Razer's CEO on the decline of PC

[GoodBytes]

Hello,

 

The Verge is a very interesting interview to read on Razer's CEO's on the decline of PC sales.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/1/4384738/razer-blade-hp-dell-innovation-apple-min-liang-tan

 

I just cannot agree more with him.

 

 

"Lots of people have been talking about the death of the PC recently",Tan told The Verge in an interview.

"We don't think the PC is dying." Rather, what's killing the PC industry isn't the PC itself, but PC makers, he says, pointing to Razer's two-year-old Blade laptop lineup as an example of the sort of innovative products that HP, Dell, and other major computer companies aren't producing.

[...]

"It's been a long time since anyone's been passionate about a PC," the executive says. "HP's doing a horrible job with it. Dell's doing a horrible job with it. They just don't want to do anything with the PC anymore. Look, HP tried to get rid of their PC division and Dell said 'we're not a PC company anymore, we're now an enterprise company.'

[...]

Tan says the company can’t build Blade laptops and Edge tablets fast enough to meet demand. "For us, when we entered this space, it was crazy," Tan notes. "It makes absolutely no business sense. It's a thin margin business. But for us, we're building products that we want ourselves. And the fact that when we launch a product, for a company as small as ours, and we get so much attention as we did for the Blade two years ago — and we're still getting attention — it's not a matter of extending our brand. It's just us building products people really, really want.

[...]

"It doesn't make sense that a company like ours should be pushing the envelope,"

 

Interesting read, you should have a look.

Do you think he is right?

 

 

---------------------------

My view:

 

I think he is dead on. My laptop is 5 years old. It's the awesome Dell Latitiude E6400. This laptops has everything you could possibly want in a laptop.

 -> Metal body

 -> Solid metal hinge, with full screen tilt

 -> Back light keyboard, and a good keyboard too for a laptop

 -> descent touchpad

 -> OS independence ambient light sensor, special keys, etc. You can put Linux and everything would works exactly like it would under Windows.

 -> 9h of battery life under Vista 64-bit, 10h under Win7, and almost 11h under Win8.

 -> Ability to cut power on components like SD card reader, firewire, optical drive, and reduce power of USB when on power saver profile

 -> Descent, at the time, Nvidia GPU

 -> Last gen Core 2 Duo CPU

 -> Cool operating, fan rarely spins

 -> 14inch - non glossy, LED back light, high resolution at the time (1440x900)

 -> Thin (at the time) and light (at the time), despite for what it comes with

 -> And it opens like a desktop case. 1 screw slide out panel, give you FULL internal access. 4 screws and the CPU heatsink and fan comes out. few more screws and the motherboard is out. Really feels like a desktop PC in terms of working inside. All the same screws, so it's easy to assemble back.

 -> Cool looking

 -> no propriety power adapter

 -> OS Disk, and driver disk included

 -> Small and thin 90W power adapter where you wrap its wires around.

 -> DisplayPort, eSATA, SATA internal drives

 -> All large ports are on the back of the system.

 -> MINIMUM 3 year warranty and 3 year next business day on site service... you know it's solid if Dell gives you this.. and it is.

 -> Junk free

 

Today, my laptop is still working in top shapes. Solid system, slow for todays needs, but amazing. I want to buy new one. But no more.

Dell, HP, Acer, Lenovo, all have nothing that is even coming close... forget price.. I am ready to give 3k to anyone.  But nope.. doesn't exist.

They have given up, and just selling out by outsourcing everything down to engineering. Crap everything.

 

Now, it's either a portable desktop monstrosity, or an overpriced Intel integrated graphic solution with a shitty display, and shitty battery life, and questionable build quality.

They are just Win8 tablets with a keyboard that you are forced to have. Might as well buy a Surface Pro, at least it's cheaper in most cases, higher build quality, digitize pen support, and actually good and responsive touch screen. Junk free, small power adapter, cheaper too. Yea battery life is a bit short, but a worthy sacrifice. Beside, Haswell will help this.

 

So now Razor has a 14inch laptop... no I won't call it 'gaming' laptop. Why? Because 'gaming', to me, means this big monumental monstrosity of computers that is poorly made.

