Microsoft Surface Book announced at Microsoft 2015 Hardware Event - NVIDIA GPU, Lastest Intel Chips

[Ex14]

-snip-

What are the options for your colleagues? I mean if they're old big, boxy, ugly laptops, I can see why?

Also if you want examples, My Polytechnic has media related courses in which using Apple computers is a must due to software they use School works with distributors (Apple has no real physical store tho theres the online store) to get amcbhooks at slightly cheaper rates. so I cna see them doing this stateside.

 

[Mr_Troll]

Kitguru just posted. that the nvidia graphic card in the surface book should have only 1GB of GDDR5... so it should be around the 950M area... see here... http://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/jon-martindale/microsofts-surface-book-laptop-has-a-custom-maxwell-gpu/

[MG2R]

What are the options for your colleagues? I mean if they're old big, boxy, ugly laptops, I can see why?

Either 15" MBP or Dell Precision M3800 (i7, 16 GB RAM, nVidia Quadro, 4K display). Or, if you're like me: BYOD.

 

OS is free to choose

 

Also if you want examples, My Polytechnic has media related courses in which using Apple computers is a must due to software they use School works with distributors (Apple has no real physical store tho theres the online store) to get amcbhooks at slightly cheaper rates. so I cna see them doing this stateside.

Well, that sucks

[Ex14]

Either 15" MBP or Dell Precision M3800 (i7, 16 GB RAM, nVidia Quadro, 4K display). Or, if you're like me: BYOD.

 

OS is free to choose

Hmm Well I'm not to sure, The fact that more people are using mac > Other optiuons means easier troubleshooting if any, cause your colleagues might be able to help you out, having the same machine and all. And what i said about Apple carrying a status/fashion symbol might still apply here. There a lot of factors as to why, so I won;t go into that. 

Btw that dell precision  specs out quite nicely what line of work are you in?

[LAwLz]

Alright, I'm good. The MacBook Air is widely considered by technology reviewers to be one of the best if not the best laptop ever made, and it's wildly popular among students and developers. All of my developer friends have Macs, and probably 60% of them have MacBook Airs.

You can't say that one laptop is the "best laptop" because it depends on what you are going to use it for. For tech reviewers the Macbook Air might be great because all it has to do is handle text. For other things it might be almost useless.

Wildly popular among students and developers is debatable. It very much depends on what type of students. From what I can tell on my school, Macs are extremely popular with people who for example read the teacher programs and a lot of the liberal arts programs. In my networking classes I have not even seen a handful of people with Macs.

I've only taken 1 course in programming (2 if you count Linux which was like 80% bash and python) and in those classes I'd guess about 10-20% were using Macs.

 

So I think it depends on the group, and blanket statements are probably inaccurate.

 

 

 

There are many reasons for this; the first of which being that Apple's productivity suite is 100% free with the purchase of a new Mac these days and costs under a hundred bucks in total separately. The same can't be said for Office. Also, every OS X update is free, and you can get updates for a ridiculously long period of time. El Capitan, the current iteration, supports iMacs going back to 2007. Out of the 350 students at my school, 290 of them have MacBook Airs, 10 have MacBook Pros, 49 have Windows laptops, and one guy has a Surface Pro 3.  (I know him, he's a nice guy, but a total Microsoft fanboy) These are numbers from a poll I ran at the end of last year.

Productivity suites being free is common these days. You got LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Google Docs, the online version of Office and probably a few more. So it's not like OS X is the only platform that has a free office suite. A lot of people still decide to pay for Microsoft Office though and that's because they want to use Office (for whatever reason they might have). So I really don't think you can count that as a benefit and valid reason to getting a Mac. Maybe if you for some reason only wants the Apple suite then sure, get a Mac. But don't say that you want it because it's free. Say that you want it because it's what you are used to, or because it's Apple or whatever because being free is not a distinguishing feature for that office suite.

 

Are you really going to try and bring up software support against Windows and GNU/Linux? El Capitan only supporting Macs going back to 2007 is pathetic. Windows 10 supports processors as old as the Athlon 64 3200+ which is at this point 12 years old. Almost twice as long support as OS X. GNU/Linux can probably run on even older hardware.

