8 ms·

My review of the Surface Pro

46 points by bhauer 14y ago

corporalagumbo 14y ago
Wow, that background animation slowed my Firefox to a crawl. Works quite well on Chrome though. Fancy stuff. HTML5? Edit: Wow, actually a lot going on in this guy's site. The little animated menus bottom left and right of the article. The filter searchable previous posts. The swivel-transition topic group-changes. The speed-controllable animation. Pretty neat, fanciest blog I've ever seen!
- phase_9 14y ago
  Shame I can no longer hear anything thanks to the roar of my laptop's fans! Text only link for TFA: http://www.google.com/gwt/x?u=http%3A%2F%2Ftiamat.tsotech.com%2Fsurface-pro-tip http://www.google.com/gwt/x?u=http%3A%2F%2Ftiamat.tsotech.co...
  - mikecane 14y ago
    Thank you for that. My god, how can anyone think that animation is necessary?
- cabirum 14y ago
  Fully loads 1 core of my i7. Who the fuck makes things like this.
  - gala8y 14y ago
    Just wanted to post the same OT: i5 spinning at 3 GHz. No comment.
- xentronium 14y ago
  Bottom right corner has a submenu for background animation (confusingly says 'normal' by default).
- Stratoscope 14y ago
  Perhaps it's fitting that the website is tiamat.tsotech.com and the offending animation appears to be in a file called tiamat.js: "In Babylonian myths, Tiamat is a huge, bloated female dragon that personifies the saltwater ocean, the water of Chaos." Source: http://www.pantheon.org/articles/t/tiamat.html http://www.pantheon.org/articles/t/tiamat.html
- stesch 14y ago
  I recommend NoScript.
  - corporalagumbo 14y ago
    Eh, I find NoScript a bit extreme. Really makes you realise how common Flash elements are... Yeah, generally I have no problems with Flash, and I find having to enable everything or stare at gutted pages irritating. Plus, how do I know what an element is until I enable it - so how am I supposed to know which elements I want to enable? (If you have any tips I'm missing, feel free to fill me in.)
- eknkc 14y ago
  Safari on my MBP slowed down to grave. (Wonder how it fares on a surface pro with IE10)
- sgt 14y ago
  52520- Google Chrom 98.2 00:15.20 6/1 2 114 296 22M 74M 60M 107M 873M 799 799 running 501 30984 98.2%! Silly background animation. Looks cool, but clearly totally inefficient.
- thenomad 14y ago
  I'm actually very grateful that background was there and running - because it reminded me I'd turned my NoScript off yesterday to deal with a particularly recalcitrant payments site...
- bane 14y ago
  <sarcasm> I'm so glad html5 has saved us from the cpu eating plague of flash websites. </sarcasm>
- bhauer 14y ago
  You can turn the animation off using the menu at the bottom right. Having written a few blog entries about how much desktop PC technology has stalled out, I chuckle a bit that a modern PC struggles to do some two-dimensional SVG/SMIL animation. Thanks for the comments. If you like it, you may be among the minority. :)
thomasbk 14y ago
That background made the article unreadable for me. Both because it slowed down the browser and scrolling, and because it was incredibly distracting.
- stcredzero 14y ago
  The attitude made the article marginally readable for me. Both because it was a bit incoherent, and because it was incredibly distracting.
  - tdicola 14y ago
    The use of 'datas' annoyed me. Data is already plural. The singular form is datum.
    - apl 14y ago
      I'm assuming that, in this case, he was using it for comedic effect.
- clhodapp 14y ago
  You can remove it by hovering over "normal" in the bottom right can clicking "stop animation".
  - mikecane 14y ago
    Why should we even have to? What is this, MySpace?
- diziet 14y ago
  I felt the same way -- if my relatively powerful laptop is not rendering the page quick enough to be able to scroll down, others probably have an even worse experience!
corporalagumbo 14y ago
"The pen really has me confused. It would be awesome if it did more than it does. I am a little surprised to realize there is no preinstalled software that transcribes handwriting into written notes nor does any Office application do that." I feel like hits on a big problem for Microsoft. They've come up with a whole bunch of fancy new gizmos (Metro, Surface) - but it's all resting on top of a mountain of random legacy cruft, and they haven't tied it together or done anything really to iron out the weird inconsistencies. Great, here's a brilliant pressure-sensitive pen. What? No, we haven't made anything for you to use it with. Nope, sorry, no accommodations for it in the OS. Sorry man - too busy coming up with crazy new shit (and slapping it onto small portions of the interface)! I'm using Windows 8 now, and, mixed with Windows Phone 7.5, Outlook.com, attempts to integrate calendar and to-do lists, being forced to use the monstrosity that is the Zune phone software, I have to say, holy shit Microsoft - time to do some spring cleaning. I really hope instead of charging on to the next big thing, Microsoft focuses on consolidation for Windows 9 - delving in to all the random nooks and crannies, clearing out the legacy cruft, unifying the interface, smoothing out the inconsistencies between Metro and Desktop, streamlining their mobile-desktop integration, streamlining their web services. Otherwise, god, how much longer can they go on coming up with the new Next Bestest Thing to mash into the pile of random crap that Windows has become?
- stcredzero 14y ago
  > The pen really has me confused. It would be awesome if it did more than it does. This reviewer is (admittedly) clueless about OneNote, which basically has its own cult following. He also doesn't seem to be the kind to be heavily using a "poor man's Cintiq." I look forward to a review from one or both of those groups. Yes, a stylus is kind of niche. It's not exactly obscure, either, though. I'd like to see reviewers go into detail about graphics and design related programs.
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    Isn't onenote for metro a free download from the windows store? I tried to get my wife interested in the tablet PC (I have a Samsung tablet running win8 with a waccom digitizer), but she says its kind of small for sketching and the hand obscures the screen anyways, not as good as her Intuos; she has never tried an Cintiq.
kin3tic 14y ago
Nice choice of jump drive. It's so silly but I love it, it's simple and versatile. I've got it on a carabiner for easy access.
berkut 14y ago