No. It's a laptop. A proper laptop. A laptop that doesn't have Intel integrated graphics, meaning that you have nice supported drivers, that the company won't pull the plug when a new CPU is out, and that follows no software list, so anything you do always works. and works well. You know that the drivers doesn't cheat in games by not drawing stuff or doing not as good job to gain higher FPS, always working multi-monitor setup, that detects monitors properly, and you know you'll always get a smooth experience. Plus you can do light gaming. More and more software uses hardware acceleration via the GPU to render the content or even interface. Example of software: Office 2013, your web browser, Visual Studio 2012, all Modern UI apps in Win8, Zune desktop software, Mathlab, Windows itself, PhotoShop, AfterEffects, and a lot more. And websites, except for Twitter and Facebook, gets more and more fancy, and the GPU is needed to accelerate it's rendering.

 

So it's thin, it's proper, it's a high quality system, it's light for what it is.. it's a laptop.. a proper laptop.

 

What do you think?

[EChondo]

I too am longing for a high built laptop, but all the ones I find are aren't made by the bigger corporations, it's made by Clevo and rebranded by Sager and it's cheap, but has things I want, but it doesn't have a good build quality.

I agree completely that the problems with desktop and laptop sales is that they aren't putting anything into them anymore. I bet Dell could easily make a laptop with high end specs with a 1600p display(or at least 1440p) for $2000 and at that price I might buy one depending on the CPU and GPU.

It's sad, but they are doing it to themselves, probably this is the reason why Macbooks are always bought, because there isn't a better alternative at that price point with decent specs and a nice screen and I hate talking about good things about a Mac, but depending on which one you buy, you have a pretty nice setup and can do a lot with it(even though no one uses it for it's intended purpose, ex. Facebook machine).

[Artorias]

I totally agree w/ him. What's killing the PC isn't the PC industry itself PC's, it's PC makers themselves.

[NickTheMajin]

I too am longing for a high built laptop, but all the ones I find are aren't made by the bigger corporations, it's made by Clevo and rebranded by Sager and it's cheap, but has things I want, but it doesn't have a good build quality.

I agree completely that the problems with desktop and laptop sales is that they aren't putting anything into them anymore. I bet Dell could easily make a laptop with high end specs with a 1600p display(or at least 1440p) for $2000 and at that price I might buy one depending on the CPU and GPU.

It's sad, but they are doing it to themselves, probably this is the reason why Macbooks are always bought, because there isn't a better alternative at that price point with decent specs and a nice screen and I hate talking about good things about a Mac, but depending on which one you buy, you have a pretty nice setup and can do a lot with it(even though no one uses it for it's intended purpose, ex. Facebook machine).

 

I'm not quite sure if this is what you are looking for, but you did mention Sager/Clevos. You may want to look into the Alienware m18x line. Solid metal with a rubber coating, dual GPUs, upgradability without voiding warranty (No void warranty stickers and extremely easy to access components. Can even upgrade the GPUs) and in home next day support. Like I said, might not be quite what you are looking for but I would say the m18x is one of the best built laptops available if you have the income to afford it. 

[Kajornkeat]

Razer blade would be a really interesting choice if I need a business design laptop. It looks professional, thin and light with a proper hardware inside. Compare to HP, some of them have great design but not good enough hardware. Lack of proper GPU. They just put i7 sticker and sell that laptop with $1000+ price tag and call them elitebook. I know that they are targeted toward small business user but they need to give a better hardware for user. On board GPU won't be enough unless it's an APU. To be clear, most seller in my country don't even put a proper spec on the brochure. They only put  i7, 8GB of RAM, 2GB VRAM and full HD screen on the brochure. CPU, RAM, VRAM and 1080p and are biggest selling points these day. This might be the reason that why most manufacturer still make a laptop with crappy hardware. Most buyer don't even care about the spec. Only thing they need is CORE^tm i7 sticker on their laptop XD

 

It's sad, but they are doing it to themselves, probably this is the reason why Macbooks are always bought, because there isn't a better alternative at that price point with decent specs and a nice screen and I hate talking about good things about a Mac, but depending on which one you buy, you have a pretty nice setup and can do a lot with it(even though no one uses it for it's intended purpose, ex. Facebook machine).

 

I think the one of the reasons why MBPs are always bought is their OS. It is more stable than windows. Even in hackintosh, it's solid as a rock if you set it up properly. Another reason is their design, I think apple did a really great job on their design. Also, pure mac user don't really want to move to other OS. They find windows is hard to use so they keep buying something new from Apple. For me, it's a meh .With that price tag, I can get a laptop with way better spec + another nice 23" ips monitor. Maybe not so good design but performance come first  :D

 

 

I'm not quite sure if this is what you are looking for, but you did mention Sager/Clevos. You may want to look into the Alienware m18x line. Solid metal with a rubber coating, dual GPUs, upgradability without voiding warranty (No void warranty stickers and extremely easy to access components. Can even upgrade the GPUs) and in home next day support. Like I said, might not be quite what you are looking for but I would say the m18x is one of the best built laptops available if you have the income to afford it. 

