Apple CEO Tim Cook: "Microsoft Surface Book Tries Too Hard To Do Too Much" (hothardware.com)

MojoKid writes: Apple CEO Tim Cook isn't making any friends on the PC side of the aisle this week. Cook took to the interview circuit this week to heavily promote the release of the new 12.9-inch iPad Pro and didn't waste any time kicking some dirt in the eyes of PC consumers around the world. When questioned on his thoughts about PCs, Cook wondered, "I think if you're looking at a PC, why would you buy a PC anymore? No really, why would you buy one?" Many would take issue with those comments. But we'll leave those comments behind, because Cook decided to set his targets on the current darling of the PC community — the Microsoft Surface Book. Even though Cook says that his company's relationship with Microsoft is "really good," he went on to say that the Surface Book "tries too hard to do too much" and that "it's trying to be a tablet and a notebook and it really succeeds at being neither." It will be interesting to see Mr. Cook's reaction as sales figures for the device roll in post holiday shopping season.

Comments

He's got his talking points

[Anonymous Coward]

He's trying to defend his design calls of the ipad "pro".

The fact of the matter is that, if it weren't for Windows 10, I'd probably be looking at a surface over the ipad "pro" because it's more versatile and makes more sense. But I don't like where MS seems to be going with Windows 10's spyware and forcing everyone onto updates - So I'm holding off on any purchases for now.

Re:He's got his talking points

[dreamchaser]

Windows 10 is really not that bad at all. I use it on my gaming system. The 'spyware' piece is trivial to mitigate, and you do not have to install updates depending on the version you get. You can defer them with Pro.

Re:He's got his talking points

[LichtSpektren]

Adding 100+ domains to your router's firewall is only "trivial to mitigate" for geeks. >99% of Windows 10 users are being spied on, even if they think they turned the settings off.

Re:He's got his talking points

[ganjadude]

if he didnt see it as a threat, he would ignore it like all the other devices that compete.

I saw one in a MS store the other day and while its too rich for my blood, If i had the money to choose between surfacebook and ipad pro, im going surfacebook

Re:He's got his talking points

[Anonymous Coward]

Adding 100+ domains to your router's firewall is only "trivial to mitigate" for geeks. >99% of Windows 10 users are being spied on, even if they think they turned the settings off.

I wish more people knew this. I wish even more that they cared. Maybe then Microsoft would put an official way to turn off all communications (besides activation) with their servers. The fact that they took away the option is a real dick move. It makes it even worse that they lead people to believe that they have full control.

Re:He's got his talking points

[unixisc]

He's trying to defend his design calls of the ipad "pro".

The fact of the matter is that, if it weren't for Windows 10, I'd probably be looking at a surface over the ipad "pro" because it's more versatile and makes more sense. But I don't like where MS seems to be going with Windows 10's spyware and forcing everyone onto updates - So I'm holding off on any purchases for now.

I get your point about the spyware & forced updates.

However, Windows 8 tries to be both a PC OS and a tablet OS, and succeeds in neither. If you try using it as a tablet - as I did w/ my Winbook - it goes into the desktop mode w/ most of your common apps. Unless you were using News, Food & Drink, Health, Travel and those metro apps. Many of which are now discontinued in Windows 10. But in most cases, like if you were using Internet Explorer, it forces you into the desktop. Why?

And if you got a surface and tried using it as a laptop, you'd run into those hot corner bugs, where if your cursor is near the right of the screen, the charms bar pops up. But even in desktop mode, it's not smooth - hit the Windows button, and you'll get the Metro screen. In Windows 10, it's slightly better, where you have a scrollable balloon pull-up menu, but I'd still have liked the capability to have listed apps, like in Windows 7.

Windows 10 is the only thing that makes the Surface usable at all. Unless one could install Windows 7 on it, and ignore the touchscreen capabilities

Re:He's got his talking points

[TWX]

Work issued to me a Thinkpad Yoga with the 12.5" screen, i5, 4GB RAM. It works so well that when my wife needed a new computer to replace the old Thinkpad X301 she bought the i7 version with 8GB RAM. It's running Windows 8.1 and we currently have no desire to change that.

Cook is right, it is neither a perfect laptop nor a perfect tablet, but when she was traveling and going to be gone for about three weeks for a family emergency without reliable Internet access it made for an excellent platform on which to watch movies and TV shows, a good book reader, a good casual simple game computer (ie, emulated card and tile games), and a good computer on which to take notes. It also allowed her to do some work when she could occasionally get Internet access as it ran full versions of productivity programs.

If I want a toy I'll buy something that's only a tablet. If I want a computer to do work on then at a minimum I want something that runs a conventional computer operating system.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Anonymous Coward]

99% of Windows 10 users are being spied on, even if they think they turned the settings off.

You have hard evidence of that claim, right?

By the way, are you that naive to think the sainted Tim Cook and his Apples are not "spying" on you? Wake up numbnutz.

Re:He's got his talking points

[LichtSpektren]

99% of Windows 10 users are being spied on, even if they think they turned the settings off.

You have hard evidence of that claim, right?

By the way, are you that naive to think the sainted Tim Cook and his Apples are not "spying" on you? Wake up numbnutz.

Hard evidence: look at the view counts of all the pages on the Internet that list all of the 100+ domains you need to block from your router to turn off the Windows 10 spying. Even if *every single view* was an individual person that went ahead and followed the directions religiously, that would still be less than 1% of all Windows 10 rollouts.

Don't get me wrong, I am no Apple fan. I proselytize for Linux. But if the choice is either Windows 10 or OS X, I would advocate for the latter, because the spying in OS X can be turned off without fighting the OS tooth and nail.

Re: He's got his talking points

[LichtSpektren]

You need Windows 10 Enterprise to turn off the spying. For Win10 Pro, you still need to block all of the domains from your router.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Anonymous Coward]

I've completely abandoned Windows except on a tiny Netbook computer where I run my tax software. Everything else is either Mac or Linux. I had high hopes for Windows 10 but the spyware they put in is just the writing on the wall... I expect it to get worse, not better.

Re:He's got his talking points

[cfalcon]

> trivial to mitigate

Would you like to play a game?

Step 1- You tell me how to mitigate the spying.
Step 2- I tell you a thing you missed.

If I can't find anything else, or I stop responding, you win.

If you stop responding, or can't find the solution, I win. If you post a link, I win.

Note: Even if you win, you'll probably have to backtrack on your "trivial to mitigate".

Right now I'm winning, because you haven't told how to turn off a single piece of telemetry or update. Go ahead, post your guide.

Re: He's got his talking points

[cfalcon]

While I was saying this a little while ago, at this point I don't believe that even Enterprise truly turns off the spying- it just lets you pick the "no telemetry" option, but still leaks some data. It's certainly a lot better than Pro (or the free Home), which don't even give you the option to turn it off.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have to make your argument by calling someone 'numbnutz' you need to really do some soul searching, bud.

Re:He's got his talking points

[lgw]

Adding 100+ domains to your router's firewall is only "trivial to mitigate" for geeks. >99% of Windows 10 users are being spied on, even if they think they turned the settings off.

You don't need to do that, you just need to run one of the many third-party utilities that kill the spyware. Updates may one day add more spyware, of course, but 99% of user install malware willingly anyhow, so it's hardly worse than what their used to - just run some sort of cleanup every so often.

Re:He's got his talking points

[LichtSpektren]

Adding 100+ domains to your router's firewall is only "trivial to mitigate" for geeks. >99% of Windows 10 users are being spied on, even if they think they turned the settings off.

You don't need to do that, you just need to run one of the many third-party utilities that kill the spyware. Updates may one day add more spyware, of course, but 99% of user install malware willingly anyhow, so it's hardly worse than what their used to - just run some sort of cleanup every so often.

Windows 10 bypasses the firewall and hosts file to phone home, so unless that third-party utility is altering your router's settings, then I'm not sure what it's supposed to do. Are they confirmed (via packet sniffing) to actually work?

Re: He's got his talking points

[LichtSpektren]

While I was saying this a little while ago, at this point I don't believe that even Enterprise truly turns off the spying- it just lets you pick the "no telemetry" option, but still leaks some data. It's certainly a lot better than Pro (or the free Home), which don't even give you the option to turn it off.

Thanks for the heads up on that.

Re:He's got his talking points

[davester666]

Aren't some of those connections hardcoded to specific IP addresses, so just blocking domains doesn't do the whole job...

And you can only 'defer' updates for so long.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Pinky's Brain]

It would be phenomenally stupid for Apple to spy on their users. If they lost even a tiny percentage of users over it they would lose more money than they could make. Now of course Microsoft's current spying is phenomenally stupid as well in the long term.

Apple is too smart for it, but the windows division of Microsoft is currently run by a bunch of incompetent chucklefucks. Maybe they should bring in whoever is running their cloud services division.

Re:He's got his talking points

[gumbi west]

wow, bypassing the hosts file is just... wow. Before I read this I would have told you MS was at least being honest on their slow crawl to death.

Re:He's got his talking points

[LichtSpektren]

I've read from some testers that using the domain firewall on their router was successful. But please show me anybody that can demonstrate the contrary, I would very much like to know. If the router can't block the spying, well, Win10 users are SOL.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Neo-Rio-101]

When upgrading, don't choose "Express Installation"
Choose "Customize" and TURN. EVERYTHING. OFF.

Then go into Privacy of your new install and turn all that off as well.

Re:He's got his talking points

[LichtSpektren]

Turning off all the settings does absolutely nothing. Try it yourself. Turn all the settings on, open up a packet sniffer, and do something rudimentary like opening up the Windows Calculator. You'll see Windows suddenly contacting over 100 domains. Then turn all the telemetry settings off, put all the domains in your hosts file and firewall, disconnect your Microsoft account, perform an animistic ritual for good fortune--there will be almost no difference whatsoever in all of the phoning home that Windows 10 does.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Ol Olsoc]

Windows 10 is really not that bad at all. I use it on my gaming system.

It's not "bad", I have it on a few computers now.

The 'spyware' piece is trivial to mitigate,

If by trivial, you mean turning off the things they allow you to turn off, you do know they continue to collect data. A few ways to mitigate that. One is to use a non microsoft hardware firewall, to block them, or like I'm doing with a scrifical computer, I have only the 3 or four programs I need on it. No social, no email, no internet use other than logs the program sends out. Third way is I have it on several computers on a airgapped (by miles) networked system.

and you do not have to install updates depending on the version you get. You can defer them with Pro.

It's pretty sad when you have to buy the enterprise version to not be forced to do updates. BTW, I'm set to defer, but they update when tehy feel like it anyhow.

It's a pity, If it were based on the operating system working well, and the return to easy system maintenance, I'd rate it at arounda solid A+.

With their invasive aspects and forced updates, that gets a 0, so the OS gets 49 percent overall.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Ol Olsoc]

Adding 100+ domains to your router's firewall is only "trivial to mitigate" for geeks. >99% of Windows 10 users are being spied on, even if they think they turned the settings off.

Id use a linux hardware firewall if I were you, otherwise, yeah a gazillion additions to a firewall is hardly trivial, and of course they will add more with every forced update.

Re:He's got his talking points

[AndroidCat]

Really? I guess Windows 10 really will be the last Windows. See, I have this strange idea that I own my computers and my Internet connection.

I can't remember when I opened an Office app with intent.
W10 won't run my old favorite games.
That flat monochrome UI is a regression to Windows 2.1, and makes long-existing apps look like poop.
My LAN took a vote and they're split down the middle on processors and terabytes between Windows and Linux, and I know who the Androids will support.
My last Windows anchor was Delphi, and I've switched to Lazarus.

Apple? An Apple Pi would have no I/O ports.

Re:He's got his talking points

[cfalcon]

You aren't OP, but you can play also. Here's one thing that you missed: This doesn't disable telemetry, because you can't turn it off under Privacy. Your options are "Basic, Enhanced, and Full". None of these options under Privacy disable telemetry- there's no off switch!

Ok, ball is in your court- say how to turn it off.

(I've got more after this, of course, so feel free to go for extra credit on the disabling to head off my next reply)

Re:He's got his talking points

[dwywit]

Do tell me how W10 manages to bypass the firewall rules in my router?

It MAY bypass its own firewall, but it's only going to take one exploit for the lawsuits to start rolling in.

Re:He's got his talking points

[cfalcon]

Shh don't get to the keylogger service and stuff until later. You have to play the game slowly. Don't jump to the end.

Re:He's got his talking points

[brantondaveperson]

OSX is not within a "walled garden", but I suppose there's no need to let facts like that get in the way of a good story.

OSX beats windows. Apple hardware lacks upgradeability. I can't see how either position can be argued against, unless you've really got a thing about minesweeper.

Oh. Wait.

Re:He's got his talking points

[lgw]

Windows 10 bypasses the firewall and hosts file to phone home, so unless that third-party utility is altering your router's settings, then I'm not sure what it's supposed to do.

The spyware is in executable files, easy enough to kill. I haven't yet dug into which utility is safe, or I'd make a specific recommendation. Microsoft has created a market here, and a market that's appealing to "all Windows customers" gets multiple competing products pretty quickly.

Re: He's got his talking points

[GrantRobertson]

He's not making his argument BY calling names. He is making an argument, and THEN calling names.

There is a huge difference. The former is born out of ignorance. The latter is born out of the frustration from needing to make said argument yet again.

In my view, conflating the two is a sure sign of the former which will likely prompt others to more of the latter.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

There's a certain irony that the one thing that really puts me off Apple gear, both iOS devices and mainstream OS X computers, is the lack of commitment to long term support. I don't want to buy a device and find the OS isn't even getting security patches within five minutes unless I update to some new version that I might or might not want. I want to buy a device where the software is supported for the working lifetime of the machine and whether to install updates for anything other than security/stability/compatibility is up to me and an independent decision.

Whatever else you can say about Microsoft, until very recently they always made a serious effort to support Windows systems long-term. But then with Windows 10 they've baked in the forced updates, which removes the one thing that almost guaranteed I'd be buying Windows and not OS X machines for the foreseeable future.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

iOS is a walled garden. OS X is not. It's basically an adapted BSD under the hood with Apple's custom OS X GUI and other services on top, and it has no more trouble installing third party software, accessing the underlying filesystems, or communicating with remote systems than a Windows system.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Anonymous Coward]

An honest review of iOS' call-home tendencies would probably not give it higher marks than Win10. For example, try playing a game? Can't disable GameCenter. Try listening to music when there's no network? You're treated to a message it can't connect to Apple before you can play it.

Re:He's got his talking points

[msimm]

There are plenty of tools that automate the process. I recently did a fresh install to clean out my system and used ShutUp10 but it's far from the only one.

Re:He's got his talking points

[NoZart]

For Non-Pro and Enterprise Machines: Set your connection to metered. Now you can control when your updates are downloaded and installed.
For Pro and Enterprise: There's a Regkey/GPO that enables the "classic" way of updating: either download, then ask to install, or notify of download and then download and install when the user wants. (I had to do this, because i have a small pipe and Windows10 insisted on downloading - and grabbing all bandwidth - stuff while i Netflixed)

Re:He's got his talking points

[hairyfeet]

Ask and ye shall receive.

Re:He's got his talking points

[brunes69]

Your comment makes it sound like you think that the iPad Pro has less "spyware" than Windows 10. Good luck with that.

If you want no spyware, but a decent piece of hardware, neither Apple nor Microsoft are viable options. Buy the Surface Pro or Macbook Pro, and put Linux on it.

Re:He's got his talking points

[serviscope_minor]

You mentioned it's not a perfect laptop: out of interest what is imperfect about it? I'm in the market for a new laptop, so I'd be really interested in your opinion of what's wrong with it. I find slashdotters opinions on laptops to be on the whole much morer eliable than reviews online.

Re:He's got his talking points

[dave420]

Did you read that article? Microsoft isn't doing anything bizarre or unheard of. It's the same stuff that's been happening for over a decade.

Misrepresenting the situation is not helping anyone.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Wild_dog!]

Interesting that windows doesn't run your old favorite games.
My version of Win 10 Runs Warcraft 2 BNE from 1999.
I think there are several others from that era that work just fine.
What games are you trying to run which don't work?

Re:He's got his talking points

[Wild_dog!]

Just run it in VM with connection to the outside world shut off.
I have done this with XP for years so that I don't inadvertently get infested with something.

Re:He's got his talking points

[citizenr]

Windows 10 bypasses the firewall

no it doesnt, building backdoors into own firewall would be a death sentence in corporate market

Re:He's got his talking points

[drinkypoo]

Interesting that windows doesn't run your old favorite games.
My version of Win 10 Runs Warcraft 2 BNE from 1999.

And yet Windows XP x64 won't run Civilization 2. And even more hilariously, neither will XP Mode. That's right, Windows XP in Virtual PC shits itself when you try to run civ2.exe. Microsoft can't even get virtual machines right.

Windows Vista was a huge step backwards in legacy compatibility, Windows 7 is basically the same level of compat as that. Windows 10 can safely be assumed to be much worse.

Back-compatibility has always been the reason to run Windows. Since they are breaking it now, so badly that even their stopgap virtual machine solution for compatibility on Windows 7 doesn't actually work, what is the point of Windows? As far as I can tell, there is none; I for one only run it because you still need it for games and for fiddly things like reconfiguring a uBlox GPS module; the config app only runs on Windows. Or reprogramming my RC transmitters, the software is windows-only. But the amateur programmer is more and more likely to do a Linux version...

Re:He's got his talking points

[Wild_dog!]

This discussion just reminded me to go ahead and fire up my Win 10 Pro VM, unblock my internet, and run some updates.
THX for reminding me.

Re:He's got his talking points

[KGIII]

You can neuter the Amazon tracking from search and any data collection with Ubuntu. It should be easier and a bit more clearly labeled, but it can be done with fairly easy steps.

