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Microsoft Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book Reviews
An anonymous reader writes: Anandtech posted reviews of the Microsoft Surface Pro 4 and the Microsoft Surface Book today. They write: "After launching Surface Pro 3 with Haswell in 2014, Microsoft — like so many manufacturers — opted to skip the short-lived Broadwell generation of Intel CPUs in favor of making the larger jump to Skylake. Skylake brings with it notable increases in both CPU and GPU performance, particularly in the mobile space thanks to a series of optimizations and the use of Intel's leading 14nm manufacturing node," about the Pro 4 and with regards to the Book, "The basis of the Surface Book is that it is designed to be used as a laptop most of the time, but the display can be removed as a Clipboard for use with the pen. The Surface Book is certainly not the first device to do this, but it does some things in new ways that are pretty interesting."
from all the reviews the hardware is exceptional, The OS is obviously personal preference, win 10 being probably the best MS based OS so far and unlike what the trolls and shills try to claim it isn't malware, people making those claims only hurt the rest of the Linux community as it makes us look like a bunch of clueless zealots.
The better question is "Can I rip out Windows 10 and slap on Windows 7?".
We bought two Surface 3's for our sales guys. The hardware is good but not great. We seem to often have networking problems with them.
The keyboards are flimsy, and when you dock them, the keyboard interferes with the sliding dock. There is no power LED that I can find on the dock to verify i the plug pack is working. Plus Win8 is a dog, even on a tablet.
What surprises me, is whenever a surface is discussed, it is like an Angel of God descended. Is the hardware really that good, or is MS upping their shill budget?
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1. Developers would rather have lots of RAM and disk space, they can have those systems with better CPU for far less than what this thing costs
Very few developers need more than 16 GB RAM or a 1 TB SSD. Also very few need a processor faster than an i5-6300U. I currently develop on an i5-4300U with 8 GB RAM and a 256 GB SSD, and never feel it is insufficient.
The extra cost is trivial for any professional use. If there is even a slight need for a touch screen for things like notes taking or drawing diagrams / UI mock-ups, then a few hundred dollars amortized over 2-3 years of use is virtually nothing. $500 of extra up-front cost comes to $20 per month even if you replace your machine every two years, or approximately 0.2% of the labor cost of a decent developer.
2. Obviously not for gamers, the system does not have powerful GPU
This is mostly true, as you aren't going to play Witcher 3 on either of these machines. But you could play plenty of casual games or even many non-cutting edge games. I assume playing Civ 5, for instance, would be fine on the Surface Book with a discrete video card.
3. Regular users now are moving away from laptop
... to devices like this. I am finally making the move from a laptop & tablet to a 2-1 when my Surface arrives next week. I will still have a desktop at home for gaming purposes, but everything but the video card is from 2011 since there is rarely a need to upgrade anything else now a days.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Very few developers need more than 16 GB RAM or a 1 TB SSD. Also very few need a processor faster than an i5-6300U.
If, by 'developers' you mean 'people writing Javascript web crap for some social media startup', yes.
I only have 16GB of RAM and 12 cores on my development machine, and it's trivially easy to exceed both when writing real code that does real work in the real world.
You need to grow up. There is plenty of real code doing real work in the real world that is not resource intensive. In fact almost all of it. Not everyone is writing the next great 3d game engine or supercomputer modeling software. Even most resource intensive software today is written to be scaled out on commodity hardware, so most development and testing can still be done on modest machines.
If you have trouble developing with 16 GB of RAM and 12 cores, you are either very bad at your job or you have an incredibly rare workload for a professional developer. Although I do agree it is trivially easy to exceed 16 GB of RAM and 12 cores on many development tasks. Writing efficient and scalable code is hard.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Yeah, we see how that went. Sad missionaries from Redmond trying to balance a flipped-back keyboard on their knees, or seeking a flat table when they have to type... Truly, the specs of the tablet were good, but a limp, flaccid keyboard was just unfathomably stupid on a device intended to run Office.
Sounds like someone who should have bought a laptop. The keyboard is for convenience and nothing more. It's quite a crappy thing, perfectly usable for typing and office type work, but as you rightly say you need a table. This thing is not a LAPtop.
Still suits for an incredibly large number of use cases.