 

With Alienware, I do agree that they are awesomely build with really high end spec. However, with m18x, they are way too heavy. If I had one, it would be sitting on my desk for most of the time. Even with my 15" MSI GT680, I don't really want  to take it with me. Laptop + power brick, 4.3kg. 

[BernardoSLR]

Razer blade would be a really interesting choice if I need a business design laptop. It looks professional, thin and light with a proper hardware inside. Compare to HP, some of them have great design but not good enough hardware. Lack of proper GPU. They just put i7 sticker and sell that laptop with $1000+ price tag and call them elitebook. I know that they are targeted toward small business user but they need to give a better hardware for user. On board GPU won't be enough unless it's an APU. To be clear, most seller in my country don't even put a proper spec on the brochure. They only put  i7, 8GB of RAM, 2GB VRAM and full HD screen on the brochure. CPU, RAM, VRAM and 1080p and are biggest selling points these day. This might be the reason that why most manufacturer still make a laptop with crappy hardware. Most buyer don't even care about the spec. Only thing they need is CORE^tm i7 sticker on their laptop XD

 

 

I think the one of the reasons why MBPs are always bought is their OS. It is more stable than windows. Even in hackintosh, it's solid as a rock if you set it up properly. Another reason is their design, I think apple did a really great job on their design. Also, pure mac user don't really want to move to other OS. They find windows is hard to use so they keep buying something new from Apple. For me, it's a meh .With that price tag, I can get a laptop with way better spec + another nice 23" ips monitor. Maybe not so good design but performance come first  :D

 

 

 

With Alienware, I do agree that they are awesomely build with really high end spec. However, with m18x, they are way too heavy. If I had one, it would be sitting on my desk for most of the time. Even with my 15" MSI GT680, I don't really want  to take it with me. Laptop + power brick, 4.3kg. 

In that case, having a laptop is simply not worth it IMO. It would be much better to just build a mITX system if space is a problem. You could make a much powerful machine in that case. If I was to buy a laptop, it would have to be, first and foremost, portable. I don't mean like an ultrabook because I want it to be powerful as well, but I would sacrifice a little bit of horsepower (a mid end GPU for example) for the sake of portability and being able to "throw" the laptop into my backpack and not having back pain at the end of the day (clearly exaggerating but you get my point!).

[Anult]

as much as I am not a fan of razer, I totally agree with him.

 

I think Dell, HP and the other PC makers are the reason PC sales are in decline.

[Mooru]

But is the market really killing itself? I think you have to look at it from a perspective.

 

The market is shifting to portability. So PC makers don't really make PC's anymore, but they make portable things, like tablets.

That's also why Haswell for example isn't a huge leap in performance, but it is in power savings. So we get longer battery lives.

 

This is a shame for many enthousiasts that are on this forum. But enthousiasts are only a small percent of the market. Most people want portable devices with long battery lives and don't need the most beast laptop out there. They want something they can do text processing on the go with and things like that. And for things like web browsing and even basic professional applications, there's no desire for more processing power.

 

I'm personally a gamer and have a pretty decent desktop pc for that. But for work I wanted a laptop that was small, light, long battery life, decent screen, quick wake up from sleep and high build quality so I got a MacBook Pro (I can feel the Apple hate already coming). And I am actually very happy with it. This desire for portability is imho what caused intel to create the ultrabook label. Because that's what consumers want and need these days.

 

Desktop PC's are probably not going anywhere as been said many times before (by Linus too). But they are probably not gonna be the main target for hardmakers. Even regular laptops are starting to become too bulky for most people since tablets became popular. 

 

I personally don't think there's much we can do about it so I say embrace the future and make the best out of it. And pray that there will still be awesome high end hardware for the enthousiast. I would like to see some really innovative things happening with laptops and desktops though. It would be awesome, unfortunately, I don't think the big companies will do that as currently the profit is with portable products.

 

This is just my opinion and I'm quite curious to other opinions actually

[Kajornkeat]

In that case, having a laptop is simply not worth it IMO. It would be much better to just build a mITX system if space is a problem. You could make a much powerful machine in that case. If I was to buy a laptop, it would have to be, first and foremost, portable. I don't mean like an ultrabook because I want it to be powerful as well, but I would sacrifice a little bit of horsepower (a mid end GPU for example) for the sake of portability and being able to "throw" the laptop into my backpack and not having back pain at the end of the day (clearly exaggerating but you get my point!).

