alt Hacker NewsMicrosoft builds MacBook Pro rival with NVIDIA-powered Surface Laptop Ultra
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The Surface line is, HW-wise, very good IMHO.
Too bad the software is awful. Thankfully the Linux Surface community is pretty strong. Proprietary Microsoft drivers don't make it easy, but we're getting there...
https://github.com/linux-surface/surface-pro-x
I'll buy another one if there's some commitment from Microsoft to be more open source friendly, but since this will never happen, they can keep their HW.
This is the story of being a tech giant where you can't stop running a creepy digital surveillance business model that depends on expensive but poor performing hardware vendors so you partner with an ungodly expensive hardware vendor that can perform well but doesn't solve the underlying problem of being a creepy digital surveillance business that snoops on your customers and sells ads to show them. Friends don't let friends or family they care about use Windows 11.
The image on the Nvidia announcement tells the story: 6 identical laptops from various manufacturers running the same SoC. The Microsoft one is just one of many.
I'm on my third Surface Pro (an 11 this time) and basically love it. Tablet form factor, lightweight, multitouch, with a real desktop OS (I mean not ipad's iOS). Decent battery life. True, it's not perfect: slow to wake, the touchpad stops working once in a while & needs to be reset. Missing a GPS chip. But it runs Adobe, Resolve, Chrome of course, msys2, and Linux (WSL2) quite well. I love the absolutely gorgeous HiDPI screen. The software emulator system is a little weird (arm64/arm64EC/arm64X, with no true universal x64/arm64 binary) for software developers, but it basically works fine from a user perspective. I say all this as someone whose daily driver is an Arm M1 Macbook Pro, also nice but not a tablet and quite heavier. I don't use a dock, just a simple USBC hub with a magnetic USBC connector.
I get that they're pushing AI really hard, but the article bearing so many of the hallmarks of being AI-generated almost feels crass, like there are no humans at the company who feel strongly enough about this device to author 5-6 enthusiastic paragraphs about its features, they had to outsource to something that can somewhat convincingly mimic enthusiasm. Yet I'm supposed to care...
A former employer of mine, owned by a retired NFL player, purchased Surface devices for the sales staff in addition to their laptops. This was presumably because Microsoft and the NFL had a deal where everyone on the sidelines were using Surfaces and they thought it was a good idea. I say that because no one was asking for them, and when we received them I was inundated with tickets about poor performance: "my surface is slow", "my surface is glitchy". I dreaded working on these things. Everyone just went back to their laptops. Tens of thousands of dollars wasted.
It's a shame, Microsoft could really do something if they created an ARM device that had the battery life of Apple Silicon, yet was a real computer that wasn't locked down, ensured/promoted ARM compatibility with their ecosystem. Heck, I'd even be OK with Windows 11, I know how to remove all the garbage now and could run WSL (though I'd prefer to just boot Linux on it).
„Built on Windows”. That’s like anti-ad these days. Maybe, maybe worth looking at if you can run other OS than Windows on it, but that will probably take some time.
For many, the appeal of a Mac is that it isn't running Windows. I'm not seeing how this won't be a repeat of the OG ARM Surface, just with a higher spec'd GPU.
Would love to see many more manufacturers read this as the slight taht it is from Microsoft and to follow Lenovos lead in making windows a paid add-on, going with a big Linux distro as the default.
Maybe instead of hardware they should just stick to the knitting and deal with their quality issues around both the OS and the Office suite right now.
The biggest problem here is the operating system. If they could fix that, this might be enticing.
I've had surface devices for a long time, originally for work to test HTML Canvas with the touchscreen. Unlike a lot of the other comments, I've had a nice time with them. The screens are a great quality, the keyboard especially in later versions is quite good. Drawing on them is nice. Battery life is middling, though.
I know it feels snarky but I didn't ever expect to read that Microsoft was pairing with MediaTek to make an ARM cpu to run Windows. So many years of the WinTel hegemony I guess :-).
I've had several Surface devices over the years, the original SurfaceBook, and a Surface Pro 4 and Surface Pro 6. The Pro 4 was the most reliable and the Pro 6 was prone to overheat. But execution in the mechanical build was quite good.
That said the battery in my SurfaceBook went all Spicy Pillow on me, the Pro 4's power slot ended up dying, and the Pro 6 just stopped responding one day (it was a work laptop so I just gave it back but still). I'm still waiting to see how folks with Macbooks experience the end of life.
If MediaTek would partner with Framework to make a motherboard I'd totally try it out :-).
I will never buy a Surface device ever again. I've been using an SL4 for the last four years with Linux on it, thanks to the surface-linux kernel.
It's awful. It feels like it's actively refusing to work properly with Linux.
Fair - it's not for Linux, and clearly that is expected with a Microsoft device.
I've recently had to call their support for missing rubber feet. I figured I could get the replacement mailed(that was how it went when it first happened about two years ago). An AI answered, did not understand what I was saying at all, hung up the call. I called again; it told me to check the website and hung up, not even giving me a chance to say anything.
Okay. Guess I'll never buy anything from you ever. Ordered them off of Aliexpress and moved on.
As awesome as this laptop could be, it is going to be $5000+ right? The DGX Spark, which has no display, touchpad, webcam, etc, is $4700.
Surface has seen so many iterations, some terrible, some nice. Still rocking the discontinued surface laptop studio as Wacom on the go, smallish footprint (14”) creative development machine. I just love its quirkiness and the fact that I can jump on photoshop to touch up an image, use it as tablet for movies, or vs code for (not great nowadays) 6h on battery. It is an odd intersection.
What's this nonsensical video on the product page that allegedly shows an "all new thermal system"? https://videos.ctfassets.net/jy9s7k22hbg4/44R1LH71xb8uO4c9dD...
