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I'm a digital artist myself. I'm a more goal based guy, so I use both Windows and Mac hardware and software. I know that I am probably the target market for bot
by bilbo0s 10y ago
I'm a digital artist myself. I'm a more goal based guy, so I use both Windows and Mac hardware and software. I know that I am probably the target market for both the Macbook Pro and the Surface Studio, but I have to say, I'm not impressed. And I'd argue that the only people who are would have to be Microsoft or Apple fans. Certainly not tech based artists.
First, this is a business for me. And I suspect it's a business for anyone that Apple or Microsoft expects to sell this stuff to. And having to pay $3000 for outdated hardware is a tough pill to swallow. The hardware in the Macbook "Pro" is simply inexcusable. (REALLY???? 16GB RAM MAX!?!?!?) But the hardware in the Surface Studio is equally galling. They give you an NVidia what? 965 for $3000??? And the BEST I could even POSSIBLY get would be a 980??? And for that magnanimous gesture on their part I would be obliged to pay a MINIMUM of $4100??? For LAST GENERATION graphics cards???? On a machine purportedly about graphics???? (A 1080 would run both faster AND cooler using LESS power Microsoft. And at this point in time, for a business investment 64GB of RAM should really be offered by anyone NOT trying to screw you. What's the deal Microsoft???)
I think to objective observers who were waiting for these presentations... both proved SEVERELY underwhelming considering the pent up expectations. I mean... OK... if you put a gun to my head, I'll probably buy the Surface Studio. But don't expect me to pretend that I don't know that both Microsoft and Apple are robbing me.
Sorry for the rant.
- satysin 10y agoWhile I really like the look of the Surface Studio I was shocked at the GPU choice and the fact it comes with a hybrid drive. I mean I do think it is still a good machine even for the price but come on!
- sp332 10y agoWhat's wrong with a hybrid drive?
- rocky1138 10y agoThey are not as fast as an SSD.
- sp332 10y agoIn some use cases they are, since they contain an SSD as a large cache. They are also a lot cheaper than an SSD, so it's nice to get some of the benefits without all the cost.
- satysin 10y agoFor me solid state > moving parts. Faster and run cooler. Edit: afaik the only moving part in the Surface Studio are the fans. Replacing a fan is an annoyance but at least it won't lead to data loss!
- jeeva 10y agoOh, heck. Didn't notice that, yet. That's a bit rough!
- chirau 10y agoyour rant about GPUs on the Studio for 3k is heavily misguided. What you are paying for with that 3k is mostly the new screen and its capability. The closest rival to that screen is a Wacom tablet which is very near the same price point without all the hardware MS has added. Are you aware of the new stuff that is packed into that one screen? That is the question you need to answer for yourself to understand that price point. As for having "outdated" cards, that is more a function of the production timeline. I am sure the Studio has been in the works for a while and those were probably the best in class cards around the time.
- __jal 10y agoPro tip: When you have to explain to people why they shouldn't be disappointed by something they've thought about, you've almost always already lost the argument. And the video is outdated, period, no air-quotes. There is simply no argument there. Making an excuse for it is nice and all, but it simply is a case of charging a premium for old tech.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rashkov 10y agoHe is directly rebutting one person's opinion, not coming up with a talking point after consulting with a survey of people's reactions to the new announcements. Who's to say it's not the parent that was mistaken? Using the Surface as a tablet for drawing has been a huge use-case for visual artists from day 1. Just see this positive review of the original Surface Pro by Gabe from Penny Arcade: https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2013/02/22/the-ms-surface-pro https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2013/02/22/the-ms-sur...
- chadgeidel 10y agoAnd his follow-up post yesterday on the Studio https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2016/10/26/the-surface-studio https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2016/10/26/the-surfac...
- ChuckMcM 10y agoI share your surprise that Microsoft didn't use the 1080. I would really love to hear the back story on that, was it getting it to fit? was it power envelope? was it driver support? Etc. I expect that if they pre-sell a million Studios or more we'll see an updated unit ("Studio Pro" anyone?) that is a 64GB/1080 machine but time will tell.
