Live data from Hacker News

Introducing Surface Book 2

blogs.windows.com

151–160 of 520 posts

Re: Introducing Surface Book 2

#151
post #17

The pricing is brutal.[1] About $100-$300 more than the 15" Macbook Pro with the same amount of storage. The base model is particularly shameful, with only 8GB of RAM. The base MBP is 16GB for $100 less. You can't configure the RAM amount, so $2,900 is the cheapest 15" model with 16GB. [1] Or perhaps it's more that the configuration options are really inflexible, with every configuration having the highest-end CPU an…

The MBP doesn't have a touchscreen with pro-grade digitizer.

Re: Introducing Surface Book 2

#152
I wonder how accurate their battery life claims are, I highly doubt 17 hours of battery life with a nvidia Getz 1060 video card, I would love to be proved wrong thought.

Re: Introducing Surface Book 2

#153
post #83
post #21

Looks like a proper MacBook Pro replacement HW wise, but the OS is not one I would use for work.. =/ So attached to OSX for the past 6 years and cannot see me using a windows OS for work , but at home only for gaming. The new MacBook Pro has many flaws. Not sure how this compares in real use for it?

Gaming, the world has changed and this generation of Apple users has way more Gamers then what they had before. Why do they continue to ignore Gamers on the Mac Platform.

One saving grace here is that switching to OSX helped me quit my gaming addiction.

Re: Introducing Surface Book 2

#154
post #29
post #17

The pricing is brutal.[1] About $100-$300 more than the 15" Macbook Pro with the same amount of storage. The base model is particularly shameful, with only 8GB of RAM. The base MBP is 16GB for $100 less. You can't configure the RAM amount, so $2,900 is the cheapest 15" model with 16GB. [1] Or perhaps it's more that the configuration options are really inflexible, with every configuration having the highest-end CPU an…

With that price you get "twice as powerful as the latest MacBook Pro. ...up to 17 hours of video playback. That’s 70% more than the latest MacBook Pro."

The “twice as powerful” is almost certainly just about the GPU. The CPU is a U series part versus the HQ series part in the MBP.

Re: Introducing Surface Book 2

#155

So many negative comments just because it's Microsoft. If you don't like the OS, obviously this machine is not for you. Personally I think it looks nice, but I have a Surface Pro 2 that works just perfectly fine and I love it. The hardware on it is still good and I don't see any reason to upgrade.

I think that in itself speaks to the quality of the Surface device line... I myself have the first Surface Book, and I will likely upgrade to the 2 at some point, but not because my current device doesn't serve me well... I'm glad this thing is still working like new and I don't have huge urges to upgrade because I suddenly feel inferior, like some other tech companies try to pull... EDIT: Don't work for MS, just a h…

Yes, the machines they produce is very high quality and lasts a very long time. Longer than any other laptop I have used. Even if I have used it for quite some time it still feel fresh and performant.

Re: Introducing Surface Book 2

#156
post #21

Looks like a proper MacBook Pro replacement HW wise, but the OS is not one I would use for work.. =/ So attached to OSX for the past 6 years and cannot see me using a windows OS for work , but at home only for gaming. The new MacBook Pro has many flaws. Not sure how this compares in real use for it?

I'm the same. I'm not at all interested in the new Macbook Pros with the touch bar and crappy keyboard, and the Surface Book 2 looks amazing. I don't even actually like macOS that much any more. And Windows has the Linux subsystem!

But. I need to do iOS development from time to time. At the very least, I need to be able to test web pages in Mac browsers. I can run a Windows VM on a Mac very easily, but I can't run a Mac VM inside Windows very easily. Sigh.

Re: Introducing Surface Book 2

#158
post #73
post #21

Looks like a proper MacBook Pro replacement HW wise, but the OS is not one I would use for work.. =/ So attached to OSX for the past 6 years and cannot see me using a windows OS for work , but at home only for gaming. The new MacBook Pro has many flaws. Not sure how this compares in real use for it?

I tried to switch to Windows for work (for gaming it's the obvious choice) but I just couldn't. Windows 10 is IMO the best Windows ever, but I was surprised that the ecosystem was really poor compared to macOS. Most of the software you find online are outdated win32 apps with scaling problems. Even modern software from major companies still has scaling problems such as Adobe CC or even the mighty Photoshop. I also di…

Oddly enough I think mac and windows switched professional users somehow. I don't know a single developer on a windows machine, however most people I know working in 3d, digital illustration or video work all use windows machines now.

Re: Introducing Surface Book 2

#159
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What issues did you face?

A better question is, what issues didn't I face? Unlocking randomly wouldn't work, the display driver was crashing when using firefox/chrome consistently, battery life was abysmal, device would bluescreen, etc. From what I understand they finally patched most of these out after more than a year. No need to go on that roller coaster again.

Yes, from my experience all that eventually got fixed. For the first six months that I owned my surface book, I continued to use my rMBP. But by now, I really do enjoy using it as my primary computer. What I like most about it is using it with two external monitors connected to the expansion dock. I flip the screen around on my suface book and then place it in the middle between the external monitors and hook up a wireless keyboard and mouse. This triple monitor mode is awesome and perfect for doing some sketching or use my programming IDE on the surface book while having the other two monitors available for productivity. I replicated this setup at the office and home and now I can't imagine going back.

Re: Introducing Surface Book 2

#160
post #36

Any experiences with dual booting in to Linux on the Surface Book? I can imagine some things, like detaching not working optimally, but does it work at all?

I've used Linux on a Surface 3 so I imagine it'll be a similar story for the Book: many things won't play as nice as they would under Windows (sleeping when closing it, WiFi), things like the touch screen might not play ball, and the graphics drivers might not work.

Linux 4.9 aimed to make the Surface usable, but I haven't found a distro that played with the Wifi drivers nicely (would work for a few minutes, then would shut off, become unresponsive, and required a hard reboot to get working again). There is a Fedora Surface image that many suggest works really well on Surfaces, but I couldn't get it to boot.

Now I just prefer using a Virtualbox image to do all my Linux stuff. It's easier to set up and requires far less rebooting.

Post reply on HN