Anand's review: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6695/microsoft-surface-pro-review http://www.anandtech.com/show/6695/microsoft-surface-pro-rev... Intel's Core i5 really shows its power here compared to the ARM chips in the benchmarks, but with the obvious downside of battery life. But when Haswell's out, that should start to change as Intel get more aggressive on the power usage side of things.
anonymoushn 14y ago
Hi there. I couldn't find any email address (or indeed any about/contact page at all), so I thought I would tell you here that scrolling on your blog is completely broken. Also, if a user middle clicks a link, he or she probably does not want the content to replace the current content.
- bhauer 14y ago
  What device are you using to read it? Middle-click should open in a new tab. Looks like a difference of behavior between Firefox and Chrome though. Firefox apparently isn't sending a middle click to the click handler on the anchor tag and I incorrectly assumed that would be the case for all browsers. I'll get that fixed up. Scrolling though? And all the griping about the background is nearly convincing me to turn it off by default.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
shin_lao 14y ago
How the heck do I close a Metro application? Do I even? Am I not really supposed to? Is this a computer or a phone-like thing? This is a Surface Pro; am I a professional or not? Do professionals close applications? Professional! (Turns out I just mash function-alt-F4, which seems to do the trick, if a little clumsily.) Just slide the screen with a finger from top to bottom to close an application.
- Ergomane 14y ago
  While you certainly can close Metro apps manually, there's no direct need in terms of resources to do so. Metro apps will be suspended when not on the foreground and removed from memory when free memory gets tight. When switching back, the app is resurrected from the grave. Such Jesus apps do depend on the developer not being lazy / retard. While MS checks apps during the winstore certification process, sometimes apps slip through that do not react to such events correctly. Using those apps is pretty annoying.
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    I often need to force restart metro apps gone wild, and I do so in the task manager (didn't know about the finger trick). These are first party apps like Mail also (to be fair, I have to do this in iOS also, no app is perfect!).
    - brudgers 14y ago
      If you have two monitors, you can toss the whole Metro interface from one to the other under Windows 8. It's efficient and effective.
      - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
        I don't use metro much on my desktop, just laptop and surface RT unit. The network sucks here in china, and most metro apps don't deal with it very well.
  - asveikau 14y ago
jhspaybar 14y ago
Any reviews out there that address how developer tool chains look? How does Unity 3D do? How about Linux on a VM for web development work? Maybe even some feedback on how something like nodejs running at the command line and serving web requests for a dev environment looks?
Andrex 14y ago
> Most importantly, despite my obsession with PAO, that remains a figment of imagination. Harsh reality says that whether I like it or not, each device I own is an island. An island with an international airport, but an island nevertheless. Sounds like a Chromebook might have been a better solution? Except he seems biased against the laptop form factor for some reason. Samsung ones even have matte screens.
- bhauer 14y ago
  Yes, a little biased against the laptop form-factor. But mostly biased against Google owning all my stuff for me. I'd rather I own my stuff and access it everywhere without "synchronization" from my compute/data server. But that might as well be science fiction.
  - Andrex 14y ago
    It's a browser so you can put as much or as little into Google as you'd like. It sounds like you're just really looking for something like the dumb terminals idea Sun was peddling years ago.
    - bhauer 14y ago
      Yeah, to an extent. Roughly that idea but with always-on broadband, high-DPI touch screens, and shared, concurrent application state across all terminals. I wrote more about what I'd consider ideal at http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao
eliben 14y ago
I really, really fail to understand how this is not a super-expensive laptop, essentially? Is it considerably smaller/faster than an ultrabook? I'll grant that this is an interesting attempt at converging two devices, but such attempts ultimately succeed or fail based on how well they can replace either device. Would this thing replace your laptop? Your tablet?
hakaaaaak 14y ago
Ok, a hypothetical. Valentine's Day coming up and my wife who is very non-technical has (1) mentioned a surface in the last few months and she never mentions things like that, (2) has developed a strong dislike for Apple (the company) and has no desire for an iPad or iPhone, (3) was raised on PC's and Windows and does not adjust to change in that regard. Let's say that she already has a laptop that is relatively new, but she spends a lot of time on the couch and doesn't take the laptop off the dock, and might enjoy having a tablet next to her on the couch. Now the question. Should I get her one, and if so, which one?
- mikecane 14y ago
  You sure she'd like something that heavy? Why not a low-weight Android tablet that can mirror her PC so she can do Windows without Windows on the tablet?
huhtenberg 14y ago
I for one want pen input, but under condition that it would allow me to rest my hand on the screen. It should, basically, recognize the pen input exclusively and ignore all other touch events, if I tell it to do so. Sketching or writing all the while hovering your hand and ensuring it never touches the screen is not exactly the pinnacle of convenience. If Microsoft ever gets around adding this to Surface, they will get an edge... but, perhaps, by copying an idea from an HN thread :-)
- MBCook 14y ago
  Doesn't the Surface Pro do that? I was under the impression that the pen on the Pro used a Wacom mechanism, not just a $5 capacitive stylus like you'd use with an iPad.
jim_h 14y ago
Where is the 8GB RAM version? Or the version with 256GB SSD? I would have instantly splurged for 8GB, but old articles were wrong about it existing. It's a great machine, but I want to be able to run applications that take more than 4GB. VMware.. Photoshop.. (Admittedly it's nice to have a dedicated machine just for OneNote.)

