alt Hacker NewsMicrosoft builds MacBook Pro rival with NVIDIA-powered Surface Laptop Ultra
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If it doesn’t have the repairability of a framework. I’m out.
Does the unified memory work in WSL2?
I have had the 15" Surface Laptop 6 as my daily driver and love it. Very reliable. The new one has a lot more ports so I am happy to see that.
I'm starting to have a sour taste in my mouth whenever I read microsoft and nvidia
Very disappointed that MS didn't stick with the watchband hinge. My wife's 10 year old Surface Book has had toddlers stand on it and the thing still works like new.
What is the CPU/GPU architecture of this and how could a collaboration between whoever made it and Nvidia possibly outperform Apple Silicon?
> Made for a kind of work that does not fit in a standard laptop.
Yeah, sure... And that kind of work is...???
The only device I'm still happy to own from them is the Classic IntelliMouse.
For me, anything else, be hardware or software, I stay very far away from them.
Cool
…but never buy v1 hardware folks! Especially for limited runs like high end laptops.
Apple quality comes from scale. A narrow product line means they have literally hundreds or thousands times more testing than PC ultra books. (And still — don’t buy a first iteration of a new Apple chassis.)
It's a shame that, outside of garish "gaming" laptops, 17" screens are very rare.
Too bad it runs Windows.
I guess that if I have to ask for the price, it’s not for me.
What happens if you vibe code an entire hardware product?
why are they showing off the fans? how hot does this thing run?
PCs still have USB-A ports? USB-A is old enough to drink.
It's not a rival. It could be the greatest computer ever made and I'm still not using Windows.
You would have to pay me to get one and I would still not use it.
There is something about Microsoft's reverse Midas touch.
I sometimes wonder if the "Corporate VP" (whatever that means) believes his own jerk-off marketing
If it runs Windows then it's dead on arrival.
I had the original surface and later a surface book from my employer. Both devices were horrible the digitizer for pen input was horrific. The software support was on a standstill for 6 months at a time with minimal updates later on. I won't touch first gen Microsoft hardware anymore except maybe their mice.
Surfaces are great devices. My Pro 3 still gets 7 hours of battery life.
We use newer Surface laptops at work, even the artists, developers, and executives (note we are not a tech company). The laptops aren't very fast but they can take a lot of physical abuse and the batteries last all day. We don't need the top of the line, and forcing our developers to use lower powered computers actually improves the quality of the apps because they get to experience how our apps work for most of our customers and take performance into account from the beginning.
Will this help strengthen the ARM Linux ecosystem?
So... nvidia agreed to pull a qualcom... well, enjoy the failure. people that would be early adopters want a real operation system that would actually allow them to leverage the hw, not a pathetic web-ui-based vibe coded operation system that requires wsl to make anything useful.
This might actually be cool hardware! I'm just wondering why anyone would waste all the overhead for the Windows OS. There's probably only 48 Gigs of unified memory left when your log-on completes...
Does it run Linux well? That's the only reason not to get a MBP.
Personally, I got a HP Zbook G1A, which is HP's take on an MBP based on (x86, but unified memory!) Strix Halo.
Battery life could be better, but pretty happy otherwise. Local LLM perf is great and I get to run an OS that doesn't drive me crazy.
What's conspicuously absent, is the CPU that's going to power this thing. Yes, it's got an Nvidia GPU, but does it have an Intel CPU, an AMD CPU, an Nvidia ARM CPU, or someone else's ARM CPU?
I wonder what kind of brightness that 2000 nit screen will actually deliver? Everyone rates their screens on peak, but then SDR is the same 250-350 nit range for most systems.
What's the actual connectivity? USB4? with or without PCIe tunneling? How many ports?
How much is it going to weigh? Battery life? Battery capacity?
DGX Spark desktops idle close to 20w on Linux: that's a lot for a laptop. I'm expecting Nvidia+Microsoft stepped up their driver game some for this release, but it's wild how few creature comforts or nicities DGX Spark came with. Launched with and still has almost no power monitoring or power management capabilities. If you turn on the highspeed NIC it turns into a 40W hotbox even at idle. Nvidia has such a weird mix of supporting what they want to support well, but doing absolutely nothing else. The way Shield TV is still occasionally getting some updates is impressive for example, but it's stayed on an ancient Android version & went a good fraction of a decade without update. Similarly, keeping folks locked on rickety old Linux4Tegra and now DGX Spark heavily modified Linux OSes has been brutal. It's hard to believe this system is going to be much better than a fantastically expensive bag of barely managed idiosyncratic quirks.
> Built on Windows
aaaaand... scene!
No thank you, and goodbye
> Microsoft explicitly tuned Windows 11 to extract the absolute best performance from the new silicon architecture.
My lie detector is going off.
> The containment features sandbox local agents like Hermes and OpenClaw so they cannot interfere with your core operating system.
Wait, isn't that kind of the point of using local agents like OpenClaw? I thought people wanted the agents accessing all kinds of applications, files, etc.?
> Legacy application compatibility is equally crucial. Microsoft optimized the Prism emulation layer specifically for the new microarchitecture. Prism utilizes the raw power of the silicon and recent AVX and AVX2 instruction set extensions to run older x86 applications smoothly under emulation.
Okay, this is pretty nice. I'll give Microsoft credit for this one. It might save my company a lot of heartache one day in the near future.
All in all, this rig is going to be quite expensive. In a lot of ways, it probably is better than a MacBook Pro. However, as a diehard Apple fanboy, it is not enough for me to consider the jump.
Too bad linux x86 on arm story is still terrible. Fex is great in a sense but getting it run is a herculean feat, with pagesize mismatched requiring a VM.
Windows…
"Copilot, write me a drivel article which could have been a 3-line press release, but instead use every unnecessary superlative you can conjure. Ignore any possible criticism and pretend this device is the second coming of Computer Christ"
Surface Laptop Ultra Ripoff: Made for World(-Class) Suckers.
Imagine thinking the rivalry is about hardware and not software... Same for IOS vs Android.
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TFA has a few more tidbits than I've seen elsewhere but it's mostly LLM-induced, hype-driven marketing bilge.
A slightly more sober announcement is available at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352627.
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Unusable website. Can’t get past the full screen consent dialog (iPhone)