We’re halfway there.
All we need now is someone to rig it into a Hackintosh clone.
It’s actually a question I’ve gotten from a lot from friends who do a lot of digital drawing and the like. And “it’s good for art” is definitely part of Microsoft’s marketing for the surface.
Most cheap or mass market laptops will choke on heavy Photoshop too. And most of the people I know who end up buying something that’s reviewed as “bad at photoshop” end up more than happy. Either because what they do is more pleasant to do on lighter weight software. Or because they’re just fine with how the full featured stuff runs on the machine.
I’m starting to suspect that PS is either a bad benchmark to use for that use case. Or the way reviewers are using PS doesn’t really model the work load in question well.
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Durability is not the surface’ strong suit; even outside of industrial environments.
They suffer from many of the same issues that contemporary smartphones have encountered while trying to feel as ‘premium’ as possible. Flexing, creaking, dodgy tolerances, plastic; all feel very downmarket. Body that’s a nice, rigid, metal piece with a satisfyingly narrow seam between the front glass and the side ‘lip’? Feels premium.
However, this also means that you’ve got a high rigidity shock-transfer strip well coupled to the front fragmentation plate; which is not the recipe for durability. The problem is particularly bad because there is a portion of the, otherwise rigid metal, rim that is plastic to allow the RF to do its thing; and a lot of cracks totally mysteriously start right at the point where the chunk of, comparatively, deformable plastic interrupts what would otherwise be a continuous metal rim and allows any shock to be delivered by the very edge of the rim to the glass. And, once you have a crack, the internal tension of toughened glass ensures that it will spread merrily(in fairness, some of the patterns are elegant, almost floral, in their meandering curvilinear exploration of the screen).
Also, they may have packed things a bit tight for safety. I’ve had a couple of units(absolutely pristine externally, to the limits of my ability to detect scuffing with a loupe and proper light) develop screen cracks in the vicinity of the power button; which occupies a hole that lets it slide merrily through the protective lip; and apparently isn’t backstopped hard enough to keep it from stressing the glass.
It’s one of those products that lives up to the Apple-issue standard of “copes with its self-inflicted limitations impressively well”.
(and since this probably sounds like a bitter rant; yeah, it probably is. Just as many aspects of windows 10 are a middle finger raised right at the IT department; the Surface line is obnoxious to support. It’s not like anything’s field replaceable; so Microsoft doing depot-only, with irksomely long turnaround times, probably makes sense; but their tendency to start every hardware support case (after letting ‘8 business hours’ elapse over a leisurely 2-3 days of radio silence) by insisting that it must be a driver problem and having you run through those hoops until the farce can no longer be maintained is deeply irksome.
By comparison; Lenovo are hardly what IBM was; but I’ve had them open my case, deliver my part and have a tech onsite to install it faster than Microsoft has returned my initial email with one of their weird “this will be our scope agreement” overtures.
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I hate that every engagement with a corporate support team feels like somewhere, someone is getting a promotion for actively making the customer experience worse and saving the company a hundred grand by making everyone’s lives actively worse.
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Really, any openbsd-based convolution accelerator and 64bit paint platform would do. So maybe I should put a ZTE disposal bin outside a Federal office and then find the others in it?
So, do the rub-on silicone screen protectors not remedy the glass cracking much?
Come and virtualize the experience of hardware for which (or for whose iteration which) Jeri Ellisworth was called -in- when it was time to ship, how are those Oculus-successors doing at suppressing the hate?
I’ve been using one for 2 days and I actually love it. The specs don’t tell the story. It’s the first small device that makes me feel like I really don’t need to tote my laptop around. (Chromebooks are a very close second, but still second.)
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Protective overlays presumably help a lot against scratches(though the toughened glass preferred for touchscreens is already pretty decent against those); but anything thin enough to not wholly ruin the touch-ability and image quality isn’t going to have much room to provide shock resistance; and in all the cases I’ve seen the cracking starts somewhere along the edge of the glass, then radiates and spreads throughout; rather than originating with a blow directly to the screen of the unit.
The one thing the ‘protectors’ can do is help keep the (unpleasantly sharp) fragments that start to flake off as the cracks surround and separate parts of the glass from escaping and either getting in your fingers or lurking in the keyboard and waiting to get into your fingers.
Given that the LCD panel often survives for a fair while after fragmentation has begun this can allow you to keep using one after it starts to fail. Which, when repair is $250, can be an attractive option.
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