Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm relatively unfamiliar with ThinkPads and happened to be looking at them yesterday. Here's my problem with ThinkPads (as well as most other Windows laptop vendors): http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/?menu-id=laptops Which ThinkPad are you talking about? ThinkPad X, ThinkPad T, ThinkPad W, ThinkPad Yoga, ThinkPad E, ThinkPad L, or ThinkPad Helix, or ThinkPad 11E? Let's say we're talking about ThinkPad T.. Which…
They can make it better than MS's offering because they are providing you with exactly what you need. Take for example me, compsci student. I wanted to have a sub-600€ laptop with good hardware and good battery life, but did not care much about display. I ordered a thinkpad, replaced the HDD with an SSD, and am now happy with it. The trick is called customization: Being better because they can deliver exactly what yo…
New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft
511–520 of 989 posts
Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft
#512Earlier quoted context omitted.
Weird keyboard layouts. Shifting the keyboard off-center to include numeric keypad which no one uses anymore. (Gamers? Please stop.) This alone makes one question what exactly they are "smoking". There wasn't a single big Windows laptop on the market that wouldn't fall into this hole of a flaw.
No one uses numeric keyboard? WTF? How’d you enter numbers then, using the number row? A huge issue with non-standard keyboards are international layouts. German layout is already requiring 2 or 3 keys combined to reach {[]}, but on some laptops you need either 3 or 4 keys combined, or often can’t reach it at all. Equally on most mobile bluetooth keyboards. It’s as if no one thought about languages using more than US…
Dell D630: Want to enter numbers? Hold FN, use uiopjkl;m,./ as a numpad. No mode switching.
No one replicated this. Sigh.
Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft
#513I have a surface pro 3 and it's the first windows based machine I've touched in five years and I love the thing. I really want the book now though... The keyboard for the pro 3 is awesome. I really love how solidly the magnetic attachment feels for the keyboard, the backlit keys and the actual mechanical buttons... It's fantastic. I look forward to seeing how the book feels in person
I feel the same way about the Surface 3 Keyboard. I wasn't going to buy one initially, but the cheapest (used) SP3 came with one. Really give me the best of all worlds - tablet for media consumption, detachable keyboard is a viable laptop replacement (trackpad is not great but usable), and the dock gives me a decent desktop replacement (Quad-core i5/8GB RAM/Gigabit Ethernet/USB3/Mini-Displayport gives me everything I need for anything except gaming).
I've also been impressed with MS's customer support - the tip on the Surface Pen broke, and getting a new one UPSed to me only took about 20 minutes (register serial number, then a quick live-chat on the support website).
Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft
#514Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Could be a MBP replacement for developers. The only thing is those of us running on OS X, how is Windows 10? >> I love my command line and linux like commands and tools. - Homebrew - Bash scripts - Docker (Windows 10 currently not supported) - Vagrant I switched from OSX to Windows last year. I thought I'd miss stuff, but you don't. There are package managers like chocolatey to replace homebrew. I use Cmder as my…
I found compiling on Windows always a bit of a PITA. On Linux I just install build-essentials and everything works fine. On Windows I had to install a specific version of VS and fiddle around with the path to get things running. But maybe there is something like the build-essentials package in chocolatey? The terminal command history also feels strange. But I like cls more than clear, haha :D
alias cls='reset -Q && echo'
Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft
#515Could be a MBP replacement for developers. The only thing is those of us running on OS X, how is Windows 10? I love my command line and linux like commands and tools. - Homebrew - Bash scripts - Docker (Windows 10 currently not supported) - Vagrant I just feel the tooling for MS isn't in the direction I am. I still have a Windows 7 desktop and it's just not the same.
I feel the same. The biggest annoyance is not having a better command-line application, at least provide tabs or split-windows. With enough work I can get around not having unix but having open 4 powershells is annoying.
Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft
#516Did anyone notice that this site is rather sexist? There's not a single image on that site of a woman using the laptop. The closest image is of a person who looks like they could be a woman under the "Key Features" > "Ultimate performance" text block, but since they don't show the person's face there's no way to know. The only women on the page are at the bottom, being the support woman and the woman sitting next to…
As a woman in STEM: I don’t give a fuck if the people in the ads using the device are men or women or cats. (Actually, I’d love to see a major manufacturer only use cats in their ads)
We have far bigger problems than this, like, for example, on the one side income equality, and on the other side people trying to fix it by banning wage negotiations. A good way to handle it would be by implementing a system – like VW did – where, up to the interview, the company only sees your CV, qualifications and references, but not age, gender or sex. This is far more useful for us right now than any kind of "let's force ads to contain 50% women"
Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft
#517That's what the OEMs get for not being able to put out a laptop that could compete with Apple in all those years, they always managed to introduce some fatal flaw in their premium laptops, from weird keyboard layouts to bad fan management software. Let's hope the Surface Book will be succesful and Apple finally gets serious competition in the premium laptop market.
"That's what the OEMs get for not being able to put out a laptop that could compete with Apple in all those years"
Exactly. I don't know why it was rocket science, but they had years to clone the MBA (which, imo, is the end of the laptop form factor - it's the platonic ideal of the laptop computer) but they couldn't.
Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft
#518I have been skeptical after a lot of Microsoft misses but the Surface Book Pro might just put Microsoft on the high road. Splitting up the hardware breaks new ground. If I understood it correctly, the GPU is in the keyboard which you can attach to get more power. In detached mode the screen itself has an i7 processor that's plenty powerful. So they managed to let you hot-plug the GPU while the OS is running?
> So they managed to let you hot-plug the GPU while the OS is running? Yes. And I think they said that with DirectX 12 it'll split the load between GPUs when both are connected.
Only if the application supports it.
Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft
#519It's a perfect fit for what I imagined to be a dream laptop for programming: 3:2 high res screen (more vertical space than 16:9 or 16:10), real quad CPU, good battery life, 16GB of RAM. It's light and great looking as well.
The only thing I am missing there and which makes me unlikely to switch is no trackpoint option. I find trackpoint to be so much superior to a trackpad I don't ever want to go back. I even prefer a trackpoint to a mouse these days (and the fact that you don't need to carry it around is just an additional bonuse)
Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft
#520Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do they prevent the Surface Book from toppling over, given that all internals must be in the screen part? It seems this would either double the system weight (due to counterweights) or require an extra stand in the back.
Well the keyboard is in the stand, part of the battery is probably in the stand, all of the ports are in the stand, the dedicated GPU is in the stand, plus the stand actually lays flat while the screen is mostly upright so in any normal position the stand could only be a fraction of the screen and still not cause it to topple right? I guess the combination of all of that and perhaps a little extra counterweight if ne…
Hmm, the fact that all the ports are in the stand sucks.
I like to pull the keyboard off my surface 3 and lean it up against the wall and watch movies on it while still having mouse control from a distance.
What we really need is for every device to have an embedded Logitech controller so I no long need the usb nub dongle