7 ms·

You compare the battery life, but not the screen to the macbook air? The screen is higher resolution, has a better coating, and is touch. Other than that, it's

by MAGZine 13y ago

You compare the battery life, but not the screen to the macbook air? The screen is higher resolution, has a better coating, and is touch. Other than that, it's smaller and lighter (around 20%, actually), and comparably priced ($1299 for 256GB/8GB surface, $1299 for 256GB/8GB Air). It also has a micro SD card slot, to add further provisions. This isn't a tablet competitor, it's an ultraportable competitor. e: made a bit more concrete

arrrg 13y ago
And has a (certainly decent for a tablet but) awful keyboard and trackpad compared to other ultra-portables. There are clear trade-offs here (there always are and there is nothing wrong with making clear and opinionated trade-offs) and I’m not sure whether the Surface Pro makes the right ones. No doubt Microsoft made all the right trade-offs for some people, the question is only whether those some people are more than a niche.
- MAGZine 13y ago
  Right, at least the bad trackpad is offset by the fact that you can touch. The need for apple-level trackpad is offset by the fact that you can manipulate pages with your fingers, instead. And from what I've heard and used, both the touch and type cover aren't "awful" or "terrible". They're not 'good' either, but I'd certainly put them in the 'usuable' category. Would I write a book on it? Hell no, but I'd also be tempted to swap my mac's chiclet keyboard for a mechanical keyboard anyhow. There is certainly room for improvement, but people in HN seem to have an particularly high disdain for the surface's covers... they're not the demon they're made out to be.
  - arrrg 13y ago
    I think you slightly misunderstood me. I think the cover is pretty awesome. To me it seems like a winning combination with a $500 tablet. But a $1000 tablet/ultra-portable with the keyboard and trackpad? Is that the right trade-off to make? If the products competing here are $1000 ultra-protables with pretty great keyboards and $1000 tablets with crappy keyboards, which has the bigger audience?
    - niels_olson 13y ago
      > which has the bigger audience? What is the most accessible creative occupation? Writing? STEM fields? Or drawing? We could draw before the written word existed. We could write before we created more abstracted languages like modern symbolic math. I think the end game is to include high resolution, precise, accurate stylus input, a'la Wacom technology or something like it. I cry a little every time I see a Microsoft product with Wacom built in and an equivalent Apple product without it. What I'd really like is something like a Surface 2 running Ubuntu or SuSE, but with an Apple-worthy battery life.
      - arrrg 13y ago
        Maybe it can be done beyond the niche. My current guess would be no but I’m not super sure about that. Admittedly, do not expect any great insights from me in this regard, all I’m going on is that drawing (with a stylus) has been a (pretty big) niche application in computing for a very long time now and always nothing more. It’s useful for some people, but very far from everyone. Maybe that can change. Actually, I don’t really doubt that (look at all the previously niche-tech that’s in current smartphones because it became cheap enough and that had to find its mass-market applications first, stuff like gyroscopes) but I’m not sure whether it’s the Surface Pro that will do it. But it has, admittedly, a better shot at doing it than anything else that came before it.
- etler 13y ago
  As it is, I think it's still in niche territory, but I think with some polish it could be a really great product. The big question is whether microsoft can pull off the polish, which historically they haven't been able to (maybe with the new management this will change). There have definitely been many microsoft products I've seen that were incredibly impressive, but were simply not taken the rest of the way. Maybe a 3rd party manufacturer can take where the surface is now, and provide that polish, which I think was the goal of the surface anyways. Show what is possible to 3rd parties and let them take the ball the rest of the way. If that can happen, then the surface will have done its job.
  - sirkneeland 13y ago
    New management, and don't forget the very talented Nokia engineers that are inbound...
    - trailfox 13y ago
      Hopefully they fare better then the talented Kin engineers...
devx 13y ago
Surface Pro actually has a worse GPU than MBA, too (Intel HD 4600 vs Intel HD 5000), which contributes to that, plus a higher clocked CPU. And we already know that Windows' battery life is terrible [1]. It's all a perfect storm of bad decisions the reason why Surface itself has bad battery life. [1] - http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/10/why-does-windows-have-terrible-battery-life.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/10/why-does-windows-ha...
- MAGZine 13y ago
  Windows doesn't have the best power consumption--the facts are irrefutable--it's empirically visible. In the Surface's defense, it is running a wacom digitizer over a 1080p IPS display. Not only is it pushing 2x the pixels as the 11" MBA, but it's doing it over IPS (up to 15% greater power consumption according to Wiki). But yes, Windows has much poorer battery life, my speculation is that since Apple targets their hardware to a few small (comparatively) number of hardware permutations, they can take this to their advantage, and power-optimize the shit out of everything.
