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New Surface products, built for Windows 11
- mike_d 5y agoWindows 11 seems to be a targeted competitor of iPad OS and just pretending desktops don't exist anymore. Hard to see the thinking in Microsoft's strategy here.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hulitu 5y agoBut they are working hard on it. So hard that they ignore all the bugs in Office 365 and just built the latest and (not so) greatest windows.
- hughrr 5y agoThey ignore all the bugs in everything. Feels like there’s a skeleton crew at MSFT just applying new turd polish and that’s it.
- pjmlp 5y agoWorse, it seems to be full of new hires (good for the people in question, nothing against them), that management just gets them lose with fresh blood ideas without any background on Windows development.
- nicbou 5y agoEspecially when there are no mobile replacements available for Windows.
- hnbad 5y agoMeanwhile here I am on Windows 11 (via the dev channel) living the best life with my touch laptop that I use both for work and leisure. Can you explain what makes you think Windows 11 "pretends desktops don't exist anymore"? If it's the product line-up revealed at this Surface event: the Surface line is explicitly a line of touch devices, so the focus on mobility seems on par.
- mike_d 5y agoYou actually hit the nail on the head. Touch devices do not make up the majority of existing Windows devices. My 43" monitor is never going to be touch. It is like if Apple decided that a third of all interactions on the next iPad OS would require you to plug in a mouse.
- hnbad 5y agoFWIW I very rarely use touch and certainly not for interacting with the OS on a daily basis. Most of the time I use the touch support for sketching or highlighting with the pen. My pairs of external monitors at home and in the office are also non-touch.
- 1_player 5y agoI was holding off and waiting for a new Surface laptop or 2-in-1 until recently when: - Windows 11 was announced and proves to be another Vista-like misstep. - I have learned about Framework laptops and repairability and being able to upgrade one has become a killer feature.
- shp0ngle 5y ago> Windows 11 was announced and proves to be another Vista-like misstep. It's not even out yet?
- skinkestek 5y agoYet they have been advertising its problems I think. I'm not that into Windows though.
- dgellow 5y agoI have to say that I do not understand the bad press around Windows 11. I'm using the dev channel since it's available and while things have been unstable (expected from a dev release), the user experience is clearly an improvement over the mess Windows 10 is. My machine doesn't feel slugish anymore, the Start menu and settings panel are finally usable, the new windows snapping features work quite well, managing external displays isn't a nightmare anymore, etc. I was even able to update my old Thinkpad x230 after enabling TPM from the bios, it feels usable again.
- 1_player 5y ago> the user experience is clearly an improvement over the mess Windows 10 is To me, it looks like another coat of varnish haphazardly and thoughtlessly painted on top of multiple layers on a crumbling, dry wall. A mishmash of ideas added on top of Windows 10, not an evolution and revolution and refactoring of what Windows is. Ah, and more telemetry and ads.
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- farnsworth 5y agoThe surface duo is just such a great concept, compared to the folding screen phones. They avoid all the tech risk and expense of the folding screen phones, and the two screen form factor is just a legitimately good way to organize apps on a screen, like having two physical monitors. The tech seems too early for the folding screen phones, and they unfold into something which is an awkward shape. There's nothing I want to do on my phone with a really big square of content. I wish the surface neo could have gotten a chance to shine. While we're on the subject, I wish the surface band had been given a little more time. Google has really dropped the ball with android wearables, it would have been a huge opportunity for microsoft.
- NoPicklez 5y agoHaving watched the video of the phone I agree, it actually looks like quite a good concept. I do think the integration with Windows is excellent as well, if I am at my computer realistically why should I need to pick up my phone? All of my notifications, features and settings should be accessible from my Windows laptop/desktop.
- itsme-alan 5y agoAll of them are accessible from your Windows machine using the Your Phone app.
- NoPicklez 5y agoYeah if you're using an Android device
- dgellow 5y agoI agree, it looks great. But the price is way too high! Starting price: 1599$?! Who can afford such a device, and what to do you actually do with something that expensive that you wouldn't do with a one-screen phone? If I sell my arm to buy something like this, which is basically the price of a good laptop, I expect a really, really special experience, I'm not sure the custom Android ROM Microsoft is using will be up to the task.
- svacko 5y agoIs it only me whom every of the links in the blog post returns "We are sorry, the page you requested cannot be found.The URL may be misspelled or the page you're looking for is no longer available." ? Normally it doesn't surprise me that links on MS sites are broken but I would expect at least fresh blog posts have it right..
- tored 5y agoSeems like the links redirects to the Microsoft store for your country. Perhaps the products are not available where you are?
- bigmattystyles 5y agoFuck that noise Jack; I recently updated my home computer and had to install Windows 10 from scratch - Even its setup seems to have changed for the worst since I originally installed it on my now defunct PC. I have the Pro edition (that I paid $200 for) - using the latest ISO, the whole setup just felt user and privacy hostile. I remembered that it would try to make me use my Hotmail account as a user account, but when I tried to go the old way of using a local account, it just kept telling me I was limiting my new system's capabilities. It kept trying to put me back on Hotmail account path. There were a few other things, like trying to get me to sign up for Office with a dark (well maybe gray) pattern, forcing Edge on me, which even though it is Chromium based and I would use it, they were so aggressive about it, it turned me off it completely. Don't get me started on the fact that I seem to be signed up for something called Bing rewards now and that there are ads in my start menu and in the new task bar weather widget. They also seem to have by default installed something called MeetNow in my taskbar and while you can hide the icon, you seemingly can't uninstall it. I have to say, as a .NET dev, I've been so happy with all the .NetCore stuff and even Azure is growing on me - but this Windows business is extremely disconcerting. If that's how even Windows 10 has evolved, I don't want any part of 11, even from just what I have seen so far.