 

Yea, totally agree with you :D I got this laptop because I gave my old rig (socket 775) to my mom and I was moving up to university so I need a laptop to do presentation + other stuff at university and It needs to be a PC at home too. At that time, this laptop went on sell. Awesome performance with great price. If I could get a pc at the same time, I would go for something else more portable for sure  :D

[felixbearpig]

for a non pc maker they make beautiful and well endowed pcs

[BernardoSLR]

as much as I am not a fan of razer, I totally agree with him.

 

I think Dell, HP and the other PC makers are the reason PC sales are in decline.

 

In no way am I a Razer fan as well. Actually I never bought a Razer product, I always thought they were a bit overpriced. But they surprised me with the Razer Blade 14'! Sure it isn't perfect, they could have made the screen an IPS 1080p panel, but they went for the 900p one probably for bragging, to say it runs Crysis 3, when it would not run if it was a 1080p monitor. But still, I see it as a very good value, because for 1800$ you get something portable (slim and light), powerful (dedicated GPU and M series CPU, probably an i7) and, as a bonus, good looking (in my opinion anyway). I think this should be the way companies start thinking, because ultrabooks are trending, but they lack the computer power that normal laptops have to kind of emulate a desktop experience on the go. It seems to me that companies are starting to either build an ultrabook or a laptop so bulky, that it no longer feels like laptop, which is quite sad to be honest. Fortunately there is Razer, who created something to fill that gap, and I hope others follow!

[NickTheMajin]

In that case, having a laptop is simply not worth it IMO. It would be much better to just build a mITX system if space is a problem. You could make a much powerful machine in that case. If I was to buy a laptop, it would have to be, first and foremost, portable. I don't mean like an ultrabook because I want it to be powerful as well, but I would sacrifice a little bit of horsepower (a mid end GPU for example) for the sake of portability and being able to "throw" the laptop into my backpack and not having back pain at the end of the day (clearly exaggerating but you get my point!).

 

You do have a point. But for my use case, I have a brick of an Alienware laptop because I like to lan with my friends a lot (Just about every single day now that our 4th semester of college is done and we're all back home). It's great being able to all haul our laptops to each other's houses and open up a few cold ones and throw back some games of StarCraft II, Broodwar and Unreal Tournament. Just easier with a laptop instead of having to take a mini desktop with a monitor. 

[ProGearUk]

To be honest with you this is totally right. 

[Kajornkeat]

I personally don't think there's much we can do about it so I say embrace the future and make the best out of it. And pray that there will still be awesome high end hardware for the enthousiast. I would like to see some really innovative things happening with laptops and desktops though. It would be awesome, unfortunately, I don't think the big companies will do that as currently the profit is with portable products.

 

This is just my opinion and I'm quite curious to other opinions actually

 

If I were big company (Dell,HP,Asus), I'll move back to PC/laptop ASAP. Most portable product (tablet/phone) market share goes to Samsung and Apple and maybe a little bit Asus and Acer. I'm not going to bother competing with Apple and Samsung for sure. Profit on those gadgets might be higher than PC/laptop but you will only get tiny piece from the market and it won't last forever unless you make something really awesome which is really hard to do. Also, mobile phone industry is expanding really fast. It's good that we have lots of good smartphones to choose but do we really need 8 cores or super hi-res screen on smart phone? Sad day for PC enthusiast :\ 

[BernardoSLR]

You do have a point. But for my use case, I have a brick of an Alienware laptop because I like to lan with my friends a lot (Just about every single day now that our 4th semester of college is done and we're all back home). It's great being able to all haul our laptops to each other's houses and open up a few cold ones and throw back some games of StarCraft II, Broodwar and Unreal Tournament. Just easier with a laptop instead of having to take a mini desktop with a monitor. 

 

In that case, it also makes a lot of sense to have those bulky laptops available. There should be a product for every type of user, and I'm not saying that bulky and really powerful laptops should disappear. I'm just saying that companies should not forget the normal laptop, because they also have an use in many areas. Macbook Pro falls into this category, and it sells really well! But unfortunately, I'm not that into macs, so it never was a product for me.

[DLM_012]

Zenbook UX31E. It is by far my favorite laptop I've ever owned (2nd of all time for me) and I think I love my laptop just as much as OP.

