7 ms·

Last summer I participated in a startup accelerator in Chicago. My Macbook died in the first week! At the time, I didn't have the funds to purchase another Appl

by fumar 13y ago

Last summer I participated in a startup accelerator in Chicago. My Macbook died in the first week! At the time, I didn't have the funds to purchase another Apple machine. Luckily, my girlfriend had recently purchased a Surface RT with the keyboard cover. I did not think that the tablet would be able to replace a laptop for "serious" work, but it did. There are a couple of things that allowed me to do this. First, a USB port having the ability to hook it up to "stuff" comes in handy. Second, snapping apps side by side. And, the ability to use the desktop. I could have Excel and a browser window open at the same time. Third, I could access all of Google's apps through Internet Explorer. I was able to create great decks on Powerpoint, manage large Excel files, use the Google Suite, and multitask like on a laptop. The Surface RT was my main machine for the entire summer. And, at home my lady still used it to watch netflix and surf the web in bed. In August instead of replacing my Macbook with another Mabook, I purchased a Surface Pro. I run Adobe CC, Ableton Live, Microsoft Office on it everyday. It is my all one in solution. Windows 8 has a learning curve. It took me about two weeks to fully understand the OS, but I came from an Mac OS background. I recently started working in a digital agency, and we use Windows 7. I have to say Windows 8 makes my workflow easier than 7. Edit: I forgot to mention the pen! This is one piece of technology that makes me giddy. It works great with OneNote and Photoshop. I grew up with plenty of PDAs with stylus input. But, none of those lived up to the promise of an actual digital pen. Most filled the need to tap small boxes and areas on the screen. The stylus on the Surface Pro makes it feel like a different device when I am in a meeting taking notes. It stops feeling like a laptop or "tablet" and more like a digital notebook.