Re:He's got his talking points

[KGIII]

Every time there's a new Windows OS (even back in 95, it seems) there's an uptick in interest in Linux. It dies down in 6 months, generally. I've noticed no greater increase in interest or questions on the various Linux forums from any other release. People just don't care. If I used Windows, I'd probably not care either. Privacy is not why I use Linux. So far, and Microsoft has been collecting information for years, they've been pretty good stewards of that information. Considering the vast amounts of data that they have (and the huge target they have with their upgrade servers) they must be doing something right.

I've used MS products extensively. Hell, I used to be a member of the MVP program. I exclusively use Linux these days (with some alternatives in VMs) but my doing so is not because of anything Microsoft did directly, so to speak. I can, and have, run Windows just fine and kept is secure easily enough. If anything, it's ease is one of the reasons I stopped using it entirely. I like to poke, to play, to break, and to learn. That's why I use Linux. You play video games. I play grep.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Wild_dog!]

I've found in my experience that there is almost always some way to install anything legacy. Sometimes it is difficult. Sometimes not.

I haven't tried this but here is a way to get the old Civ 2 to play on 64-bit systems allegedly.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/...

Re:He's got his talking points

[KGIII]

Citation needed. I'll accept anything similar to a wireshark printout side-screened with a video of the OS in action, preferably with the task manager open.

Why? 'Cause I don't use Windows and not even *I* expect they've jumped the shark this bad and I'm pretty sure you're full of shit given the many, many articles on the subject.

It's only a half dozen or so, not 100. ;-) It's something like 60 of 'em total but they're not all going to be invoked by opening the calculator.

Re:He's got his talking points

[AmiMoJo]

It's a security measure that has been in place since Windows 98. Windows Update always bypasses the hosts file to prevent malware disabling it that way, or even worse redirecting it to another server.

Note that it only affects Windows Update. I have confirmed with a packet sniffer that the telemetry stuff does use the hosts file.

Re:He's got his talking points

[drinkypoo]

I haven't tried this but here is a way to get the old Civ 2 to play on 64-bit systems allegedly.

Well, I'll try that patcher (for the onlookers, it's a patch for civ 2 gold multiplayer only) and see what happens... yes, it seems to work. There was a lonnnnnng pause before it launched, so long I thought it wasn't going to, and then it kicked off. I didn't copy any additional files from the install media. Maybe it was trying to play an intro. It's not even pinning any of my CPU cores, which is unusual for civ2. Thanks for the heads-up.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Wild_dog!]

You can create a Virtual 32 bit version of XP using virtual box that should be able to run the rest of your software.
DOSBox is another program that is useful for running DOS programs and games.

If there is a will, there is a way.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Bruinwar]

OK so MS is collecting more data than ever before, even with the options turned off. Apple & Google both do it, correct?

Re:He's got his talking points

[AmiMoJo]

Try it yourself.

I did. Windows 10 Pro, installed from the official ISO in a VM, all updates to date. Packet sniffer on the host machine. Turns out, you are full of shit.

When opening Windows Calculator with the default settings after installation I got hits on five domains. Not 100, just five, and three of those where when I opened the start menu and typed in "calc" (because it searches Bing by default).

Then I disabled all the telemetry etc. Opening the calculator now contacts exactly one domain. Not over 100, not the original 5, just one.

Finally I tried blocking those domains with the hosts file and it worked perfectly.

It's bad, but there is no reason to make shit up.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Anonymous Coward]

and crApple fans think it's any different. Apple can say what they want, but, they are spying just as much as anyone else.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Applehu Akbar]

I service both operating systems, and I see just as many old Macs by proportion of ownership than old Windows systems - more, in fact, because so many Windows systems are the junky low-end PCs that wear out fast. OS X systems also tend to be updatable more times before the newest accompanying hardware undergoes some major change that prevents the upgrade from running on older systems. Because Windows machines are susceptible to the "snowflake syndrome" - many manufacturers of hardware, each with its own persnickety combination of Windows drivers required - users are much more reluctant to move to a new Windows release because it might not run on their individual snowflake.

Re:He's got his talking points

[drinkypoo]

And yet Windows XP x64 won't run Civilization 2. And even more hilariously, neither will XP Mode.

You can create a Virtual 32 bit version of XP using virtual box that should be able to run the rest of your software.

Try again? But to be fair, there is a patch that will let it work now, provided you have civ 2 multiplayer gold. Someone just pointed it out to me. Still, having to jump through hoops to get software to run is the opposite of the point of Windows.

Re:He's got his talking points

[LichtSpektren]

I looked into a few of those. Most of them attempt to do something but do not succeed. For example, the most popular one "DisableWinTracking" just adds all the domains to the hosts file, which Windows 10 bypasses. I haven't looked at all of them though.

Re:He's got his talking points

[LichtSpektren]

Unless Microsoft decided to regress their spyware policy last night, your findings contradict Ars Technica's: http://arstechnica.com/informa...

Re:He's got his talking points

[metrix007]

Anything more advanced than grep and you would probably break your machine. Stick with the basic, you cudgy old loveable "hacker" you.

Re:He's got his talking points

[LichtSpektren]

"It's a bad idea, therefore Microsoft did not do it" is not a compelling argument, considering their history.

Re:He's got his talking points

[JackieBrown]

Or, you can change a registry setting, disable a couple of services, and be done with it.

http://winaero.com/blog/how-to-disable-telemetry-and-data-collection-in-windows-10/

I love the crapple/linux fanbois on slashdot...

This is great. If someone gave you these "simple" instructions for linux, you would be launching into a tirade about how this is why linux will never win on the desktop

Re:He's got his talking points

[Wild_dog!]

"Try again?".

Virtual Box won't let you run 32-bit XP?? That is too bad.

I use Parallels on my Mac and have a copy of XP and it runs Civ2 vanilla just fine. Also runs some of my more esoteric 32-bit software like TacX i-Magic & Fortius for my VR bike trainer.

I think the link I provided above had a work around to convert Civ 2 Vanilla to Civ2 Multiplayer Gold. It isn't just Civ2 MGE that works allegedly.
Hoops yes... but that is the price of progress. I like that I can still run my Atari 800 software on PC's. I don't really expect 20-30 year old software to just work without having to do a bit of Hoop Jumping.

Re: He's got his talking points

[JackieBrown]

Sure sign of a troll -- posting a link that has nothing to do with the topic

You had to check the link before realizing that it was a troll post?

Re:He's got his talking points

[JackieBrown]

You can create a Virtual 32 bit version of XP using virtual box that should be able to run the rest of your software.

Did a 32 bit license come with the 64 bit or did you have to buy both?

Re:He's got his talking points

[TWX]

Screen is slightly too small relative to the bezel that it's mounted into, reminiscent of older laptops. It also has some of the downsides of tablets in that the memory is soldered-on rather than modular so upgrading the memory is not possible, which dictated choice of model; we bought the one with the most RAM in the product line. The positioning of the keyboard and the touchpad is not quite as good as it was on the X301 either and the Microsoft-equivalent of Multitouch is a bit awkward for right-clicking with just the touchpad. When using as a tablet the calibration can get off, and the stylus requires an unnaturally high lift off the screen to distinguish between writing and not, and reacts slowly to the change, so the software might not interpret lifting one's pen and leave extraneous lines.

If I had to buy one right now I'd look at either the 14" version or else whatever in the Thinkpad line is available. We briefly considered the Helix, where the whole computer is built into the part with the screen and the keyboard section only internally provides more battery and some pass-through ports, but the breakage rate seen at the repair depot is far too high for a computer to be used in travel. We also looked at the downright-cheap offerings from Dell and Asus, but we like replacing technology like this on a five-plus year plan, rather than on a two-plus year plan like the cheap devices would probably need.

Re:He's got his talking points

[angel'o'sphere]

I won't buy another i-Tablet- until it is running OS X.

Putting a phone OS on a tablet is a waste of resources, my money, Apples engineers work time and real energy and "elements".

OTOH a few of those Apps I would perhaps like running on my OS X laptop, too. They don't ... can't even install them on the emulator as the emulator only runs 386 code, and not ARM.

Re:He's got his talking points

[TWX]

I suppose I should add, no integrated Ethernet port, and only two serial ports, so I have to use dongles off of the two USB ports for both, leaving none available. I've got one of those flexible Microsoft mice that use Bluetooth so it's not so bad, but it was a much bigger pain in the butt than it should have been to find a Bluetooth mouse. Too many vendors are still trying to get consumers to use their USB dongle. I'm looking at you, Logitech...

The BIOS supports swapping Ctrl and Fn key duties, which I have done for my work i5. The screen tends to leave artifacting on the i5 model that we don't see on the i7 model, there was some Wacom-based feature available for the i7 version that I don't think the i5 version is equipped with. We use the SD slot for a 256GB card for media. The lack of 3G/4G was mildly offputting, given that the Helix models have it available; it would have been nice for her to have been able to use cellular when she couldn't use anything else but that SD slot helped account for it a bit.

Re:He's got his talking points

[AmiMoJo]

None of that contradicts what I said, in fact the Ars article confirms it. W10 doesn't access "over 100" domains when you open the calculator, it accesses a few and most of those can be disabled. Not all, but again that isn't what the GP was claiming.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Wild_dog!]

I had an old copy of XP pro with a valid license. There was no 64-bit edition when this copy was released.
I only have the 32-bit edition.

Re:He's got his talking points

[LichtSpektren]

Excerpt altering those settings doesn't *actually* turn off the spying in Windows 10. This has been proven by several independent tests.

Re:He's got his talking points

[LichtSpektren]

The following list was collected from a packet sniffer, it's every domain that Windows 10 contacts when you are actively using the OS: https://github.com/WindowsLies...

It's 107 to be precise.

Re:He's got his talking points

[AmiMoJo]

The GP claims that happened when opening the calculator, and even if you disabled everything. The list you linked to says nothing about what happens when you open the calculator, or if disabling stuff disables access to any of it.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Wdomburg]

How well does MacOS run applications from 1996 (like Civilization II)? Not at all. Apple was still on System 7 back then. Support for classic apps was dropped in 10.5 (2007) and for PowerPC apps in 10.7 (2011).

How well does Linux run applications from 1996? Largely a moot point, since there were relatively few compiled applications in the first place. But the Linux world was only just transitioning off a.out binaries and libc5. Anything written in C++ would be a non-started since we're talking GCC 2.5 or 2.7. Newer applications are potentially even worse, as they might depend on abandoned pieces of the nascent desktop frameworks (e.g. Bonobo, ORBit, DCOP, ARTS, ESound, etc).

That isn't to say it wouldn't be nice to have every older application work out of the box, but Microsoft has still maintained a laudable level of backwards compatibility in their products.

I've actually moved to Windows on my personal machine for the first time after running various flavors of Linux for twenty years. Why? Obviously not for backwards compatibility. Rather, the advent of web applications have largely rendered my desktop needs down to a web browser and a terminal. I can get that anywhere, but right now Windows offers competent HiDPI support, working trackpad gestures, and mature touchscreen support.

I still run Linux on my main work machine, but new releases continue to be plagued by a host of petty annoyances, like the secondary displays on my docking station not being recognized until I open a new window. Or corruption in the text rendering in my window title bars. Given tho problems I see in conventional hardware that is several years old, even on a days old version of Linux, there is no way I will be wasting my time trying to coerce it onto a brand new Surface Pro 4.

Re:He's got his talking points

[MachineShedFred]

Hint: OS X != iOS.

You can install anything you want on OS X, right down to downloading source code and compiling yourself. There are whole package managers that port Linux utilities to run on OS X, and a complete X11 system for compatibility with those ports. Get a clue before spouting false statements.

Re:He's got his talking points

[fluffernutter]

Walled garden or not, I could do without all the nagging I get on OSX to:
- Sign into icloud
- Upgrade iTunes
- Upgrade the OS

I mean is there any way I could just get some small security upgrades to Mavericks without upgrading the entire OS? Why do I have to keep going into the control panel and saying 'no I don't want to use iCloud ever' for every single user on the laptop and why doesn't this setting STAY OFF? Same with the setting to restart applications after login.

There doesn't seem to be a setting that says 'no I don't want to use these things EVER and I don't want upgrades, I just want patches'. This is what I consider to be the walled garden.

Re:He's got his talking points

[MachineShedFred]

And when it still doesn't block it, as has been proven by sniffing the actual network traffic?

Re:He's got his talking points

[TWX]

We noticed in the stores that the Thinkpad Yoga was less encumbered with garbage software than the mainstream, non-Thinkpad Yoga series. We also bought this one at the Microsoft Store; both it and the X301 came from there and both were better deals than online or at other retailers at the time. I wonder if Microsoft had some say in what was installed on them, to reduce the amount of Lenovo garbage compared to being sourced elsewhere.

Re:He's got his talking points

[MachineShedFred]

You ask for a citation of evidence for Windows 10 users being spied on, and then make a completely baseless claim that Apple is doing the same.

I'll now ask you for evidence of that, and refrain from name calling while I wait for the answer that will never come.

Re:He's got his talking points

[cfalcon]

Parent claims that on accessing calc, with sniffer, he sees 100 domain hits.
You claim NO WAY, it's only five. And you discovered a way to work around that, involving a hosts file to block it.

First- this is still absolutely ludicrous, not just bad.

Second- given that this is a stream of encrypted data that contains your user action being beamed upstream, *WHY DO YOU ASSUME IT IS THE SAME BEHAVIOR IN ALL CASES*???

Simply put, it could be only five for you, and a hundred for him. It's an undocumented spy behavior, so it could be doing stuff different on tuesday than sunday. LITERALLY NO ONE KNOWS OUTSIDE OF MICROSOFT!!!

Pretend you were documenting an actual virus. Would you assume that because you saw a different network action when you inspected packets than someone else, that he's wrong? Or that the virus is just acting differently for its own reasons? Given that you can't look at the source, given that it's definitely spewing data, and given that there's no official claim over what the fuck is going on...

Why even assume he's wrong for a moment? He's reporting what he saw, and its in line with what others on the net see. No one even knows what this data fucking IS!

Re:He's got his talking points

[metrix007]

Gee whiz fella, with all your talk of "spinning up NetBSD in a VM" or "I play with grep", you think you'd be able to figure out how to use wireshark...

Re:He's got his talking points

[MachineShedFred]

In my experience, WinXP 64 wouldn't run *. It was as much of a general purpose OS as Windows NT 4 was.

Vista was shit, but at least could run most commercial software without vomiting (after it was patched a bazillion times).

Windows 7 worked pretty good. 8 was basically 7 with a shit UI. 10 isn't bad if you blackhole all the spyware shit. I've yet to run across something I can't get to work on it, once I got it over it's fear of the Intel X99 chipset microcode.

Re:He's got his talking points

[metrix007]

Who the fuck puts bad in quotes?

Re:He's got his talking points

[cfalcon]

Claiming that older versions of Windows leak data is quite the distraction tactic. Can you prove to me that crashes are reported to microsoft with no opt out? I very much doubt that.

I'll also point out that none of what you are saying is either official, nor the general opinion of people who are all running packet sniffers on external boxes- and even if entirely true, it's still a huge problem, and still represents data leaks with no opt out- you're just saying we've been deceived for close to a decade in some cases.

If what you say is true, Microsoft is vastly more spy-ey than we even thought, and we should be even more angry.

Re:He's got his talking points

[serviscope_minor]

Thanks for the detailed information.

Too many vendors are still trying to get consumers to use their USB dongle. I'm looking at you, Logitech...

Yeah, they're using some cheapass low power Nordic chip rather than Bluetooth LE, since regular bluetooth is a but power hungry, I believe.

Re:He's got his talking points

[fluffernutter]

Has Apple ever given assurances that their employees with access to iCloud storage aren't spying on everything in there?

Re:He's got his talking points

[fluffernutter]

Count me as a person who went almost all linux. I was going to make an honest effort on Windows 10 but all the telemetry stuff made me see that there is no longer any commercial OS that won't try in some way to contact the mother ship.

Re:He's got his talking points

[ArhcAngel]

it has no more trouble installing third party software, accessing the underlying filesystems, or communicating with remote systems than a Windows system.

YET!

Have you tried creating a local account on Windows 10? Microsoft has made it damn near impossible and then nag you to death about the advantages of one of their shiny Microsoft online accounts. Microsoft tried to create the walled garden with RT and it failed so now they are using the slowly bring the water to a boil method of gently getting users used to requiring an account. Since Apple is the king of walled garden systems you can bet they are watching this experiment closely and will soon "invent" it on OS X.

Re: He's got his talking points

[DavidIQ]

A keylogger???? Shares your password with everyone???? BAHAHAHAHA!

If you're going to bash on Microsoft at least try to sound more intelligent and believable. Also what gets shared, if you choose to do so and has been mentioned by pretty much everyone, is your WIFI password and it's with certain people, not with your entire social network nor is it some post that gets put into your Twitter or Facebook feeds for the world to see.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Ol Olsoc]

Who the fuck puts bad in quotes?

"Me"

Re:He's got his talking points

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

OS X systems also tend to be updatable more times before the newest accompanying hardware undergoes some major change that prevents the upgrade from running on older systems.

It's not having the ability to update that I object to, it's being forced to update the whole OS just to keep up with basic security and stability issues.

For one thing, upgrading your OS is never a trivial exercise and always carries some risk in the real world, even if you're careful. A major update might fix some security issues but introduce new ones as part of new or modified features, for example.

Just as important, you might simply not like the new version as much as the old one. Maybe that's because of the UI look and feel. Maybe they changed the way some feature you rely on worked, or removed it altogether. Maybe they dropped compatibility with some third party software you use. In any case, you shouldn't have to feel like you're playing the lottery about how long a computer is going to continue working in the same way it was supposed to when you bought it.

Devices for professional use and at this kind of price level should be supplied with software relevant to a generous reasonable working lifetime. If that software was defective (security vulnerabilities, instability, whatever) then it should be properly fixed so it works properly and as advertised. Security screw-ups are not an excuse to get the user to change to other software that wasn't what they signed up for.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I don't run Windows 10, either at home or on my work machines, for much the same reasons many here are posting. But even with the various issues over privacy, forced updates and the like, I still don't think it's reasonable or useful to call it a walled garden today.