• insane battery life on sleep and actual usage (pretty sure I can achieve about 8 hrs out of it and the advertised 2 weeks to a month in sleep)
• bright screen
• really light and slim for that aesthetics factor
• aluminum body for a rigid design. I despise plastic now

My only complaints are

• 900p res glossy screen (I despise glossy anything unless it's the paint job on a car)
• no dedicated GPU

 

You can bet I'll have this until it dies or if I come across a successor that fixes current gripes without compromising the things I already enjoy.

[_ASSASSIN_]

I can agree, there are a ton of crap manufacturers, they really bring down the concept of PC gaming, many of my console friends think that PC gaming is playing on a crappy Dell computer
by Microsoft is ruining themselves also, trying to be something else, when clearly what they had was going for them, and open environment free for updating, but now they are attempting to make it closed, cutting off half of the original users with win 8. Microsoft really needs to do some evaluating

[Joshua]

Some companies seem like they don't care anymore. Some companies like Fractal Design seem like they care a great deal about their products, which they do, but they main system builders don't, which is unfortunate.

[ALXAndy]

The PC industry runs on the assumption that we are all made of money. Like it grows on trees, and that we will queue up behind them and buy their wet farts.

 

This was OK until a couple of years ago when the recession hit. People just aren't prepared to buy an Intel CPU and board and then throw it away a year later and replace it.

 

This happened in the 1980s with Atari and so on and it's happening now. People are happy to hold onto their equipment as it's more than good enough, and can't justify paying out £350 or so to replace what they already have with something 5% better with a load of crap bolted to it.

 

Most of the products being sold to us *glares at Razer* are absolute crap, built like crap and completely over priced. We fall for this shit when we have loads of money as we don't care, but when pennies become tighter we tend to look a lot harder at something before taking the plunge.

 

So in summation - stop marketing us a load of pointless shit hoping we will keep buying it because we won't. Do some hard work and get some stuff out there that's actually worth having.

[dyent10]

ironic how razer describes how other manufacturer's are killing the pc industry. if they are so commited on keeping pc industry afloat, why dont the make an affordable "gaming" laptop, instead of selling a crappier one. their switchblade technology isnt all that great. ur gonna be most likely going to be using a mouse with it anyway. so unless u have a third arm, its going to be a hassle to deal with when playing a game. if they are really serious about making the pc better, they should make their laptops more "future proof." instead of having a directly soldered on gpu and cpu, make it upgradable. keep the form factor of the motherboard the same with each new cpu release and update the support on newer gpu. instead they plan on selling a sub-par gaming laptop, and they want people to shell out exuberant amount of money.

[alicskysareblue]

ironic how razer describes how other manufacturer's are killing the pc industry. if they are so commited on keeping pc industry afloat, why dont the make an affordable "gaming" laptop, instead of selling a crappier one. their switchblade technology isnt all that great. ur gonna be most likely going to be using a mouse with it anyway. so unless u have a third arm, its going to be a hassle to deal with when playing a game. if they are really serious about making the pc better, they should make their laptops more "future proof." instead of having a directly soldered on gpu and cpu, make it upgradable. keep the form factor of the motherboard the same with each new cpu release and update the support on newer gpu. instead they plan on selling a sub-par gaming laptop, and they want people to shell out exuberant amount of money.

good like finding a mobile gpu on amazon because there arent anyways, also most manufacturers use there own custom socket, and mobile cpus are also not on the market.

what I would like is access to the fans and the cpu, or at least the fans, because most laptops end up overheating  do to having clogged ventilation, its alos  one of the main reasion I got an asus g75 was the fact I could clean the vents,  I also REFUSE to buy laptops that don't allow access to the fans  do to have lost one to over heating

[dangermouseAUS]

I'm actually liking the ultra-book offerings cumming from Samsung, Acer, Asus and to a lesser extent Toshiba. Toshiba has the Kirabook which is cool but i think with the release of haswell  and the retina display from apple on the macbook line, ultrabooks are going to step up. I'll buy one when i can get a 13 or 15 inch 1440p IPS display (i don't care about touch as i like to have a clean display), gigabit ethernet, wireless AC, core i7 with Iris GPU, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD and 8+ hours battery life with good build quality, design from $1400 to $1800.

 

I hope that the next generation high end of integrated graphics will be fine for my use case.

