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Introducing Surface Book 2

blogs.windows.com

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Re: Introducing Surface Book 2

#461

Post by skinnymuch »

WalterSear wrote: post #386
nikanj wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Latency 2) Developing custom hardware that needs to be attached to dev box 3) No rage when the wifi at the airport sucks 4) etc Even though you don't need lots of power, there's plenty of solid and valid reasons why others might.

Exactly: a few reasons. Moreover 1. latency is low enough that people are playing triple AAA video games on AWS for a $1/hr. https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-ow... 2. Sure, that's a good reason. It had better be spewing out lots of data, though, or again, you might as well process in the cloud. 3. Being able to access your workstation via airport wifi at all is actually a benefit in this case…

Latency is still annoying. I prefer VMs still.

Regarding your number 3. For a lot of this, we are talking about devices like the MacBook Pro line. Not huge workstations.

Re: Introducing Surface Book 2

#462

Post by skinnymuch »

damnyou wrote: post #326
masklinn wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if anything it's more comfortable than OSX since you get up-to-date GNU versions rather than older GNU tools. 1. By and large, OSX ships the BSD userland not GNU 2. You can trivially add up-to-date GNU tools to OSX: install homebrew, install whichever GNU stuff you want

I have better things to do with my life than prefix every command with a g.

You don't have to. Many of the commands that you install have simple work arounds so you can use the same command.

Re: Introducing Surface Book 2

#463

Post by robotresearcher »

baldfat wrote: post #409
mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incorrect. Both Apple laptops and mice support right-click out of the box. You can configure it from the System Settings -> Mouse / Trackpad.

> right-click out of the box. You can configure it from the System Settings -> Mouse / Trackpad That's not out of the box :) But an Apple Mouse can not have right click added it physically has one button but it does it in software and it doesn't work or it button bounces whenever I have tried. 95% of all Mac I have ever seen or used have Official Mice.

It is enabled by default.

Re: Introducing Surface Book 2

#464

Post by abrookewood »

skywhopper wrote: post #66

This is a good example of how Microsoft often does marketing poorly. The text reads like a script for an in-person product launch. On the page it doesn't even make sense "When you think about Microsoft and you hear our mission – to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more – it’s powerful." What? And then after all of that, you click through to the store and there's no pricing informat…

All valid points, but I think the embedded video does a good job of marketing the product.

Re: Introducing Surface Book 2

#465

Post by jamesrcole »

dandare wrote: post #25
trothamel wrote: post #12

A bit of headline fail there: "Introducing Surface Book 2, the most powerful Surface Book ever" Out of the two of them so far?

Thank you Apple for introducing this meaningless phrase to humanity's discourse.

It's not meaningless. There's two reasons.

Improvements along a particular dimension aren't always a given. If they said "Introducing the Apple iPhone 8 Plus, the lightest iPhone ever" they'd be lying. You can't assume that a newer model of something is always going to be more powerful.

Language isn't purely literal. Especially when there's a limited number of words to market to people. You can't write a 10 000 essay. So mentioning a detail isn't just to communicate the literal facts, it's to highlight details, point out significant details. So when someone says "it's the most X ever" they are saying that the improvements are significant enough to make them notable.

Re: Introducing Surface Book 2

#466

Post by digi_owl »

darklajid wrote: post #108
digi_owl wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there are laptop Ryzen variants out yet, thus the only "laptops" that exist use desktop Ryzen variants and are squarely aimed at gamers.

Lenovo A475[1] is using a mobile version afaict. Unfortunately .. it's based on Bristol. HP Envy x360 [2] seems to come out ~soon~ based on Raven, but the outlets/the community seems concerned that they'll limit those to single-channel. Which according to reviews in the past severely cripples the whole setup. That said, details aren't out so maybe HP does the right thing.. So potentially two options I'm aware of, one…

That reminds me. I got kinda burned by AMDs laptop APUs a while back. This because the laptop i have seems to route the external screen through the iGPU, and AMD discontinued support for it quite early because it was a variant of their older GPU models.

Thus i am stuck using their older driver pack, and ever so often i have to beat back Windows trying to auto-update the driver...

Re: Introducing Surface Book 2

#467

Post by wlesieutre »

scholia wrote: post #415
olyjohn wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that they did it in the first place is enough for most people. An apology hardly covers the potential for damage. All in the name of some bundled shitware to make them a few extra bucks. Totally inexcusable, and I don't see why people jump in to defend them at all.

You also don't see why someone should jump in to correct a wrong statement? Either way, the potential for damage wasn't that obvious: it could have happened to any company. (Employees often make commercial decisions without understanding the technical ramifications.) Also, Superfish said it wasn't its fault: it blamed Komodo's tool. This amounts to a similar type of buck-passing. I've bought a couple of Lenovo machin…

>I also know that if I wasn't happy with the installation, I could download Windows 10 from Microsoft and do a clean installation.

You’d think so. It turns out not though.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150812/11395231925/lenov...

Re: Introducing Surface Book 2

#468

Post by wlesieutre »

rbanffy wrote: post #405
singularity2001 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for some reaon Chinese spyware tastes appaling

If you install a decent OS replacing the one it comes with, there won't be any malware (at leat not the kind we knew about)

Just linked this in another comment, but I’ll post it here too: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150812/11395231925/lenov...

Short version, manufacturers can use a feature called WPBT to load executables into your “clean” Windows installation from firmware. It’s intended for providing drivers.

Re: Introducing Surface Book 2

#469

Post by imh »

landr0id wrote: post #168
markcmyers wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former advertising executive, I can tell you what the problem is here. The writer and his boss who approved the copy aren't addressing the customer, they're addressing the boss's boss. In a dysfunctional organization like Microsoft, communicating up rather than out is how you get promoted. It's a rare Microsoft employee who moves up the ladder by thinking about the customer.

Well in fairness, the link points to the Windows blog. The actual marketing page should probably be the link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-book...

Well that ad's great. It has a footnote giving caveats to the very first sentence!

Re: Introducing Surface Book 2

#470

Post by mantis369 »

amadeusw wrote: post #438
seabrookmx wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting the Dell Precision 5520, which uses the same chassis as the XPS 15. It comes in a few different configurations that aren't available in the XPS. Mine is the last-gen 5510 (same chassis but with an i7-6820HQ), and I was able to get a 1080p screen (for battery life and to avoid scaling issues) and 32gb of RAM only in the Precision, not the XPS.

I never considered the Precision line. I just saw that I can customize pretty much everything about it - cool! I'm considering getting it. How is it in your experience? Are there any bios or driver issues? Did you try installing linux? (I have twitter link in my profile for DM)

Beware the throttling. You get that i7 or Xeon performance for the first 45 seconds of the compile, and then that and the testing (or encoding, or whatever) go down to i5 performance or worse.
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