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Microsoft Surface Book 2 Puts Desktop Brains in a Laptop Body (wired.com)
David Pierce, writing for Wired: As Microsoft went to create the Surface Book 2, the company once again tried to bust categories. The result is the most combinatory device Microsoft's made yet. It's a laptop (screens measure 13 or 15 inches; there's a keyboard and trackpad) -- and it's also a tablet (the screen detaches, you can use a pen, everything's touch-friendly), and it's also a desktop. A stupendously powerful one, at that: It runs on Intel's new eighth-generation quad-core processors, in either a Core i5 or Core i7 version. The higher-end models come with Nvidia's GeForce discrete graphics, up to 16 gigs of RAM, and as much as 1 terabyte of solid storage. All that in a fanless body that gets up to 17 hours of battery life, and weighs about 3.5 pounds for the smaller model or 4.2 pounds for the larger. What does all that mean? Microsoft claims the smaller model is three times more powerful than the last Surface Book, and the 15-inch runs five times as fast. Those are meaningless comparisons, but the point holds. This thing screams. More useful are the comparisons to Apple's latest MacBook Pros: Microsoft claims up to 70 percent more battery life, and double the performance of Apple's laptops.
My current desktop has 2 Xeons in it and room for 256GB of RAM. Mobile is always playing catch up. So while this may have an 'i7' and compete fine with older desktops in engineering we've just taken that to mean we get that much faster desktops.
"Microsoft claims up to 70 percent more battery life, and double the performance of Apple's laptops."
That's great. How much? The article claims $1500 for the "base model" whatever that is. Is that one going to be twice as fast as an equivalent MacBook?
Also, how long after it's release are the inevitable hardware bugs are worked out?
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Faster than a macbook air 13" with intel's ultra slow high efficiency processor or faster than the high end mac book pro with the hex core, and 2 graphics cards. NOT. Even the new Iphone from apple is faster than the slow mac book (not making that up). On the other hand MS tablet actually weighs more than the entire laptop from apple.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Finally a compelling reason to perhaps ditch my 7 year old PC. The huge drawbacks of non replaceable battery and storage give me pause, but the mobile factor and managing one system may win over.
The 15" version reportedly starts at $2499, maybe if it's my company paying but not me. It makes my gaming PC - which in itself is a giant money sink - seem like a good investment. Unless you're actually making money with it, real money.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Apple's innovation is impossible to beat. Witness the specifications of the new low-end 2017 MacBook Air:
- 5th-generation Intel Broadwell processor, your choice of dual-core or dual-core processor
- Your choice of 8GB of 1600MHz LPDDR3 or 8GB of 1600MHz LPDDR3
- Impossibly-large-to-fill 128GB SSD storage
- Low-resolution twisted nematic (TN) display (patented in the 1970's)
- "only" USD$999
I have to agree with Apple on this one, it takes courage to still ask that much money for ancient technology.
#DeleteFacebook
Can you totally get rid of Windows and install Linux natively on these?
A Core i7 with that amount of RAM, screen and battery wonâ(TM)t have 15h life. In standby perhaps but not anywhere near useful life. These puppies use 77W so they can keep a cup of coffee warm. You need a Tesla powerpack to keep the system running that long.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
replacecability and the expandability of a desktop too?
I mean the point of a desktop vs using a laptop for the same thing today is mostly the fact that all the ports are there and that you can easily put in a new hard drive or swap out the video card or whatever you need to do.
Somehow I doubt that the Microsoft device has that, so it is just a high end laptop. They are a different beast from a desktop...
This is a 15W TDP mobile processor, not a desktop chip. Someone should look at the specs before posing nonsense.
https://ark.intel.com/products/124968/Intel-Core-i7-8650U-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-4_20-GHz
way better then Imac pro $4K get's 64 GB ram + dual cpu.
Lets see, they've got almost all the major ports one would need but missing ethernet and an external video port. Can the USB-C connection support two simultaneous video signals so that I can plug in two external monitors (with the relevant dongles)?
Lets be clear. It's not about the age of the CPU or the RAM, although that's obviously a factor. The biggest reason anyone would want to leave Apple is because of bullshit games they're playing with their hardware. Soldered unupgradable ram and storage is unacceptable. USB-C/TB3 only in a world that has no intention of going exclusively USB-C within the next decade is unacceptable. A keyboard that is an ergonomic nightmare is unacceptable.