- azurelogic 10y agoI can't imagine that it was power envelope. Pascal really made progress on power efficiency, which is what makes it even more surprising.
- e12e 10y agoI think the idea that it's a digital drafting table that can also be used as a desktop computer is the right way to think of it (as many have alluded to in this thread). I wonder why ms didn't stick with AMD (like the xbox one) if they weren't going to use a 1080 (or 1070, might make more sense). As someone that used to enjoy drawing/doodling but never made the leap from mouse to a digital pen - sketching and doodling on the surface 4 was eye-opening. Any number of programs paired with the pen/screen feels a lot like ink drawing without the mess and with multi-level undo. The combination of a decent pen and great screen makes for a very satisfying and immediate drawing experience.
- dakull 10y agoAFAIK: 980M - 100W / 1060 ~ 80W / 1070 ~ 120W / 1080 ~ 150W If they started out with the max TDP of 100W for the cooling system - upgrading it to 150W in that small space it sounds like too much of a change to meet their DL? Clearly this does not excuse the reengineering but it might explain why they went this route.
- EpicEng 10y agoYou're surprised that they didn't use a top of the line card when most of their target audience will never even make the thing sweat? I have a 1080 and use it to play games at 4k while driving two additional 1080p monitors. It kicks ass and I push it much harder than most digital artists ever will.
- lloyd-christmas 10y ago> or LAST GENERATION graphics cards Not even just that, it's the last gen mobile cards, which means you have to spend 4.2k just to have 4GB of VRAM on something that, at the end of the day, is really a desktop. the 980 desktop version is ~$600 with 6GB VRAM.
- maxsilver 10y agoOr even an RX480. It could have had 8GB of fast VRAM for less than $300.
- novaleaf 10y agothat's not what you are paying for. you are paying for a digital drafting table. As mentioned in another thread, purchasing the lcd panel itself ala-carte would cost more than the entire unit.
- alexqgb 10y agoExcept that you are paying for it. If it costs money (which is does) and you pay (which you do) then you are very much paying for it. And that's the problem. Not only are the 9 series GPUs a generation behind, the shift to the Pascal architecture delivers previous gen. performance for literally half the price (see GTX 970 vs. 1060). Maybe the thing you want to pay for is the screen, but there's no avoiding the outdated GPU tax that you have to pay to get it.
- imtringued 10y agoYou don't even need the desktop 980 to compete with the laptop 980M. The 1060 beats it with a significant gap.
- lloyd-christmas 10y agoYeah, but my point was that if they were too far along with old tech, there were still drastically better pre-existing options for a product that isn't really mobile.
- ksk 10y agoI don't understand how the bump in graphics card hardware matters to your drawing workflow.
- usaphp 10y agoDriving that 16mln pixel screen needs some graphic power today, tomorrow it will be even more resource hungry
- j2bax 10y agoI am also puzzled by this... Maybe knowing they have more horsepower than they need empowers them. Or maybe they are doing a lot of high poly 3D work or something.
- kodisha 10y agoPhotoshop, and many other gfx software use GPU acceleration since 5+ years ago.
- danudey 10y agoAnd almost none of those apps are going to max out an Iris Pro, let alone a 980M.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y agoThey don't need to "max out" a card, because PS is not a game. What counts is the time it takes to perform an operation like a Camera RAW import or a blur. If that goes down by a significant percentage, productivity goes up by a significant amount. For drawing, good acceleration is the difference between a distracting experience that's laggy and unusable, and a smooth experience that gets out of the way of the work. Besides, there are people with an interest in art and machine learning. Good luck with a 980M if that's your area of interest.
- EpicEng 10y agoNot to the level people in this thread think they do.
- revelation 10y agoYou go on and on about specs. Nobody cares about specs. Just see this MacBook landing page, it's full of meaningless percentage numbers. 70% faster, they could just as well write "new recipe".
- alexqgb 10y agoActual graphics and design pros (as opposed to Apple 'Pros') absolutely care about specs. Come hang out in VR developer land for a while, where interest in specs extends to system architecture choices.