- dgellow 5y agoI understand that you're angry and feel frustrated, but you're writing about your Windows 10 experience in a thread about new Surface devices and Windows 11. That just feels off-topic IMHO.
- LeoPanthera 5y agoDo you honestly believe that Windows 11 will not do any of that stuff? That would be a sudden shocking reversal.
- dgellow 5y agoWe will have plenty of time to complain about it when Windows 11 is released. I would personally prefer to see discussions regarding the actual Surface devices in a Surface thread.
- pram 5y agoLaptop Studio feels like the Windows 8 launch "convertible" tablet laptops no one bought all over again. Ominous!
- ThatMedicIsASpy 5y agoI've had a notebook like the Surface Laptop Studio - Sony VAIO Flip 15 (2014) - right before Sony sold VAIO. I've had it send in for repairs because the touchscreen was unresponsive a bunch of times before I got my money back and bought a Thinkpad (T440s). It was a software issue because a reboot always fixed it. But I bought it for school so the main part randomly stops working while taking notes was a deal breaker. The concept isn't bad. But the height of it while being a tablet on a surface is a pain to comfortably use a pen.
- dgellow 5y agoI also like the concept. Did you face issues with heat management, was your device fanless? That's often one of my main concern with those 2-1, if you want a good CPU, you often have throttling issues because it's really difficult to design a good cooling system for such a unique form factor.
- pizza234 5y agoSadly, they've abandoned the Surface Book. This means that currently, there is no modern big tablet on the market. Besides, aside the outdated design, the Book is a very valid concept. They've enlarged the Surface Pro screen (now 13", half inch less than the 13.5" Book), but it has a subtly different design (that is, port-richer), which inevitable increases the weight to 880+g - uncomfortable for extended time tablet usage.
- dgellow 5y agoFrom what I understand, the Surface Laptop Studio is a new approach/iteration to the Surface Book concept. Instead of being able to separate the display from the keyboard, which in practice is a bit of a pain as you never know how well Windows and your applications will react, you just switch from "laptop position" to "tablet position". Not sure how well that would work in practice, but it's an interesting idea.
- pizza234 5y agoIt really depends on the use case. If the use case is tablet-like functionality, any convertible design simply doesn't work. Using a 700g tablet is already barely comfortable for long usage; a 1.2+ kg one is essentially unusable. In my opinion, it's a great marketing success (in other words, a scam). For other use cases, I really have no idea what's the user base. I definitely recognize the (relative) innovation of the new functionality, but I have the suspicious that very few users actively use it. The convertible idea itself has been around for a long time, and based on my experience, it doesn't work in practice (in other words, it's a very
- satvikpendem 5y agoIndeed, is it really so difficult to give me a 15 inch tablet that can attach to a keyboard? The iPad is so close, ARM based performance, battery life, cooling, even as many complained about the Book being unable to be powerful because it's so thin. Well, that never stopped Apple. However, iPadOS is a deal breaker, I need to run whatever I need on the hardware, not what a higher power deigns it so.
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- pjmlp 5y ago> Introducing new Surface products, built for Windows 11 Surface Duo runs on Android 11 :) I guess at least the version number is the same. Sometimes I wonder how marketing department comes up with such statements.
- satvikpendem 5y agoIt says built for, not built on. I recall the livestream saying Duo and Duo 2 can connect to Windows 11 and integrate together.
- pjmlp 5y agoIt is a matter of interpretation, one can consider hardware built for running Windows 11, when reading such headline.
- lostmsu 5y agoNo Ryzen variants?
- galkk 5y agoNo new surface book? Did they ditched idea of that hinge? Surface studio "infinitely powerful" and the best cpu that MS offers is i7-11370H?
- nemacol 5y agoThere is a good tag line "Microsoft - redefining infinity"
- nicbou 5y agoI brought a Surface Go 2, and returned it within 3 days. The device was brilliant, but I couldn't get over its operating system, especially not on a mobile device. I hoped for a tablet I can do light dev work on, but I got a mediocre laptop without a keyboard. The open/edit/save process is good for desktop, but not for mobile. On mobile operating systems you open and close apps without thinking. On windows you first need to tackle the unsaved change dialogs, find where you save your files, etc. You don't open recent drawings from a gallery, but from your filesystem. It sucks all the joy out of sketching, for example. It becomes work. The lack if drawing apps was critical. There were Photoshop-like desktop apps, and half-baked mobile one. They were either really complex, or buggy beyond repair. Each handled the pencil in a different way, but never smoothly. Even media playback sucked. I had to mess with environment variables to make VLC usable with fingers. Windows Media Player was not better. Then there's Windows Update. My tablet was unusable for a big chunk of the first evening while it installed Bing news in my task bar and messed with my theme. I heard that these tablets have tons of hardware and software problems, but I didn't get to that. Long story short, it's really hard to get excited about Surface products when they are crippled by a poor OS and serious reliability issues.
- vb6sp6 5y agoI like my go 1 but I use it more like a small windows laptop with a touch screen, not a tablet. Note taking in onenote is pretty good and about the only tablet-like thing I do with it.
- wayneftw 5y agoI was looking to see why they didn't go with AMD CPUs and the only answer that I could find in my relatively brief search was that it was due to the chip shortage. Is that true?