moron4hire 13y ago
I recently bought a Lenovo Helix, very similar to the Surface Pro with the Power cover. With WiFi on (i.e., at a coffee shop), I get about 6 or 7 hours of battery life out of it. With WiFi off (i.e., in the car when my wife is driving, or on an airplane), I get more like 10. It is a little heavier than the Surface Pro (though I've never seen the Surface Pro with the Power cover, so I don't know what the weight is like on that), but I don't mind, it's still lighter than my regular laptop. It lets me work without compromise. On my Android tablet or iPad, I can only do certain types of work, and it all basically boils down to "can I make an SSH connection?" With a Windows 8 convertible tablet, I can even have a copy of my database locally and be working completely disconnected from the internet. It's pretty amazing. Though, after this particular project is done, I might install a Linux OS on it, perhaps Ubunutu (though I'm not too keen on vanilla Ubuntu). I need to do some Visual Studio-centric work right now, but after this particular push I'll be able to move things over to Mono/SharpDevelop/etc., then get off Windows permanently. And that's the important thing. It's not so much that "my tablet runs Windows and the iPad does not". It's "my tablet runs a full operating system that doesn't pigeon-hole me into a 'curated experience' and iOS never will be such." EDIT: I should say "iOS and Android never will be such".
doorhammer 13y ago
The digital pen part is the one that keeps tempting me to check out the surface pro 2. I'm no artist, but having a digital notebook would be really nice. I want something that really comes close to the fidelity and feel of a notebook and a pen. For instance, when I'm sketching out a design or an idea, I like to jot down the ideas, connections, etc, and move them around. I like doodling random notes during meetings, and I also think it would be nice to have that while I'm working through math books. The Surface Pro came up when I was reading the review of it as an artistic tool written by Gabe from penny arcade. Really tempting now, as well, since I need to get a new windows machine to do some side .net work. In your opinion, does it feel as good/natural as others have said for hand-writing notes?
- LukasMathis 13y ago
  Not as good as pen on paper, but the closest I've ever seen. You should probably go to a store and play with one to see if it suits you. I bought my Surface after I did that.
  - doorhammer 13y ago
    Awesome. Yeah, I think I'm going to do just that today. I've got an ipad, which I love for a lot of things, but even with the various pens/stylii, the writing experience is pretty bad, for me.
    - LukasMathis 13y ago
      Same here. Even just the faster processor, and the responsiveness while drawing that comes with that, makes a big difference.
    - slantyyz 13y ago
      The one gotcha, especially if you go for a heavily discounted Surface Pro 1, is battery life when compared to the likes of an iPad. If you can deal with that, the Surface Pros are fantastic devices.
pinaceae 13y ago
you did all of that on a Surface RT? Impressive, because Excel and Powerpoint are unusably slow on RT. Source: We've developed a business app for Win 8, development was co-sponsered by MS and Intel. We have a very succesful iPad app in our vertical, it allowed large swaths of our customer base to switch to iPads for their fieldforce. MS themselves acknowledged that if you want to handle "large Excel" files, the RT is the wrong device. The Surface Pro 2 finally has the performance. I understand your enthusiasm, switching from a 2005 MB Pro to any device in 2013 is mindblowing. Just hold back with a little bit too much hyperbole, the RT was an underspecced consumer device, Office support on it was an afterthought and a paniced scramble for the dev team (as documented here on HN a while ago).
- fumar 13y ago
  Yes, I was able to do all that on the RT. I never planned on using it as my main machine, but I had no choice. Using an ARM powered device to handle an entire workload is not ideal. You are right it was not the fastest or best spec'd machine. When the time came instead of buying another RT, I purchased a Pro.
- 300bps 13y ago
  because Excel and Powerpoint are unusably slow on RT. I guess if you're using pivot tables or vlookups on massive datasets you might have a point. But I use Excel every day on my Surface RT and it performs very well.
- SirPulse 13y ago
  What is a large Excel file here? hundreds of Megs? For most files that I encounter, my old Surface RT works great.
- bane 13y ago
  My wife had her computer blink out for a couple weeks and while the problem was getting fixed she hooked up her ~10 year old netbook she bought back then for ~$300 to a monitor/kb/mouse and after windows updated the ancient XP and office installs, was back to work pretty quick. It was absolutely fine for office work and basic web surfing, full screen videos were a little rough but they worked...she even got some dev work done on it. Tbh, if the video performance was a little faster and it had an extra GB of RAM, she'd be perfectly fine with it as her day to day...and it fits okay in one of her larger purses. It's absolutely amazing how overpowered our machines are these days, there's almost no sense to it.
gotyou123 13y ago
Who you believe you can fool with such a comment? 100% camouflaged ad spotted.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  It's too obvious to be an ad. A covert camouflaged plug needs to be hidden much better.
rbanffy 13y ago
> I was able to create great decks on Powerpoint, manage large Excel files, use the Google Suite, and multitask like on a laptop The fact we consider such uses to be stretching the abilities of a 5-core 32-bit 500 megahertz processor coupled to half a dozen gigabytes of RAM and attached to gigabytes of blazing fast storage, that displays data using a multi-core SIMD supercomputer just for pushing pixels speak a lot about how ludicrously inefficient our use of computing resources is. With this kind of computer power, our parents designed Hydrogen bombs, ICBMs, supersonic fighters and spaceships. Now we make great Powerpoint decks...
- ksk 13y ago
  >With this kind of computer power, our parents designed Hydrogen bombs, ICBMs, supersonic fighters and spaceships. You can still write bare-metal code and run it on modern hardware with a thin OS that has functionality on par with the ones from that era. Question is, why would you want to? What specific tangible development cost/time (or other) benefits do you get out of it? >Now we make great Powerpoint decks... Powerpoint is also a vector art editor, a word processor, a spreadsheet tool, a multimedia player, a language translator, a restricted web browser, a script engine, etc, etc.
rudin 13y ago
You have posted 10 positive Microsoft reviews in the past year which corresponds to approximately 10%-20% of your posts. Are you paid to do this or just really into the company?
- ntkachov 13y ago
  I think he just likes Microsoft and the anti-MS circlejerk has been pretty strong lately.
- ksk 13y ago
  So are you paid to question why people like ms products by their competitors? Accusing people like this is rather childish.. unless your 'proof' takes the form "someone likes a product which nobody is supposed to like.."
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
    - ksk 13y ago
      >It's a reasonable suspicion, Let me get this straight. You believe that a multi-billion dollar company hires people to post multiple comments on a forum (which less than 1% of their total customers read) under the same username, and only 10% of those are positive (assuming its true, i have zero interest in digging through anyones comment history) - per year - just so a small percentage of people reading those comments might go out and buy a product without doing further research? >Surely you know how common it is for people to be hired to pose as bloggers who are in fact paid representatives of specific companies or political causes? No, actually, I don't know how common it is. >As to the OP being paid to doubt your sincerity, just ask yourself what his motive might be -- who might pay for that to happen. In other words, exercise common sense. Um.. I am not the person who posted the original comment (or the article). >Yes, unless it's justified by evidence. It's justified by evidence. You have a bizarre definition of evidence. The "evidence" in this case is the subjective opinion of one person who is interpreting the subjective opinion of another. There is no actual evidence that anyone was actually paid for anything. People using the "I can't think of anything else" argument don't convince me.
lloeki 13y ago
> I could have Excel and a browser window open at the same time. My developer coworkers — whether on Linux or Windows — multitask by ALT-TAB'ing between maximized windows (so, basically fullscreen). If they have multiple monitors, they use each one with a full-screen app. They never use Aero snap, they never have floating windows. The first thing they do when opening a program is double-click on the titlebar (possibly putting it on the monitor of their choosing before). Conversely I can't work without Mission Control, and use Moom liberally (~ Aero snap on steroids)