[cyberlocc]

Sorry if someone said this its late i read a little more than half. I agree a few comments about how hp dell ect are moving to the laptops and tablets but a little confused as to them saying they wish the enhausists could get a peice. The thing here i dont undersrand is how many enhauists that you know would buy a dell desktop. Normal everday people wanr laptops and tablets so hp and dell make those we enhausists want big water cooled multi gpu powerhouses but we also would never buy a dell so im confused dell never made powerhouse pcs and even if they did we wouldnt buy them nor would the regualr user. To an ehausist the words dell and hp might as well be greek aside from our laptops and such how many dell parts are in your custom build. Asus nvidia intel amd xfx corsiar samsung nzxt coler master ect there still making are sfuff with no end in sight so whats the issue. The point is diffrent markets diffrent compainies what dell does again laptops aside mean nothing to us.

Oh and as above stated theres still great laptops around like asus customs alienwares segans ect theres quite a few companys that make good custom laptops. And i never consider hp dell acer ect pcs to be true nice pcs there watered down overpriced crap to feed to consumer sheep they have always been that ans alwags will be nothing has changed.

[Lyons]

Goodbytes, why haven't you bought a retina Macbook Pro? I assume if you use a 5 year old Dell laptop you don't use it for games... Don't tell me you're one of those people who completely disregard Apple just because they're Apple. Macbook Pro's are easily the best laptops in the world in every category except gaming, but hell even the 15" rMBP has a 650m GPU and is likely to be refreshing very soon with Haswell and at least a 750m. $3000 to spend on a laptop? It's a no brained...

[GoodBytes]

Goodbytes, why haven't you bought a retina Macbook Pro? I assume if you use a 5 year old Dell laptop you don't use it for games... Don't tell me you're one of those people who completely disregard Apple just because they're Apple. Macbook Pro's are easily the best laptops in the world in every category except gaming, but hell even the 15" rMBP has a 650m GPU and is likely to be refreshing very soon with Haswell and at least a 750m. $3000 to spend on a laptop? It's a no brained...

 

Ah very good question. No, Apple is in my considerations. Unlike some people, I use my laptop to actually take notes in class. and record them (with professor permission).

A problem I have, is that any math class, or logic class, or anytime there is a graph or diagram, I simply can't do it on a laptop. I usually have my laptop on the side, closed but recording, and now I take notes by hand. For my next laptop, I am considering the Microsoft Surface Pro, due to the digitize pen. However the 5h, at best battery life is an issue for me... well the non changeable battery is the real issue. Battery life is too short. While 5h is nice, the problem is that battery life reduces over time... so it will become quickly 3h after a year, most likely. And 3h isn't enough. And I don't feel like cashing out an another Surface Pro.. A tablet is something I initially wanted for school. But at the time, a convertible tablet, with a digitize pen that didn't suck, was over 3000$, and performance was very low. It was using Intel first ultra low voltage CPUs. So it was hard to bite the bullet.

 

So this is what I am waiting:

 -> Seeing at the Computex what's new from the competitor

 -> Seeing at Microsoft BUILD event, for a Surface Pro 2, and possibly a keyboard add-on that contains a battery for not only extended usage, but change battery., especially if I can flip the keyboard on the back of the unit, allowing me to use my Surface Pro as a thick note book.

 -> Now, Razor new laptop... while it doesn't have a digitize screen. It can replace my laptop.

 

Also, a problem with the MacBook Pro, is that the 13inch version doesn't have an Nvidia or AMD GPU. Making the retina display version, a chop fest of an experience when you play a video or have a lot of window open. I saw it at an Apple Store... it was disgusting. It felt like you are using one of those non-Vista ready Intel integrated graphic solution, with Vista with glass transparency.. and everything is choppy and slow. The 15inch is too big.

 

I need an Nvidia GPU for my projects and work (yes, I use my own laptop.. I work in a small company, so I am free from all that VPN thing, and over zealous security software putting the laptop performance down to a crawl. My work stuff is encrypted, of course. And yes I can, I have permission). Why Nvidia GPU, because we use Nvidia libraries for work. While I know that the Surface Pro doesn't have an Nvidia GPU, I can still bring my laptop and my tablet, if I need both, as the tablet is thin, light and small.

Yes, I am fine with work using my 5 year old laptop, as the way we work, is that I work on a specific thing at a time.... for example... lets say I work on... hmmm.. bump mapping. Let's just say, I am the person that works on Bump mapping for the sakes of a simple example, and not revealing what we actually work on. I'll have a cube... with the effect applied on it.  That is all. Just assume that sometimes I could be using Nvidia libraries for some things. So I don't need performance per say, and if my laptop is stolen and project source code decrypted... he won't get anything helpful, might as well be some tutorial on the interwebs for something. At work, is where we merge things and apply it where it needs to be applied.