Every time I read something like "completely redefines professional computing" I think that somebody in the marketing department didn't do a good enough job to disguise a sponsored content, or at the very least didn't review what the independent author wrote.
Anyway, what I like of this machine is the 15" screen with a keyboard without a numberpad: the center of the body of the user can be aligned with the center of the screen. The screen seems to be particularly bright, which is good. There are claims of good self repairability, we will see when it starts to sell.
I'd wait a few years before buying one machine in this product line. I want to see how Windows on ARM will play out in terms of compatibility. My build targets are all Intel servers (Linux), so I don't want to have surprises. I would have to wait years anyway because I would run Linux and I think that it takes more effort to port Linux to new ARM hardware that to new Intel one (ACPI etc.) WSL is not an option because I still have Windows around it and it's even more unpleasant than having to deal a Mac GUI.
Let's say that if this were an Intel laptop I'd be tempted to buy it, if the hands on reviews will be good.
fodkodrasz 1 hours ago [-]
I'm curious about the openness of the platform. As long as the openness and standardization of the PC platform is not present, this platform is not a contender of x86 in my eyes. We can see with the highly praised Apple M platform on the example of the Asahi Linux what the lack of openness brings: people are locked in to operating systems by the vendors, and planned obsolescence, even with long support periods. On the other hand the PCs abandoned by Windows 11 support (sometimes even 1 year old models!) had the freedom to choose from a variety of operating systems, all thanks to the openness of the PC platform.
Repairability is important, but why repair something when you can only use terrible, soon out of support operating, which spy on you? (This means practically any OS vendored by large corporations)
For ARM systems openness boils down to the custom boot process, and of course the driver support. Has ARM PC vendors standardized on a boot standard yet? I cal recall the horror on reading articles how Raspberry Pi boot was working, or how M1 Mac bootloader is locked down.
thisislife2 9 minutes ago [-]
Yes, with 128GB RAM, I guess one could even ignore that it is soldered (and hence "unrepairable"), but if it can't run Linux or *BSD it is a definite no go. We definitely don't need two closed hardware platform duopoly (Apple and Microsoft), as together they will dominate and kill the "open" platforms. But I am pessimistic here as everything seems headed towards that eventuality. We should never have accepted smartphones as closed platforms.
bandrami 36 minutes ago [-]
I just got one of the lighter Snapdragon surface laptops and the software ecosystem is still hit and miss. LuaJIT in particular still has build problems on WoA and that's unfortunately upstream of a lot of stuff I use day-to-day. The NPU is apparently neat if you're into LLMs (it can allegedly run gemma) but that's not my thing.
camillomiller 39 minutes ago [-]
>Anyway, what I like of this machine is the 15" screen with a keyboard without a numberpad: the center of the body of the user can be aligned with the center of the screen. The screen seems to be particularly bright, which is good. There are claims of good self repairability, we will see when it starts to sell.
Oh you mean like the incredible MacBook Pros of the last two generations that have been selling like hotcakes and have a surprisingly similar design to this device?
"Redmond, start your photocopiers" never gets old.
DeathArrow 26 minutes ago [-]
Apple wouldn't ever do something like that. "Good artists copy, great artists steal"
RankingMember 14 hours ago [-]
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.
exmadscientist 12 hours ago [-]
I worked with some of the people responsible for the Surface Book, Surface docks, and specifically the Surface Book's dock. These were hardware people (EEs), not software people, and this was after their time at MS. Unfortunately I don't remember specifics (both because it's been a few years, and because I'd probably have to fuzz details anyway), but... :
Docks are horrifying products. Thunderbolt docks are doubly horrifying. They ordered in every single competing dock they could find, from that era's products, and found that every last one was garbage in some way or other, usually fatally so. The Thunderbolt interface in particular, and the firmware that needed to run on that interface controller, was the source of a lot of issues. None of them were particularly intrinisc to the protocol, but the hardware available was junk and the software available was worse. They couldn't really order up a custom non-garbage IC just for a $100 accessory that sells in limited volume. (Apple, however, could and would; they'd also demand to control the whole stack. This shows.)
They were very proud they got the thing working as well as they did, even though they all knew it was still pretty much trash. It was still better than the competition. Which is sad, but what can you do?
(At least it wasn't the Wi-Fi chip. The Surface Book's Wi-Fi adapter was chosen by higher-ups as the same one used in the XBox, presumably for sourcing reasons. It is trash. Again, much blood, sweat, and tears were spilled making it work as well as it does.)