by fumar 13y ago

moron4hire 13y ago

I recently bought a Lenovo Helix, very similar to the Surface Pro with the Power cover. With WiFi on (i.e., at a coffee shop), I get about 6 or 7 hours of battery life out of it. With WiFi off (i.e., in the car when my wife is driving, or on an airplane), I get more like 10. It is a little heavier than the Surface Pro (though I've never seen the Surface Pro with the Power cover, so I don't know what the weight is like on that), but I don't mind, it's still lighter than my regular laptop. It lets me work without compromise. On my Android tablet or iPad, I can only do certain types of work, and it all basically boils down to "can I make an SSH connection?" With a Windows 8 convertible tablet, I can even have a copy of my database locally and be working completely disconnected from the internet. It's pretty amazing. Though, after this particular project is done, I might install a Linux OS on it, perhaps Ubunutu (though I'm not too keen on vanilla Ubuntu). I need to do some Visual Studio-centric work right now, but after this particular push I'll be able to move things over to Mono/SharpDevelop/etc., then get off Windows permanently. And that's the important thing. It's not so much that "my tablet runs Windows and the iPad does not". It's "my tablet runs a full operating system that doesn't pigeon-hole me into a 'curated experience' and iOS never will be such." EDIT: I should say "iOS and Android never will be such".

doorhammer 13y ago

The digital pen part is the one that keeps tempting me to check out the surface pro 2. I'm no artist, but having a digital notebook would be really nice. I want something that really comes close to the fidelity and feel of a notebook and a pen. For instance, when I'm sketching out a design or an idea, I like to jot down the ideas, connections, etc, and move them around. I like doodling random notes during meetings, and I also think it would be nice to have that while I'm working through math books. The Surface Pro came up when I was reading the review of it as an artistic tool written by Gabe from penny arcade. Really tempting now, as well, since I need to get a new windows machine to do some side .net work. In your opinion, does it feel as good/natural as others have said for hand-writing notes?

LukasMathis 13y ago
Not as good as pen on paper, but the closest I've ever seen. You should probably go to a store and play with one to see if it suits you. I bought my Surface after I did that.
- doorhammer 13y ago
  Awesome. Yeah, I think I'm going to do just that today. I've got an ipad, which I love for a lot of things, but even with the various pens/stylii, the writing experience is pretty bad, for me.
  - LukasMathis 13y ago
    Same here. Even just the faster processor, and the responsiveness while drawing that comes with that, makes a big difference.
  - slantyyz 13y ago
    The one gotcha, especially if you go for a heavily discounted Surface Pro 1, is battery life when compared to the likes of an iPad. If you can deal with that, the Surface Pros are fantastic devices.

pinaceae 13y ago

you did all of that on a Surface RT? Impressive, because Excel and Powerpoint are unusably slow on RT. Source: We've developed a business app for Win 8, development was co-sponsered by MS and Intel. We have a very succesful iPad app in our vertical, it allowed large swaths of our customer base to switch to iPads for their fieldforce. MS themselves acknowledged that if you want to handle "large Excel" files, the RT is the wrong device. The Surface Pro 2 finally has the performance. I understand your enthusiasm, switching from a 2005 MB Pro to any device in 2013 is mindblowing. Just hold back with a little bit too much hyperbole, the RT was an underspecced consumer device, Office support on it was an afterthought and a paniced scramble for the dev team (as documented here on HN a while ago).