Of course, with forced updates, you have no guarantee they won't turn it into one over time. Did I mention I don't run Windows 10? :-)

Re:He's got his talking points

[MachineShedFred]

Yeah, because there are tons of large enterprise customers that depend only on the awesome software firewall in various states of configuration on thousands of machines strewn across the landscape.

No, I'm pretty sure that if they're serious about it, they'll use authenticated proxy servers and firewall appliances at the egress which also filter outbound traffic. Any properly engineered corporate network would shitcan this traffic long before it ever made it out.

Re:He's got his talking points

[MachineShedFred]

You can always black hole route the IPs themselves. Yes, this is a pain in the ass, but no desktop OS can dictate to my router what it does with packets.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Anonymous Coward]

There doesn't seem to be a setting that says 'no I don't want to use these things EVER and I don't want upgrades, I just want patches'. This is what I consider to be the walled garden.

It would help if you learned what a "walled garden" is.

Re:He's got his talking points

[cfalcon]

I am glad the debate is currently between those claiming the number of stealth domains contacted is over a hundred, and those claiming it is merely dozens.

The sad fact is, we don't really understand ("we" meaning anyone not on the Microsoft team, and it is possible that no one person there has a handle on it) what the hell is going on.

Here is what we do know: with default settings, the amount of drama is hard to qualify. It absolutely pushes stuff to bing when you try to type calc.exe, cortana gets updated with contacts, calls made, etc., so probably apps ran intermittently get pushed to that, windows downloads tiles even if told not to, windows bypasses vpn when it can, unless stopped by an external firewall, windows ignores host file entries for certain connections.

Here's a bunch of known domains:
http://www.dslreports.com/foru...

And these are just the ones that Microsoft actually bothers to DNS before contacting. I'll hazard a guess that you'll eventually need blocks by IP numbers.

I don't know if Microsoft contacts a literal hundred domains. I think the fact that it's a giant hassle to make that number zero is scary as shit, and out of everyone who has released telemetry removal and spyware blocking tools, no one is certain that they got everything.

Re:He's got his talking points

[MachineShedFred]

Pure, Unabashed, FUD. Millions of people use their iPhone / iPad / Mac to play games or listen to music on airlines without a network connection EVERY DAY.

Stop lying.

Re:He's got his talking points

[cayenne8]

So far, and Microsoft has been collecting information for years...

What exactly information have they been collecting in the past?

Re:He's got his talking points

[cfalcon]

It absolutely bypasses its own firewall and hosts. It can't bypass your router rules. Is Windows so good that you have keep it behind a firewall that stops hardcoded OS functions? That's a very expensive pet to maintain.

Remember to update your firewall with every windows update, based on guides provided by people who are trying to keep up with wireshark. Solid user experience, there.

Re:He's got his talking points

[cfalcon]

So we all need application firewalls maintained daily by corporate IT to use Windows 10 safely. Duly noted.

Re:He's got his talking points

[cfalcon]

First, no desktop OS would try to betray its owner and user.
Then, no desktop OS would ignore the network stack it provides, bypassing its own host files.
Then, no desktop OS would ignore its own firewall, built to allow custom rules.

Now, no desktop OS can dictate to your router what it does with packets.

So literally everything that it can do from your machine to fuck you, it does. Your opinion is that, because you still have physical control over at least one intervening node, that you are safe. That is quite the stretch. Isn't this a batshit crazy standard to set? "Windows doesn't strangle me in the night, because it doesn't yet have arms... ok, now it has arms, but they aren't able to overpower my own arms... yet..."

Re:He's got his talking points

[bingoUV]

Probably the updated hosts file is supposed to be used at the router?

Re:He's got his talking points

[cfalcon]

> Or, you can change a registry setting, disable a couple of services, and be done with it.

> http://winaero.com/blog/how-to...

Ah, I see you are playing one of my favorite forum games- you are trying to tell people how to disable the Microsoft spying!

You have missed TONS of thing, even with that link. I will list just one thing that the thing doesn't do: it doesn't turn off the "Customer Experience Improvement Program", which is normally disabled under task scheduler. This continues to leak tons of data if not disabled.

In practice, the steps to getting Windows 10 to a state that is assumed to be not talky, are massive and generally incomplete. I could list many many more things that the winaero link doesn't deal with, and if you just scroll down to the comments section you'll see people listing massive strings of commands that MIGHT make the OS do what they want.

If Linux had anything like this, you'd be laughing your ass off. Because it's Windows and you're some AC Windows fanfuck, you bury your head in the sand.

Re:He's got his talking points

[phantomfive]

How well does Linux run applications from 1996?

The Linux kernel it still runs binaries from 1992. The Linux kernel team is obsessive about backwards compatibility, and more than one of Linus' rants was at someone who broke it.

Some of the higher-level libraries don't have the same commitment, but you can still run things written for Motif.

Re:He's got his talking points

[cfalcon]

Windows is easy, Linux is hard. In Linux, sometimes you have to use a package manager. In Windows, all you need to do is, turn off one drive, log out of your microsoft account, ensure one drive isn't active, disable cortana, add one hundred entries to hosts, add them to windows firewall, add them to an external firewall because Windows ignores hosts and windows firewall, disable and remove seven services, remove several entries from a task scheduler, change several group policies, and spam over twenty wusa uninstall commands from the command line.

Simple.

That's not everything though. It may be close.

Re:He's got his talking points

[KGIII]

Metrics like what hardware you have, what applications are installed, etc... It was some "User Experience" thing before. Now, they're more mobile and collecting GPS data. I don't know what else they collect but I'd not be terribly worried if I used the products. There's a lot of FUD being spread around. I've watched and read it, I've been really skeptical of the FUD slinging crowd since the XP days - I kind of believed them until then.

For instance, one needn't pay for the solitaire game - you can get it free from the app store without paying. I guess there are many versions that don't even have ads. You can disable pretty much everything except some built in stuff. There's no keylogger sending stuff out (that we know of) but they do track usage habits somehow so there might be. Yet it's touted as factual - which is odd 'cause it's sending out encrypted data. These people must be reading encrypted data somehow. Rather than bitching about Microsoft, they should be world famous.

That Cortana thing? I think that's what it is called. That's not going to work without sending and retrieving data. They kind of have to know what it is that you're asking for and that processing is not done locally or someone would complain that their computer is slow. Siri and Google Voice do it too, as I understand.

I'd wholeheartedly agree that it should be able to be shut off but they've done surprisingly good at keeping their data safe. They must be. Look at how big of a target they are. Can you imagine how much power you'd have if you got control of an update server? How much info they're keeping stored away somewhere? You know that shit's online somewhere - but they have managed to keep it locked down for years.

Oh, I'm sure they'll have a breech and screw something up but, so far so good. I'm actually kind of impressed, considering that they pretty much run Microsoft products exclusively now. (Hotmail used to run on Unix or Linux - I forget which and Azure has the ability to natively spin up a Linux client and has some Linux code in there but it's not code that's being released so that they don't have to share it back with the community. However, they are doing more and more with the open source community.)

I've kept Linux on a partition for a lot of years but now I use it exclusively. I mostly use Lubuntu and Mint Cinnamon but I've played with about every major distro. I do have a bunch, too many really, VMs that can be spun up and utilized but I don't usually boot to them. I mention this because I'm not a huge fan of Microsoft but I'm not a hater either. (I just used the word hater. Ugh...) I'm grateful that there is a Microsoft. I am glad for what they've done for the industry. We tend to concentrate on the negative. I prefer to be positive.

Anyhow, if I were still using Windows then I'd probably shut some of the stuff off and leave other stuff on. Unless I'm using a tablet (which is unlikely) or a laptop then I don't have a microphone hooked up. I'd not want Cortana running. I don't know if that can be entirely disabled. I'd let them "spy" on me (I'm not sure it's spying if they tell you what they're doing) because that means they can give me a better user experience. They're also using that information to give a more customized update system so that you'll be getting more specific patches and whatnot. I sure as hell wouldn't have the WiFi password sharing shit enabled nor will anyone that comes to my house - I've got a password free guest account that's isolated, of course. ;-)

Re:He's got his talking points

[david_thornley]

FWIW, I could really do without this malware that pops up a window fairly frequently on my Windows 7 laptop that tries to get me to "upgrade" to Windows 10.

Re:He's got his talking points

[fluffernutter]

Yup... There's why I migrated to linux. Commercial OS's are no-win. The difference is, every single thing I did on Windows, I do on Linux. On the other hand, Apple forces me to use OS/X for iOS development so the Windows nags don't bother me so much.

Re:He's got his talking points

[KGIII]

That is true. That is definitely true. I did learn how to start a server in Python with a single command. I probably should not have learned about that - I left it running in the background for a while before I realized that I was sharing my entire /home directory with the internet at large. Then, not too long ago, I figured I'd give a VPN a try and so I went about learning how to write my own configs and how to use OpenVPN. This process was probably three times longer than it needed to be. I eventually changed my user permissions and recompiled OpenVPN. It was close but not close enough. I finally decided to think about someone having mentioned that I'd had to have permissions as a different user group (the network group as I recall, one of those, at any rate) and so I finally tried it with sudo... *sighs*

I picture you as having the cutest little button nose. I hope I'm right. I'm glad you're okay though, I was a bit worried. I'd not seen you for a few days. I hope you're heart is doing well. Those elevated stress levels can't be healthy. You're literally taking years off your life!

I should probably stick with grep. I'm getting better with it - it's handier if you know what you're looking for and want to pipe it to a text file or something like that. I'm going to "master" awk next. Whilst I've made use of both commands there is still much I do not know and more for me to learn. You wanna know what I had for lunch? 'Cause I'll tell ya.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Anonymous Coward]

I just recently scrapped a Mac at work because it couldn't be upgraded to a version of Mac OS X that is receiving security updates. It's hardware was working fine. It was a 2006 MacBook Pro. All of the other Macs here at work, some dating back to 2007, are capable of running El Capitan (they're not yet because of Microsoft Office issues).

Compare that to the fifty five-year-old PC's that I am about to scrap because their hardware is failing. Even if they weren't dropping like flies, they cannot be upgraded to Windows 10 because their video controllers aren't supported.

Re:He's got his talking points

[david_thornley]

There is a bit of a potential problem in downloading a third-party utility to make system-level changes.

Re:He's got his talking points

[david_thornley]

XP64 was able to run Microsoft software, including Visual Studio, and what I compiled with Visual Studio. For my work purposes, that was pretty much all it had to do. I'm more demanding of my personal OS. If it doesn't run anything I want to run, it isn't good enough.

Re:He's got his talking points

[GuB-42]

And what legitimate reason do you have to redirect Microsoft domains using the hosts files?
There is a good reason for Windows to bypass the hosts file. The reason Windows phones home is not just for spying on you, it is also important so that you get all your security patches. So it is important that the update is done even if some malware modified the hosts file.
And BTW, bypassing the hosts file is as simple as using a hardcoded IP. Hardcoding IPs is also effective at preventing DNS poisoning, which is another thing malware loves to do.

The whole idea of using the hosts file to prevent Windows from tracking you is retarded anyways. Windows 10 has built-in "do not track" options that are shown to you during the installation procedure. Ok, you don't trust them, fine. In this case, why would you trust MS for honoring a half-broken hosts based blocking even though it has no obligation to do so.

Re:He's got his talking points

[david_thornley]

Having a vital purchase available from only one vendor should have been a death sentence in the corporate market. Doing another stupid thing isn't going to get Microsoft kicked out.

Re:He's got his talking points

[david_thornley]

There are ports you pretty much have to keep open, and W10 could start using those. A personal computer with port 80 disabled is significantly less functional.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Solandri]

Exactly this. It is a trade-off between having perfect devices for every possible task, and the inconvenience of having a multiple devices which you need to lug around and keep synchronized. At some point you have to ask yourself, does this particular task need its own dedicated device, or can another device I already own do a good enough job? That's what the Surface Book is aiming at - merging the laptop and large tablet categories.

I've been using tablet PCs for over a decade now, primarily because I wanted the larger (12+ inch) display in tablet form factor. Current technology seems to only be able to get that size screen in a tablet at a weight of 1.6 lbs (iPad Pro, Surface Book tablet-only, Surface Pro, Samsung Tab Pro all hit this weight). That's too much extra weight to lug around in my bag when I travel to warrant a separate device. But if my laptop can double as a tablet, I can cover both bases with a single device. I'm going to get that device, even if it's only 90% as good as a separate laptop and 90% as good as a separate tablet. Cook's reasoning is right if you're a CEO who has an entourage of staff carrying his bags for him everywhere he goes. For the rest of us who have to carry our own bags and have a limited budget, a device which does two functions well enough will trump two separate devices.

BTW, I had a Thinkpad Yoga 14 for a while. My main reason for giving it up was the screen's 16:9 aspect ratio - it's way too narrow in portrait orientation. 16:10 or 3:2 is much more preferable. And before anyone starts crowing about the iPad's 4:3, I lived with a 4:3 tablet from 2004-2008. It's too wide in portrait format. PDFs end up with excess blank space on the left and right margins, or the top and bottom have to be clipped. 4:3 seems like it would be best if you think of a letter-sized sheet of paper (8.5x11 = 1.29). But when you actually scan pages and try it, you quickly realize you're wasting a ton of expensive screen space on useless white margins. Remove the margins and you're right around 3:2 or 16:10.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Wdomburg]

A stable kernel ABI is only one aspect of backwards compatibility. It's great that Alan Cox can run a static binary from 1992, but the majority of applications are dynamically linked and therefor depend on having the appropriate libraries available. To make matters worse, GCC didn't provide a forward compatible ABI until 3.4 (released in 2006), so for older applications not only do you need the appropriate version of the library, they would need to be compiled with a compatible version of the compiler suite.

Individual Linux distributions provide their own backwards compatibility guarantees, but only for a limited pool of libraries, and only across a limited number of releases. For example, Red Hat supports the following libraries across three releases: alsa-lib, krb5-lib, libtbbmalloc, mesa-libGL, elfutils-libelf, libgcc, libtbb, mesa-libGLU, glibc, libgfortran, libusb, motif, glibc-utils, libgomp, libvirt-client, pam, gtk2, libstdc++, libxml2, SDL, hesiod, libtbbmalloc_proxy, libxslt. So RHEL7 can run applications dynamically linked against those libraries for applications compiled on RHEL5, which was released in 2007.

The next tier of libraries is only supported within one major release. In other words, it if was compiled for RHEL 7.0 it will work in all subsequent RHEL 7 releases, but there is no guarantee it will work in RHEL 8.0.

And sure, you can still run apps written for Motif - or any other toolkit - but with the same caveats mentioned about. Any and all dynamically linked libraries need to be available, compiled with a compatible compiler. And applications may fail regardless. For example, a GNOME application which depended on bonobo for intra-application purposes (the way Evolution did) would simply fail when it couldn't contact an object broker.

TL;DR: Linux mostly sucks for backwards compatibility when it comes to desktop applications. Part of this is due to a fair amount of experimentation by the competing desktop environments. Part of it is due to a focus on source compatibility rather binary compatibility, which is fine. The silver lining is that the applications are largely open source, and most of them evolved along with the platform.

Re:He's got his talking points

[david_thornley]

We know that Microsoft is spying on things I don't want spied on. You say you think Apple does as much spying without actually providing any evidence for your argument. Apple and Microsoft are two different companies, and operate in different ways. Most of Microsoft's revenue is from software licensing, and most of Apple's is from selling Macs and iDevices.

Re:He's got his talking points

[david_thornley]

Google makes nearly all its money from facilitating targeted advertising. Apple makes most of its money from hardware sales, and has no sort of monopoly in anything. Microsoft makes most of its money from software licensing, and has a monopoly, in the sense that hundreds of millions of computers are going to have their software on it pretty much no matter what they do. This results in different behavior among the companies. Apple has nothing going for it except user experience, and isn't going to mess that up for a minor reward. Microsoft can do pretty much what it wants. Google depends on collecting data from everyone.

Re: He's got his talking points

[DavidIQ]

http://windows.microsoft.com/e... When you interact with your Windows device by speaking, writing (handwriting), or typing, Microsoft collects speech, inking, and typing informationóincluding information about your Calendar and People (also known as contacts)óthat helps personalize your experience. This information improves your deviceís ability to correctly recognize your input, such as your pronunciation and handwriting. You can turn the Speech, inking, and typing setting (which is called Getting to know you) on or off in Settings.

Yes I know all about Microsoft's use of their telemetry tools and it's not at all what you've purported it to be. Most people hear "keylogger" and think "zomg Microsoft is recording everything I type!!!111" when that's in fact not true. When you read all resources and not just some vague article on the internet on some silly tabloid site that says "Microsoft is using a keylogger to record all of your typing" you realize that it's not that at all and that people have blown it out of proportion. By the way if you've ever spoken to or used Siri or Google Now then you've basically allowed Apple and Alphabet (Google) the same access.

To be precise, I didn't write what you said I wrote.

Well...

[...]allowing people who you allow access to your network to share your password with everyone on their social network, and a couple other things I had to turn off on all of them.

You did conveniently leave out the fact that it's the Wi-Fi password and conveniently placed that sentence right after mentioning a keylogger, which would give the idea that the supposed keylogger is being used to give the password you just used to login to your computer to someone else.

Do you read that? Do you comprehend? Here, I'll just put the expressly relevent part of the statement:

You and your friends get Internet access without telling each other your passwords.

Yep I can read just fine. They mention it in an FAQ about Wi-Fi Sense, not vaguely insert it into an FAQ about your login credentials for instance.

If you are going to contradict what I write, at least be prepared for the cites I'll give. This is not bulllshit, this is settings that I have had to deal with in several W10 setups.

You've given some good cites to re-state everything you've said in the proper manner and not just vaguely placing words and sentences in a way that creates FUD. It's not a matter of contradicting someone but more like correctly conveying the right message, which you've now done with your cites.