46 points by bhauer 14y ago

Wow, that background animation slowed my Firefox to a crawl. Works quite well on Chrome though. Fancy stuff. HTML5? Edit: Wow, actually a lot going on in this guy's site. The little animated menus bottom left and right of the article. The filter searchable previous posts. The swivel-transition topic group-changes. The speed-controllable animation. Pretty neat, fanciest blog I've ever seen!

phase_9 14y ago
Shame I can no longer hear anything thanks to the roar of my laptop's fans! Text only link for TFA: http://www.google.com/gwt/x?u=http%3A%2F%2Ftiamat.tsotech.com%2Fsurface-pro-tip http://www.google.com/gwt/x?u=http%3A%2F%2Ftiamat.tsotech.co...
- mikecane 14y ago
  Thank you for that. My god, how can anyone think that animation is necessary?
cabirum 14y ago
Fully loads 1 core of my i7. Who the fuck makes things like this.
- gala8y 14y ago
  Just wanted to post the same OT: i5 spinning at 3 GHz. No comment.
xentronium 14y ago
Bottom right corner has a submenu for background animation (confusingly says 'normal' by default).
Stratoscope 14y ago
Perhaps it's fitting that the website is tiamat.tsotech.com and the offending animation appears to be in a file called tiamat.js: "In Babylonian myths, Tiamat is a huge, bloated female dragon that personifies the saltwater ocean, the water of Chaos." Source: http://www.pantheon.org/articles/t/tiamat.html http://www.pantheon.org/articles/t/tiamat.html
stesch 14y ago
I recommend NoScript.
- corporalagumbo 14y ago
  Eh, I find NoScript a bit extreme. Really makes you realise how common Flash elements are... Yeah, generally I have no problems with Flash, and I find having to enable everything or stare at gutted pages irritating. Plus, how do I know what an element is until I enable it - so how am I supposed to know which elements I want to enable? (If you have any tips I'm missing, feel free to fill me in.)
eknkc 14y ago
Safari on my MBP slowed down to grave. (Wonder how it fares on a surface pro with IE10)
sgt 14y ago
52520- Google Chrom 98.2 00:15.20 6/1 2 114 296 22M 74M 60M 107M 873M 799 799 running 501 30984 98.2%! Silly background animation. Looks cool, but clearly totally inefficient.
thenomad 14y ago
I'm actually very grateful that background was there and running - because it reminded me I'd turned my NoScript off yesterday to deal with a particularly recalcitrant payments site...
bane 14y ago
<sarcasm> I'm so glad html5 has saved us from the cpu eating plague of flash websites. </sarcasm>
bhauer 14y ago
You can turn the animation off using the menu at the bottom right. Having written a few blog entries about how much desktop PC technology has stalled out, I chuckle a bit that a modern PC struggles to do some two-dimensional SVG/SMIL animation. Thanks for the comments. If you like it, you may be among the minority. :)