(I also have the exact circuit for the LED that lights up on the charger cable. Apparently it was a big deal, which I find hilarious.)
com2kid 9 hours ago [-]
My team (Microsoft Band) discovered the reason why the surface's keyboard sometimes wouldn't work when connected. There was a hardware bug in the cortex MCU the keyboard used involving waking from deep sleep. One of our FW engineers spent several months figuring it out and eventually reported it to the manufacturer, and to the Surface team. IIRC it was something about wake on interrupt in a specific deep sleep mode and also something around timing.
It was a rather nasty bug. Firmware is full of nightmare scenarios like that.
z3ratul163071 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
wilted-iris 3 hours ago [-]
Respectfully, no, not even a little bit. That’s normal everyday microcontrollers for you.
exmadscientist 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, wake from deep sleep is always one of the weirder bits. It's just hard to do.
vitally3643 3 hours ago [-]
You clearly have never tried to implement sleep on a microcontroller. It has nothing at all to do with ACPI. And this kind of eldritch bug is par for the course. It has nothing at all to do with Microsoft or PCs at all. Microcontroller sleep just sucks in a lot of incredibly weird ways.
Gigachad 9 hours ago [-]
I've been using the Apple USB-C multi port adapter thing since I got one free from a previous job, it seems overpriced since I can see a lot of similar ones much cheaper from competitors, but I've also never had an issue with it in any configuration on any device including non Apple ones. While I regularly see people having issues with the cheaper ones from Dell or Amazon sellers. So maybe you really are getting something extra when you pay for the Apple one.
thewebguyd 7 hours ago [-]
> Docks are horrifying products. Thunderbolt docks are doubly horrifying.
I believe it. From all my years as a sysadmin, docks were by far the second largest source of headaches (after printers). Super high failure rate, all kinds of quirks, shoddy power delivery. And these weren't some cheap amazon basics dongles, I'm talking the $250+ docks from Dell, Lenovo, etc.
whatever1 5 hours ago [-]
Docks ok. But why printers are such a hot mess? For the past 20 years they could have been just webservers that we send REST requests to.
But no, we had to install random drivers on our machines, get blue screens and have to plug and unplug the printers until they get reset properly.
dwaite 2 hours ago [-]
It's not considered fully RESTful, but it sounds like you are describing IPP, which came out in 1997.
Compatibility marks/certifications like AirPrint (2010) define how to advertise your IPP printer and its features, such as whether you can directly send a PDF. IPP Everywhere is perhaps the most notable open alternative to AirPrint.
kube-system 2 hours ago [-]
> For the past 20 years they could have been just webservers that we send REST requests to.
That exists, it’s called IPP.
vitally3643 3 hours ago [-]
Because printers must be as cheap as possible and require a recurring revinue stream, which includes malware. Sorry, "valuable special offers".
It costs more money to make a printer with good firmware, and you're more likely to throw away a buggy printer and buy a new one with new special ink cartridges.
2 hours ago [-]
colechristensen 3 hours ago [-]
Printers are complex robots, require frequent supply refills, and are high touch interactions with people. (people printing things wrong, people misusing printing resources, managing quotas for same, etc.)
It's not just firmware.
dylan604 11 hours ago [-]
The fact they are stuck with the concept of a dock being something the computer needs to physically sit in is just funny to me. I have a "dock" for my MBP that is just a little box that everything connects to that doesn't leave my desk. When I connect my MBP to it, I just plug in the single cable to it. If the cable goes bad, it hasn't in the 3+ years of use, I would just swap out the cable.
esikich 4 hours ago [-]
I haven't seen a dock that the laptop needs to sit in in ~10 years. Afaik those kind of laptops haven't been made for that long either. It's all USB-C now.
jonhohle 9 hours ago [-]
I’ve been doing this for about a decade with thunderbolt 2 then 3 (and backwards compat with 4).
I’ve had one cable begin to fray in all that time (a thunderbolt 4 caldigit cable). It swapped it out for an Apple cable and kept going.
I’ve used OWC docks, which aren’t known to be the best, but have worked great for charging, usb, Ethernet, FireWire, display (both over daisychained thunderbolt and display port), and SD cards. The only thing I have used them for extensively is audio. My monitor is a Thunderbolt 2 monitor with USB breakout. In between it and the dock is a two drive SATA enclosure.