If you do an express setup, and most peolpe will, you'll have all the telemetry goodies, the key logging, and share your password. This is information that is freely available on Microsoft websites, this is without a doubt, and with provable and admitted actions that Windows 10 performs. Its a spying system that you have to opt out of, if you don't do the work to opt out, it is what you get.

There you go again with this "spying on you" nonsense. You make it seem as if Microsoft is now going to turn on your computer's web cam if you're not careful or that you shouldn't make any web transactions on your Windows 10 machine because Microsoft will steal your bank account details and passwords since they're listening to each and every keystroke, statements that are utter nonsense and simply not true.

On a side note if you've been installing Windows 10 on so many machines with this supposed keylogger that is listening in to every key press and that has all sorts of invasion of privacy then that would make you a very irresponsible tech.

Re:He's got his talking points

[citizenr]

this and actually TESTING
drop all on windows 10 firewall does not leak traffic

Re: He's got his talking points

[cfalcon]

> A keylogger????

Yes!!!!

You need at least two steps to remove the keylogger....

First,,,, use these easy GUI steps to turn off the above board keylogging stuff::::

http://www.pcworld.com/article...

Second,,,, you will want to also get rid of the keylogger service (((( this continues to run and remotely log your data,,,, sending it to microsoft ))))

https://www.reddit.com/r/Windo...

Hope that helps,,,, quad punctuation man.

Re:He's got his talking points

[TWX]

Yeah, the older Alienware M17xR2 that I'm using as a desktop computer at work (we had it laying around, may as well do something practical with it) has a 16:10 screen, and I've found that I like that resolution better than 16:9 if only because dual-page PDFs fit really nicely on it.

Re:He's got his talking points

[TWX]

If I never wanted any tablet functionality I'd probably go with a Thinkpad Carbon X1. Much larger screen relative to the bezel, plus as a more conventional laptop I could probably run Linux on it, or at least downgrade to Windows 7 and not have to use Metro...

Re:He's got his talking points

[gnasher719]

if he didnt see it as a threat, he would ignore it like all the other devices that compete.

Strange enough, half the Apple haters complain that Cook is an arrogant bastard because he tells the world what he thinks of this "surface book", and the other half claims that he must be afraid.

Re:He's got his talking points

[thegarbz]

The 'spyware' piece is trivial to mitigate,

How? On a system that offers you no low level control of the hardware capable of bypassing it's own hosts and dns lookups?
Or on a system at the edge of your internet connection which will not be present when you take your Surface device to another network?

Re:He's got his talking points

[thegarbz]

It's a portable device. Doing anything on your own firewall is a non starter for security purposes. This only applies to using Windows 10 on a fixed desktop that is unlikely to jump between networks.

Re:He's got his talking points

[thegarbz]

Windows has been doing this since the Windows 2000 days for certain domains.

Re:He's got his talking points

[serviscope_minor]

If I never wanted any tablet functionality I'd probably go with a Thinkpad Carbon X1. Much larger screen relative to the bezel, plus as a more conventional laptop I could probably run Linux on it, or at least downgrade to Windows 7 and not have to use Metro...

I'm actually rather tempted by a Wacom like pen for artistic reasons. However you say you can't run Linux on it? That's a huge minus for me, given I only run Linux!

Have you tried?

Re:He's got his talking points

[KGIII]

Ah, but I don't have a Windows VM and I am relying on them for a citation. That is how it works, yes? They made the claim, they can do the footwork to prove it. I'd bet it isn't more than a dozen, at best.

Re:He's got his talking points

[vux984]

Microsoft has made it damn near impossible

Damn near impossible?

At the Microsoft Account sign in page, you click Create New Account, then at the bottom of the new account form click "Sign in without a microsoft account."

I concede its slightly unintuitive, and definitely treated as a second class option... but if you don't already have a microsoft account, you are going to end up on the form to create one, with the option to sign in without one... so you can't actually even miss it if you read.

It's not remotely "damn near impossible"?

And i don't know what you are going on about with "Apple *watching* this experiment"; you do know that by default OSX has you signing into your computer with an apple cloud account now too right? And you have to do pretty much the same gymnastics you do with Windows to opt out of it. And this has been true for the last 2 or 3 releases of OSX already.

Re:He's got his talking points

[cfalcon]

I semi-dispute that ios is spyware. Mostly, I'd like you to cite something- ios certainly wants to be "connected" (much like Windows 10), but, unlike Windows 10, it seems eminently possible to turn all that off and actually have it be off. I wouldn't be outright shocked if it was doing something sketchy- the direct comparison to Windows 10 is OS X, not ios- but still, would like to know.

Secondly, I don't see many folks talking about running linux on a surface, and I feel that this is a really neglected point. It really hadn't occurred to me that this was NOT locked down hardware, and that you could turn around and run free software on it. Though it won't help me, is there a guide on installation you could link to? Out of the set of "all the people in the world who would want to run Linux on their Surface", a surprisingly large percent are probably reading this thread, after all.

Re:He's got his talking points

[afidel]

I wonder if Microsoft had some say in what was installed on them, to reduce the amount of Lenovo garbage compared to being sourced elsewhere.

Yeah, those were Microsoft Signature Edition laptops, no crapware allowed.

Re:He's got his talking points

[afidel]

There's plenty of stuff compiled for an older version of glibc that won't run.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Blaskowicz]

I remember jumping through many hoops for running xmms on debian lenny. On this same machine installing the nvidia proprietary driver for an old card (geforce 2MX or TNT2 M64) was as much involved (just to get basic graphics a bit faster and more CPU efficient).
And likely, this would fail on the next major distro release but it did work. Sadly using xmms was pointless because of 1990s-like issues with "illegal" or russian characters, and lack of support for file formats.

Re:He's got his talking points

[ttpilot]

I'm running an eight-year old MacBook Pro. It upgraded to OS X El Capitan just fine. It's a bit slow editing video nowadays, but otherwise it's completely serviceable

Re:He's got his talking points

[Bruinwar]

Thanks!

Without any research, I had thought by turning off the data collection, it was actually off. I'm unsure how they are getting away with this. Why hasn't someone filed a lawsuit yet?

Re: He's got his talking points

[Redbehrend]

Windows 10 isn't as bad as people make it, there are fixes and work around for those issues. Someone should tell Tim to his face it's better to try something than nothing at all. Their so afraid to change anything, it'll take 20 devices for 1 major change.

Re:He's got his talking points

[MachineShedFred]

Let's be clear - I didn't say that it's fine, and I'd appreciate you not insinuating that I did. It's absolutely not. But you're not powerless to stop it. Shitcan their phone home bullshit where they can't do anything about it, because anything you do on the box that is running their OS can is a temporary measure at best if they are intent on delivering your information.

Re: He's got his talking points

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. Many Apple products got hardware obsolescence where Windows didn't. I'm mostly thinking of models where CPU or video was the reason it couldn't upgrade.

Re:He's got his talking points

[KGIII]

Oh, it's not terribly important. It's just the hyperbole that's silly. We get enough rhetoric as it is, we can at least tell it like it is and still be making the same points. The whole, "Microsoft spies on you - open calculator and see the 100+ domains it contacts!" That's just silly. I don't even believe that. These are the same people who ran around claiming that Windows Activation meant registration was mandatory. They claim you can't use Windows 10 without a Microsoft Live account. They claim that you have to pay for Solitaire or that it has ads. (I have it on good authority that there were, shortly after release, some dozen free versions that did not contain any ads at all.) They claim you'll have to pay a yearly fee.

The insinuation here is that Microsoft's going to do some evil with this data. I don't see it. I suspect that I'd leave it enabled if I had a Windows system. I am getting a Windows phone - I imagine that I'll never bother turning it off.

Don't get me wrong - I think you SHOULD be able to turn it off, easily. I just don't need the hyperbole to be aware of this and to make this decision. I think we should be honest, factual, and articulate. I know, that's a lot to ask. However, if the goal of communicating is to make people aware then it would help to not be telling lies and to not be speckled with your own spittle.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Rakarra]

I've found in my experience that there is almost always some way to install anything legacy. Sometimes it is difficult. Sometimes not.

I haven't tried this but here is a way to get the old Civ 2 to play on 64-bit systems allegedly.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/...

That works fine until Civ2 reaches a point on a map where it just crashes. Repeatedly, consistently. The only way to keep playing is to start a totally brand-new map. Wish I knew why. :-(

Re:He's got his talking points

[Rakarra]

I wouldn't mind doing that, but does MS let you set up a 32-bit XP, or do you have to get your hands on a pirated version?

Re:He's got his talking points

[Wdomburg]

Yeah, back in the day even running contemporary applications on different distributions was a challenge. Maybe you were running Slackware and couldn't run the latest MySQL because it was linked against glibc instead of libc5. Or maybe you were on Caldera and couldn't run a commercial app because it was compiled for Red Hat's controversial GCC fork (2.96). Or maybe you were just still stuck on a 486 and were trying to run a binary from Mandrake after they started compiling with an i686 target.

I can't bring myself to miss those days. :)

Re:He's got his talking points

[TWX]

Haven't tried. I use Linux on my Alienware at my desk but with work's use of AD I can't easily travel with Linux, and throwing the tablet convertible nature on I don't think it's worth trying. If I had a pure laptop I might give it a shot.

I have put cygwin tools on. I do wish I could go all-Linux but at the moment it's not in the cards.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Except for everyone who purchased Windows up until Windows 10, you mean?

Re: He's got his talking points

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

But security updates are not the same as general feature/look-and-feel updates. You can have one without the other.

And default-to-on updates are not the same as mandatory updates. You can protect people who don't know better just as much either way, but the only reason to mandate updates is to force the user to install something they actively don't want to.

Re:He's got his talking points

[hairyfeet]

Shilling much? If you would like more details here is a traffic analysis of windows 10 and wadda ya know? Everything you do suddenly generates data that is sent back to the mothership DESPITE having privacy settings engaged. Turn on your webcam? Oh look it suddenly calls these addresses, turn on your mike? Different addresses are called, start typing? Yep, different addresses start getting data from your PC.

Sorry but I've only seen that kind of behavior at the shop on PCs that are infested with malware, so I guess that means Win 10 is pre-infested, huh?

Re:He's got his talking points

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

We have some Apple gear for testing, and for the most part we've also upgraded OK. We know other people who weren't so lucky.

Anecdotal data is anecdotal, but my point is that there is some risk involved with any major software upgrade. Users shouldn't be forced to take that risk just to get security patches for vulnerabilities that, obviously, shouldn't have been there in the first place.

Re:He's got his talking points

[metrix007]

oh, idiots. right.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Ol Olsoc]

oh, idiots. right.

Wandered over to Slashdot from the Youtube comments eh? You should post as AC, you have all the proper attributes.

Re: He's got his talking points

[cfalcon]

> If linux had those features to begin with, there'd be a lot more disabling. So your point is moot.

What features, the spying?

The only actual features in my post are remote file sharing (which you 100% can do with Linux) and remote voice recognition / assist, which, if present, would be something that wouldn't be snuck into the active state.

If it honestly was just turning off One Drive, not using a Microsoft Account, and disabling Cortana, then I would actually be fine with it. But instead, YOU STILL CAN'T TURN IT OFF. Look at the rest of my post- NOTHING in there is a "feature" that benefits ANY GODDAMNED USER. It's just spy garbage.

What feature is this?

http://www.pcworld.com/article...

Who does a keylogger benefit?

So no, there are no features that come with all the services you have to disable, and all the spypacks you have to wusa away. Just noise and loss of privacy for no benefit to any user, any where, at any time.

But you know that, that's why you posted AC.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Jack Griffin]

I have a surface pro 3, I find the tablet/laptop combo good for work because I have twin screen and keyboard/mouse on my desk. But when mobile the keyboard is a shit to work with. It passes for casual holiday type use, but I trying to type a day's work with it is impossible.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Jack Griffin]

In Linux, sometimes you have to use a package manager. In Windows, all you need to do is,

For Joe Sixpack they do nothing, because they don't care about tracking so just leave it on. MS and Apple win because it looks polished, and mostly just works. I run Linux at home purely because I hate the corporate evil, but I still accept that Apple and MS win hands down on the total user experience front

Re:He's got his talking points

[Wild_dog!]

I don't know about a pirated version, but it was fairly strait forward setting up my VM with XP. and a valid license. I don't even remember having to call microsoft for activation. It activated straight away.

Re: He's got his talking points

[terjeber]

Tes, 99% of Windows 10 users are being spied upon. 100% of Gmail users are being spied upon. 100% of Apple users are... Mitigating being spied upon entails moving into a cave somewhere and never coming out. I am not happy about MS spying, but you can't metigate being spied upon by not being a MS customer. In this regard MS is neither worse not better than basically all realistic alternatives. Oh and if you even attempt to claim Linux is an alternative, you are a moron. Linux is FAR less an alternate be than fixing your router is.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Carewolf]

We know that Microsoft is spying on things I don't want spied on. You say you think Apple does as much spying without actually providing any evidence for your argument. Apple and Microsoft are two different companies, and operate in different ways. Most of Microsoft's revenue is from software licensing, and most of Apple's is from selling Macs and iDevices.

Microsoft implemented the mechanism to catch up to OS X, which already had the same for years. iOS is much much worse, but being tracked is common on mobile devices.

Re:He's got his talking points

[david_thornley]

Have you any actual evidence? Nobody's provided any. It's proof by blatant assertion.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Altus]

I just retired a 8 year old laptop that runs the most recent OS. How much support do you want?

Re:He's got his talking points

[siliconsmiley]

I want to buy a device where the software is supported for the working lifetime of the machine and whether to install updates for anything other than security/stability/compatibility is up to me and an independent decision.

I hope you're enjoying your stay here in software fantasy land 1986.

Re:He's got his talking points

[dl_sledding]

Wow, did you really even READ his statement???

OS X systems also tend to be updatable more times before the newest accompanying hardware undergoes some major change that prevents the upgrade from running on older systems.

Seriously, if you're gonna be an M$ fanboi, at least don't make yourself look so goddamn stupid while you're doing it! You're making all of the others look bad!

Re:He's got his talking points

[toddestan]

You have an odd way of counting OSes. By your logic, Microsoft has been supporting Windows now for 30 years. There really isn't much in common with the latest version of OSX and version 10.0 from 2001. You can't even run a program that ran on 10.0 on the latest version of OSX. But you can run a program that ran on Windows XP RTM on the latest version of Windows.

Re:He's got his talking points

[theArtificial]

Here's a previous post that links to a Wireshark session.

Re:He's got his talking points

[KGIII]

The video is unavailable. Did said video show activity on "100+" domains when opening just the calculator? I bet not. It was probably less than a dozen. In other words, let's try to be factual if we want people to listen.

Re:He's got his talking points

[theArtificial]

The video is unavailable.

Is the thread that the comment from unavailable, too? tl;dr Claims were made that disabling "tracking" features prevents telemetry data being sent out, the video that was available until very recently proved otherwise. Why does it need to send anything out when using calculator or an image viewing program?

I bet not. It was probably less than a dozen. In other words, let's try to be factual if we want people to listen.

I like that my post is some how conflated with this 100 or 1 nonsense. The simple fact that it bleeds information out despite privacy settings being dialed down is alarming enough. Also, tell the person who made the 100 claim to be factual and you won't come off as patronizing.

Re:He's got his talking points

[KGIII]

I *am* patronizing. Why would I want to "come off" as something entirely different than my intent? It's not hard to get the same point across while being honest and not engaging in hyperbole, now is it?

Is what the OP posted factual? Not even close. Thus they're certainly worthy of no more than derision. You're welcome to join their camp, if you desire. I've enough contempt for dishonesty to more than cover you as well. If you want people to listen to you then tell the truth. The truth is that 100+ domains aren't being connected to by simply opening up the calculator. The truth is that just one is one too many for anyone who is concerned with their privacy. There is no need to lie. Hyperbole is not a requirement. If caught lying, you'll do more damage to the idea than you'd have done by just telling the truth.

These are not difficult concepts and, as said, you're more than welcome to a share of my derision if you want. Honesty is not a difficult policy.

Re:He's got his talking points

[theArtificial]

How am I being dishonest? Your entire post is about tribal emotional ME ME ME us or them crap. I notice you're not doing any experiments yourself and encouraging others to join you on the righteous enlightened path blahblah hyperbole, it's like witnessing an argument over whether a Star Destroyer or the USS enterprise would win in a fight when the rest of us are interested in why does Microsoft want this information? I don't care, please read what others have researched on this very topic, or let the seeds stop you from enjoying the watermelon.

Re:He's got his talking points

[KGIII]

You are not being dishonest - at least not yet, you're welcome to do so, however. The poster that I was replying to was dishonest. Opening the calculator does not make the PC connects to 100+ domains, which is what they claimed. Attempting to twist this, misrepresent this, or somehow kick the goalposts elsewhere doesn't negate the fact that they're dishonest.

I've given them (and you) a chance to cite your references - and not one reference has indicated that opening the calculator results in Windows connecting to 100+ domains. The burden of proof is not mine, it is your's if you make that claim. You are insinuating that the claim is correct by your posture, but I'll give you the benefit of doubt.

At no point have I said it's acceptable for them to connect to even one domain without my express consent. What I have said, and I'll reiterate for you, on the off-chance that you're not a native speaker, is that hyperbole and dishonesty are unacceptable. Feel free to insert any opinions you want to, specifically those I've not actually shared, and make believe I said anything you wish to think I said. You can make all the assumptions you wish.

You seemingly don't actually understand why dishonesty is a bad thing. I think we're pretty much done here. I have neither time nor inclination to explain basic morality to you. You're free to willfully misinterpret anything I've written. Knock yourself out with that.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Apparently I'm still living in that "software fantasy land". I just run Windows 7 instead of Windows 10.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

What you think are different OSes are really just security patches and upgrades to the same underlying OS.

Some of those "upgrades" include completely changing the look and feel several times, loss of compatibility with older software...