thomasbk 14y ago

That background made the article unreadable for me. Both because it slowed down the browser and scrolling, and because it was incredibly distracting.

stcredzero 14y ago
The attitude made the article marginally readable for me. Both because it was a bit incoherent, and because it was incredibly distracting.
- tdicola 14y ago
  The use of 'datas' annoyed me. Data is already plural. The singular form is datum.
  - apl 14y ago
    I'm assuming that, in this case, he was using it for comedic effect.
clhodapp 14y ago
You can remove it by hovering over "normal" in the bottom right can clicking "stop animation".
- mikecane 14y ago
  Why should we even have to? What is this, MySpace?
diziet 14y ago
I felt the same way -- if my relatively powerful laptop is not rendering the page quick enough to be able to scroll down, others probably have an even worse experience!

corporalagumbo 14y ago

"The pen really has me confused. It would be awesome if it did more than it does. I am a little surprised to realize there is no preinstalled software that transcribes handwriting into written notes nor does any Office application do that." I feel like hits on a big problem for Microsoft. They've come up with a whole bunch of fancy new gizmos (Metro, Surface) - but it's all resting on top of a mountain of random legacy cruft, and they haven't tied it together or done anything really to iron out the weird inconsistencies. Great, here's a brilliant pressure-sensitive pen. What? No, we haven't made anything for you to use it with. Nope, sorry, no accommodations for it in the OS. Sorry man - too busy coming up with crazy new shit (and slapping it onto small portions of the interface)! I'm using Windows 8 now, and, mixed with Windows Phone 7.5, Outlook.com, attempts to integrate calendar and to-do lists, being forced to use the monstrosity that is the Zune phone software, I have to say, holy shit Microsoft - time to do some spring cleaning. I really hope instead of charging on to the next big thing, Microsoft focuses on consolidation for Windows 9 - delving in to all the random nooks and crannies, clearing out the legacy cruft, unifying the interface, smoothing out the inconsistencies between Metro and Desktop, streamlining their mobile-desktop integration, streamlining their web services. Otherwise, god, how much longer can they go on coming up with the new Next Bestest Thing to mash into the pile of random crap that Windows has become?

stcredzero 14y ago
> The pen really has me confused. It would be awesome if it did more than it does. This reviewer is (admittedly) clueless about OneNote, which basically has its own cult following. He also doesn't seem to be the kind to be heavily using a "poor man's Cintiq." I look forward to a review from one or both of those groups. Yes, a stylus is kind of niche. It's not exactly obscure, either, though. I'd like to see reviewers go into detail about graphics and design related programs.
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  Isn't onenote for metro a free download from the windows store? I tried to get my wife interested in the tablet PC (I have a Samsung tablet running win8 with a waccom digitizer), but she says its kind of small for sketching and the hand obscures the screen anyways, not as good as her Intuos; she has never tried an Cintiq.

kin3tic 14y ago

Nice choice of jump drive. It's so silly but I love it, it's simple and versatile. I've got it on a carabiner for easy access.

berkut 14y ago

Anand's review: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6695/microsoft-surface-pro-review http://www.anandtech.com/show/6695/microsoft-surface-pro-rev... Intel's Core i5 really shows its power here compared to the ARM chips in the benchmarks, but with the obvious downside of battery life. But when Haswell's out, that should start to change as Intel get more aggressive on the power usage side of things.

anonymoushn 14y ago

Hi there. I couldn't find any email address (or indeed any about/contact page at all), so I thought I would tell you here that scrolling on your blog is completely broken. Also, if a user middle clicks a link, he or she probably does not want the content to replace the current content.

bhauer 14y ago
What device are you using to read it? Middle-click should open in a new tab. Looks like a difference of behavior between Firefox and Chrome though. Firefox apparently isn't sending a middle click to the click handler on the anchor tag and I incorrectly assumed that would be the case for all browsers. I'll get that fixed up. Scrolling though? And all the griping about the background is nearly convincing me to turn it off by default.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

shin_lao 14y ago

How the heck do I close a Metro application? Do I even? Am I not really supposed to? Is this a computer or a phone-like thing? This is a Surface Pro; am I a professional or not? Do professionals close applications? Professional! (Turns out I just mash function-alt-F4, which seems to do the trick, if a little clumsily.) Just slide the screen with a finger from top to bottom to close an application.