I recently threw an extra Thunderbolt 3 dock I had on a USB-4 mini computer running Linux and it worked without any issue.
I’m sure there may be things that don’t work well, but its worked for me. I even wrote an app to have a global hot key to eject all my attached disks (DriveLight). Press the key combo, wait for the eject sound, pull the cable and go.
UltraSane 8 hours ago [-]
There are many windows laptops that have usb-c docks that don't physically dock. They are more accurately called port replicators. My work laptop is a Dell with one.
whateverboat 11 hours ago [-]
> They ordered in every single competing dock they could find, from that era's products, and found that every last one was garbage in some way or other, usually fatally so.
It is so hard to believe that when more than 1000 employees at my employers are also using at least one dock (Dell and Thinkpad both) and using them very well.
selicos 7 hours ago [-]
In 2017 or so the standard Surface docks were rough. I think we had at least a 60% failure rate, though for the CEO who demanded a surface we swapped his issue dock with the one he had the week prior. And it would work for X weeks until failing to display to external monitors. Then we'd swap it out for the one from X weeks back and continue the cycle. Maybe change the power brick out.
Today I swap the power brick on my Dell thunderbolt dock when it acts up. Given the hours of use and how many times it's been plugged/unplugged from various laptops/etc (it worked great off an AMD desktop PC with thunderbolt on the rear I/O), I think my employer should buy me a knew one out of respect.
esikich 4 hours ago [-]
Ask your helpdesk team what they think of docking stations.
rtpg 6 hours ago [-]
I think 2017 is the big thing here.
We had those early "blessed by Apple" USB-C LG monitors. Garbage when it came to connectivity. Same with docks and the like.
We're now 9 years later so... I think it's all better now than before.
mschuster91 10 hours ago [-]
We are talking about a situation some years past. I member there were USB docks that if you had them attached to external power and ethernet, but not a laptop, they'd instant-kill the network by sending garbage frames that would cause switches to fault off.
Only around 2024-ish the situation with USB and TB docks seemed to stabilize.
menssen 10 hours ago [-]
I had a CalDigit TB dock -- maybe 2021-ish? -- that every time I unplugged my MacBook would take my internet offline. I thought I was insane. How is that even possible? But I finally gave up and returned it.
Thanks for finally answering this mystery for me.
semi-extrinsic 9 hours ago [-]
I have a brand new TV where if I plug the HDMI into my M4 MBP, MacOS ceases to have any functioning WiFi capability. Unplug the HDMI and internet returns instantly.
mschuster91 9 hours ago [-]
That's probably because your TV has support for Ethernet over HDMI enabled. Run ifconfig to check if there's a new (and, possibly, default-routed) interface when you plug that TV in.
I remember getting my first CalDigit TB dock and being excited - everyone seemed to love them. I expected it to largely Just Work.
That thing Didn't Work more than it Worked, but options were slim. Eventually it fully died about 14 months in. I didn't even bother checking to see what the warranty terms were. TS3 Plus, back in 17 or 18. What a piece of shit.
Sounds like it's a good thing I didn't bother trying again in the early 2020s and only recently bought a new dock.
bayesnet 7 hours ago [-]
I have a TS3+ that broke about 18 months in. I talked to support, set up a repair, and before I could send it the dock unbroke and had worked since. Truly mysterious and left me with a sense of unease with that thing given the cost.
phs318u 9 hours ago [-]
Very similar story here. Went through two Caldigit TB hubs most recently a TB4. Soooo many issues. The same Ethernet issue described above, a failure to provide the rated PD power, and the TB linked monitor connection was dodgy af. A very expensive lesson. Add to this the confusing (and deceptive) jumble of TB cable standards. I have so many supposed TB3,4 and 5 rated cables I could probably circle my house. You have to hand Apple one thing and that’s the consistency of their hardware due to tight control of the stack and supply chain. You get far fewer of these sorts of issues.
davb 3 hours ago [-]
Yes!! The Dell WD19 was notorious for that. My wife’s company used those - we couldn’t leave her WFH dock connected to our home network because of the wild broadcast storms causing our core switch to stop processing frames from her home office desktop switch. My org used HP Dock G5 units which behaved much better (besides the occasional firmware update killing video output until a power cycle, and inconsistent MAC address pass through between hardware revisions).
exmadscientist 8 hours ago [-]
Yes, this would have been around 2015. (When I said "Surface Book" I meant the original!)