- dperfect 10y agoI think you (and a few others here) are making the mistake of equating digital art with a need for high-end graphics cards. 99% of what most digital artists consider to be "digital art" does not require state-of-the-art GPUs. Graphic design work, retouching, painting, etc. barely even scratch the surface of what the last generation of graphics cards could handle. Let's call high-end graphics cards for what they really are: gaming console graphics hardware stuffed into PCs. Apart from a relatively small number of professionals who work with 3D rendering, high-end graphics cards are an even greater waste of money (unless of course you're buying the machine for gaming, which doesn't really fit the "digital artist" target of these machines). Microsoft and Apple may still be pricing these products too high ("robbing you" as you say), but that's a separate discussion.
- Ar-Curunir 10y agoThis person is a (self-identified) digital artist; if their claims are true, I'm sure they know what digital art does and doesn't require.
- ixtli 10y agoThe stats for the Cintiq Companion 2 are in the same ballpark and, from personal use, the thing has a hard time providing smooth UI when editing very large photoshop, illustrator, or unity projects. I think you're right that artists largely don't need what high end gaming PCs might require to play the newest steam titles at full graphics settings, but for what Microsoft is asking here, they do at least need enough GPU/CPU strength to have a very responsive UI when editing very large and complex graphical projects at 2560 x 1600 and beyond. My worry about the Surface is simply that the minority report-style advertisement isn't really possible with a real-world PSD or 3dsmax scene.
- bilbo0s 10y ago"...I can't help but notice that you (and others here) are making the mistake of equating digital art with a need for high-end graphics cards. 99% of what most digital artists consider to be "digital art" does not require state-of-the-art GPUs. Graphic design work, retouching, painting, etc. barely even scratch the surface of what the last generation of graphics cards could handle..." I can't help but notice that you are equating that 99% of "digital art" that can be handled by mobile graphics cards, to the 1% of "digital art" that anyone's going to actually PAY someone to produce. As I said, this is a business. If I could make the living I currently make retouching photos, then I'd gladly pay $3000 for an underpowered machine... but I can't. because no one is going to pay us that kind of money to retouch photos are they? Look, these machines, to a business, are INVESTMENTS. You invest for the FUTURE, not to take advantage of the past. A 1070 or 1080 is not too much to ask considering Pascal's MANIFEST superiority in efficiency. Additionally, I was being kind, I think MS should OFFER 64GB in the Surface Studio, but a 128GB option would really be necessary to future proof this thing. I'll tell you what MS and Apple are going for here... it's a money grab. And they are setting themselves up to come back to guys like me every 18 to 24 months for another mandatory money grab instead of just giving us a 60 month machine from the outset. Offer me a 60 month Surface Studio at the $3000 price point and I'd update every workstation here. But that's not what they're offering is it?
- CN7R 10y agoOk graphics shouldn't really be that big of a problem, if companies were trying to maximize it. Instead, they're trying to minimize the footprint of the actual computer without sacrificing productivity capabilities. Luckily, this provides incentive for the eGPU market, which will hopefully give us compact devices with modular powerful computing specs.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rbirkby 10y agoThe architects at Foster + Partners designing the Apple campus use Revit and being architects they want the coolest tech. Surface Studio hits that sweetspot better than anything from Apple at the moment.
- martijn_himself 10y ago>> And the BEST I could even POSSIBLY get would be a 980??? Not only that- it's a mobile processor, 980M, so it would lag some distance behind a 980. That is cutting serious corners for a desktop at that price point.
- nicky0 10y agoIsn't something like the Mac Pro aimed more at you? It's packed with graphics hardware. Although admittedly they haven't updated that for several years.
- tw04 10y agoI'm struggling to believe you're a digital artist if you're complaining about the Surface Studio. A Cintiq monitor, with no computer, costs nearly what the surface studio does, and gives you an inferior display to boot. The machine is not "purportedly about graphics", it's about 2D artists, and they made that clear in pretty much every presentation I've seen on the device.