For practical purposes, each major revision of OS X is typically a new OS. Windows 8 was not Windows 7 just because it had Windows in its name.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I want to be able to run the OS it had when I bought it. That was the OS I chose to pay money for and for whatever reason decided was what I wanted to use.

Sometimes newer versions are better, but sometimes they aren't. Being able to run some new version of an OS on older hardware is nice as an option, but not my primary requirement.

Re:He's got his talking points

[theArtificial]

I have made no claim either for for against the arbitrary number of endpoints windows 10 may connect to. Your post asked for some proof, specifically wireshark captures of these events. Here's the quote:

I'll accept anything similar to a wireshark printout side-screened with a video of the OS in action

At one point in time there was indeed a video at the URL quoted that met these requirements which was created by another Slashdot poster, that many people saw and reviewed (hence the upvotes and replies). My goal was to provide what you requested. Here's something that you might find interesting for argument.

Re:He's got his talking points

[KGIII]

I'm assuming that you're missing my point and I'm starting to wonder if I'm not articulating it properly or if you're not understanding because of a language barrier.

Thank you for the link. I've seen similar but not that particular page.

Anyhow, if you go back to my post you'll see that my only contention was that it wasn't actually "more than 100" (or however they put it) domains that were connected to by simply opening the calculator. Which is why I requested a citation - see, I know it's not that many (if any) because that many would just be silly for one single application to call.

It's only a half dozen or so, not 100. ;-)

(I believe the current known total is 57 and that's with everything enabled.)

They claimed (see quote below), falsely, that opening the calculator would make the computer connect "suddenly" to 100+ domains. This is not true. It is knowingly false, thus it is a lie. It is an attempt to create drama. Thus it is hyperbole.

...do something rudimentary like opening up the Windows Calculator. You'll see Windows suddenly contacting over 100 domains.

I'm concerned with people being able to control their own PC or, at least, know about what their computer is doing without their knowledge (we could argue that they consented by accepting the EULA even if they failed to read it). Thus, it's disheartening to see people lie and engage in hyperbolic rhetoric when such damages the cause - a cause which is that a user should know (and trust) what their computer is doing.

It's hard but I'm still giving you the benefit of doubt here. I've seen you post before, I am pretty sure you're a smart person. That is why I'm assuming there's some confusion here. The OP stated that opening the calculator would result in Windows connecting to over 100 domains. That is patently false. That doesn't mean that I'm okay with Windows connecting to even a single domain - it means that I am disgusted by their behavior and lack of morals.

Hopefully, that's articulated well enough. I've been baffled as to why you've taken the tact you have since I saw your second reply. The first one seemed like it might be interesting but, honestly, didn't actually provide any proof that what the OP said was true. There is no proof that what the OP said is true - because it is not true. I prefer the truth and advocate for such, which is why I made my response to the OP in the first place. There are serious concerns with privacy and being dishonest about them is not going to help.

If something I have said is confusing then, by all means, ask for me to clarify it and I'll do my best. Having seen your other posts, I can only assume you're not actually understanding or making some very strange (and wrong) opinions on my stance on things. Not only would such assumptions be wrong, they'd hardly be fair, given the actual content of my posts, my publicly available posting history, and my continued effort to explain my position.

Finally, I'd never dream of using Windows 10 as my desktop, or laptop, compute device. I'm a Linux user almost exclusively. I do use BSD in a VM, sometimes, and I've a bunch of VMs spun up that allow me to use lots of operating systems but not one single one is a Windows OS. I even have an OpenIndiana and Minix VM spun. There is a caveat, I will be getting a Windows phone on Monday (that's when it's scheduled to arrive by post to the hotel I'm currently visiting). Yes, it will collect my data and I'm aware of this. Yes, I'm willing to accept that loss of privacy.

For me, it's not a matter of privacy but a matter of control. I think the OS should allow you to disable all tracking/usage pattern collecting/unwanted data uploads. I think you should have the ability to control your computer, all the way to the bare metal. At the same time, I'm willing to *choose* to give up my privacy, if I want to. I'd rather be able to make that choice and hav

Re:He's got his talking points

[theArtificial]

Thank you for the link. I've seen similar but not that particular page.

It's a pretty solid breakdown and analysis of communications emitted during routine interactions with the system, conclusion being that while chatty nothing crazy (webcam firing up etc.) seems to be going on.

I'm concerned with people being able to control their own PC or, at least, know about what their computer is doing without their knowledge (we could argue that they consented by accepting the EULA even if they failed to read it). Thus, it's disheartening to see people lie and engage in hyperbolic rhetoric when such damages the cause - a cause which is that a user should know (and trust) what their computer is doing.

I'm concerned with people being able to control their own PC or, at least, know about what their computer is doing without their knowledge (we could argue that they consented by accepting the EULA even if they failed to read it). Thus, it's disheartening to see people lie and engage in hyperbolic rhetoric when such damages the cause - a cause which is that a user should know (and trust) what their computer is doing.

This aspect terrifies me, suppose they send out a hash of each image you view and later compare these against subversive content or whatever the powers that be determine isn't appropriate to view.

Anyhow, if you go back to my post you'll see that my only contention was that it wasn't actually "more than 100" (or however they put it) domains that were connected to by simply opening the calculator. Which is why I requested a citation - see, I know it's not that many (if any) because that many would just be silly for one single application to call...It's hard but I'm still giving you the benefit of doubt here. I've seen you post before, I am pretty sure you're a smart person. That is why I'm assuming there's some confusion here. The OP stated that opening the calculator would result in Windows connecting to over 100 domains. That is patently false. That doesn't mean that I'm okay with Windows connecting to even a single domain - it means that I am disgusted by their behavior and lack of morals.

If something I have said is confusing then, by all means, ask for me to clarify it and I'll do my best. Having seen your other posts, I can only assume you're not actually understanding or making some very strange (and wrong) opinions on my stance on things. Not only would such assumptions be wrong, they'd hardly be fair, given the actual content of my posts, my publicly available posting history, and my continued effort to explain my position.

I understand where the miscommunication occurred. I agree that the calculator connection claim is indeed hyperbole. My focus wasn't so much on the morality of the argument, which is a reasonable argument, my focus was on supporting the technical aspect of the parent, not the **grandparent ("...do something rudimentary like opening up the Windows Calculator. You'll see Windows suddenly contacting over 100 domains.") with the absurd claim. I appreciate your clarification, I was reading too much into the tone of your argument. Here's a page which the latest list of domains may be found at, currently the list is at 106.

Finally, I'd never dream of using Windows 10 as my desktop, or laptop, compute device. I'm a Linux user almost exclusively. I do use BSD in a VM, sometimes, and I've a bunch of VMs spun up that allow me to use lots of operating systems but not one single one is a Windows OS. I even have an OpenIndiana and Minix VM spun. There is a caveat, I will be getting a Windows phone on Monday (that's when it's scheduled to arrive by post to the hotel I'm currently visiting). Yes, it will collect my data and I'm aware of this. Yes, I'm willing to accept that loss of privacy.

The right tool for the right job. Which BSD? I'm a longtime fan of F

Re:He's got his talking points

[KGIII]

I believe the number 57 comes from (and this is concerning) the number of domains that are still contacted after turning off everything that you can disable with the GUI selections. The larger number is what's being contacted with everything enabled. Disturbing is that, after you've disabled everything the user can disable, it still has things that can't be disabled. (Some are time, some are update servers, some are Windows Store update polling, etc.)

Thanks for the link. They could turn off a bunch of those and some they may not want to disable - things like updates, I'd kind of want those if I were a Windows user but, to each their own, I guess.

I figured there had to be some confusion. I knew that I was, in no way, condoning Microsoft. It's possible to condemn one while still not supporting the other. I do believe that, with this hyper world, it may be easy to misinterpret things. However, I'm a pretty big fan of controlling my operating system and think that others should have the ability to do so, as well. Unfortunately, Microsoft has pretty much decided that the user is no longer allowed full control of their OS - and I'll leave the data leakage as an obvious side effect of that.

As for BSD... I'm *mostly* a user these days and most of my time is in a desktop. So, my choice is GhostBSD. I want, very much, to move it to the bare metal while forcing myself to use it exclusively for six months or so. Unfortunately, I am unable to find a browser that I enjoy and I can't get VMWare for it. I do own a small number of servers and administer my own network as well as have a leased cage. I also have, literally, dozens of computers around my home. I'm a typical user, right? ;-)

Anyhow, GhostBSD is solid as a rock and pretty speedy. There are a lot of things that I want to learn about it that I don't know already and, I'm afraid, I might not learn unless I sit down and force myself to use it. I don't have a compelling reason except for curiosity and a desire to learn new things and break things in new and interesting ways. (I seem to learn best by breaking stuff and then fixing it. Oh, man, my programming skills are legendary in their inefficiency, lack of comments, and a complete and total failing of anything resembling a quality user interface.) So, I want to learn to break stuff in BSD-land next. I spent a long time in Unix (my company was a Sun shop) so I really want to go break stuff and learn new things. Being retired gives me some joys.

Either way, it's good to see that this was figured out. I was really confused for a while. Hindsight, being what it is, says that I could have been more clear in my posting but I thought the reference to there being fewer than the alleged amount would be a sufficient indicator of my stance. I even included a smiley face.

But, if you're a FreeBSD fan and a desktop user then I absolutely, very strongly, recommend taking a look at GhostBSD. It is so less... Less clunky. FreeBSD is functional, which I like, but it is clunky. Using it on a desktop is akin to using a standard cab pickup truck to take the family on vacation. You can do it, and it will suit just fine, but there are more elegant solutions. I'm not into a glossy desktop with loads of silly features - I like light and fast, which FreeBSD is. However, GhostBSD just seems so much nicer, as it if is designed specifically for desktop use. (I've never actually read why they made GhostBSD or what their purpose for existing is. I'll do that...)

Err... So it appears I was correct in my findings. I just spent way too long reading their site and going over a bunch of the stuff their. They used MATE to reach their goal of being a familiar workstation with FreeBSD's code beneath it. It's a bit more involved but I am pretty sure that I needn't explain it to you. You probably know more about it than I do.

If not then, well, here:
http://ghostbsd.org/

Re:He's got his talking points

[TomGreenhaw]

On top of all that, communications can be encrypted with ssl so I'm not sure how router packet sniffing would be totally effective. They could easily use peer to peer technology to defeat any possible IP filtering strategy. Seriously, Microsoft could have the ultimate botnet tomorrow, but why would they do that?

Ignorance may be bliss, but from a information security standpoint, most of us place implicit trust in bios vendors, circuit board vendors and their firmware, Intel, AMD, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple and the list goes on. If any of these people really want your data they have the means to get it. If you think they aren't smart enough to hide their activity you're delusional. The fact is, our activity isn't really that interesting and these people aren't crooks so it's an acceptable risk.

If you run Windows you implicitly trust Microsoft. If you run Linux, you implicitly trust the open source movement. If Microsoft wants your data they have the means to get it. If for some reason they needed to hide that fact, nobody would likely know.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Plumpaquatsch]

if he didnt see it as a threat, he would ignore it like all the other devices that compete.

It's kind of hard to ignore something when you are asked about it in an interview. Well, he could have said "No comment", but you would have taking that as proof he was shaking in his boots.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Plumpaquatsch]

I want to be able to run the OS it had when I bought it.

Then you will have to buy from a company utterly unable to bring out a new version of their OS for years after they announced the new version.

Re:He's got his talking points

[metrix007]

No, in fact I've been here long before you. Go back to Digg.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Why? People keep making these sound-bite replies as if I'm asking for something that is somehow unrealistic, ignoring the fact that what I described has been absolutely routine for multiple decades. And at Enterprise level, it seems even 2015 Microsoft aren't willing to rock that boat.

This idea that it's acceptable to ship sub-standard software and then fix it later (very possibly breaking other stuff in the process) is a relatively recent invention, and it needs to die. It can be buried next to the idea that rapid update cycles make better software from the user's point of view.

Re:He's got his talking points

[david_thornley]

Um, yes, but the only time they've needed my credit card was when I wanted to spend money. Every EULA I've seen has been overreaching. What does it do after a crash? I've never noticed anything unusual. (Not that it crashes all that often.)

Re:He's got his talking points

[Ol Olsoc]

No, in fact I've been here long before you. Go back to Digg.

Maybe I am an idiot - what's Digg?

Re:He's got his talking points

[Plumpaquatsch]

Why? People keep making these sound-bite replies as if I'm asking for something that is somehow unrealistic, ignoring the fact that what I described has been absolutely routine for multiple decades

No, it just seems that way, because Microsoft completely blew it with the successor to XP and you morons think that it has always been that way,

Get it into your fucking skull already: Microsoft officially announced the successor of XP "for next year" before XP even shipped. And XP support would have been over no later than 2 years after that.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Swearing at me won't make your argument any more convincing.

Also, extended support for XP only ended in April 2014, more than 12 years after its release to manufacturing, while extended support for Vista still has a year and a half to run despite that one being the turkey and no fewer than four newer versions of desktop Windows being released since then. It's right there on Microsoft's web site.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Plumpaquatsch]

Swearing at me won't make your argument any more convincing.

Well, not calling a spade a spade is not going to change the fact that your argument sucks, so I might as well do it.

And the fact that you don't know that that Vista was not the promised successor to XP shows just how little you know about this clusterfuck.

Re:He's got his talking points

[gumbi west]

I'm more OK with that but I'd think you would put a note about that in the header of the routing tables.

Re:He's got his talking points

[Ol Olsoc]

Sorry kiddo, guess you're a tween. Go back to Reddit then.

Actually an olde farte. Reddit? Nah, the limit of my social addiction is here.

"Tries too hard to do too much"

[rmdingler]

Honestly, you could do worse...

nonetheless, it is plausible that Tim Cook's assertions about the Microsoft product are possibly not completely unbiased.

Re:"Tries too hard to do too much"

[lgw]

Honestly, you could do worse...

I've been using a Surface 3 for a while now, which might still be relevant to the new stuff:

* It's a perfectly good lightweight touchscreen Windows laptop, solidly built it a bit pricey for the specs.

* It's a poor tablet for normal home tablet use without the keyboard, because Windows software especially games just expects a keyboard, and the onscreen keyboard lacks important keys like "Escape". (Plus there's not a single consistent right-click gesture.)

* It's great tablet for special cases like taking notes with the stylus, or anything that there's actually an app store app for (for me, Kindle and Audible are important, and it's just fine there).

So, if I think of it as a lightweight laptop, also usable as a table for a few specific needs, I think it's great. But I won't be sitting on the couch playing games with it.

Re:"Tries too hard to do too much"

[cbhacking]

* Only if you don't include the weight and battery life among those specs. As a computer, it's overpriced. As a *portable* computer, it's just about smack in the middle of the pack for its class, price-wise.

* Switch the touch keyboard to the "Standard" or full layout. It has the meta keys you are looking for. You may need to enable it. In Win10, the setting is at Settings -> Devices -> Typing -> "Add the standard keyboard layout as a touch keyboard option".

* In desktop apps (i.e. non-Store apps), tap-and-hold is always right-click. In Win8.x Windows Store apps, right-clicking brings up the app bar; you can also achieve this by swiping in to the screen from above or below.

* I generally avoid the app store stuff - for me, its limitations aren't worth it, even in a touch environment, and that's without even getting into the fact that it's a DRM system.

Re:"Tries too hard to do too much"

[Big Hairy Ian]

I think it's the "We can't do as much as Surface therefor Surface is trying to do too much" attitude

I remember a time...

[mikaere]

when Apple just got on with it a made good products. Now they need to spread FUD about a competing product ?

I've got a Surface Pro 3 - it's a great laptop replacement and the tablet form factor is handy for some situations and the fact that it runs standard Windows software makes it a great device. Unless your work consists of surfing the web and sending the odd email, why would anyone want an iPad Pro ?

Re:I remember a time...

[Anonymous Coward]

> when Apple just got on with it a made good products. Now they need to spread FUD about a competing product ?

No, you don't. Apple has always taken jabs at Microsoft. https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2385/1895583251_f102d4324d.jpg

Re:I remember a time...

[ShanghaiBill]

when Apple just got on with it a made good products. Now they need to spread FUD about a competing product ?

There was never a time when Apple refrained from spreading FUD. Their iconic 1984 super bowl ad was an attack on IBM, and said nothing about the features or benefits of their own products. Steve Jobs regularly made ad hominem insults against Bill Gates, John Scully, etc.

Re:I remember a time...

[Howitzer86]

And my favorite from the 90s: http://farm1.static.flickr.com...

The "Mac Addict" looks suspiciously like Seinfeld.

Re:I remember a time...

[Wdomburg]

An i7 with 16GB is "underpowered and worthless for 'work'"?

Re:I remember a time...

[bigfinger76]

Ahh, the old "No True Sighted Person" fallacy...

Re: I remember a time...

[Anonymous Coward]

I do full 3d Unity game development on my Surface 3. It's a fucking incredible piece of hardware, as good as my 3 year old desktop.

Re: I remember a time...

[LichtSpektren]

Is it less dweebish to post on obscure and dated websites as an anonymous coward?

Re:I remember a time...

[retchdog]

Well, PCs have been well overpowered for most "work" for well over a decade, since most of the "work" done on an average computer is office apps. The past two decades of home computer progress have been mostly for aesthetics (you have to do a lot of computation to get computers to feel responsive and look pretty) and video gaming. Now that the improvements on those fronts are yielding rapidly diminishing returns, and battery technology is picking up, it only makes sense to go for portability.

Numerical computation and programming are pretty rare work. If computers were bought and sold just for that, the market would be far smaller.

Re:I remember a time...

[Anonymous Coward]

In enterprises where these are regularly used as workstation replacements yeah they do. We ordered 300 of them here, we started initial rollouts on the surface pro 3. mostly devs and system admins using them. Hell even most of the *Nix guys love them.

Re:I remember a time...

