Gotta admit... This thing is pretty slick!!! Microsoft just introduced its first-ever laptop and it's insane Microsoft Microsoft just introduced its first-ever laptop on Tuesday, called Surface Book. Weighing in at a little over three pounds, Surface Book is the fastest 13-inch laptop ever created, and it's two times faster than Apple's MacBook Pro, according to Microsoft. We've tested the computer for a few minutes at Microsoft's launch event, and it definitely feels like a strong competitor to Apple's MacBook Pro. It will be available October 26 starting at $1,499. Check it out. The Microsoft Surface Book is machined out of a single piece of magnesium. Microsoft The laptop is built with a dynamic fulcrum hinge. Microsoft The display has a muscle wire lock so you can remove it entirely and use it as a tablet. Microsoft You can even flip the display around to draw on it like a clipboard. Microsoft The trackpad is made with precision glass that can support five-point multitouch. Microsoft Surface Book is powered by Intel's sixth-generation Core i7 chip and an incredibly fast graphics card from NVIDIA. It also comes with up to 16GB of RAM and 1 terabyte of storage space.
It can actually separates the screen part from the keyboard portion and become a big clipboard/tablet - the interesting part about it is that the hinge can change it's size based on how it is used - and contains power and data wires in it (when the screen is separate - it uses the built-in Intel GPU - when connected to the keyboard part, in addition to the extra battery - it has a stand-alone NVidia GPU so can be used as a high-end workstation for CAD or video-editing, or as a high-end gaming notebook). The "Muscle wire lock" bit is just marketing propaganda - the same way that Apple does not sell you a fingerprint reader, they sell you "Touch ID" - but the clever part of this is that it provides secure, rigid notebook like connection that supports 360 degree rotation (like a Lenovo Yoga) - but can also detach while providing more than just minimal connectivity as needed by just a keyboard. Expect Apple to poo-poo it and "innovate" in 3 years by bringing a clone to the market (as they just did with the iPad Pro being a Surface clone just recently). I have to admit that while I do not need it - I am tempted to get one anyway, my Yoga Pro 2 is almost 2 years old already...
Start the new Microsoft army!!! Buy stuff you don't need because it's cool and the Microsoft way of life! I actually like this rig. Don't like the clunky OS though.
Probably wait another year for my notebook update, the yoga is surprisingly good -I still really enjoy it. The wife might get a surface pro 4 soon, my daughter by mistake bashed her little Asus notebook - so it might be time to treat the boss.
That is a big advantage. Downtown Portland the Apple store and the Microsoft store are on the same street, 1 block apart. It's pretty funny to walk by both of them, one is packed day and night - the other staffed by a few lonely Maytag repairmen. barfo
Disneyland - the place where bored adults go to stand in line for acts they outgrew a long time ago because they need to entertain their kids. Yes, this analogy works.
Apple Store is where consumers go to drool over all the neat stuff. If Microsoft had neat stuff, people would go to their stores, too. Apple Store last christmas: Microsoft store last christmas: The store are in the same mall on the same level, about 3-4 stores distance between them.
First, I have a Mac Mini, an iPad and 2 iPhones here, so I am not an Apple hater, I just do not like the googly eyed fandom that some people have where Apple is all there is - they make some beautiful stuff, but they also make some stuff that annoys me (just like any other company, honestly) - Anyone that wrote software for both the App Store and Google Play can tell you which one is harder to deal with - with some crazy requirements that do not make too much sense (Google have their own quirks as well - I suspect it is true for any time you work with some big company that needs to adhere to millions of developers). Second - I am not surprised that the Apple store is busier, Apple has been a much stronger consumer brand for a while now - Microsoft has really gone all enterprise in the early 2000s - because that is where the big money was for their growth and they already had the consumer market - and they did not bother with the consumer market properly, which is why Apple and Google kicked their butts from 2007 forward - and deservedly so. Microsoft is however starting to turn that ship around - and they make some great consumer devices and services now - I do not expect them to be as big as Apple in the consumer world for many years - but you will see a lot more consumer stuff now that they have the products. Last year they had the XBox One and just came out with the Surface Pro 3 which was the first truly worthwhile consumer device they had in years. This year they will have the XBox One, Surface 3, Surface Pro 4, Surface Book and the Band. You will likely see more traffic there.
Why do people forced to use Microsoft OS at work come home and (consumers) use Mac? It's actually been a fairly long ongoing trend that IT managers have had to deal with people bringing in their own Mac laptops to use on the company LANs. As I see it, the war is between Linux and BSD. Microsoft will lose share as long as they're pushing Windows (which is not Linux or BSD). Linux is the OS of choice for enterprise servers and the basis for Android and ChromeBooks. BSD is Mac and iOS.
Honestly, in the enterprise it is not an OS war anymore, this is a past war - which is not that important in the long run. The current war is the cloud war - and as far as enterprises are concerned there seem to be 2 big competitors - AWS and Azure - Sure Google dabbles and you have Rackspace and others - but from what we have seen for enterprises, when they start looking at the cloud, the two they go with are AWS or Azure. I know many people, especially consumers do not think of Amazon as anything other than a commerce outlet, but they are a very big deal as the backbone of the independent App market with AWS. FWIW - We are an AWS shop on the back-end - and I am sure that more and more enterprises will move to the cloud partially or completely as time moves on - when your database is in the cloud - who cares what OS it is running on? We use S3, SimpleDB, DynamoDB, SQS and have both Windows and Linux machines running our software. Honestly, the API is the cloud services, no-one cares about the OS anymore. If a Windows AMI is cheaper than a Linux AMI - you go with it and vice versa. For enterprises moving forward - if they have a lot of Windows in their local installations - Azure is likely easier - but you can have just about anything on AWS AMIs as well. If you start from scratch, I feel that AWS has more to offer at this point compared to Azure - it is just more mature and has a lot more services. There is a good reason that Microsoft's new CEO was their cloud lead before - and why Microsoft seems to be turning around in their understanding of where the computing world is going.