Docks were bad, bad products in those days. They were no longer the dedicated bulky-but-reliable things of years past, or the modern finally-debugged dongles we've got now.
This was Intel's Alpine Ridge and it was hell. (At least, I think that was the one. Certainly, it was hell!)
als0 11 hours ago [-]
> It was still better than the competition
Plenty of cases where Surface isn't. Microsoft like to think they can make hardware but they're no better than other OEM and it's clearly not a focus for them
chihuahua 10 hours ago [-]
When I worked at Microsoft (years ago), some employees had Surface laptops. They frequently had issues where the laptop just wasn't working right and required rebooting, at the start of a meeting where they wanted to connect the Surface laptop to a projector. Always the Surfaces, never the Lenovos. One of the Surface things split into two parts, the screen (containing the actual computer) and the keyboard. There was something weird about connecting and disconnecting those parts, some motorized docking/undocking mechanism, that caused problems.
Then Microsoft had the episode where some of their Surface hardware would not reliably stay in sleep mode and cooked itself while being transported in a bag. At the time, Microsoft tried to excuse this by claiming that "a fundamental Computer Science problem" needed to be solved to fix this issue. Strange how other manufacturers could do this without overcoming unsolvable problems in frontier CS research.
While I'm usually a die-hard Microsoft fanboi, I have concluded that their Surface line is terrible.
alargemoose 10 hours ago [-]
This is even more of a knock to Microsoft but the overheating during sleep issue can affect any windows laptop made in the last 5 or so years. The cause is nothing surface specific, it’s Microsoft enforcing “Modern standby” and blocking S3/S4 sleep states in windows. My best understanding is that some bug causes the system to stay awake after one of the periodic wake ups to check for updates/notifications that happen in modern standby.
jval43 9 hours ago [-]
My work laptop just started doing this 3 weeks ago! It's insane. Rather new machine too.
It gets so hot in my bag I actually worry about it starting a fire one day. I now take it out every night.
Obviously I tried googling but no dice. Nothing changed, settings seem in order, no idea what to do.
vel0city 2 hours ago [-]
It's probably a particular device that's causing it to wake. Check out using sleepstudy.
Windows 8.1 and a Surface Pro 2, touch first with the start screen completely replacing the desktop outside storing files, was fantastic. It felt new and functional in the world of ungainly non Apple tablets, could do everything a regular laptop could, and boast solid touch support and features. It was a phenomenal device for me in college for notes given I had my own wireless keyboard for long typing sessions. Given the rush for digital text books, PDF or terrible, its form factor and flexibility made sense.
But I completely understand why it didn't meet market expectations and the 8/8.1 UI fell off a cliff. If you weren't willing tyo overhaul how you interacted with a Windows device and use it as designed, or needed something that was better at any given feature the surface tablet presented, it was not the right option.
I would love an option for the 8.1 style start screen on Windows 11, at least for a touch screen laptop. It really worked for me and how I used a computer at that point in time. I have an 8.1 install iso hanging around in case it comes up.
exmadscientist 2 hours ago [-]
> One of the Surface things split into two parts, the screen (containing the actual computer) and the keyboard. There was something weird about connecting and disconnecting those parts, some motorized docking/undocking mechanism, that caused problems.
Yep, that's the Surface Book (original). I've got one, and mine still works! Somehow.
That detach mechanism is insane. As far as I've been able to put together (I haven't done a patent search or anything, just heard bits from people who'd know), there's no motor involved... it's way weirder. I believe the thing actually heats up a nitinol shape-memory alloy latch in the base so it detaches from the tablet piece. That heating is why it takes a couple seconds. But then reattachment is instant, so it's just something clicking in to place. And you can't reattach immediately, because the base has to cool down (just a few seconds, short enough that you never notice unless you're deliberately messing with it). Black magic!
I'm not 100% sure of any of the above, except the use of nitinol somewhere. That's right, the weirdest piece of the conjecture is the only one I've got hard confirmation of. Like I said, black magic.
gambiting 56 minutes ago [-]
>>Then Microsoft had the episode where some of their Surface hardware would not reliably stay in sleep mode and cooked itself while being transported in a bag
To be fair, I've had exactly this with a Dell, MSI and a Razer laptop in the last few years. The only way I can reliably get it to stop waking up while asleep(and never going back to sleep) is disable sleep entirely and use hibernation instead. It's insane that such a basic functionality seems to be broken across a whole range of hardware.