 

 

 

It's undeniably a tight market, and the current problem is that too many people already have laptops and they don't upgrade them with anywhere near the frequency that they do with iPhones. Furthermore, the new iPad Pro actually benchmarks better than the new MacBook does, and it's running an ARM processor. If Apple continues on their meteoric pace of speed increase, they could have ARM chips in all of their laptops within five years. Current iPads are also not upgraded frequently.

The iPad Pro only benches better than the MacBook (which is a really low performance laptop) in GeekBench. That does not tell the whole story since ARM processors often score much closer to desktop processors than they should (because they use things such as hardware acceleration in some of the tests) in GeekBench.

 

 

 

Let me emphasize that I think the Surface Book is an excellent piece of hardware, just like how I think MacBooks are great hardware as well. However, Microsoft needs more than that. Microsoft needs to be a little better than Apple at everything, or way better than Apple at a few things. The Surface Book is neither. It's great for a Windows PC, which unfortunately is a low bar. Windows PCs are a market rife with commodification, and that's why I'm worried about the Book's market prospects. Surfaces are nowhere near as popular as Mac or even PC laptops as productivity tools, and Surface Pros are nowhere close to competing with MacBooks in the premium productivity market. Hopefully the Surface Book will be close. Apple needs competition that currently nobody is giving them.

I think Apple has lots of valid competitors which for marketing and image reasons aren't as successful.

Not sure which Macs you are referring to but if we were to compare for example the Surface to the Macbook then I would say the Surface was in fact better at pretty much everything and yet it is still not doing anywhere near as well in terms of sales. It's not that Microsoft has to be a little bit better than Apple at everything because in many areas they already are. It's that they have to build the same kind of cult following and image that Apple has.

[MG2R]

what line of work are you in?

IT. I'm currently a DevOps Engineer (read: sysadmin ). I work for a web development company that focuses on enterprise PHP solutions (Drupal, Magento, Symphony, Zend), mostly for e-commerce platforms (think webshops). The company is part of Cronos, the biggest privately held IT holding in Belgium.

[RedRound2]

I personally didn't find anything great with the MS event. There was the Surface Pro 4 with the same usual internal upgrades (and not even by much) and then the Surface Book which is a more powerful version of a Surface 4 Pro which i believe was what other OEMs were initially doing when Windows 8 came out

 

What I don't understand was why the whole internet went upside down. MS fanboys went crazy and every article is like how MS is cool again. I guess Panos Panay did a good job presenting the keynote with his expressions and whatnot because all I could honestly see was spec upgrades (and I guess the fulcrum hinge)

 

And also not to mention on how expensive the Surface Book is compared to a 13 inch rMPB. If it was ever Apple people would go nuts

[Commander Llama]

Hahaha all you people with logical reasons for justifying computer products.

 

I only want a Surface Pro because it's what they use in sci-fi shit. Little handheld datapad thingy with the functionality of a proper computer. It's not photonic or with a holographic display but damn it I can't wait any longer to be IN THE FUTURE.

 

 

 

Picard using the Federation Apple-Disneysoft Surface iPro Wisp 87B+ (i9x 900THz photonic CPU, 64PB RAM, wireless link to near-infinite ship-based storage, terabit dl/ul)

Picard is a spec-chasing bastard, but on the other hand, the flagship Captain deserves the best when browsing his morning spreadsheets and playing Angry Klingons.

 

 

 

I tried to find that scene with Garrus Vakarian using some handheld tablets but there's too much god damn Garrus FemShep romance clutter clogging the internet pipes. Suffice to say Garrus is a huge techie. He loves his ReaprTech Ooogle Glass eye computer (full wireless charging!) and I bet he's using his Surface Dock right now!

 

So yeah I'm getting a Surface Pro to take amazing notes, program small projects, run 1-2 virtual machines, and any other general task I need it to do and well.

 

But let's be honest here, I'm actually just wishing I was Jean Luc Picard, Garrus Vakarian, and playing XCOM on the shitter.