Who is the target market for this?
As an Apple user who can’t make iPad OS work I am always tempted by the surface but..
Every time I contemplate the surface (I like the hardware / concept) it seems the software I might want to use doesn’t support arm..
My first thought on seeing this was that it could be great for Linux. If the hardware is a little more standard than Apple's, it wouldn't need all the tricks Asahi has figure out. Finally you could have the best performance without compromising on fine details.
They can put whatever hardware they want in it, Windows knows know bounds in undermining the overall package. I don't want a faster processor to run user-hostile adware that's constantly trying to upsell me, and uses dark patterns to trick me into switching off my chosen alternatives to their bad products every time there's a minor update. I don't want to run it at all.
I'm pretty happy to see someone else making a serious play in the ultra-premium notebook market. For way too long Apple has basically only been in competition with the much heavier "desktop replacement"/gaming laptops, or the flimsy/plasticky likes of Dell and LG with questionable trackpads. Real competition in this space could be a great thing for consumers
I've had about 4 generations of surface devices. Never again. The frustration of that SP4 where every bodies screen would jitter and they would just stoiclly send me a replacement with the same problem. Until warranty expired.
Or every model after that just slowed down to a crawl after a year. Or the keyboard connection not working reliably.
No thank you very much.
I had the Surface 3 and it was a good product, really good for note taking in college, quite revolutionary I'd say, to use the same device for the notes and for MATLAB and the likes. It was terrible in terms of maintenance but I think they fixed it in later iterations. The surface 3 had a glued screen that would crack 99 out of 100 times and there was no other way to access components in it. It survived for about 10 years which I think is fair. Shame that such an interesting product is developed by a completely untrustworthy company.
These machines are total garbage in my experience.
> And with all-day battery life[ii]
If they managed to get anywhere near Apple, they'd have confidently published some kind of actual hour figure without a scare citation.
"The world is full of makers. Only a few make the world."
What does this mean ? How can you make the world ?
A Spark-like machine in a laptop form factor is certainly exciting and interesting competition for Apple. I wonder about Linux compatibility, given NVidia's history with proprietary drives. I am absolutely not willing to go back to Windows, though.
i've only ever owned a 'Surface Laptop 2' and for the time it was excellent, the keyboard and trackpad were both superior to my macbook pro of the time, the screen was great in both brightness and the 3:2 ratio. it was great value.
from all the comments on here it seems like that model was an anomaly and the rest of the product lineup is often pretty lacking.
I used a surface book II for years all the while hoping it would die. It didn’t, which says something I guess. What sucked: the hinge, the split battery, mysterious problems with screen detach, the magnetic power connector, glossy screen. What didn’t: screen ratio.
It is not too far fetched to see NVIDIA acquiring Microsoft for the vertically integrated advantages Apple enjoys.
[edit:typo]
IIUC this is using lower bandwidth RAM than macs, and will run windows, with uncertain linux support (it's spotty even on the dedicated linux boxes that this chip is based on). So less of a "rival" and more "metoobutworse"...
I'm surprised they released this thing. Brand perception is probably a lot more important to Nvidia than whatever sales they could get from this thing, and if it's basically just DGX Spark, it's likely to underwhelm.
I've heard there's still a large backlog of both software problems, and hardware problems with the platform. The software problems could be fixed with time, but they'll still give a shitty first impression. I'd have thought Nvidia would just bury this and try again with a successor run of silicon with a new design.
This thing seems practically destined to just be a repeat of the Snapdragon laptop debacle.
If it doesn’t have the repairability of a framework. I’m out.
Optimized for multi core.. like windows is out of the box for x86 and ARM already? What did they do manually set cores=20? Such optimal. Many Cores! This will be the third attempt at Windows on ARM.. hopefully this is the one
Whatever they all do, they can never, ever match the quality of Apple! I've bought many Macs so far, and many Windows machines (Dell, Sony, 1st and 2nd Gen of Surface) as well. All of those Windows machines died within less than 2 years, while the Macs, which were bought more than 10 years ago, are still working fine. So, I'm not going to buy a new Windows machine anytime soon.
No price? I guess over 3k for 128GB ram and Nvidia spark.
Oh thank god it has a co-pilot button
> It’s well known that the Surface trackpads are among the best in the industry, surpassing even MacBooks in several aspects
What aspects are these?
I don’t trust Microsoft after how they abandoned the Surface Book
If it's still based on the chip in the DGX Spark, idle power draw remains a problem to be solved. My Spark pulls down 40W when doing nothing under Ubuntu.
The primary reason to buy Macs isn't the hardware, it's macOS.
I don't know if it's on purpose, but I've seen a few images and videos and I can't figure out what the laptop looks like.
Why are all the pictures so dark? You can't see it!
Macbook Pro rival running ..... Windows?! I'd take a bottom of the line Macbook over anything running 'doze.
That copy reeks of AI generated text... for a premium, luxury laptop. What a shame.
Does the unified memory work in WSL2?
Wondering about Linux support. Would it take Asahi-level community commitment? For Windows, ~no one will switch from their macs for some (seemingly) single-year-generational gains. It would need some distinctive feature, not only performance. For me, the 2in1/tablet aspect was that, which they drop now.
Unusable website. Can’t get past the full screen consent dialog (iPhone)
My experience with Surfaces and, particularly, the Surface Book and its accompanying dock were such that I'd have to be paid to use one again. For example, the dock would get its own updates silently and brick itself randomly and the proprietary magnetic connector between the dock and the computer was prone to a poor connection. I remember many occasions trying to work and my screens just randomly blinking in and out. To get service we'd have to go to a local Microsoft Store, a sad replica of the aging Apple "shiny glass minimalism" aesthetic, which have since all closed so we'd have to mail the thing today instead.