[ganjadude]

im not talking about wedding DJ;s im talking about home producers. sure dr dre isnt using it but you can do alot more with a surface than you can with an ipad

Re:I remember a time...

[Wdomburg]

The Surface Pro 4 configured with an i7 and 16GB is $1799. And you can get the Surface Book with an i7 and 16GB (plus a dGPU w/ 1GB GDDR5) for $2499. That's well within the ballpark people pay for a well-equipped MacBook.

For more modest budgets, the midrange models provide plenty of performance. I'm typing this on the $1299 model, which has "only" the i5, 8GB and 256GB SSD.

Re:I remember a time...

[cfalcon]

> why would anyone want an iPad Pro ?

You don't have to deal with Microsoft, plays all or almost all your ios games, has a great stylus that appears to be suitable for professional work (I can't speak to this personally, but the artist forums are abuzz for damned sure), and syncs up with all your Apple Drama, assuming you roll that way.

The surface has some serious weight behind it to, and anyone might prefer to deal with Microsoft over dealing with Apple- it's not crapware, and Cook is obviously shit talking it because it's a competitor. But there's plenty of reasons to pick an ipad pro.

Re:I remember a time...

[guacamole]

Apple was always about FUD or making ridiculous marketing claims. I recall how in 1998, when they came up with the G3 PowerPC based computers, they were making the ridiculous claim that 233MHz G3 in an iMac was faster than 400MHz Pentium II, even though the claims were not based on some real world usage experience or benchmarks like spec int, but on some obscure Photoshop based benchmark if I recall that correctly. By the time Apple started using the G4 processors, claiming to be faster than Intel was not enough. Now they claimed that G4 is a supercomputer processor. Then couple of years later they announce the switch-over to Intel.. surprise surprise.

Granted, in the more recent times Apple hardware has usually been top notch, but companies will always have a need to spread marketing FUD against the competitor products..

Re:I remember a time...

[dprimary]

You lost me somewhere around DJ. I have yet to see a surface in a studio. I see PC's on tours, but few surfaces.

Re:I remember a time...

[aralin]

This post, to an old timer like me is absolutely excellent source of entertainment. Do you know the origin of the term FUD? I'd like to refer you to wikipedia, which has it more or less right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

As for the G3,G4 and even G5, they were faster, in some case more than twice as fast even on Intel's own benchmark than contemporary Intel chips. But they were expensive and the economy of scale was in favor of Intel. If Apple wanted to ever compete on cost with comparable high end Wintel systems, they had to make the switch to Intel chips.

Please, learn your history, young one.

Re:I remember a time...

[ihtoit]

underpowered? I bet that the Surface Pro pisses all over my laptop.

My laptop:
Dual core 1.6GHz AMD with dual core Radeon HD on die
8GB RAM
500GB HDD storage + 3xUSB 2.0 + DVDRAM
15.4" 1366x768 panel
2MP camera

Not bad for £339 back in March 2011.

Surface Pro 4 (to meet spec):
quad core 4GHz Skylake i7
2736x1824 12.3" touchscreen
16GB RAM
1TB SSD
8MP camera
Miniport + USB 3.0

I don't know if the £1800 asking price is worth it, though. I could get a beast of a desktop system for about that.

Asus Crosshair 990FX motherboard with 5GHz AMD Piledriver 8-core and 16GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR3: £515
(that's 14 USB 3.0 and 4 USB 2.0 ports for anyone who's counting)
CIT Black Edition 1KW PSU at I think my last one cost £60. That's one thousand Watts certified continuous output.
Samsung 850 Evo 1TB SSD @£322
XFX Radeon R9 390X 8GB £374
CIT Venom case: £19
Coolermaster T4 CPU cooler: £22
Noctua Vortex 120mm case fan x3 @£13 (these things are brilliant: whisper quiet and they shift a LOAD of air)
Pioneer Blu-Ray/DVDRW £61

That's £1412 give or take. I have change there for another TB SSD! Or I might spoil myself and go for a £305 24" 4k UHD monitor.

(anyone know what happened to Firewire? Finding a "modern" system with Firewire is like hunting unicorns these days... oh, wait, found a card on Amazon for £16.)

Re:I remember a time...

[ihtoit]

that's £1799, not $1799. http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/new...

In USD that's about $2738 at today's rate.

Re: I remember a time...

[cfalcon]

I am about 50% on the belief that there are still shills active on slashdot, but the real reason shills are rarer here than, say, certain tech subreddits, is because of the large amount of user accountability- shills tend to get downvoted and usually have to post AC, meaning that a typical user won't see the shills as easily as can be forced on the "democracy" types of sites where upvotes or likes or whatever will give the shill enough of a platform. There's also a lot of people to call out shills here, so it's lower reward. But I still see posts that seem designed to craft narrative instead of share opinion, share information, or argue, and those are at the very least candidates for shills.

Re:I remember a time...

[Zontar The Mindless]

I regularly compile a product that has 30M lines of code...

Slashdot discussion pages don't count, sorry.

Re:I remember a time...

[Macfox]

The G's were rarely faster. And the ones that were, cost vastly more. Kinda like saying "my Ferrari is faster than the average consumer sedan....So there!" The whole photoshop benchmark was a joke. Basically comparing optimised PPC PS plugins against vanilla x86 plugins, processing rather large images to exaggerate the difference. Anyone that worked with both on a daily basis knew the truth. The one thing Apple had going for it was it's elegant structure ("System" OS). No DLL hell, simple drag and drop. No Install/uninstall. Just delete the files. But that was all lost in the switch PPC and I guess need for extensible OS with the various clones. OSX just shoves all the nastiness under the rug.

Re:I remember a time...

[hvdh]

The top CPU model "i7" is the Core i7-6650U, only a dual-core with HT.
In Cinebench R15, it has only 60% of the performance of a desktop i7-6670K (the first comparable benchmkar i've found).
The RAM is dual-channel DDR3L-1600, with only 60% of the bandwidth of dual-channel DDR4-2666.

Re:I remember a time...

[serviscope_minor]

You're mistaken about the G3 and G4 processors. This is going back a bit, so there may be some errors. Back when the G3 was very, very new, the company I was working for got a new IBM workstation running off a G3, I think or perhaps some very closely related version of PowerPC. Holy crap that thing was *FAST*.

To set the scene:

Bear in mind this company made CFD software which is one of those applications for which no CPU will ever be fast enough. However much computing power you have, you can always shrink the grid and use more. It was a mixed shop with a fair emphasis on UNIX back then though was following the transition to Windows NT. The good 3D vis stuff was still completely ruled by SGI.

Anyway as the intern, I got the brand new IBM machine, for several reasons. Mostly it transpired, no one wanted it because the company got the cheapest (or no??) graphics option since it was there for porting and testing so as a day to day machine it sucked if you already had a nice SGI on your desk (no audio, no asteroids, less space than a nomad, lame). Also, the C++ compiler was particularly finicky (bear in mind this was either before or contemporary with the first C++ standard, around 1997 or 8), even compared to the DEC compiler.

Anway, that machine ran rings around a surprising number of rather more expensive machines. I think it was for a brief while the fastest machine in the building until the new high end Alpha arrived a few months later. Naturally that would have had no problem finding a home even if the only option was to programe over a paper teletype because it was an Alpha and the company was nothing if not full of cheerfully nerdy unix nerds.

It was that job which also made me into a young proto unix nerd.

TL;DR The G3 was very very fast at the time.

Re:I remember a time...

[drinkypoo]

Back when the G3 was very, very new, the company I was working for got a new IBM workstation running off a G3, I think or perhaps some very closely related version of PowerPC. Holy crap that thing was *FAST*.

SPARC processors of the day were much faster than PowerPC, and about equivalent to POWER itself. PC processors were highly competitive. The G3 was faster at some kinds of math than the PC processors of the day, but that was it. By the time the G4 rolled around, PowerPC was much worse at general-purpose computing than the PC; it was only faster specifically at vector math. If you had a highly parallelizable task that could reasonably be broken down into vectors than it would run dramatically faster on the G4, but otherwise your code would run faster on a PC. By the time of the G5, the PC processors had caught up on vectors and there was no more reason to use PowerPC, but Apple kept doing it because they saw it as their differentiator.

Re:I remember a time...

[drinkypoo]

The RAM is dual-channel DDR3L-1600, with only 60% of the bandwidth of dual-channel DDR4-2666.

As it turns out, memory latency is way more important than memory bandwidth at these rates. I get literally no performance improvement by overclocking my RAM, which mind you is an XMP profile and not something I just pulled out of my ass.

Re:I remember a time...

[nine-times]

This isn't FUD. FUD = "Fear, uncertainty, and doubt." He's not even implying that the Surface will possibly eat your babies. He's not even saying that it sucks. He's just saying that it's not great.

Re:I remember a time...

[Wdomburg]

It's $1799 USD in the US store. Prices in the EU are always higher.

Re:I remember a time...

[vegabook]

Ad hominem attacks on product leadership are an effective marketing strategy. They're the converse of celebrity endorsements. Irritating but effective.

Re:I remember a time...

[Wdomburg]

Of course a mobile processor isn't going to match the speed of a desktop processor. The question is not whether it is the fastest machine, but whether it is "underpowered and worthless for 'work'".

Processor speed has long since stopped being the bottleneck for the majority of workloads. Likewise memory bandwidth, which is why trading off lower speeds for lower latency makes a lot of sense. (This was often the case even when memory bandwidth was drastically lower. Look at the failure of RDRAM to capture market despite offering 1600MB/s when SDRAM was still pushing only 1066MB/s. Price was a factor, as well, but in enterprise applications the drastically higher latency made the technology less suitable regardless of nominal bandwidth).

In the end, design always involves trade-offs. For someone graphics rendering, this would be an awful choice. They would probably be better off with a desktop, or at least a "mobile workstation" class machine that trade weight and portability to cram in a 45W processor and a higher end GPU. For my wife, who largely uses her machine for typical office applications or remote access to work, the portability and the ability to use the stylus for signing are far more important than raw performance. For myself, a lightweight machine is perfect for taking to meetings or while travelling. Our development resources live in racks in a data center, not in laptop bags.

Re:I remember a time...

[serviscope_minor]

SPARC processors of the day were much faster than PowerPC

We're talking at a time here whwn things were changing very, VERY fast---the late 1990s. The MHz was just heating up and PCs were just becoming fast enough (and had a "good enough" OS---NT 4) to begin to supplant UNIX workstations. What was true one month would have changed by the next.

SPARC was much later to the party with OoO execution compared to PPC, and I'm fairly sure the G3 had it.

Bear in mind this was a *long* time ago and I might be a year or two out, which would completely swizzle things around. It might have been the PPC604e which IBM certainly used in workstations and I believe Apple used in PCs. That would have been '96 or 7, not 98 or 8.

From what I remember about the PPC970 was it had a very brief period in the sun where it was a superior processor for desktop use. That didn't last long at all and they could never produce low power ones, so the ageing G4 laptops really did lag behind the PC counterparts. IBM couldn't keep up on either front, and by the end the G5s were lagging.

Bear in mind, the G5 came out in 2003, with I believe a dual processor option. That was smack in the middle of the Northwood era of the P4: the Prescott and Cedar Mill were still to follow. The P4s were frankly not very good at that time and it was a while before Intel would get their act together on desktop CPUs. Of course there was AMD which apart from some rather obscure benchmarks were stopming over Intel on the desktop and completely creaming them in the server benchmarks at the time.

I actually remember that era pretty well. I was doing a PhD and was very very deep into very optimized code since I was writing real-time computer vision systems and that was just about the time when computers had got fast enough to do more than some very simple tracking realtime. We had a dual G5, a dual opteron and top end P4 of some sort. The G5 was very competitive and the P4 largely sucked, except for some rather obscure cases of little use mostly where it came out ahead of the pack.

On the whole, however, the G5 and Opteron were the favoured machines over the P4.

Re:I remember a time...

[Overzeetop]

Which is entirely true, but limited to those people with high-media demands or those who need to minimize encoding time.

I run an engineering consulting firm and personally work on over 200 archtiectural projects in a typical year. I was using an i7-920 tower with 24GB of RAM and a three-monitor setup up until a week ago. I'm currently running all the same software on an i5-6300U surface pro 4 with 8GB of RAM. t's currently every bit as responsive as the old (quad core) i7. OF course, I'm limited to just my main 30" monitor plus the screen at the moment (due to the DP connections), but will be switching to a pair of 42" 4k monitors in the next week or so. I'll be able to pull up two full-sized (Ansi D 22x34) prints side by side, plus the surface's own display for mail/calendar/task/notifications simultaneously. As for memory...I never actually exceeded 12GB used on the old machine, and the SP4 idles at about 4GB less than the desktop.

I suspect that 99% of users would be perfectly well served with a dual core/HT machine at 2.5-3GHz. For those that don't, there are 5-8 pound "laptops" running HQ quad core processors or desktop machines.

Re:I remember a time...

[screwzloos]

The last two models on your pcadvisor list are customized configurations, and are not standard offerings on the US Microsoft Store. Yes, you can dial the Surface Pro 4 up to $2699 if you want a 1TB ssd, but Wdomburg is right about the price of the i7/16/256. £1449/$1799.

Re:I remember a time...

[thegarbz]

One thing I will point out that is that raw specs become quite meaningless for laptops these days. The Surface Pro 3 looks great on paper and well outperforms the identically speced Mac Air with the same processor because of its fan. Likewise it gets completely smashed by any competitor with a proper cooling solution.

It works very well for transient workloads but do something ever so slightly heavy with it such as open a large image, play a video or play a game and the CPU starts heavily throttling very quickly.

That said I love mine and would buy another.

Re:I remember a time...

[cfalcon]

If your point is that you can get a powerful surface for powerful cash, then that's a good point, and often not brought up- most competitors simply don't scale that high.

But I really feel you are not being fair to compare a nearly THREE THOUSAND DOLLAR current gen surface to a pretty ghetto laptop from four years ago.

1800 pounds converts to 2740 USD, according to Google.

An Alienware laptop that costs 2500 USD has:

Intel® Core i7-4710MQ processor, 4-cores, 6MB Cache, Overclocked up to 3.7GHz
Dual NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 970M with 6GB GDDR5 each (NVIDIA SLI® Enabled)
16GB Dual Channel DDR3L at 1600MHz
1TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s
18.4" WLED FHD (1920 X 1080)
2MP camera (with something about double speakers or some crap)

The big point here is: dual mobile nvidia graphics cards. That's absolutely monstrous- that kicks the shit out of onboard graphics.

Now, the unfair part is that this is an 18 inch laptop, compared to a much more portable surface. But the surface doesn't have comparable performance to a laptop, at the high end (and note you can spend even more on a laptop).

Re:I remember a time...

[cfalcon]

> You think most people buy the high end of this line, which costs almost ~$3000?

The funny part is you'll see the same people make an argument like "Apple is for rich kids, it's overpriced", pointing to a 1000 dollar ipad in one place, and then compare it to a 3000 dollar competitor in another and be like "and it's underpowered!".

Anyway, to your point- I doubt most people will buy the top end thing, but it is a real offering that does have a ton of power to it. If you're a professional who doesn't like input lag or whatever, you will probably consider such an expense.

Re:I remember a time...

[guacamole]

I was a college Solaris administrator from 1999 to 2007, and we stopped buying new Sun machines (mostly desktops, and some low end servers) at around year 2000, which can give you an idea how non-competitive they were in terms of hardware price-performance. And around that time, Intel Xeon was already slaughtering SPARC in CPU benchmarks like spec int/fp. Some have speculated that Sun's brand new UltraSparc III was briefly faster than intel around the year 2000 or so, but it took Sun like two years to start shipping those in significant numbers, and by then AMD/Intel left them in dust again.

Re:I remember a time...

[Plumpaquatsch]

music pros (AKA HIPSTERS) have switched from macs to surfaces years ago. You can do real work with a surface.

And yet far more music professionals still use iPads. Mostly because you couldn't give any real reason why somebody would switch to the Surface instead of a PC notebook - and they chose the iPad over PC notebooks for more than one reason. There certainly doesn't seem to be any Surface specific music software. BTW FTFY.

To Quote Gandhi

[R3d M3rcury]

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

Maybe we'll see Apple come up with a iPad Duo Dock at some point. "It's not the same thing, though..."

Re:To Quote Gandhi

[skovnymfe]

If you're going to quote Gandhi at least fucking do it right.

Unfortunately for His Excellency the movement is likely to grow with ridicule as it is certain to flourish on repression. No vital movement can be killed except by the impatience, ignorance or laziness of its authors. A movement cannot be 'insane' that is conducted by men of action as I claim the members of the Non-co-operation Committee are. Ridicule is like repression. Both give place to respect when they fail to produce the intended effect. It will be admitted that non-co-operation has passed the stage [of] ridicule. Whether it will now be met by repression or respect remains to be seen. But the testing time has now arrived. In a civilized country when ridicule fails to kill a movement it begins to command respect.

Re:To Quote Gandhi

[kb7oeb]

Until the dock jammed and you couldn't eject your laptop. Everyone I knew with a Duo Dock (all of 2 people) had to take their dock apart at least once to get the laptop out.

Re:To Quote Gandhi

[david_thornley]

From Apple's point of view, having a touchscreen OS and a desktop OS as two different things is a good idea, and, having seen what Microsoft did in uniting the two, they have a point. The iPad is going to be the best tablet they can make, and the MacBook Pro is going to be the best laptop they can make, and they aren't going to compromise either for compatibility.

Of course, Cook could be wrong about this. Lots of people don't have desktops any more because their laptops are cheap enough and do everything they want to do. There still are desktops, and they have better expandability and better performance/price, but they don't dominate like they used to. It could be that the tablet is capable of doing almost anything people want it for, and by attaching a decent keyboard and mouse they make good laptops. Microsoft may or may not be doing it right, but it's a definite possibility for the future if not now.

Gamers are always going to demand the best computers they can get, but most people aren't gamers like that.