[randomhkkid]

Just found this http://microsoft-news.com/heres-how-surface-book-detachable-experience-works/

 

Key points:

• When you are detaching the device, Windows will ask you to close the apps that are using GPU.

• Unlike the devices in the past with external GPU, you need to restart the device to take advantage the power of GPU.

• Since most of the battery is in the base, you will get only about 3 hours of battery life when Surface Book is in detached state. In laptop mode, you will get about 12 hours of battery life.

That last point is the most disappointing, only 3 hours in tablet mode means it won't be able to last through a day of lectures detached from the base and away from power. Looks like this is another key differentiation from the SP4.

 

Edit:

 

Since my original post microsoft has changed the wording of the article, hotplug is infact supported over PCI-E.

[RexinOridle]

Nobody knows what GPU it is. For all intensive purposes, it can be even a GeForce 256 SDR. Like WTF?

[xewp]

holy smokes that price,

 

Think i'd just buy a razerblade at that price point. Then again I don't need 12hours of battery life

[Builder]

You can't say that one laptop is the "best laptop" because it depends on what you are going to use it for. For tech reviewers the Macbook Air might be great because all it has to do is handle text. For other things it might be almost useless.

Wildly popular among students and developers is debatable. It very much depends on what type of students. From what I can tell on my school, Macs are extremely popular with people who for example read the teacher programs and a lot of the liberal arts programs. In my networking classes I have not even seen a handful of people with Macs.

I've only taken 1 course in programming (2 if you count Linux which was like 80% bash and python) and in those classes I'd guess about 10-20% were using Macs.

 

So I think it depends on the group, and blanket statements are probably inaccurate.

 

Take a trip to any Hackathon, tech conference, or any startup in Silicon Valley. Everyone will be using Mac or Linux, and the majority will be using Macs. As for students, results may vary but they are still very popular.

 

Productivity suites being free is common these days. You got LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Google Docs, the online version of Office and probably a few more. So it's not like OS X is the only platform that has a free office suite. A lot of people still decide to pay for Microsoft Office though and that's because they want to use Office (for whatever reason they might have). So I really don't think you can count that as a benefit and valid reason to getting a Mac. Maybe if you for some reason only wants the Apple suite then sure, get a Mac. But don't say that you want it because it's free. Say that you want it because it's what you are used to, or because it's Apple or whatever because being free is not a distinguishing feature for that office suite.

 

Yeah, I'll cede the office suite. I'm a fan of Google docs myself for collaboration but I think iWork is still the best designed suite overall.

 

Are you really going to try and bring up software support against Windows and GNU/Linux? El Capitan only supporting Macs going back to 2007 is pathetic. Windows 10 supports processors as old as the Athlon 64 3200+ which is at this point 12 years old. Almost twice as long support as OS X. GNU/Linux can probably run on even older hardware.

 

Well, first of all, Linux doesn't have any support, in fact every copy of it you get will include a license that stipulates that it includes no warranty in any form. And yeah, I'm certain that certain Linuxes can run on older hardware. The latest Ubuntu probably can't. And you're forgetting that every update is free, meaning that your eight year old iMac can upgrade to the latest software for free at any time, not restricted by the shitty Windows 10 free upgrade period that they've been forced to do because nobody would have paid for it in the first place.

 

The iPad Pro only benches better than the MacBook (which is a really low performance laptop) in GeekBench. That does not tell the whole story since ARM processors often score much closer to desktop processors than they should (because they use things such as hardware acceleration in some of the tests) in GeekBench.

 

Yes I'm aware that it's a low performance laptop, it's very thin and it has a Core M inside. However the fact that they're even close at this point is cause for concern for Intel. Intel is no longer blowing everyone away at everything, and low power consumption is where the future of silicon is at.

 

I think Apple has lots of valid competitors which for marketing and image reasons aren't as successful.

 

I'd love to hear what these are.

 

Not sure which Macs you are referring to but if we were to compare for example the Surface to the Macbook then I would say the Surface was in fact better at pretty much everything and yet it is still not doing anywhere near as well in terms of sales.

