First of all, this is a beautiful piece of hardware.
I hate that I have to ask this, but do these ship with locked bootloaders? If they don't, they might be a candidate for beautiful Hackintoshes or Linux laptops. I just can't bring myself to run something that isn't unix under the hood and OSX has been a pretty decent balance of openness/unixness/ecosystem with a pretty nice looking UI and a thriving software market. I haven't tried Windows 10, but I suspect I'd be just as unhappy with it as I was with Windows 9 on a Surface.
I'm still a fan of the MacBook hardware, but a detachable screen is something you just won't see out of the Apple camp. I would love to have a laptop that converts into a tablet for light use/presentation/travel. A Hackintosh would be ideal, but I'd easily consider a Linux distro if it meant I could use something like this.
It didn't ship with USB-C ports (shame), but it sounds like you might be able to buy an upgraded "bottom" and take advantage of that when it ships (that's huge!):
No x86 computer ships with locked bootloaders, it's part of the spec that you have to be able to disable SecureBoot in the BIOS.
Having said that, I don't think Linux will be a good fit for this device. People will first have to reverse-engineer the locking mechanism (which is done in software in Windows). That'll probably happen quickly, but then there's the issue of the hybrid graphics, which Linux has never played well with IME. That's assuming Linux drivers will be available for the dGPU at all; it's apparently a custom part from Nvidia and there may not even be a binary blob for them on Linux.
I'm in the same camp as you. I really like this hardware but I don't want to use Windows. I don't think we'll see any good support for all of the modes it can operate in on other operating systems though at least not for a long while and then in very limited capacity.
Me not wanting to use Windows is more about unfamiliarity with what modern windows is like for a non MS centric developer. My previous experience dates back to the XP days where trying to do anything other than MS things was a chore. I _really_ like the surfacebook, maybe it's time to take another look at windows?
Windows 10 is quite nice -- actually the UX is better than OS X in my opinion -- but I really do sympathize. On my desktop machine at home, intended primarily for gaming, I sometimes run a Vagrant VM, and I have babun setup for when I want a Unix-like terminal but not a full VM (a preconfigured Cygwin distribution).
Perseverance is one of the key MS strength, they don't easily give up once they start, considering their history of getting things right by v3, it makes sense. There are exceptions, but still MS is a company mostly for long haul.
If I remember correctly, the XBox was operating at a loss at the beginning. I think it was more than expected that it would take a few years to break into the market.
I was blown away by the Surface Book presentation and my first reaction was "I want one".
But if you think about it, the product makes no sense. The bottom part holds all the battery, so you want to have it attached. But the top part has 3 hours of portability, so you don't want to have it attached. But the bottom part has a dGPU, so you might need that, some times. But the top part runs very well without the dGPU, so you don't need that.
It's just weird to me. It just wants to be everything I don't need. I'll take my SP4 with a dock and a keyboard and be just as happy.
It makes no sense because it doesn't fit your needs. If you want a tablet you can hold all day long and switch to a "laptop" for a few hours, SP4 makes sense.
If you want a laptop but for a few hours a day, you'd want a light tablet to read or do research on, Surface Book makes more sense and the clipboard is much lighter than the SP4 as well. In addition, you can rotate it around while attached to the base to use it as a drawing surface as needed.
SB/SP4 strikes a difference balance for different people. For me, I use my tablet as a content consumption device all day long and rarely type, so SP4 makes more sense than SB for me.
>It's just weird to me. It just wants to be everything I don't need.
With a dock both the book and surface 4 can replace your desktop.
The question is, when you're not in desktop mode, do you want an awesome laptop experience with a lesser tablet experience or an awesome tablet experience with a lesser laptop experience?
My wife's Surface comes today, but I got the i7, so the wait is on. ;)
For Surface Books, the price point seems to be off. It's priced higher than Macbook pro, and thus I have to justify the need for SB's exceptional portability. A MBP with i5/128GB typically sells for $1299 (but often cheaper from non-Apple online stores) , while the similar spec SB costs $1499. A MBP i7 costs $2000 while SB costs $2700+.
