~ years almost exclusively. Heavy Photoshop work, lots of video editing, 3D modeling & rendering, etc. Sure, I'd love to have 32GB of memory and an even more powerful machine in general, but I've been damn happy with all of the Surface products I've owned.

I would love to hear your feedback on the new Surface Pen features. Keep up the great work!

Re: New Surface Pro

#398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had really bad experience with Surface Pro 3 (lots of hardware and software issues), but I have to say this: Microsoft is trying to do the right thing here. There is no reason tablets should be dumb-down media consumption devices when they have computing power equivalent to desktop PCs of a few years ago. But to be used as real computers they must have keyboard and stylus by default and must allow to install arbitr…

Surface Pros run Windows 10, so they have the same UI as other computers. I don't see the problem?

Something that works well for a desktop with a large monitor, keyboard and mouse doesn't necessarily work well for a tablet with a relatively small touchscreen and vise versa.

Re: New Surface Pro

#399
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people are missing a point here. The game itself runs perfectly fine on a 7 year old CPU and 8GB of ram(it might run on 4GB but I haven't tested this personally). - I'd say the actual game client is optimized extremely well. Is it really shocking that dev machines have a lot of ram? If someone works in full frame photography or edits 4K video, do you tell them to try working on machines with 4GB of ram to see…

> You're not going to fly a desktop over the Atlantic just for a games conference. Why not fly just an encrypted SSD with the game and buy desktop at the location?

I suppose that would work, but a one-time big laptop purchase that is then owned by the studio is easier to justify than buying a machine abroad(not to mention you can test that the laptop works several times before going, a brand new desktop might/might not work and people usually arrive a day or two before a conference so it's not like there's loads of time to debug problems before the big show).

Re: New Surface Pro

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you buy an Apple laptop, and need a repair, they'll fix it if it's in warranty, regardless of where you are." This can be misleading. I bought my Macbook Air in Portugal, had 2y warranty there. Then moved to the UK and the brick stopped working. Went to an Apple Store and since it was after the 1y warranty offered when you buy it in the UK, they rejected replacing it for me. Eventually went to Portugal to visit m…

I bought a MacBook in the UK and some time later when I was in the US they keyboard became faulty. I walked in to a US Apple store and explained the problem. The Genius person agreed there was a fault and then started tapping away at their computer. He umm'ed and ahh'ed and called over a manager. At this point I was thinking they were going to reject the warranty repair for some reason, but the manager ended up apolo…

counter example.

I had to take my MacBook in three times durnig its life, for the same issue (wifi/bt issues because of aircard connection to VM)

Every single time I was told to make an appointment. Which take about 3 days to get. They took the laptop and spend a week fixing it (every time!) My experience at Multiple Apple stores in Southren Ontario.

Post reply on HN