 

How unfortunate. The Surface is not in fact better than a MacBook Air at everything, I've tried them several times and could not stand it. 

 

It's not that Microsoft has to be a little bit better than Apple at everything because in many areas they already are. It's that they have to build the same kind of cult following and image that Apple has.

 

In some areas they already are, yes. I believe I've said this...three times now? I'm sorry to say that the software quality has still not caught up, because now it at least looks decent but it still doesn't work as well as OS X does. The Surface Book still assumes that separating the screen of a laptop from its keyboard is actually something people want or need to do, regardless of its unquestionable beauty.

 

I'm not saying it doesn't deserve to succeed, it absolutely does. However as is evidenced by several reactions to the price in this thread by PC enthusiasts, it's priced in a market that most people buying PCs don't purchase in. Perhaps we will see people switching away from Macs to buy one, or perhaps we will see PC people buying upmarket. I hope we will see both, but the fact remains that people who buy PC laptops are mostly not looking to spend $1499 on a laptop, because they don't tend to care about paying for design and paying for quality as much as people who buy Apple laptops do.

 

The reason why most expensive PC products such as the Surfi (latin plural of Surfus) haven't succeeded in the market is because Apple absolutely dominates the high end. So far, there simply hasn't been a sizable group of people who want to spend over $1000 on Windows machines and refuse to buy Apple products. My buddy the Surface Pro user is the only example I know of. Fortunately, (unfortunately for you of course) once most people spend a significant amount of time using an Apple product, they don't want to go back. That's my story, and it's the story of many other people I know very well, including my parents and nearly all of my best friends.

[GoodBytes]

A bit of details from Microsoft on the Surface Book CPU options:

6th Gen 2.6-GHz Intel Core i7-6600U processor with Intel HD graphics 520

6th Gen 2.4-GHz Intel Core i5-6300U processor with Intel HD graphics 520

Microsoft confirms that the Nvidia chip is Maxwell once again, and that it has 1GB GDDR5 memory. Still no detail revealed.

The mentioned CPUs are faster than the one in the Surface Pro 4, which are:

6th Gen 2.2-GHz Intel Core i7-6650U processor with Intel Iris graphics 540

6th Gen 2.4-GHz Intel Core i5-6300U processor with Intel HD graphics 520

6th Gen 900-MHz Intel Core m3-6Y30 processor with Intel HD graphics 515

CPUs on both systems are dual core for all CPU models. There is no Quad core U series CPU.

Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2989906/laptop-computers/here-are-the-details-of-the-surface-book-and-surface-pro-4-chips-and-why-they-matter.html

The highest end currently available Surface Book ($2,699.00 option) is now sold out on the U.S site of Microsoft Store.

[Xorbot]

Nobody knows what GPU it is. For all intensive purposes, it can be even a GeForce 256 SDR. Like WTF?

 

"intents and purposes", rather?

[NeoZeon]

I'm also a developer (sort of). I develop numerical models for HPC Clusters as well as ways of visualizing big data (hundreds of terabytes)  in VR environments. To put it in perspective, one of my simulations takes ~3 months on ~1000 cores to run.  I develop these models on a mac ^_-. 

 

I think a lot of people here, pardon my french, speak out of their ass when it comes to understand what people use products for. The tech field is dominated by the bay area in northern california (where I also happen to be located ish) and apple this the premiere  company here.  Its not just that we like to use their products, but their products come from where we live.  Use git hub on a windows computer and tell me how that goes? If all you do is game and word process, it really doesn't matter what you use really. You will find fun games on any platform. If you are playing games so much so that you can exhaust linux, OSX or windows of all their games you are in such a niche that your perspective is wildly obscured. 

 

If you find yourself wondering why apple products sell, and then coming to the conclusion that only stupid people or people who don't think buy their products, then you probably aren't the target audience. But what is so pathetic about that point of view is that your ability to empathize with others. The only solution to this is to actually spend more time with different types of people. But don't take this rant as an insult or some reason to think that I look down or pity you, because forcing yourself outside of your default setting, where other peoples needs are just as important as yours, is hard. We all fail at this, even the ones who realize that thinking this way is important. All we can do is try and do better, so consider that when you are about to post something you know nothing about. 