Artists, musicians, etc

[PopeRatzo]

"I think if you're looking at a PC, why would you buy a PC anymore? No really, why would you buy one?"

To run ProTools with all the plugins?

Am I the only one who remembers when Apple made machines for creative people? An iPad Pro is useless for them, except for being able to write an email to your parents asking for more money.

Re:Artists, musicians, etc

[ganjadude]

all my audio/video friends who need on the go type machines have traded their macbooks in for surfaces when the 2 first came out.

Re:Artists, musicians, etc

[Anonymous Coward]

Inferior machines? My middle of the road MacBook is far faster than anything I had when I was a musician and we charted quite a bit on machines that are obsolete. Years ago, I was a hobbiest PC builder -- we could afford to buy machines prebuilt, but I loved trying to get just a little more processor time out of the box. From a music perspective, I ended up having the fastest spec'd machine for one of the bigger softsynth companies (Native Instuments) and after benchmarking it, the company asked to borrow the machine for a week so they could check the benchmarks themselves.

At the time, it was said we'd never need more. Again, I have a middle of the road macbook...it puts my custom built machine to shame. I have the full line of Native Instruments Komplete running on it without any issue. I have Premier on my machine. It works far better than anything I had in the past when I was a creative professional.

What is the point? Apple sold 6 million of these inferior machines in the last quarter that are far better than anything I'll ever need to be creative. I have a few PCs in my rackmount still, but I don't even bother anymore because my laptop is good enough. For the record, one of my rackmounts in a hackintosh -- I wanted all the PCI type slots and everything else I was use to in older machine. The fact is, I never use anything inside. I just plug in with either Thunderbolt or USB3. USB3 is good enough for 90% of what I do.

The point is that if you can't be creative with these inferior machines, you are doing something wrong. And fucking shit...I don't care if it is Mac or Windows or Linux...the operative systems and software and hardware are all good enough that the only people that complain that they can't be creative are idiots that shouldn't be in the industry, or probably just not as creative or smart as they think they are.

Re:Artists, musicians, etc

[cfalcon]

> An iPad Pro is useless for them, except for being able to write an email to your parents asking for more money

While time will tell on this, a lot of people are excited about apple pencil, and I'm pretty sure there are artists that are planning on using it with their current app set (Adobe, Procreate, etc.). I doubt you could compile on it, but I bet you can draw.

It's still speculation, but that seems to be what people are saying... so far.

Re:Artists, musicians, etc

[macs4all]

"I think if you're looking at a PC, why would you buy a PC anymore? No really, why would you buy one?"

To run ProTools with all the plugins?

Am I the only one who remembers when Apple made machines for creative people? An iPad Pro is useless for them, except for being able to write an email to your parents asking for more money.

I think he meant "PC" as in a WINDOWS PC. I think he thinks of Macs as "Macs", not "Macintosh PCs".

Apple still makes plenty of machines for creative people. MacBook Pros, iMacs, Mac Pros...

But the iPad has a place among creative pros, too, as a quick way to record a musical idea before it is forgotten, as well as a unique type of musical instrument, as well as a MIDI controller, as well as the platform for Apps like Apple's Logic Controller, etc.

Re:Artists, musicians, etc

[avandesande]

Yes but none of the adobe software runs on the ipad except for some crippled drawing sofware, so you will need a 'real' computer to do anything with what you create with it. The surface pro has pressure sensitive stylus and can run the full version of photoshop.

Re:Artists, musicians, etc

[jader3rd]

Am I the only one who remembers when Apple made machines for creative people?

Yes you are. Apple made computers for people who liked to consume music and tell themselves that they were creative.

Re:Artists, musicians, etc

[Princeofcups]

"I think if you're looking at a PC, why would you buy a PC anymore? No really, why would you buy one?"

To run ProTools with all the plugins?

Am I the only one who remembers when Apple made machines for creative people? An iPad Pro is useless for them, except for being able to write an email to your parents asking for more money.

How's that? The iPad Pro is a great new tool for artists. With a stylus you have a Wacom with touch sensitivity and a computer all rolled up into one. The resolution alone is amazing for any graphics manipulation. Quick sketch on paper that you did on the bus, take a photo, grab your stylus, and photoshop that up to finished artwork without having to power up your computer. That is powerful.

Re:Artists, musicians, etc

[ihtoit]

A/V work.

I have several multicore machines (albit all fairly low spec but clustered they can keep up with a Skylake) that I chew through a LOT of video hours on.

Re:Artists, musicians, etc

[ihtoit]

because they realised the real power is in software rather than hardware, so they reduced the hardware overhead by switching architecture to the x64 and rewrote most of their code. These days Mac laptops and their HTPC-type systems are fabricated by Dell in Ireland, same as they've always been, only this time round the only real divergence is when it comes to mounting the boards in the cases.

Re:Artists, musicians, etc

[cfalcon]

Well, I'll let someone else address whether it is crippled or not- I'm no expert. I will say that Apple Pencil is supposed to be a good pressure stylus- that's one of the selling points of the new ipad. And by selling point, of course I mean 100 dollar additional product- but still.

Re:Artists, musicians, etc

[Lennie]

I know this sounds a bit like Clippy but:

You seem to be talking about Moore's Law, would you like some help with that ?

Re:Artists, musicians, etc

[dave420]

Their point is that the iPad pro runs only a small subset of the software many creative folks need. Its direct competitor, however, has all you just stated and all the desktop software people use to be creative.

Re:Artists, musicians, etc

[cfalcon]

> I loved trying to get just a little more processor time out of the box

So the machines you bought were fast, but you wanted faster, and you pushed towards that.

> The point is that if you can't be creative with these inferior machines, you are doing something wrong.

Is that the point, or is it that people can buy something that is fast, but want something faster, and push towards that?

Re:Artists, musicians, etc

[Lennie]

Soon the same might apply to mobile devices.

The mobile devices may need attachments or other accessories.

So far the convergence that people talk about hasn't happened yet though.

Almost starting to wonder if it will. Even though it seems to be the natural progression.

Flamebait

[ShnowDoggie]

There was quite a bit of context hothardware left out. I am calling it - flame bait.

I'd like to hear from content creators

[LichtSpektren]

I myself don't do any graphics/audio/video editing or creation, but I'd like to hear from people who are. As I understand, traditionally Macs were the most popular tool for the job. Is that still true? Has anyone transitioned to a tablet to do most of their work?

Re:I'd like to hear from content creators

[Dracos]

Since Apple moved to Intel chips, the Mac/PC divide has become mostly about branding.

The important thing about graphics/video/audio that these are among the most complex workflows that exist, and become exponentially more cumbersome without a full keyboard and multi-button mouse. A touchscreen by itself is a regression in HID capability... that's why people don't find and paste the link into the conversation from their phone, they apologize for not being able to do so instead.

Re:I'd like to hear from content creators

[cfalcon]

There's a giant wad of stuff that doesn't have OS X versions (or Linux versions). Games are the biggest offenders, but so are the one-off tools that many people require. There's stuff that goes the other way too, but I'm of the opinion that each of these big OSes offers a workflow that is not entirely compatible with the others.

Re:I'd like to hear from content creators

[mcrbids]

To be fair, I copy/paste all the time on my Android 4.4.x phone all the time. It is a little awkward, but it works fine.

Re:I'd like to hear from content creators

[ihtoit]

games are what consoles are for.

I still have a stack of XBoxes. One's unmodded, that does me for Live. One's softmodded and packed with retro games. Four have ludicrous (for the base spec) hard drive upgrades and sit there running various file services including a webserver on a load-balanced pair (experimental, I don't expect for it to be getting a million hits a day or anything daft like that).

Re:I'd like to hear from content creators

[cfalcon]

Can't play WoW on a console. Can't play SWTOR on a console. Plenty of games I run have no console versions. Honestly, Linux has more games I care about than consoles do, most especially with emulation.

I get that you can run some great stuff on a dedicated console- I like my Wii U a lot- but it simply can't compare graphically or in many other ways to what a PC can do. And much of the great PC games are only made for Windows, sadly.

Re:I'd like to hear from content creators

[ihtoit]

This might interest you - Blizzard have been talking about porting WoW to console (probably the next gen XBox), though how many DVDs the content would ship on is anybody's guess...

According to Gamerant, SWKOTOR *might* be getting a console remix.

Re:I'd like to hear from content creators

[cfalcon]

That is pretty interesting. Best would be Linux, though!

I wouldn't be too shocked if Blizzard ported to either PS4, Xbone, or both. They just announced a bunch of class changes and I honestly feel you could make a stronger case than ever for being able to play with a lesser input device like a gamepad- I don't think they are that dumbed down yet, but it seems that that's the direction they are at least headed.

Final Fantasy 14 is a solid MMO that is available on Windows, OS X, and PS4.

Interestingly, Overwatch is announced to be Windows only at the moment, and that game seems ripe for a console port.

Re:I'd like to hear from content creators

[cbhacking]

KOTOR (Knights Of The Old Republic) is different from "Star Wars: The Old Republic"; the latter is an MMO, currently supported, and more akin to WOW than to KOTOR except in its story aesthetic.

Re:I'd like to hear from content creators

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

FF XIV is on OS X? Since when?

Re:I'd like to hear from content creators

[david_thornley]

When I first played SWTOR, it felt an awful lot like WoW in space. I almost never had any difficulty with the mechanics because of my WoW experience.

Re:I'd like to hear from content creators

[ihtoit]

I hear of people plugging keyboards into XB360, even my son had a play (before his 360 blew up). Aside from the input options, what other issues affect game portability? Graphics? How hard can it be to port to 1080p when most modern consoles (if not all of the current generation) can output 1080p anyway?

Re:I'd like to hear from content creators

[cfalcon]

The mouse / keyboard has a low adoption rate on consoles. Partly this is due to it being a relatively expensive peripheral set for a console, but the bigger part is that most console games will not need or require a keyboard and monitor- meaning that much of your userbase won't have the required input.

This direly hurts the motivation to make a keyboard / mouse game- and there's a big flipside. The keyboard and mouse for Xbox famously do not work in Halo, and this is a huge controversial point in console gaming. Mouse + Keyboard (really, mouse plus buttons) is VASTLY superior to joystick for any FPS game, meaning that if your FPS supports mouse input, you are screwing your other users in pvp.

So, that's a huge deal.

The second big piece is graphics, which consoles are universally awful at. Remember that getting a game to run in 1080p is only one small part of how a game looks- you simply can't push polys with a 400 dollar gaming machine like you can with a serious graphics card.

http://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-con...

That long bar is not even close to state of the art for PC graphics.

There is literally no comparison.

but a big piece is that it would essentially become mandatory

Re:I'd like to hear from content creators

[cfalcon]

Ignore last line- was edit cruft about mouse/keyboard, sorry.

Re:I'd like to hear from content creators

[cfalcon]

Another issue affecting portability is that the consoles are gated at several levels. It is a much higher bar to enter the console world.

A final one is that each online ecosystem is curated quite differently. It's rare to be able to play your Xbox versus their PS4.

So I think an MMO developer would look at the system and see that their content would be subject to some third party constraints, they would need to set up their accounts through a different method, they would not be able to upgrade indefinitely (the fact that you can play FF14 on a PS3, PS4, Windows, or OS X makes it have the broadest possible base of anything that I've heard of), etc. WoW can bump system requirements up slowly over the years- it would have to, as it launched in 2004. If that had been a console game, it would have been on the PS2 and Xbox, and you would have to give serious consideration to those original boxes, while porting it to the PS3, Xbox 360, PS4, and Xbone.

Creative people tend to be broke

[rsilvergun]

artists and whatnot. Or hobbyists. Yeah, yeah, lots of exceptions, but they weren't a good market once PC multimedia caught up. The Sound Blaster Live with it's dirt cheap Midi and good enough recording was a big hit. Then Intel caught up with PowerPC on Photoshop benchmarks and they lost the Printshops. They could have chased after them, but why bother when veblen goods were bringing in so much more and when they'd already almost bought the farm chasing after PCs.

Re:Creative people tend to be broke

[Anonymous Coward]

So I guess you weren't around for the '90s, when creative professionals made shitloads of money using Apple products for publishing, graphic design, music and video production? No matter.

You're right that PCs got good enough to eat Apple's lunch in those markets, and the writing was on the wall for me when Apple fucked over Final Cut Pro users' workflows by turning it into "iMovie Pro."

Also when they discontinued Xserve, it was clear that they had no love for enterprise (it was mutual), so it was "enterprise and creative pros are out, consumer gadgets are in." Now they want us to do *everything* with consumer gadgets and that dog just won't hunt.

Re:Creative people tend to be broke

[Zontar The Mindless]

I learned something today. Thank you!

Re:Creative people tend to be broke

[metrix007]

PCs were always the better option. Artists just like to feel special.

Maybe

[rsilvergun]

but the Penny Arcade folks made a good point about the new surface: it's not powerful enough to drive that ultra high res display w/o input lag. If you're just mousing with a stylus you won't notice, but their artist noticed the lag right away. Yeah, he could drop res, but that means not running in the panels native res. He was using a Surface Pro 1 on the road, might still be.

Re:Maybe

[Wdomburg]

That was the Surface Pro 3, not the new Surface Pro 4, and Microsoft largely addressed his issues in their firmware update last October: http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2014/11/01/surface-3-update

The new model is significantly more powerful, with no noticeable parallax or lag, and a greatly improved display: http://gizmodo.com/the-surface-pro-4-has-the-most-accurate-tablet-display-1738801322

Re:Maybe

[rsilvergun]

Neat. An artist buddy of mine was considering hunting down a SP3 now that the 4 was out (hoping to get a deal) but after reading about the lag and given that it wasn't that great a deal (they're still in demand) he held off. I'll let him know, thx.

Re:Maybe

[Wdomburg]

Yeah, I looked at the SP3, since they still have them on display in the store, but the difference in price with the current discounts isn't nearly large enough to justify foregoing the new model. The display improvements are very apparent and the cooling improvements keep the SP4 comfortable to hold even when the fans kick in.

Re:Maybe

[cfalcon]

Others are bringing up that the newer Surface Pro 4 is more powerful. I'll point out that the topic is kind of about the Surface Book, which is more powerful than that (and also mostly a laptop).

The flipside here is that the Surface Pro 1 wasn't advertised as "hey, here's a new product, but it has input lag if you try to use it". That's like advertising 3D graphics on the NES and then pointing to the N64 and saying "see, they got'em now!".

Anyway, the current Surface line definitely scales up, with increased power at each level.

Who runs PC"s

[future assassin]

Well there are two in my house and two laptops. Both desktops get constant use and one is used by me to do everything computer wise, run and play my game server, do graphics work, work on my shops websites, browse the internet you know the regular things you do. When I play my game and chat with others on iRC there's TONS of you 14+ year old to 60+ using PC's My kids who is 16 spends most of his time on his with two monitors playing games on one and having the internet on the other screen.

Me thinks that comment is someone trying to fight a the reality check that the pad market is saturated and for what people use them for they don't upgrade much.

Re:Who runs PC"s

[future assassin]

Says the anonymous coward.

I gotta ask while I'm here

[rsilvergun]

Anyone think the SP4 is a serious Wacom competitor (e.g. for their flagship, not their portable)?

Re:I gotta ask while I'm here

[Wdomburg]

They are certainly moving into that space. They actually acquired the pen and digitizer tech from N-Trig, rather than simply licensing it, and have been hinting that the capabilities will continue to evolve. (The latest firmware update included an update to the Pen driver that "adds support for future functionality".)

And in 2 years...

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple will release a Surface Book clone, call it the "ibook" or something ridiculous like that, dumb down the features for the mass, because that's how little they think of your intelligence and be praised for "innovating". All my hate.

Why would I buy a PC?

[Osgeld]

Cause I have work to do

Re:This isn't aimed at PC users

[cfalcon]

In fairness, touching Apple products absolutely makes you smug. They are very shiny.

Maybe Cook is jealous

[Streetlight]

I guess he didn't think of the tablet with a keyboard running a workbook OS like the Surface Pros. Microsoft sort of tried what the iPad Pro is with their Surface RT, an app based device, and it was an unmitigated disaster. Cook should have learned from that. Leo Laporte today showed an iPad Pro with the Logitech keyboard-case and it was bigger and heavier than his Macbook and only $100 less costly. Apple certainly could make a Macbook with touch using OS X having a removable keyboard. I think it would sell like hotcakes.

Not impressed at all

[WaffleMonster]

Tim Cooks remarks are nonsensical.

None of the batteries are user replaceable, neither is anything else.

Microsoft had to ruin windows with its cloud adware/spyware garbage.

Price is ridiculous.

Win 10 enterprise does *NOT* turn off spying

[Taco Cowboy]

... I don't believe that even Enterprise truly turns off the spying ...

I can almost be certain that Win 10 Enterprise does not turn off spying

3 of my business offices - one in Singapore, one in the States and one in Africa - we are running parallel experiments on Win 10

We have workstations running Win 10 Enterprises, turning off all the spying option - including the updates - and in the meantime we turned on the sniffers

For the past few months we have encountered _some_ abnormalities - even with all the spying options turned off, Win 10 Enterprise still 'phoned home' - and the data we captured so far are found to be encrypted, so we can't say for sure what kind of data Win 10 enterprise is sending back to its mothership

Re:Win 10 enterprise does *NOT* turn off spying

[cfalcon]

That's disheartening.

I will say this- given that the EULA for Windows 10 definitely allows them to do this, even if you figure it out, there's not really any limit to what they start doing in the future, except that which they are legally bound against. Interesting work for sure, though.

Tim Cooks response should be...

[Tolvor]

The IPad Pro costs far too much to do far too little. Seriously Tim, an Apple Pencil that costs $100?!? Really?

Re:Tim Cooks response should be...

[Dixie_Flatline]

Wacom stylus replacements are only slightly cheaper, depending on the model. Some are very inexpensive, but some are certainly in the $100 ballpark. Apple isn't charging appreciably more than competitors, and by accounts of how the pencil works on that screen, it's a much better device.

