New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft • Hacker News Board

Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

#881

Post by Theodores » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 3:59 AM UTC

sampo wrote: post #655

nogridbag wrote: post #481

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…

> Let's say we're talking about ThinkPad T.. Which model? > T440p, T450, T450s, T540p, or T550? T450s. When looking for a competitor to Apple, go for the T-series, but also take a look at the X-series. T5XX has 15" screen and numpad in the keyboard, so unless you like numpad, forget those. 440 is the older series, before it there was 430 series, and presently 450 is the current line. "p" stands for "performance", bas…

Compared to the Yoga 2 (or is it 3?) non-pro (proper HD rather than faux retina or faux HD), the 'proper' Thinkpad is a generation of CPU behind with half the RAM and double the price.

The backlit 'chicklet' keyboard on the Yoga Whatever(tm) is also subjectively better than the barrage of nipples and buttons that come with those 'legendary' Thinkpad keyboards. The screen is of a magnitude more vibrant and you can run two disks - mSATA SSD + normal SATA SSD/spinny-disk. Plus touch is just a feature, not something that is a special requirement. The hinge seems better engineered too, even if it never gets used in 360 tablet mode.

There is proof of pudding in that my colleagues with 14" Thinkpads have those stands and external monitors, with external keyboards and mice, rarely with the machines being 'un-docked' or taken home. Meanwhile, my off-brand Yoga Whatever(tm) gets carried around as intended, used on trains and used at home.

Sure some of the shiny has worn off the fibreglass in the palm-rest area but I actually do not care, I don't like the feel of Apple-style aluminium, plastic is more me when it comes to what I want to rest my palms on. The build quality is absolutely fine on Yoga Whatever(tm), same power connector as Thinkpad with same USB3 connector.

I downgraded from Windows Whatever to Ubuntu and admittedly the wifi does need 'make install' every time the kernel changes, but it runs a full set of dev tools fine (my colleagues desk-bound machines run 'Outlook', a web browser and nothing else, maybe 'Excel').

I prefer a standard linux distro as the Apple dev environments don't have the repository 'apt-get install' thing done very well. Horses for courses but there are surprises in the consumer range that are better for getting work done and a worthy contender for Apple competitor. Actually I would be annoyed if company policy forced me to have either a proper Thinkpad or a proper Apple computer, the Yoga Whatever(tm) with 14" deep-colour proper-HD screen hits the sweet spot for me.

Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

#882

Post by wahsd » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 4:04 AM UTC

lqdc13 wrote: post #706

wahsd wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You don't chip $50 off a premium laptop and make it crappy I got that kind of feeling though when he was talking about both the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book. The SP4 is thicker than it could be because you wanted to add a full USB-A??? WHY?? and there are USB-A and not USB-C and a full SD slot on the Book ... WHY??? It made me ill to see them add that shit. It felt like typical MS snatching defeat from the jaws of…

Full SD makes complete sense. Many cameras use an SD card. Now you need a separate adapter to carry around with your laptop instead of a nice built-in SD card reader.

No it doesn't its a horrible and unnecessary dependency. Why not simply do what Apple did with the MacBook, for those hands full of users who still need an SD reader and can't connect the device directly by wire, they could simply plug in a dongle. It's absolutely stupid really, especially with USB-C looking to take over. Hell, they put it in the damn phone, why not be consistent and go with it everywhere. stupid.

Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

#883

Post by chadaustin » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 4:08 AM UTC

eosrei wrote: post #705

bsilvereagle wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat off topic, what're Vaio users migrating to? I look every year or so to see what the current laptop offerings are, and nothing has convinced me to leave my 5+ year old Vaio.

I have a Sony Vaio Pro 13.3", 1080P, i7, 256GB SSD, 8GB, 2.3lbs, touchscreen; dual booting, but primarily running in Linux. It will cover me through this entire tech cycle. The above mentioned "premium fatal flaw" in this case is the terrible internal wifi, but a micro-usb wifi has corrected that. I also fixed IMO the glossy display with a screen protector. Other than those two issues, I really like it. When it's fin…

FWIW, I have the Dell XPS 13 running Linux (and Windows 10 from a USB 3 SSD), and it's great. I bought the one that comes with a Windows license and installed Fedora 22 on it. It was pretty rough around the edges at first, but with several BIOS upgrades and kernel updates, it runs perfectly now.

Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

#884

Post by rayiner » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 4:09 AM UTC

Miffed that you gotta by the $2,600 model with dGPU (which most people don't want or need) to get 16GB of RAM. You can get a 13" rMBP with 16GB for only $1,500.

Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

#885

Post by tacticus » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 4:16 AM UTC

lelandbatey wrote: post #845

danudey wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And every price point has one thing you want that the other ones don't have, so you end up sophie's choice-ing your way through Dell's website. And then you go from their Home to their Business site and the prices, features, bundles, and add-ons are different for the same hardware. It's the same reason Google started making Nexus phones: so that someone , somewhere , would make a good Android phone without messing so…

Something I do want to note: everyone seems to only ever look at two, maybe three companies for "serious" notebooks: Dell, Lenovo, and (maybe) HP. However, I've found that by far the best company to buy laptops from is Asus. The latest example of this I've seen is the Asus Zenbook UX305LA. The specs are: 8GB Ram 256 SSD Intel Core i5-5200U 1080p IPS display A keyboard devoid of obviously poor layout[0] Nice large mul…

the out of the box linux compatibility is a game of chance on those. you have half the models with shitty broadcom cards. a third with the only atheros cards they can find without any drivers and the remaining with an intel card for this month and realtek after that.

it's just a pain in the arse to find one that you can reliably recommend. and 1920x1080 is still a shit resolution.

Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

#886

Post by jmspring » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 4:30 AM UTC

lelandbatey wrote: post #845

danudey wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And every price point has one thing you want that the other ones don't have, so you end up sophie's choice-ing your way through Dell's website. And then you go from their Home to their Business site and the prices, features, bundles, and add-ons are different for the same hardware. It's the same reason Google started making Nexus phones: so that someone , somewhere , would make a good Android phone without messing so…

Something I do want to note: everyone seems to only ever look at two, maybe three companies for "serious" notebooks: Dell, Lenovo, and (maybe) HP. However, I've found that by far the best company to buy laptops from is Asus. The latest example of this I've seen is the Asus Zenbook UX305LA. The specs are: 8GB Ram 256 SSD Intel Core i5-5200U 1080p IPS display A keyboard devoid of obviously poor layout[0] Nice large mul…

I've found the general quality of Asus machines, especially the zen book to be exceedingly poor when trying to come off of a MacBook Pro. The touchpad and keyboards typically are horrible. That's what matters to me more than ram or Cpu.

Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

#887

Post by RaleyField » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 4:31 AM UTC

suryon wrote: post #411

elipsey wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point, but not ideal for everyone. Especially with IOMMU and an SSD, performance isn't so bad when it works. I haven't liked the overhead with this in the past though, plus no full disk encryption, (although I guess you could do it in the guest), and Windows security in general, and bad 3D drivers for the guest (compositing please), and anything that wants low level hardware access is out. So if you don't actual…

Windows security in general is better than Linux security in general.Unless you are running Grsec/PaX but hey i do not believe you do that on desktop. Also you can still run EMET on Windows.

> Windows security in general is better than Linux security in general.

Maybe. Have they fixed UAC not being security boundary [1] if you are on a default administrator account? It's hard to take them seriously when most software for most users still runs effectively under 'root'.

[1] http://www.pretentiousname.com/misc/win7_uac_whitelist2.html

Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

#888

Post by witty_username » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 4:31 AM UTC

tacticus wrote: post #885

lelandbatey wrote: post #845

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something I do want to note: everyone seems to only ever look at two, maybe three companies for "serious" notebooks: Dell, Lenovo, and (maybe) HP. However, I've found that by far the best company to buy laptops from is Asus. The latest example of this I've seen is the Asus Zenbook UX305LA. The specs are: 8GB Ram 256 SSD Intel Core i5-5200U 1080p IPS display A keyboard devoid of obviously poor layout[0] Nice large mul…

the out of the box linux compatibility is a game of chance on those. you have half the models with shitty broadcom cards. a third with the only atheros cards they can find without any drivers and the remaining with an intel card for this month and realtek after that. it's just a pain in the arse to find one that you can reliably recommend. and 1920x1080 is still a shit resolution.

I used a laptop with a broadcom card 2-3 years ago; it worked for me.

Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

#889

Post by intrasight » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 4:31 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #884

Miffed that you gotta by the $2,600 model with dGPU (which most people don't want or need) to get 16GB of RAM. You can get a 13" rMBP with 16GB for only $1,500.

Totally agree. But typically vendors capitulate to buyer demand, so expect a 16GB model w/o dGPU eventually. And this launch price probably won't hold anyway.

Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

#890

Post by SwellJoe » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 4:34 AM UTC

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #879

SwellJoe wrote: post #697

I can't believe I'm seriously considering buying a Microsoft product. But, this is a really nice looking laptop, and I suspect does not fall prey to all of the bullshit that is so common on Windows laptops, even high end ones. If it were possible to dual boot to Linux, I'd be sold. I have my doubts that it is, however. I guess one could use a VM...I've always found that clumsy in the past, particularly in terms of ge…

> If it were possible to dual boot to Linux, I'd be sold. I have my doubts that it is, however. Why do you have your doubts? It's typically pretty easy and people have guides for doing it on the Surface Pro 3; it would be odd if the Surface Book couldn't do it as well.

That's cool. I haven't followed anything about the Surface. I have such a long history of avoiding Microsoft products that I have very little knowledge of them. What knowledge I have is from a time when Microsoft would have happily made it impossible to dual boot if given the power to do so (like if they were designing he product from the ground up).