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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."
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Way above what I need, both in price and in capabilities.
So the hardware is garbage running a malware OS AND costs $2700.
We're testing Skylake processors and Z170 chipset motherboards for moderately priced POS systems. The Core i5-6500 based system is 3X the performance across the board of an i7 based system from 2.5 years ago at 1/4th the cost. The relatively low cost, low power (read quiet operation), and performance are amazing. Putting these into a surface pro has got to be really awesome.
Greed is the root of all evil.
Isn't that called a laptop? And why does it cost so much? And it has all that spyware sending every link you look at to headquarters, people have to be intensely stupid to pay for that type of abuse!
I am not trolling, I do not understand the target market for this costly laptop.
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
2. Obviously not for gamers, the system does not have powerful GPU
3. Regular users now are moving away from laptop.
MS had to write off on Surface inventory recently as well. What does MS achieve from this Surface book and Surface Pro when it is not making profit?
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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Microsoft's highest achievement was stealing the late Steve Jobs' distortion field when they announced the Surface. It kinda went like this: "Holy shit, it's an iPad for Windows! And it has a kickstand we stole from Archos! Running a tiled window manager we lied about market-testing! And some people have to do real work on it, so we made up this floppy disaster of a keyboard, because hinges are so yesterday!"
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. Sure, the thousands they distributed to employees at the time were greeted with interest, but after a few days with the floppy felt touch keyboard, more than half just got boxed back up and stuck on a shelf while something with a HINGE got used everyday.
And now they tacitly admit the floppyboard sucked, by claiming they invented/reinvented/discovered the hinge. Brother, please. How about just saying "yeah that was a screwup, but we've come up with something nice"?
I think not...(*poof*)
Fuck Microsoft. Zero trust. All their shit is spyware and malware and even adware.
Their final bamboozle. The final lies.
distrowatch.com for a happier internet.
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.
I thought the Macbook Air was expensive when it first came out. Not sure I would consider either Microsoft Surface pro 4 or Surface Book a gold standard for Windows PC's. But I give Microsoft credit for no holds bar development on a notebook. But put a price like $1500 or more on a small notebook and it better hold up under scrutiny.
This is the teacher/professor's laptop of choice. Most of the things they need to access are web based anyway; the most graphic intensive thing they'll run is using it for a video presentation. My husband is still lugging around his original Surface Pro and has decided to ask for one of these Surface Books as a replacement when it's time for a refresh rather than a Surface 4 or 5 or whatever number they'll be at then.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
It falls short in both respects, while costing more than most decent laptops.
Sorry if I implied that the CPU itself is 3X faster - by across the board I meant I meant the whole computer PassMark rating as reported by PerformanceTest 8.0 from CPUComparison.com for an i5 system (3210) and an i7 system (994).
I'm comparing three computers, the HP RP3000 POS system we used to sell, the Desktop I use daily and a new i5 computer we are considering to use instead of the RP3000.
The RP3000 uses an Atom Processor and its associated Intel chipset video and 4GB PC2-6400 ram and WD 500GB Caviar Blue HD
My desktop is a Core i7-920 2.67Ghz on an Asus Sabertooth X58 with an NVidia GT610 graphics card with 24GB PC3-12800 ram and WD 1TB Caviar Black HD
The new Skylake system is a Core i5-6500 on an Asus Z170M-Plus with 8GB PC4-19200 ram and Samsung EVO 128GB SSD
Here are the rating details:
PassMark RP3000 - 260, CPUMark 249, 2d/3d GraphicsMark 63/NA, MemoryMark 242, DiskMark 332
PassMark i7-920 system - 994, CPUMark 4916, 2d/3d GraphicsMark 435/158, MemoryMark 1436, DiskMark 664
Passmark i5-6500 system - 3210, CPUMark 7366, 2d/3d GraphicsMark 622/1092, MemoryMark 2713, DiskMark 4373
Conclusions:
The i7 processor and GT 610 video card on my desktop computer was not the highest performance model 2.5 years ago but the model that fit my budget at the time. I went back and checked the costs and I exaggerated that- it was 2x the cost of my i7 system and not 4x the cost.
The new Skylake CPU and Z170 chipset is much cheaper and faster than systems from several years ago.
For about the same money, the i5 system is more than 10x faster than the HP system most of our customers have for about the same cost.
Finally, the power utilization is shockingly low. According to CPUID HWMonitor, the power of the whole system is usually under 5 watts in the i5 system versus over 100 watts on the i7 system. Using BurnInTest Pro, I could not get the i5 system to draw more than 38 watts.
While its clear that Moore's law in the CPU category is in trouble, the overall system performance with the integrated graphics, DDR4 memory and SSD storage has made up for it. As an added bonus all this is been made available with low power capability suitable for tablet/laptop systems.
Greed is the root of all evil.