8note 10 hours ago [-]
the split thing got updates that juat made it unable to be removed except while the device is restarting
but also, it was really easy to accidentally lock the screen while removing it, at which point youd put it back on to get the password filled in again
that and if the battery got low, youd be stuck with it in the wrong configuration, so the screen would get scratched
2muchcoffeeman 9 hours ago [-]
Microsoft has built some good hardware over the years. The problem with this is that it runs windows. The hardware is probably nice.
basch 5 hours ago [-]
It was not better than a competing dock from Dell or Lenovo etc at the time. Wireless docks worked better.
Forgeties79 2 hours ago [-]
This is going to come across a flippant, but aren’t they Microsoft? Couldn’t they order whatever parts they wanted to spec? It’s hard to imagine that every fundamental piece is so horrifically useless as you describe, but it’s also not my world. It just seems to me if any company could, M$ could just spend their way through the problem. Grabbing everybody else’s cheap hardware and going “there’s absolutely nothing we can do“ is strange to me, but maybe I misunderstanding what you’re describing. I fully admit I am way out on a limb here so I am curious to learn more because I really don’t know much.
8note 10 hours ago [-]
clearly they werent mechanical engineers - the dock bent my pro-3 and shattered the screen
the clamp around setup was a very poor choice
jmyeet 10 hours ago [-]
Not an EE but I'll add an anecdote as a user.
I went through a period of using a Macbook Pro with a dock. At the time the best option seemed to be the Caldigit TS3. It's a sleek device but luckily someone else was footing the bill because:
- 3 of them failed on me. THREE;
- You really learn how bad cables are. I got in the habit of ordering 2-3 at a time because experience taught me that at least 1 of them would be bad or die;
- It exposed just how bad the USB-C situation was (and still is). Is this just a power cable? Or you want data too? How about an alt mode so you can do DisplayPort passthrough? Well good luck with all that. There's no cue that the cable can do any of that. And if a cable can, it's typically 3 feet or less in length, expensive and prone to failure.
A lot of people don't know how complex a modern USB-C or Thunderbolt cable really is. It typically has a chip in each end of the cable. So the failure mode is not just the cable, it's the two chips as well. Bend or twist the cable too much. Gone. Damage the head of the cable. Gone.
Oh and USB-C is made more complex because it can be plugged in either way. The cable and the chips at either end and the controller on either side need to be able to seamlessly handle all 4 combinations (or 2 of the cable is truly symmetric pin-wise; it might be, I'm not sure).
I hope that this tech is more stable now but I honestly doubt that it is.
I'm reminded of an old quote I heard (not sure from who) that said we went from a world where no cables fit but if they did, it worked, to a world where the cable always fit but nothing works. That's USB-C in a nutshell.
Docks have to handle a lot of bandwidth. Even passthrough requires bandwidth. It's a nice idea but it's a hard problem.
whynotminot 10 hours ago [-]
I’m a little surprised to see how much trouble people in this thread have had with the Cal Digit TS3.
Mine works pretty well — have used it with three Intel MacBooks in the past and now currently two different Apple Silicon MacBooks.
One of the Intel MBPs did not like it. Would reboot every time I unplugged it from the dock. I blamed that MacBook for that one, since nothing else was ever a problem. I sent every crash report to Apple, along with some choice words that my $2,500 MacBook should be able to handle connecting to a very commonly owned TB Dock. Eventually they did fix it and it stopped being an issue.
Has ended up one of the more reliable pieces of tech gear in my life, especially given the absolute mad complexity of TB3 behind the scenes.
Marsymars 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I've had 3 CalDigit docks (USB-C Dock, TS4 and Element 5) and they've all been bulletproof.