Talking down the competition never has been good

[blang]

in my book.
a MAC IS a PC.
If I want an ipad i will get it on its merits. Same with surface.
Although neither are likely in my world.
I get by perfectly well with android devices both for my mobile and tablets.
I get by perfectly fine with linux and windows-based PC's and laptops.
For the most part I buy them refurbished or second hand. Can get 3 year old professional grade top performing laptops for $200.

Re:This isn't aimed at PC users

[taustin]

So is Steve Job's ass if you apply some furniture polish.

Tim Cook?

[bytesex]

The same Tim Cook who says that you don't need to buy a PC anymore?

Re:Tim Cook?

[david_thornley]

Originally, if you had an iPhone, you needed a computer running iTunes. This changed along the way. If your needs are satisfied by a tablet, and that's true of quite a few people, you don't need a PC.

Re:Tim Cook?

[zlives]

great so apple is shutting all PC sales?

Re:Maybe Cook is jealous

[cbhacking]

The sad thing is, the Surface RT (and Windows RT generally) would have had a chance if MS has just not crippled the thing with insane lockdowns. It had the full Win32 and .NET 4.x APIs, used standard driver models so you could easily add support for devices that used its full-size USB port, and supported a bunch of features found in no other mainstream ARM tablet (full file system access, built-in script engines, multi-user capability, Windows networking, placing any windows you wanted to side-by-side, booting off removable media, browser with developer tools, etc.). It had compelling hardware, aside from the lowish screen resolution (and it's not *that* low, the MacBook Air has the same resolution, but cost a hell of a lot more).

It was trivially easy to port many Win32 programs to it; if they would compile in Visual Studio 2012, you could compile them for RT. .NET programs didn't even need re-compiling. Drivers built using the modern driver kits were as easy to port as Win32 programs; some open-source drivers were successfully ported, and Pluggable even managed to get theirs USB Ethernet dongle's driver signed by MS before MS backpedaled on that. The bitch was getting past the stupid signature checks (most people were even less lucky than Pluggable). You could compile (where needed), and you could copy the programs to the tablet. You could even tell it to run them as Admin. But, without a jailbreak or a Microsoft signature (not just any Authenticode signature, it had to be from specific Microsoft keys), it wouldn't run.

That doomed the whole RT ecosystem. The app store's offerings were neither plentiful enough nor desirable enough to make the tablet worth its price (which was good for an 8-hour-battery laptop, but high for an ARM tablet). The initial jailbreak brought a surge of interest in porting open-source programs, and even led to the development of an x86-to-ARM dynamic recompilation (like emulation, but faster) layer that allowed running unmodified Win32 programs, including some old games. For months, MS didn't bother people who were finally getting to use their tablets as actually computers... and then 8.1 came out, and they blocked the jailbreak four different ways. There's a new jailbreak out now, but people just don't care much anymore. I don't know what idiot at MS thought that making RT even less useful was going to increase sales, but they traded in their .22 pocket footgun for a .50 fully automatic footrifle, and people just stopped bothering with it.

Who?

[BlackDesign]

Who still runs a PC? Well a great deal of companies... A very great deal, so a lot of people still have to use them every day. I'm the kind of Apple fanboy that thinks Apple's look great, work great but are just to expensive to actually own (and be able to upgrade every 2 years), unless you earn enough to buy loads of new stuff (well I guess then you don't have a family to feed/study/live or you really just earn a great deal of money) People not only want good looking computers, they wan't good looking, cheap and robust computers. Well that combination will never work. We've got to embrace the fact that we have a few big manufacturers or the market would be dead. So Tim Cook, live with it, because thanks to Microsoft/Windows you still have something to work for every day.

Re:Who?

[david_thornley]

The price difference isn't all that great. If the Mac is $600 more expensive than some low-end crap that satisfies your requirements, that's less than $1/day. If you use it every day, having a good laptop can be worth a lot more than $1/day to you. If you're going for a quality computer, the Mac is a lot closer to the price, since a lot of the price differential is that Apple doesn't go low end.

News at 11

[Alioth]

CEO of one company says product of competitor is somehow inferior. Why is this news?

Re:Care to share the list of the '100+ domains'?

[Chas]

This isn't 100 of them, but it's 57 known domains that need to be blocked.

vortex.data.microsoft.com
vortex-win.data.microsoft.com
telecommand.telemetry.microsoft.com
telecommand.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
oca.telemetry.microsoft.com
oca.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
sqm.telemetry.microsoft.com
sqm.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
watson.telemetry.microsoft.com
watson.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
redir.metaservices.microsoft.com
choice.microsoft.com
choice.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
df.telemetry.microsoft.com
reports.wes.df.telemetry.microsoft.com
wes.df.telemetry.microsoft.com
services.wes.df.telemetry.microsoft.com
sqm.df.telemetry.microsoft.com
telemetry.microsoft.com
watson.ppe.telemetry.microsoft.com
telemetry.appex.bing.net
telemetry.urs.microsoft.com
telemetry.appex.bing.net:443
settings-sandbox.data.microsoft.com
vortex-sandbox.data.microsoft.com
survey.watson.microsoft.com
watson.live.com
watson.microsoft.com
statsfe2.ws.microsoft.com
corpext.msitadfs.glbdns2.microsoft.com
compatexchange.cloudapp.net
cs1.wpc.v0cdn.net
a-0001.a-msedge.net
statsfe2.update.microsoft.com.akadns.net
sls.update.microsoft.com.akadns.net
fe2.update.microsoft.com.akadns.net
diagnostics.support.microsoft.com
corp.sts.microsoft.com
statsfe1.ws.microsoft.com
pre.footprintpredict.com
i1.services.social.microsoft.com
i1.services.social.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
feedback.windows.com
feedback.microsoft-hohm.com
feedback.search.microsoft.com
rad.msn.com
preview.msn.com
ad.doubleclick.net
ads.msn.com
ads1.msads.net
ads1.msn.com
a.ads1.msn.com
a.ads2.msn.com
adnexus.net
adnxs.com
az361816.vo.msecnd.net
az512334.vo.msecnd.net

Re:With Windows 10 you are the product

[dave420]

No, you are the customer. They provide Windows 10 for free to get the user base up, which increased app sales through their app store.

MS isn't Apples biggest threat ...

[Qbertino]

There's no doubt, that new surface thingy looks impressive - MS really upped their Hardware game to brand new heights, that's for sure. However, it still has one problem: Windows. MS depends on selling software and services, which practically forces them to castrate their software package. Apple is years and a bazillion dollars ahead in selling the package experience.

There is another player, that Apple should and probably actually is way more worried about: Google.

Googles existing business model is the one that is most future-safe amoung the big players. They can sell nifty hardware if they wish, they can sell dirt cheap hardware if the market demands it, they can have others sell hardware ... no matter what, their branding doesn't even take a dent. Chromebooks are the poor mans Macbook and the ubiquity of their service and cloud-integration, all for free for end-users to use, makes it very difficult for MS and for Apple to compete in the long run. And improving hardware speeds and cost-effectiveness will only make the web more powerful in the future.

Apples new iPhone subsciption model is aimed squarely at this problem posed with Google, enabling users to buy into a constant stream of Apple hardware and give the 'we-sell hardware' model a service-like spin. MS is putting huge amounts of effort into their switch to subscription models aswell.

Tim Cook and his crew are probably more worried about Googles Pixel C at the moment than the MS Surface line - I would be too.

As for him harping the the too-much-too-hard - I get that. Sort of. The iPad Pro and the Pencil is an impressive device combo for artists and creatives - wacom is probably shaking with terror right now. Apple can count on the refreshend creative vide rubbing off onto their entire product line once again. And it's the hippster creative community that is willing to put down this amount of cash for an apple device and will spread the love - forcefully if it must be. We all know the frantic love for Apple the core fangroup has.

I see a place for the iPad Pro, because it's clearly positioned - not so much for the new surface thing.
Although, once again, it is a darn impressive device.

My 2 cents.

iPad needs to add BT mouse pairing

[swb]

I've owned all the iPhones between 3G and 6 Plus, iPad 1 and 3. And I own a Surface Pro 2 which I use as my daily laptop for work.

I think the iPad would gain greatly in broader use cases if they would just allow bluetooth mice pairing.

I begrudgingly accept at least one likely "altruistic" reason why they didn't, because they thought it would pollute the touch screen UI. I'm sure there were more mercenary concerns that it might undercut the sales of some Macbooks, too.

IMHO, the iPad has been a great tablet for uses where a traditional laptop is just too much computer. Couch surfing, lying in bed, airplanes, all places where extreme simplicity and smaller form factor is beneficial.

But I think the touch-only user interface has limits on usability. I have some drawing apps and while the developers seem to have gone out of their way to make it useful with a touch screen, it seems to lend itself to MORE UI complexity with only touch than it would if you had a higher precision pointing system. Then there's uses like as an RDP client where you're interfacing with a mouse-centric UI like Windows where touch is just awkward.

Maybe they're still stuck on ideology or maybe it's all about commerce, but I think one of the reason iPad sales may be flagging somewhat is that whatever the reason, without a mouse there's only so much you can do with it.

I'm not a fan of Surface's price

[DrXym]

But as a device it's a damned sight more useful to me than any tablet produced by Apple is. It's a proper PC that also happens to operate as a tablet.

Personally I'm somewhat surprised that neither Google nor Apple have produced something analogous - something which can be a desktop for professionals who need a desktop but also reverts to be a tablet for when someone is just browsing or doing something which doesn't require a keyboard / mouse. Google are supposedly trying to merge ChromeOS and Android which may eventually become their solution. I don't believe that Apple isn't doing something similar despite their noises about what a terrible idea it is.

Re:Care to share the list of the '100+ domains'?

[sproketboy]

It should really just be *microsoft*

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Care to share the list of the '100+ domains'?

[LichtSpektren]

The full list: https://github.com/WindowsLies...

Re:Care to share the list of the '100+ domains'?

[Comboman]

ad.doubleclick.net

Doubleclick is owned by Google, I doubt they have anything to do with Microsoft other than perhaps serving ads for them.

wrong criticism

[DriveDog]

Of course, Cook can't criticize Surface for its real problem—excessive price—because that plagues his own wares as well.

Answering a question with a question

[wonkey_monkey]

Cook wondered, "I think if you're looking at a PC, why would you buy a PC anymore? No really, why would you buy one?"

Why doesn't he say why we shouldn't buy one?

Apple CEO Tim Cook: "Microsoft Surface Book Tries Too Hard To Do Too Much"

And I say Tim Cook doesn't try too hard to do too much enough!

Re:Maybe Cook is jealous

[Streetlight]

Not quite. MSFT has a market cap of $427 billion and Apple has somewhat more than $200 billion in cash, most, if not all, in foreign banks. If that money ware repatriated, Apple might have up to $120 billion after paying federal taxes and even less if there's a California corporate tax, and other state taxes where they do business.

Time will tell whether the huge iPad will sell really well. For some uses, particularly for artists using the pen (which is not yet available) interface, it may work. But making it a keyboard device for real work, I think folks might find a less heavy, OS X based Macbook for $100 more to be more useful.

Not an Apple hater or MSFT lover here. I use Windows and am upset at what Windows 10 is and am considering moving to Apple equipment should my current hardware fail or MSFT not change the Windows 10 paradigm.

Re:Care to share the list of the '100+ domains'?

[LichtSpektren]

Watson is owned by IBM as well. What they get out of it, I'm not sure; I'm just reporting what the packet sniffer is saying.

Apple isn't a hardware company

[Overzeetop]

I think you have it somewhat backwards. Apple is a software company. Start to finish. They sell chunks of silicon and and aluminum, but that's not what their business is - it's Operating Systems and User Experience. They sell an easy-to use iOS and a full fledged OSX. They re-sell all the software and content that goes on them (to the extent they can) as well so that they can curate the OS/UX system. They sell hardware to run their OSes, too. In fact, in order to make sure that their OS experience is as controlled as possible, they are the ONLY place you can buy hardware to run their software.

It's a nifty trick, and they've gotten stupid rich in the process - but don't let anyone fool you that they're a hardware company. They sell software. It just happens that they only sell it to you on their preferred devices.

Sure, Apple..

[fluffernutter]

Personally I'd prefer to have technology companies that try to do more with technology and succeed at some of it and fail on other bits of it, as opposed to companies like Apple that just find a huge market segment with minimum requirements and only ever focus on that. The company that 'tries to do too much' will always have the devices that are more interesting to me and more worth my money.

Apple = Toy; Microsoft/Google = Spying

[Merk42]

Guess we'll just have to wait for a Linux convertible tabl----HAHAHAHA

On the flipside...

[wardrich86]

iPad costs too much and does too little. Soooo I guess that makes Android tablets the winner?

Going with the Surface Pro 4 for my budding artist

[SirAnodos]

My daughter is a budding artist and so we decided it was time to purchase a digital platform for her. We narrowed it down to either the new iPad Pro or the new Surface Pro 4. We decided for the Surface Pro 4, even though every other device in our home is Apple. Why? For one very simple reason: she is really into Minecraft and has invested quite a bit of time building her own world on our minecraft server. A server she cannot connect to with the pocket/mobile version of Minecraft - and this device will replace her aging (and almost dead) laptop.

Re:Talking down the competition never has been goo

[david_thornley]

When I looked at my requirements and wants, I didn't see any room for a tablet. I eventually got a low-end one with a big screen as a PDF reader, and it appears to serve my purposes well.

Re:Care to share the list of the '100+ domains'?

[godefroi]

Not that Watston, the Watson that comes with Windows.

Re:Care to share the list of the '100+ domains'?

[Blaskowicz]

I loved the icon in Windows 3.1 but the program didn't seem to actually do anything at all.

Re:Care to share the list of the '100+ domains'?

[Rakarra]

Just use APK's hosts and be done with it. ;-)
I'm sure he has to have something in the works, this story is a godsend.

Re:Care to share the list of the '100+ domains'?

[Jack Griffin]

This isn't 100 of them, but it's 57 known domains that need to be blocked.

I managed to whittle it down to 16...

microsoft.com
nsatc.net
bing.net
live.com
cloudapp.net
v0cdn.net
a-msedge.net
akadns.net
footprintpredict.com
microsoft-hohm.com
msn.com
doubleclick.net
msads.net
adnexus.net
adnxs.com
msecnd.net

Re:Talking down the competition never has been goo

[blang]

Tablets i do enjoy.
A few examples, private web browsing while at work. My work machine is heavily loaded with corporate big brother-ware so I use it for as little as possible.
Some companies will fire you just for talking to a recruiter.
Reading email, web browsing, even movie watching in bed.

Re:Ah, the smell of fresh astroturfing in the morn

[Wdomburg]

And? That's a fact. You accumulate those through experience and education, assuming you pay attention.

This is Apple speak for...

[terjeber]

"Shit, those guys came up with some cool stuff we didn't think of. Give us a couple of years to look at it, then we'll create the exact same product, have it specced at half the specs and priced at twice.

I have and use and like my Mac Book Pro. I have Windows 10 on my home PC. In fact, I love my Mac Book Pro. It's Unix the way nobody else was able to do it. It's the "Year of Linux on the Desktop", just that it's not Linux. On the other hand, I am more productive on my Win10 desktop. There are more tools. There is more speed per dollar. There are more options. Very importantly - my Windows 10 PC runs Visual Studio, and there simply isn't anything out there, written by anyone ever, that can touch Visual Studio as a development environment. The competition doesn't even reach the knee level of VS. I can develop Android apps on VS2013 and 2015 better than is possible on anything else anywhere. Running the Microsoft Android emulator is like driving a Porche Carrera to the 1969 VM Bug from Google.

I could of course run Linux on my desktop, but the apps simply are no there. Oh, and the UI is, still, after all these years, a horrible monstrosity so bad that everybody involved in designing it should be "taken out back and shot".

all i want

[bitterblackale]

I'm no longer able to use Windows; it's utterly useless to me for anything but gaming, which thanks to Steam and Wine, I now do entirely on Linux. All I want is a decent tablet with detachable keyboard that runs Linux where I can do quick code updates, run python and ruby on rails, and git. I've tried Cygwin, and it almost kind of works, but it's just so much better to have a full Linux command line and gnome apps.

Apply to decline but no go away

[rhyous]

My Surface Pro 3 is far superior to the iPad Pro and it is last years model. The iPad Pro isn't even really as good as the first Surface Pro. Add to that the fact that the Kindle is as good as the iPad mini and much, much cheaper, and they just released an even cheaper model that takes an SD Card (you can now by 8 Kindles for the price of an iPad Mini), and you will see a major drop in iPad sales this Christmas.

A mouse is a "requirement" for a Pro device. Failure to see this is the major reason why this first iPad Pro version will fail. The dev work to add all the mouse events into iOS is going to be costly and even then that doesn't guarantee apps will work with a mouse.

So, sure, Apple owns the phone and tablet market, today. But Microsoft already won the hybrid market. The iPad Pro is a disappointing device at best. The iPads are great but over-priced. Fortunately, their drop in sales will not mean a loss for Apple. They will continue to make money because they have a good infrastructure, with existing customers and many of their customers are religiously loyal.

Re:Maybe Cook is jealous

[Plumpaquatsch]

I guess he didn't think of the tablet with a keyboard running a workbook OS like the Surface Pros. Microsoft sort of tried what the iPad Pro is with their Surface RT, an app based device, and it was an unmitigated disaster. Cook should have learned from that. Leo Laporte today showed an iPad Pro with the Logitech keyboard-case and it was bigger and heavier than his Macbook and only $100 less costly. Apple certainly could make a Macbook with touch using OS X having a removable keyboard. I think it would sell like hotcakes.

No, it wouldn't. Because the Modbook has been available for almost a decade now, and doesn't.

That's sorta my point

[rsilvergun]

this isn't the 1990s. PCs caught up. Apple didn't bother trying to catch up. There was more money in selling their computers a high end Veblen goods.