  - etler 13y ago
    The most effective optimizations will probably be on the driver level, which microsoft would have little say over (in terms of the surface, they should but they're weak in the hardware game). Here's a question complaining about 1/2 battery life for ubuntu, and an answerer said they were able to match the battery life by using proprietary drivers. http://askubuntu.com/questions/158778/why-does-ubuntu-have-about-2x-shorter-battery-life-than-os-x-on-macbook http://askubuntu.com/questions/158778/why-does-ubuntu-have-a...
  - Tloewald 13y ago
    Remember how everyone used to give Microsoft a free pass on its awful installation process (driver hell) because it supported so many options, but then Knopper (one guy!) created a Linux distro that auto-installed on almost anything. Microsoft makes tons of money on Windows and has tons of engineers, it could power-optimize for a heck of a lot of configurations. Given that a fairly small number of chipsets account for a huge proportion of PCs, I think it would be easier than we think.
vondur 13y ago
I don't think of it as an ultraportable competitor. The Surface pro seems to be running into the same issues with the very first tablet computers that ran Windows, they were/are a niche product. Great if you have a need for a stylus, but simply not worth it compared to a regular laptop. Like others have mentioned, to make it ultrabook capable,(getting a keyboard/storage upgrade) it's far more expensive than nice Windows based ultrabooks.
- oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
  This is the point everyone seems to be missing. Microsoft tried releasing tablets with styluses, keyboards, and a desktop OS before - they failed, big time. The market hasn't suddenly changed in the intervening years to one that wants that kind of form-factor. As Apple proved, the market wants a very minimal tablet, with an on-screen keyboard, a great touchscreen, and an OS optimised for those features. For FUN, not for work. A handful of people will use tablets for 'work' and for being creative, a couple of niche industries will find they can integrate tablets into their workflow, but for the average office worker who wants to watch some videos, the iPad is perfect, the surface is 'overkill'. (edit to correct incorrect autocorrect on ... iPad ;-)
  - discreditable 13y ago
    > The market hasn't suddenly changed in the intervening years to one that wants that kind of form-factor. I'll agree that most of the market doesn't want that kind of form factor, but two segments in which the convertable tablet has really taken off are in the education and health care industries. I work with a few schools that manage to hand out tablet + stylus + keyboard laptops to all of their students and do pretty well with it. My school isn't a fan of the Surface due to serviceability issues (non-replaceable battery being a big one) and that it is a great tablet, but gives up some ground in the general-use laptop area to do that. The other schools in our group share the same sort of sentiments.
Pxtl 13y ago
It's an everything competitor. It's the tablet/ultrabook answer to the way smartphones merged PDAs and cellphones. And like those early smartphones, it's got some growing to do. But the market it's trying to carve out strikes me as a real one with real demand. I'm surprised we're not seeing more doctors and other specialists-on-the-go wielding them.
- _wmd 13y ago
  Kinda tired debating the surface pro on HN, but you hit the nail on the head. This is a desktop computer that sacrifices very little, yet is the size of an iPad with comparable usability. Anyone who voluntarily indoctrinated themselves on the merits of toy mobile operating systems will never understand how awesome the Pro-range surfaces are. Much like the HTC Dream was basically a first generation joke, I'm hopeful and very much intend to be carrying one of Surface's offspring in my backpack in a few years time.
  - tadfisher 13y ago
    Hell, I'm interested in using one with Linux (if they've got the wacom issues sorted out, that is).
    - wfraser 13y ago
      The only problem with using Linux is that there isn't (as far as I can tell) a good Linux UI that's very touch-friendly. The closest one is Unity, and well, that's all I need to say there. (I realize some people like it, but I'm just not one of them, sorry...) I'm excited to see what comes of the Ubuntu tablet distro, but at the same time, they were the ones who made Unity, which isn't really good at anything. So I'm not super optimistic either. Windows's "metro" UI is obviously touch friendly, but even the desktop can be made touch friendly-ish via its DPI scaling, which I think works pretty well. I haven't been able to get that same usability out of any Linux desktop environment yet. (If someone has, I'd love to know about it!)
      - vanderZwan 13y ago
city41 13y ago
It really isn't though. I own a Surface Pro 1 and as much as I like it, it's a terrible portable computer. I hook mine up to a monitor, keyboard and mouse 90% of the time.
- iamshs 13y ago
  I would respectfully disagree, as i had one too and used it pretty much on the go 30-40% of the time. But then, I do not know your use case.