[Nowak]

Nobody knows what GPU it is. For all intensive purposes, it can be even a GeForce 256 SDR. Like WTF?

I don't think a GeForce 256 supports up to 1GB GDDR5 lol

[Deletive]

A bit of details from Microsoft on the Surface Book CPU options:

6th Gen 2.6-GHz Intel Core i7-6600U processor with Intel HD graphics 520

6th Gen 2.4-GHz Intel Core i5-6300U processor with Intel HD graphics 520

Microsoft confirms that the Nvidia chip is Maxwell once again, and that it has 1GB GDDR5 memory. Still no detail revealed.

The mentioned CPUs are faster than the one in the Surface Pro 4, which are:

6th Gen 2.2-GHz Intel Core i7-6650U processor with Intel Iris graphics 540

6th Gen 2.4-GHz Intel Core i5-6300U processor with Intel HD graphics 520

6th Gen 900-MHz Intel Core m3-6Y30 processor with Intel HD graphics 515

CPUs on both systems are dual core for all CPU models. There is no Quad core U series CPU.

Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2989906/laptop-computers/here-are-the-details-of-the-surface-book-and-surface-pro-4-chips-and-why-they-matter.html

The highest end currently available Surface Book ($2,699.00 option) is now sold out on the U.S site of Microsoft Store.

Finally a Iris option on one of these laptops, and also interesting to see a Core M style too. 

[patrickjp93]

Microsoft advertises the surface pro 4 core i7 version for VS.

I know it can technically run it but it'll probably lag.'

This isn't targeted at you.

Oh and thanks mod for the warning post really appreciate it! I wanted to give LTT forums a chance but it appears the internet censors anything it doesn't like. That's what you do if you want to make your userbase disappear.

Visual Studio just lags in general. In my graphics class we're using OpenGL, GLM, and FreeGlut, and my god project build time can exceed a minute on VS even with parallel compiling enabled. If I take the same CPP, very, and frag files to Fedora 22 and have G++ compile and link the same project single-threaded with optimization, G++ takes maybe 5 seconds. Both of these tests are running on a MacBook Pro Retina 15" with a 4950HQ or 4960HQ (whichever is 3.8GHz boost).

[Commander Llama]

A bit of details from Microsoft on the Surface Book CPU options:

6th Gen 2.6-GHz Intel Core i7-6600U processor with Intel HD graphics 520

6th Gen 2.4-GHz Intel Core i5-6300U processor with Intel HD graphics 520

Microsoft confirms that the Nvidia chip is Maxwell once again, and that it has 1GB GDDR5 memory. Still no detail revealed.

The mentioned CPUs are faster than the one in the Surface Pro 4, which are:

6th Gen 2.2-GHz Intel Core i7-6650U processor with Intel Iris graphics 540

6th Gen 2.4-GHz Intel Core i5-6300U processor with Intel HD graphics 520

6th Gen 900-MHz Intel Core m3-6Y30 processor with Intel HD graphics 515

CPUs on both systems are dual core for all CPU models. There is no Quad core U series CPU.

Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2989906/laptop-computers/here-are-the-details-of-the-surface-book-and-surface-pro-4-chips-and-why-they-matter.html

The highest end currently available Surface Book ($2,699.00 option) is now sold out on the U.S site of Microsoft Store.

 

I can't wait to see the HD 520 vs. Iris 540 benchmarked, because aside from the iGPU the gap is really close between the i5 and i7. Visually the new cooling solutions on the SP4 look improved, but the truth is in the testing. I'm kinda reminded of their Xbox 360 original model vs. Xbox 360 Slim changes. The originals literally melted and caused so much grief with the RRoD shit. They put out the slim and it's just fans, fans, fans. "We fixed it." Pro 3 had some thermal issues, and now I'm eager to see if the Pro 4 has solved this. Especially with the iGPUs getting a pretty solid jump in performance vs. Haswell.