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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

"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...

[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...

[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...

[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...

[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.

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..."

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

[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

[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.

Flamebait

[ShnowDoggie]

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

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

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:Creative people tend to be broke

[Zontar The Mindless]

I learned something today. Thank you!

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: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.