Ergomane 14y ago
While you certainly can close Metro apps manually, there's no direct need in terms of resources to do so. Metro apps will be suspended when not on the foreground and removed from memory when free memory gets tight. When switching back, the app is resurrected from the grave. Such Jesus apps do depend on the developer not being lazy / retard. While MS checks apps during the winstore certification process, sometimes apps slip through that do not react to such events correctly. Using those apps is pretty annoying.
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  I often need to force restart metro apps gone wild, and I do so in the task manager (didn't know about the finger trick). These are first party apps like Mail also (to be fair, I have to do this in iOS also, no app is perfect!).
  - brudgers 14y ago
    If you have two monitors, you can toss the whole Metro interface from one to the other under Windows 8. It's efficient and effective.
    - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
      I don't use metro much on my desktop, just laptop and surface RT unit. The network sucks here in china, and most metro apps don't deal with it very well.
- asveikau 14y ago

jhspaybar 14y ago

Any reviews out there that address how developer tool chains look? How does Unity 3D do? How about Linux on a VM for web development work? Maybe even some feedback on how something like nodejs running at the command line and serving web requests for a dev environment looks?

Andrex 14y ago

> Most importantly, despite my obsession with PAO, that remains a figment of imagination. Harsh reality says that whether I like it or not, each device I own is an island. An island with an international airport, but an island nevertheless. Sounds like a Chromebook might have been a better solution? Except he seems biased against the laptop form factor for some reason. Samsung ones even have matte screens.

bhauer 14y ago
Yes, a little biased against the laptop form-factor. But mostly biased against Google owning all my stuff for me. I'd rather I own my stuff and access it everywhere without "synchronization" from my compute/data server. But that might as well be science fiction.
- Andrex 14y ago
  It's a browser so you can put as much or as little into Google as you'd like. It sounds like you're just really looking for something like the dumb terminals idea Sun was peddling years ago.
  - bhauer 14y ago
    Yeah, to an extent. Roughly that idea but with always-on broadband, high-DPI touch screens, and shared, concurrent application state across all terminals. I wrote more about what I'd consider ideal at http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao

eliben 14y ago

I really, really fail to understand how this is not a super-expensive laptop, essentially? Is it considerably smaller/faster than an ultrabook? I'll grant that this is an interesting attempt at converging two devices, but such attempts ultimately succeed or fail based on how well they can replace either device. Would this thing replace your laptop? Your tablet?

hakaaaaak 14y ago

Ok, a hypothetical. Valentine's Day coming up and my wife who is very non-technical has (1) mentioned a surface in the last few months and she never mentions things like that, (2) has developed a strong dislike for Apple (the company) and has no desire for an iPad or iPhone, (3) was raised on PC's and Windows and does not adjust to change in that regard. Let's say that she already has a laptop that is relatively new, but she spends a lot of time on the couch and doesn't take the laptop off the dock, and might enjoy having a tablet next to her on the couch. Now the question. Should I get her one, and if so, which one?

mikecane 14y ago
You sure she'd like something that heavy? Why not a low-weight Android tablet that can mirror her PC so she can do Windows without Windows on the tablet?

huhtenberg 14y ago

I for one want pen input, but under condition that it would allow me to rest my hand on the screen. It should, basically, recognize the pen input exclusively and ignore all other touch events, if I tell it to do so. Sketching or writing all the while hovering your hand and ensuring it never touches the screen is not exactly the pinnacle of convenience. If Microsoft ever gets around adding this to Surface, they will get an edge... but, perhaps, by copying an idea from an HN thread :-)

MBCook 14y ago
Doesn't the Surface Pro do that? I was under the impression that the pen on the Pro used a Wacom mechanism, not just a $5 capacitive stylus like you'd use with an iPad.

jim_h 14y ago

Where is the 8GB RAM version? Or the version with 256GB SSD? I would have instantly splurged for 8GB, but old articles were wrong about it existing. It's a great machine, but I want to be able to run applications that take more than 4GB. VMware.. Photoshop.. (Admittedly it's nice to have a dedicated machine just for OneNote.)