by MAGZine 13y ago

arrrg 13y ago

And has a (certainly decent for a tablet but) awful keyboard and trackpad compared to other ultra-portables. There are clear trade-offs here (there always are and there is nothing wrong with making clear and opinionated trade-offs) and I’m not sure whether the Surface Pro makes the right ones. No doubt Microsoft made all the right trade-offs for some people, the question is only whether those some people are more than a niche.

MAGZine 13y ago
Right, at least the bad trackpad is offset by the fact that you can touch. The need for apple-level trackpad is offset by the fact that you can manipulate pages with your fingers, instead. And from what I've heard and used, both the touch and type cover aren't "awful" or "terrible". They're not 'good' either, but I'd certainly put them in the 'usuable' category. Would I write a book on it? Hell no, but I'd also be tempted to swap my mac's chiclet keyboard for a mechanical keyboard anyhow. There is certainly room for improvement, but people in HN seem to have an particularly high disdain for the surface's covers... they're not the demon they're made out to be.
- arrrg 13y ago
  I think you slightly misunderstood me. I think the cover is pretty awesome. To me it seems like a winning combination with a $500 tablet. But a $1000 tablet/ultra-portable with the keyboard and trackpad? Is that the right trade-off to make? If the products competing here are $1000 ultra-protables with pretty great keyboards and $1000 tablets with crappy keyboards, which has the bigger audience?
  - niels_olson 13y ago
    > which has the bigger audience? What is the most accessible creative occupation? Writing? STEM fields? Or drawing? We could draw before the written word existed. We could write before we created more abstracted languages like modern symbolic math. I think the end game is to include high resolution, precise, accurate stylus input, a'la Wacom technology or something like it. I cry a little every time I see a Microsoft product with Wacom built in and an equivalent Apple product without it. What I'd really like is something like a Surface 2 running Ubuntu or SuSE, but with an Apple-worthy battery life.
    - arrrg 13y ago
      Maybe it can be done beyond the niche. My current guess would be no but I’m not super sure about that. Admittedly, do not expect any great insights from me in this regard, all I’m going on is that drawing (with a stylus) has been a (pretty big) niche application in computing for a very long time now and always nothing more. It’s useful for some people, but very far from everyone. Maybe that can change. Actually, I don’t really doubt that (look at all the previously niche-tech that’s in current smartphones because it became cheap enough and that had to find its mass-market applications first, stuff like gyroscopes) but I’m not sure whether it’s the Surface Pro that will do it. But it has, admittedly, a better shot at doing it than anything else that came before it.
etler 13y ago
As it is, I think it's still in niche territory, but I think with some polish it could be a really great product. The big question is whether microsoft can pull off the polish, which historically they haven't been able to (maybe with the new management this will change). There have definitely been many microsoft products I've seen that were incredibly impressive, but were simply not taken the rest of the way. Maybe a 3rd party manufacturer can take where the surface is now, and provide that polish, which I think was the goal of the surface anyways. Show what is possible to 3rd parties and let them take the ball the rest of the way. If that can happen, then the surface will have done its job.
- sirkneeland 13y ago
  New management, and don't forget the very talented Nokia engineers that are inbound...
  - trailfox 13y ago
    Hopefully they fare better then the talented Kin engineers...

devx 13y ago

Surface Pro actually has a worse GPU than MBA, too (Intel HD 4600 vs Intel HD 5000), which contributes to that, plus a higher clocked CPU. And we already know that Windows' battery life is terrible [1]. It's all a perfect storm of bad decisions the reason why Surface itself has bad battery life. [1] - http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/10/why-does-windows-have-terrible-battery-life.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/10/why-does-windows-ha...