But Microsoft is playing their own bullshit games, and in many ways what Microsoft is doing is FAR worse. On OSX I don't worry that Apple is siphoning data and files without my permission. I'm not worried that from one day to the next, my computer will become a very expensive brick cause Apple forced an update without my consent and that update bollocksed up my machine. The surface 2 could have a quad-xeon with 1TB of RAM and a 100GBbaseT network connection to a cray supercomputer but that doesn't mean anything if every boot up feels like you're playing a game of roshambo.
At least with Apple, there are ways to work around most of the hardware limitations. It's just that those ways usually involve spending even more money. But with Microsoft? You have no choice at all that doesn't involve a huge and permanent investment in time and additional resources. Basically there's no way to make Windows 10 a reasonable alternative unless you have a full IT department behind you.
That desktop part is pure bullshit.
Its CPU is a U series (that's the low power one) mobile CPU (i5-7300U or i7-8650U, both have 15W TDP) and it has the mobile version of the Nvidia GPU, too (and 16 GB max memory is pretty puny).
So it actually has a pretty run-of-the-mill laptop HW, it's the case and the display that is interesting.
Real life is overrated.
Wish I had mod points. Reprinting advertising from other "magazines" and calling it "news." There are things no prostitute would do, regardless of the money offered. Nice to see \. doesn't have that problem.
This is the second time this week that a Slashdot story has referred to the CPU of a computer as its "brains". What is this, 1980?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Apple has, in review after review, shown to be pretty accurate in battery life estimates.
Meanwhile all we know about the Surface Pro battery life from existing products is that the estimates are about DOUBLE reality - consider what you can expect from real life use of the current Surface Pro with a battery life estimate of 13.5 hours:
"With my typical moderate-to-heavy usage, I regularly managed about six to eight hours of Getting Work Done."
So an estimate of 70% batter than the hasn't-been-updated-in-years MacBook Air, probably means that it MAY give you almost as much battery life as a MacBook Air in practice... but probably not, and certainly will be worse than the real comparison - a 13" MacBook Pro (which weighs about the same and is nearly the same size as the Air).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
THIS is the reason people hate Apple... if only competitors would STOP letting themselves be affected
The reason competitors are "affected" is because the list of things you think are "brainfarts" are in fact cherished by the average non-technical user:
No ports - people don't plug many things in these days, preferring wireless.
No minijack - see above.
Glued-in non-replicable battery - Well Apple doesn't really have that nice I can go into any store and have a battery replaced in about about hour. But basically people don't like or want to manage batteries, for the few times when they really need extended battery life external batteries have been FAR more popular since you can choose the exact shape and storage capacity you need.
Extreme prices - Apple devices are within 10% of anything else these days.
Ancient tech - I think you misspelled "reliable"/
Small batteries - Apple doesn't do small batteries, they deliver realistic battery life for a day, not bat estimates that mean you really get four hours.
So why are you blaming Apple for there companies building products with features customers prefer? You can still buy crappy technically-oriented devices if you like, why chide hardware makers for people who literally cannot manage such things.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Doesn't matter what hardware they stuff into these things. They are crippled by the OS>
The millennial that doesn't like most of the stuff designed for millennials.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Only thing that prevents me from getting one at this point. Hunting for WiFi is annoying.
For those who seek perfection there can be no rest on this side of the grave.
For half the price you can get a solid desktop and a cheap tablet. Whoops.
Good luck running (say) Visual Studio or even something like ModPlug or FamiTracker on "a cheap tablet".
A laptop is for people who commonly use applications that aren't ported to Android and who don't care to subscribe to yet another cellular data plan for the tablet so that it can connect to the desktop PC at home through VNC or RDP.
Get your Apple out of my Microsoft commercial!
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Uninterested unless they have the bravery to tell us what actual GPU chip is inside each model. CPU has not been a bottleneck for my workloads for many years, but GPU definitely is. If this is still Maxwell, I'm definitely not interested (and will be VERY annoyed).
I got my hopes up on reading this - had MS cracked the lightweight, high-performance bracket by shoving desktop components in a slimline laptop?
Nope. It's the same old crummy performance-of-a-cucumber U processor, albeit with a semi-decent GPU.
For now, the limited number of genuinely "desktop" laptops remains as it is. I'm wriitng this on one (with a desktop i7-6700K processor and a "desktop equivalent" GeForce 1080 - and of course this laptop is nowhere near as thin and light as the Surface. I'd rather have the power on tap, though, even if it is a bit of a pain lugging it around airports and such!
This isn't a 'story', it's an advertisement for a Microsoft product. Oh and by the way when did /. become a shill for Microsoft? Did they get sold again or something?
Seriously, /. is shitty enough at times, we don't need advertisements for Miscreant-o-soft products masquerading as 'tech news stories'. Please delete this 'story' immediately.