New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft • Hacker News Board

Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

#901

Post by belak » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 5:18 AM UTC

sz4kerto wrote: post #33

belak wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, it definitely works, but it depends on the distro and how much tweaking you're willing to do. I've got hybrid graphics working on a Dell XPS 15 with no real problems. Bumblebee works like a charm when set up correctly. The battery life isn't perfect, but it's still much better than just running the nvidia chip.

It works on a per-program basis if you set it up nicely, but (afaik) it's not possible to get the docking station work nicely. The problem is that to drive external displays, you need the discrete GPU (esp. for UHD displays). Therefore whenever you dock it in, it should start driving the external display with dGPU, etc. I've not seen a single successful attempt on getting this working (this = hybrid graphics + dockin…

Fair point. Wayland promises to make this possible, but it's definitely not completely ready yet.

Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

#902

Post by RaleyField » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 5:32 AM UTC

izolate wrote: post #771

eric_cc wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck getting the touch screen to work flawlessly with your Linux install

As a developer who spends the entire time in the terminal and only touches the keyboard... so?

Unless you are reading this in lynx then you do sometimes use graphical terminals. For some people reading websites and consuming other media that don't require much textual input is more comfortable in 'tablet mode'. Dual use nature of Surface computers allows people to carry around one device instead of two and with no syncing required.

Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

#903

Post by ekianjo » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 5:43 AM UTC

aianus wrote: post #796

lqdc13 wrote: post #773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do people transfer photos from digital cameras then? Many cameras don't have built in USB/networking of any kind.

Most people don't own digital cameras any more, they just use their smartphones (which have USB/networking).

LOL, your comment is quite funny. This may be true for "most hipsters that don't care about photography", but in reality there are still many folks using regular mirrorless camera or even better, full frame DSLR because their price has dropped so much in the past 3 years. And these folks also happen to be the ones looking for premium laptop options in order to get data transferred fast (wifi is too slow for RAWs) and work on their pictures before publishing them.

It's not because you dont have a use for it that everyone out there is just like you.

Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

#904

Post by ekianjo » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 5:45 AM UTC

wahsd wrote: post #680

tmd83 wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! At least from the initial look and spec it looks like they did a lot of the things right and put effort in making this nice. Yes there are things that maybe I can get by without but the basics looks fantastic. You don't chip $50 off a premium laptop and make it crappy. OEM just keeps making too many model at every price point .. at every 20 dollars it feels like. While I hate the almost singular choice for OsX…

>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…

You have insert mini and MicroSD with small adapters into SD slots, but you can't do the opposite. On top of that, SD cards are the ones with the biggest capacity out there. MicroSDs are very limited in storage and tend to be very costly when you go in the high storage range.

Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

#905

Post by pjmlp » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 5:53 AM UTC

reubenmorais wrote: post #849

sampo wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Also Apple makes do with just the integrated Intel graphics, so we don't need NDIVIA either. No they don't… the 15" MBP has a dedicated GPU, and a good one at that.

And costs 1000€ more than the Thinkpad W, a graphics workstation laptop.

Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

#906

Post by togusa » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 6:08 AM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #748

togusa wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NTFS is only a turd on lots of small writes. It really flies on reads.

Unless it is fragmented heavily, which often tends to happen.

Pretty much a non issue since 2012. It defrags itself.

Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

#907

Post by astaroth360 » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 6:09 AM UTC

That hinge is so cool! Finally a real tablet/laptop hybrid comes out!

Seriously, this makes the difference for me. I never wanted to buy a tablet device because I thought I wouldn't use it much, but if I can just pull off the keyboard and turn it into a tablet that runs the same OS occasionally, that's something I'm interested in.

Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

#908

Post by astaroth360 » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 6:12 AM UTC

curiousjorge wrote: post #357

scholia wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, a copy of a MacBook with a touch screen, pen operation, a serious GPU, and a detachable screen that works as a tablet running iPad-style apps? Still waiting for a MacBook that does any of that ;-)

I would never be caught with an Apple product built on the backs of millions of Chinese children and women in horrible and tyrannical working conditions. If this turns out to be the same case I will also denounce and boycott it.

Good luck avoiding all electronics with parts from China :P

Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

#909

Post by rifung » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 6:20 AM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #484

ypcx wrote: post #468

Earlier 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…

I use the number row. Is that weird? I think it's much faster than using the numpad anyway since you have 8 fingers you can use instead of just 3 (or 4?) for the numpad. It also means you can much more easily switch between letters and numbers.

Re: New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

#910

Post by sratner » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 6:22 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…

My two last laptops have been from ASUS. No complaints, no problems with reliability, decent trackpads and generally solid builds (not Apple-solid, but they are also not Apple-priced as you point out). For a while, they were the only company making decent 13" with discrete graphics.

The thing that I found incomprehensible, and somewhat tangential to the grandparent, is how ASUS manages to screw up distribution so badly. They release slightly different models at slightly different times in different geographic regions, and it is usually impossible to buy, say, the European or Asian versions, in the US. A year ago I was quite literally ready to throw money at them in exchange for a UX303LN to replace my aging U36SG, but my dream model was only available in Europe. The only two options I could get in US both had something wrong with them. Repeat: they actually manufactured a laptop to the exact specifications that I wanted, but didn't give me a way to buy it.

Considering they have global distribution channels, it don't imagine it actually being hard to make all models globally available, so the only other explanation I have is forced market segmentation: the two models available in US were pretty much the lowest and the highest end, with nothing in the middle.

I had been waiting to see if UX303UB will make it to US, or if it will suffer the same fate. Instead, I just pre-ordered a Surface Book.