fumar 13y ago
Yes, I was able to do all that on the RT. I never planned on using it as my main machine, but I had no choice. Using an ARM powered device to handle an entire workload is not ideal. You are right it was not the fastest or best spec'd machine. When the time came instead of buying another RT, I purchased a Pro.
300bps 13y ago
because Excel and Powerpoint are unusably slow on RT. I guess if you're using pivot tables or vlookups on massive datasets you might have a point. But I use Excel every day on my Surface RT and it performs very well.
SirPulse 13y ago
What is a large Excel file here? hundreds of Megs? For most files that I encounter, my old Surface RT works great.
bane 13y ago
My wife had her computer blink out for a couple weeks and while the problem was getting fixed she hooked up her ~10 year old netbook she bought back then for ~$300 to a monitor/kb/mouse and after windows updated the ancient XP and office installs, was back to work pretty quick. It was absolutely fine for office work and basic web surfing, full screen videos were a little rough but they worked...she even got some dev work done on it. Tbh, if the video performance was a little faster and it had an extra GB of RAM, she'd be perfectly fine with it as her day to day...and it fits okay in one of her larger purses. It's absolutely amazing how overpowered our machines are these days, there's almost no sense to it.

gotyou123 13y ago

Who you believe you can fool with such a comment? 100% camouflaged ad spotted.

sliverstorm 13y ago
It's too obvious to be an ad. A covert camouflaged plug needs to be hidden much better.

rbanffy 13y ago

> I was able to create great decks on Powerpoint, manage large Excel files, use the Google Suite, and multitask like on a laptop The fact we consider such uses to be stretching the abilities of a 5-core 32-bit 500 megahertz processor coupled to half a dozen gigabytes of RAM and attached to gigabytes of blazing fast storage, that displays data using a multi-core SIMD supercomputer just for pushing pixels speak a lot about how ludicrously inefficient our use of computing resources is. With this kind of computer power, our parents designed Hydrogen bombs, ICBMs, supersonic fighters and spaceships. Now we make great Powerpoint decks...

ksk 13y ago
>With this kind of computer power, our parents designed Hydrogen bombs, ICBMs, supersonic fighters and spaceships. You can still write bare-metal code and run it on modern hardware with a thin OS that has functionality on par with the ones from that era. Question is, why would you want to? What specific tangible development cost/time (or other) benefits do you get out of it? >Now we make great Powerpoint decks... Powerpoint is also a vector art editor, a word processor, a spreadsheet tool, a multimedia player, a language translator, a restricted web browser, a script engine, etc, etc.

rudin 13y ago

You have posted 10 positive Microsoft reviews in the past year which corresponds to approximately 10%-20% of your posts. Are you paid to do this or just really into the company?

ntkachov 13y ago
I think he just likes Microsoft and the anti-MS circlejerk has been pretty strong lately.
ksk 13y ago
So are you paid to question why people like ms products by their competitors? Accusing people like this is rather childish.. unless your 'proof' takes the form "someone likes a product which nobody is supposed to like.."
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - ksk 13y ago
    >It's a reasonable suspicion, Let me get this straight. You believe that a multi-billion dollar company hires people to post multiple comments on a forum (which less than 1% of their total customers read) under the same username, and only 10% of those are positive (assuming its true, i have zero interest in digging through anyones comment history) - per year - just so a small percentage of people reading those comments might go out and buy a product without doing further research? >Surely you know how common it is for people to be hired to pose as bloggers who are in fact paid representatives of specific companies or political causes? No, actually, I don't know how common it is. >As to the OP being paid to doubt your sincerity, just ask yourself what his motive might be -- who might pay for that to happen. In other words, exercise common sense. Um.. I am not the person who posted the original comment (or the article). >Yes, unless it's justified by evidence. It's justified by evidence. You have a bizarre definition of evidence. The "evidence" in this case is the subjective opinion of one person who is interpreting the subjective opinion of another. There is no actual evidence that anyone was actually paid for anything. People using the "I can't think of anything else" argument don't convince me.

lloeki 13y ago

> I could have Excel and a browser window open at the same time. My developer coworkers — whether on Linux or Windows — multitask by ALT-TAB'ing between maximized windows (so, basically fullscreen). If they have multiple monitors, they use each one with a full-screen app. They never use Aero snap, they never have floating windows. The first thing they do when opening a program is double-click on the titlebar (possibly putting it on the monitor of their choosing before). Conversely I can't work without Mission Control, and use Moom liberally (~ Aero snap on steroids)