I'd also want it to be Unixy, so my thought is to just run VM and use the Windows 10 only as a VM host, but nothing else. However, that'd be kind of a waste for such a machine.
2 points: Panay's presentation was the best presentation from MS I have ever seen. It was about 100 times better than any MS presentation I have seen so far. Second, this is a nice write-up, and it is a promo, but for some of its honesty I'm surprised it makes out the SB as such a miracle. It is not particular thin and that might matter more than a lack of a kickstand.
Does anyone have a source or any numbers on how Microsoft's revenue is split among its departments? I'd be curious to see how much of their revenue is from their hardware vs. software now.
They don't break it down per-product, but the whole segment was $9.1B revenue out of $20.4B for the quarter. And the only hint we get about this product specifically is:
"Devices revenue decreased $1.8 billion or 49%, mainly due to lower revenue from phones, driven by the shift in strategy for the phone business, as well as lower Surface revenue. Phones revenue decreased $1.5 billion or 58%, as we sold 5.8 million Lumia phones and 25.5 million other non-Lumia phones in the first quarter of fiscal year 2016, compared with 9.3 million and 42.9 million sold, respectively, in the prior year. Surface revenue decreased $236 million or 26%, primarily driven by the release of Surface Pro 3 in June 2014."
Has anyone used touch screen as a whiteboard during skype call or teleconf, how good it is? Sometimes, a real whiteboard is not good enough with camera.
Not so much a touchscreen but I've used plenty of stylus/digitizer setups for this purpose over the years and they work as well as you'd expect. At one job, we used normal PCs with simple Wacom tablets for annotation of slides during love Adobe Connect sessions and the only complaint was from some users who hadn't yet become comfortable with looking at a monitor while drawing on a surface (sort of like learning to use a mouse or touch-type for the first time).
At my current job, we have Sympodium monitors at lecture podiums so you can draw directly on the screen. These are also not touch screens but make use of an active digitizer like the Surface products and traditional drawing tablets.
Likewise, I've got a Gen 1 Surface Pro which works just as well for the same sort of thing. Basically, as long as framerate doesn't need to be as high as video, it's fine. Usually the "slides" portion of those conferences (whether web-based or using VTC appliances) is set to use a lower framerate for bandwidth purposes while the "camera" portion will attempt to hit more video-like framerates. But otherwise, it's pretty useful and something of a standard in the educational live conferences I've worked on.
Sort of. I used to use a cheapo Wacom tablet with a painting app for online WebEx demos a few years ago; I'd flip from whatever thing I was demo'ing to a new desktop with a blank raster file open and draw explanatory diagrams. It was actually pretty decent. Having a pen integrated into the device, with some sort of transparent annotation overlay app would have been pretty exciting for me back then (not least because I wouldn't have to hand write text!).
I would think rarely would a normal on the wall whiteboard work well with a webcam on a teleconference, but then again I've never had a meeting room that worked for much of anything teleconference-related. Always something wasn't right, lighting, space, noise etc.
[+] [-] mmastrac|10 years ago|reply
I hate that I have to ask this, but do these ship with locked bootloaders? If they don't, they might be a candidate for beautiful Hackintoshes or Linux laptops. I just can't bring myself to run something that isn't unix under the hood and OSX has been a pretty decent balance of openness/unixness/ecosystem with a pretty nice looking UI and a thriving software market. I haven't tried Windows 10, but I suspect I'd be just as unhappy with it as I was with Windows 9 on a Surface.
I'm still a fan of the MacBook hardware, but a detachable screen is something you just won't see out of the Apple camp. I would love to have a laptop that converts into a tablet for light use/presentation/travel. A Hackintosh would be ideal, but I'd easily consider a Linux distro if it meant I could use something like this.
It didn't ship with USB-C ports (shame), but it sounds like you might be able to buy an upgraded "bottom" and take advantage of that when it ships (that's huge!):
http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2015/10/23/surface-book-user...
[+] [-] Analemma_|10 years ago|reply
Having said that, I don't think Linux will be a good fit for this device. People will first have to reverse-engineer the locking mechanism (which is done in software in Windows). That'll probably happen quickly, but then there's the issue of the hybrid graphics, which Linux has never played well with IME. That's assuming Linux drivers will be available for the dGPU at all; it's apparently a custom part from Nvidia and there may not even be a binary blob for them on Linux.