MAGZine 13y ago
Windows doesn't have the best power consumption--the facts are irrefutable--it's empirically visible. In the Surface's defense, it is running a wacom digitizer over a 1080p IPS display. Not only is it pushing 2x the pixels as the 11" MBA, but it's doing it over IPS (up to 15% greater power consumption according to Wiki). But yes, Windows has much poorer battery life, my speculation is that since Apple targets their hardware to a few small (comparatively) number of hardware permutations, they can take this to their advantage, and power-optimize the shit out of everything.
- etler 13y ago
  The most effective optimizations will probably be on the driver level, which microsoft would have little say over (in terms of the surface, they should but they're weak in the hardware game). Here's a question complaining about 1/2 battery life for ubuntu, and an answerer said they were able to match the battery life by using proprietary drivers. http://askubuntu.com/questions/158778/why-does-ubuntu-have-about-2x-shorter-battery-life-than-os-x-on-macbook http://askubuntu.com/questions/158778/why-does-ubuntu-have-a...
- Tloewald 13y ago
  Remember how everyone used to give Microsoft a free pass on its awful installation process (driver hell) because it supported so many options, but then Knopper (one guy!) created a Linux distro that auto-installed on almost anything. Microsoft makes tons of money on Windows and has tons of engineers, it could power-optimize for a heck of a lot of configurations. Given that a fairly small number of chipsets account for a huge proportion of PCs, I think it would be easier than we think.

vondur 13y ago

I don't think of it as an ultraportable competitor. The Surface pro seems to be running into the same issues with the very first tablet computers that ran Windows, they were/are a niche product. Great if you have a need for a stylus, but simply not worth it compared to a regular laptop. Like others have mentioned, to make it ultrabook capable,(getting a keyboard/storage upgrade) it's far more expensive than nice Windows based ultrabooks.

oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
This is the point everyone seems to be missing. Microsoft tried releasing tablets with styluses, keyboards, and a desktop OS before - they failed, big time. The market hasn't suddenly changed in the intervening years to one that wants that kind of form-factor. As Apple proved, the market wants a very minimal tablet, with an on-screen keyboard, a great touchscreen, and an OS optimised for those features. For FUN, not for work. A handful of people will use tablets for 'work' and for being creative, a couple of niche industries will find they can integrate tablets into their workflow, but for the average office worker who wants to watch some videos, the iPad is perfect, the surface is 'overkill'. (edit to correct incorrect autocorrect on ... iPad ;-)
- discreditable 13y ago
  > The market hasn't suddenly changed in the intervening years to one that wants that kind of form-factor. I'll agree that most of the market doesn't want that kind of form factor, but two segments in which the convertable tablet has really taken off are in the education and health care industries. I work with a few schools that manage to hand out tablet + stylus + keyboard laptops to all of their students and do pretty well with it. My school isn't a fan of the Surface due to serviceability issues (non-replaceable battery being a big one) and that it is a great tablet, but gives up some ground in the general-use laptop area to do that. The other schools in our group share the same sort of sentiments.

Pxtl 13y ago

It's an everything competitor. It's the tablet/ultrabook answer to the way smartphones merged PDAs and cellphones. And like those early smartphones, it's got some growing to do. But the market it's trying to carve out strikes me as a real one with real demand. I'm surprised we're not seeing more doctors and other specialists-on-the-go wielding them.

_wmd 13y ago
Kinda tired debating the surface pro on HN, but you hit the nail on the head. This is a desktop computer that sacrifices very little, yet is the size of an iPad with comparable usability. Anyone who voluntarily indoctrinated themselves on the merits of toy mobile operating systems will never understand how awesome the Pro-range surfaces are. Much like the HTC Dream was basically a first generation joke, I'm hopeful and very much intend to be carrying one of Surface's offspring in my backpack in a few years time.
- tadfisher 13y ago
  Hell, I'm interested in using one with Linux (if they've got the wacom issues sorted out, that is).
  - wfraser 13y ago
    The only problem with using Linux is that there isn't (as far as I can tell) a good Linux UI that's very touch-friendly. The closest one is Unity, and well, that's all I need to say there. (I realize some people like it, but I'm just not one of them, sorry...) I'm excited to see what comes of the Ubuntu tablet distro, but at the same time, they were the ones who made Unity, which isn't really good at anything. So I'm not super optimistic either. Windows's "metro" UI is obviously touch friendly, but even the desktop can be made touch friendly-ish via its DPI scaling, which I think works pretty well. I haven't been able to get that same usability out of any Linux desktop environment yet. (If someone has, I'd love to know about it!)
    - vanderZwan 13y ago

city41 13y ago

It really isn't though. I own a Surface Pro 1 and as much as I like it, it's a terrible portable computer. I hook mine up to a monitor, keyboard and mouse 90% of the time.

iamshs 13y ago
I would respectfully disagree, as i had one too and used it pretty much on the go 30-40% of the time. But then, I do not know your use case.