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

Posted by samzenpus on from the no-sir-I-don't-like-it dept.

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.

12 of 478 comments (clear)

  1. He's got his talking points by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:He's got his talking points by LichtSpektren · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:He's got his talking points by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:He's got his talking points by TWX · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    4. Re:He's got his talking points by LichtSpektren · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    5. Re:He's got his talking points by Anonymous+Brave+Guy · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
    6. Re:He's got his talking points by cfalcon · · Score: 5, Insightful

      > 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.

    7. Re:He's got his talking points by cfalcon · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  2. "Tries too hard to do too much" by rmdingler · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Honestly, you could do worse...

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

    --
    Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

    Ernest Hemingway

  3. Re:Maybe by Wdomburg · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  4. Re:I remember a time... by guacamole · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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..

  5. Win 10 enterprise does *NOT* turn off spying by Taco+Cowboy · · Score: 5, Informative

    ... 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

    --
    Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !