Half the weight, 50% more battery life, and 1/3 the thickness.
I’m stuck with ThinkPad tablets because I need the Wacom digitzer and the trackpoint, but these Surfaces do call out to me.
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It’s a Lenovo?
Meh. I just ordered 20k of Surface products today, so I’m probably a little biased.
A large number of Apple users are developers and scientists and aren’t into Apple for any “brand loyalty” but because in order to get any actual work done you need to have access to a bash prompt and POSIX utilities. So either you have to run a Linux system or use a Mac, and especially for laptops, running Linux and getting things like sleep working properly is often more trouble than it’s worth.
Traditionally Microsoft has had little interest in either the developer (except for their own .NET stuff) or scientist market, but to be fair they are beginning to recognize their lack and have recently introduced test versions of a Linux layer for Windows 10 than basically allows Linux binaries to run unchanged. It’s not quite there yet, but it’s this sort of thing rather than gimmicks like pens and touchscreens that will get serious users to reconsider Windows.
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Point taken. I’ve been on Linux for my laptop and home server for so long, and driod for my phone, that I sometimes forget about the other less loved evil empire.
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How bout if they call it the 4S?
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Thanks for posting that. I spent a lot more time with the Surface Pro than the iPad, so my iPad Pro feelings aren’t super strong.
I do feel that Apple is more likely to get it right soon though. It’s amazing to me how terrible the trackpads are on Windows laptops (I’ve never used one I thought was good). If Apple puts the same effort into the pencil, I think they will get it right before Microsoft. Microsoft has been pushing pen computing for a decade or two now and they still aren’t doing a very good job. You can get an excellent experience with Wacom (and other) devices, but I want a good on-screen pen (or pencil).
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I have the 9 inch model and like it a lot. It ruined Wacom for me. I’m waiting for the new models and will upgrade to the 12-inch one then.
I wanted a true tablet mode, light weight and functional.
Yoga’s tablet mode is still a full size laptop: keyboard and hinges and all. Having the keyboard on the backside was just weird too, holding it one handed, mashing keys, the machine being split in two pieces… It just doesn’t have the feels that the clean Surface does.
I don’t completely dislike the yoga style of 2 in 1s, but I think the future will demonstrate the Surface style will be more popular and likely the majority of the market.
Nice joke.
But this idea of dropping the number just makes no sense to me. Why not a 4+?
Is this like when star wars became a new hope?
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My email laptop is a Lenovo Yoga and the pen is complete garbage. If I could get the same machine without the touchscreen or pen, I would because otherwise it’s a nice machine (I like the keyboard).
It’s relatively easy these days, at least with mass market laptops, but still harder than just buying an already working system.
The last time I checked, you could buy a fully supported linux laptop for about the price of a mac, but very few people in the sciences seem to know this.
I find your take on the mobile / non-mobile divide interesting. I remember when Windows 8 was introduced and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth because mobile elements had been added to the desktop interface. Largely I still agree with that lament. You, however, make it sound like Microsoft is the forward looking, customer friendly actor here. I’m so conflicted and confused right now.
That said, thank you for a fresh perspective.
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Virtualbox is great for that. You can run the same Linux environment on both Windows and Mac, and therefore have a consistent work environment across machines while having the OS, interface, configuration, and other software of your choice outside of the development environment.
I like that it’s both easier and a lot cheaper to get a lot more RAM on a Windows system than on a Mac. RAMdrive I/O is orders of magnitude faster than disk I/O which is very valuable if you’re crunching a lot of data. (Of course, if you’re doing the crunching on cloud servers, that doesn’t matter since the network will be the bottleneck instead of disk I/O or RAM swapping so in that case either is fine.)
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