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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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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.
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.
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
As someone with a maxxed-out ThinkPad W530 they've payed ~$2.2k for overall (originally $1.7k then upgraded to a 512GB mSATA ($200) + 2 * 2TB SATA ($100 each) and 32GB of RAM ($200) aftermarket during sales) honestly the Surface Pro 4 is quite tempting.
The Core i7 version with the Iris 540 has equal/better performance to the Quadro K2000M my current laptop has as a secondary Optimus video card. So it has MASSIVE power honestly, "Integrated" doesn't mean it's any slouch for gaming anymore, this is a giant myth ever since the first Intel HD Graphics 4000 came out. Iris is capable of 1080p gaming just fine, and the HD 4000 can cruise-control even brand new games at 720p easily in my experience.
Honestly, $1800 for the i7 w/ 16GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD, or $1600 for only 8GB of RAM? That's a damn good price for a travel-friendly laptop for any business traveller. It's far more capable than most 'full fledged' notebooks I've had to cope with.
And at $900 for the 'Core M' version with 4GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD? I'd still rather have that than the other $900 laptops out there. People with desktops seem to miss that you really don't need massive storage on a portable device. You need storage, yes, but most of that can be kept off-device, even for gaming these days I rarely have more than 50GB of games installed at a time as I uninstall anything I haven't played in a few months and re-download it later if I pick it up again.
So for the crowd MS is targetting? I'd call the Surface a home run. The 3rd version had massive and known overheating issues, but this iteration? I'm excited about getting one to replace my W530 at some point most likely.
- WolfWings, too lazy to login to /. in years and years.
In the consultancy I work within, two platforms are most common: Macbook Pros and Surface Pros. There are a smattering of relative dinosaurs hauling around 2.8kg Dells or Thinkpads, but the lighter form factors are absolutely relevant in this space, which does require good grunt running a development platform. I'm still using my Thinkpad because even at 2.5 years of age it has plenty of dev grunt, but I refreshed into a Surface Pro which in most ways is faster, and when docked it's a delight to work with. I went with SP because it's like a grand less than a MBP and I prefer a tablet with a standard okay detachable keyboard to the MBP's keyboard of just wrong (don't smack me, I worked with one for two months and never stopped hating its keyboard). My SP I can slip into a small bag and take to presentations or do small engagements, or I can pack the dock and accessories into a backpack. At 16gb and 512gb RAM and SD, it's plenty for even the big iron engagements I've done in the past few years.
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
... The letters of many programs are fuzzy ....
I think I can help with this one. Open the properties dialog for the executable (or shortcut) of that program. Click on the Compatibility tab and check the box for "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings".
I have customers using them for point of sale in their restaurants. The Surfaces were cheaper than the POS terminals the vendor was pushing, the ordering system is web based and didn't require anything special and all of the printing and card swipe stuff they already owned just worked.
Original Surfaces (the RT version) also shipped with a full copy of MS Office and never had any sort of Malware issues (or games), so they are/were decent choices for actual productivity with a minimal management requirement. The philosophy behind the Surface is substantially different from the way most people see tablets. They were never meant to be media consumption devices and in fact that's something they're oddly bad at being.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
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.