[+] [-] DIVx0|10 years ago|reply
Me not wanting to use Windows is more about unfamiliarity with what modern windows is like for a non MS centric developer. My previous experience dates back to the XP days where trying to do anything other than MS things was a chore. I _really_ like the surfacebook, maybe it's time to take another look at windows?
[+] [-] nilkn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] widowlark|10 years ago|reply
- There is SecureBoot configuration, and it can be reconfigured and disabled.
- There are USB and PXE boot options available, so running Linux from those shouldn't be too difficult
- It looks like the 'MuscleWire' is controlled by firmware, not windows, as I was able to detach the device in BIOS outside the OS.
So give it a few months, I am sure someone will get debian on this thing!
[+] [-] m52go|10 years ago|reply
Goodness. That probably means there was much more than 9 figures of losses in total. The trust MSFT places in Panay and his team must be gargantuan.
I really wonder what MSFT's upper-limit of tolerable losses was for the Surface program.
[+] [-] dump100|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qzcx|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neals|10 years ago|reply
I was blown away by the Surface Book presentation and my first reaction was "I want one".
But if you think about it, the product makes no sense. The bottom part holds all the battery, so you want to have it attached. But the top part has 3 hours of portability, so you don't want to have it attached. But the bottom part has a dGPU, so you might need that, some times. But the top part runs very well without the dGPU, so you don't need that.
It's just weird to me. It just wants to be everything I don't need. I'll take my SP4 with a dock and a keyboard and be just as happy.
[+] [-] mikhailt|10 years ago|reply
If you want a laptop but for a few hours a day, you'd want a light tablet to read or do research on, Surface Book makes more sense and the clipboard is much lighter than the SP4 as well. In addition, you can rotate it around while attached to the base to use it as a drawing surface as needed.
SB/SP4 strikes a difference balance for different people. For me, I use my tablet as a content consumption device all day long and rarely type, so SP4 makes more sense than SB for me.
[+] [-] IanDrake|10 years ago|reply
With a dock both the book and surface 4 can replace your desktop.
The question is, when you're not in desktop mode, do you want an awesome laptop experience with a lesser tablet experience or an awesome tablet experience with a lesser laptop experience?
My wife's Surface comes today, but I got the i7, so the wait is on. ;)
[+] [-] criddell|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] otterpro|10 years ago|reply
I'd also want it to be Unixy, so my thought is to just run VM and use the Windows 10 only as a VM host, but nothing else. However, that'd be kind of a waste for such a machine.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Tloewald|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xixixao|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raylan_givens|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dcohenp|10 years ago|reply
They don't break it down per-product, but the whole segment was $9.1B revenue out of $20.4B for the quarter. And the only hint we get about this product specifically is:
"Devices revenue decreased $1.8 billion or 49%, mainly due to lower revenue from phones, driven by the shift in strategy for the phone business, as well as lower Surface revenue. Phones revenue decreased $1.5 billion or 58%, as we sold 5.8 million Lumia phones and 25.5 million other non-Lumia phones in the first quarter of fiscal year 2016, compared with 9.3 million and 42.9 million sold, respectively, in the prior year. Surface revenue decreased $236 million or 26%, primarily driven by the release of Surface Pro 3 in June 2014."
[+] [-] dump100|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soylentcola|10 years ago|reply
At my current job, we have Sympodium monitors at lecture podiums so you can draw directly on the screen. These are also not touch screens but make use of an active digitizer like the Surface products and traditional drawing tablets.
Likewise, I've got a Gen 1 Surface Pro which works just as well for the same sort of thing. Basically, as long as framerate doesn't need to be as high as video, it's fine. Usually the "slides" portion of those conferences (whether web-based or using VTC appliances) is set to use a lower framerate for bandwidth purposes while the "camera" portion will attempt to hit more video-like framerates. But otherwise, it's pretty useful and something of a standard in the educational live conferences I've worked on.
[+] [-] scrumper|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelbuddy|10 years ago|reply