I will note that mine have all functioned as docks for effectively-stationary PCs, so there's basically zero cable wear happening.
anonymars 12 hours ago [-]
My absolute favorite fact about the Surface is that if the battery runs out, the Surface Dock power is unable to bootstrap it. You have to plug in a charger
Not sure if that's still the case but truly astonishing
To be fair, my MacBook Pro had the same issue - if the battery was dead, charging via USB-C wouldn't work, it would need the MagSafe charger. Presumably because the USB controller needs power in order to negotiate power delivery.
cthalupa 10 hours ago [-]
Never had this issue with any of my MBP. I never even have magsafe available, couldn't tell you where a USB-C to magsafe cable is in my house if my life depended on it.
dansquizsoft 9 hours ago [-]
While not quite what you are saying here, I have found that I like usbc charging on my 15in m3 MacBook Air way more than its magsafe. The magsafe is always falling out as soon as I move the computer on and off my lap and is another cable that I can only use for one purpose. Nowhere near as good as it was back in the early 2010s macbook days...
jazzyjackson 4 hours ago [-]
They are saying they don’t own a MagSafe cable and have never experienced the above anecdote of a MacBook that was too dead to be charged by USBC alone. Likewise, my M1 MacBook Pro has only ever been charged by USBC and I let it die all the way often.
10000truths 9 hours ago [-]
In my specific case, the laptop was already at low (<10%) battery when I closed the lid, and it sat for several days without a top-up.
paaradise 1 hours ago [-]
Seems weird. What charger? AT least 60W USBC?
daemin 4 hours ago [-]
I would have thought that the default 5V coming through the cable should be enough to power on the chip and negotiate power delivery though?
Or was it actually working but charging only on 5V and taking a long time to wake up?
StilesCrisis 8 hours ago [-]
I've owned many MacBooks and have never experienced this. I usually just dump the MagSafe in the attic and use USB-C for everything.
acchow 11 hours ago [-]
I had a similar issue with the Nikon Z5 full frame camera. It can be charged via the built-in USB-C socket only if the battery still has some charge.
If the battery is fully dead, you have to remove it and charge it using the separate battery charger.
That means you can't travel with only a USB-C cable.
cobalt 11 hours ago [-]
there is a hidden paperclip button you can unlock it with
jansan 10 hours ago [-]
MacBooks recently had this bug that you had to connect it to LAN in order to initialize it, or return it to the shop. It's not all perfect in Apple world.
Still, Windows is a problem here. I wonder what the monthly fee is to get rid of the ads?
StilesCrisis 8 hours ago [-]
Not sure what you're talking about. Almost no one has Ethernet anymore. This would be national news-level failure.
The backrooms version of an Apple Store… I’ve been to precisely one and it was, indeed, a sad experience.
You’d also need to pay me a lot to use Windows. I even have an assigned Windows virtual desktop at work, but I also have a MacBook for actual work - the VDI is only used for the stuff that doesn’t quite work right on Macs.
joelshep 12 hours ago [-]
Interesting. I've had exactly the opposite experience. The Surfaces I've owned (3 so far, over the last 8 years) have been much more reliable than the other Windows laptops I've used over the same time period (mostly at work). To the point I bought myself one for work and didn't bother trying to expense it because I was so happy to have a laptop I could rely on (and I could use it for personal use once it was "retired"). Not invalidating your experiences, but they've been really solid for me.
yndoendo 5 hours ago [-]
You have to pay me to use Microsoft. There software has become garbage and alternatives are far more better. I cannot think of a single product they have I will be willing to use personally.
Hardware, Frameworks has replaced any other OEM in the market for me. You have to pay me to use Dell, HP, Microsoft, Asus, Apple, ...
paj26 1 hours ago [-]
I similarly bought a surface laptop during Covid WFH - better Remote Desktop experience for the windows shop I was working at. Assumed that spending the extra for premium Microsoft hardware, “it just works” - not at all. I ended up using my Mac’s USB-C Ethernet dongle because the dock would just lose the Ethernet driver. Insane for an ecosystem fully owned by one company, but very telling of the company.
AustinDev 12 hours ago [-]
Counter-point the Surface Studio was one of the best PCs for drafting and design we've ever owned.
tortilla 11 hours ago [-]
and love the 3:2 monitor aspect ratio
AustinDev 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah that was really the cherry on top. Just sublime to use.
dboreham 13 hours ago [-]
I've used surfaces of various kinds for more than 10 years. Overall they've been significantly less troublesome than the laptops from other major brands I've had over the same period. I put this down to the dogfood eating nature of the Surface. Whoever is responsible for the sound interface driver in a Dell laptop is unlikely to be a user of that laptop and even less likely to have the capability to get Dell to ship a fixed version. Microsoft however I suspect uses Surfacen extensively in house. In this respect it makes the Surface products more akin to Apple computers. The same is probably true for high end Chromebooks. I never used a dock, fwiw.
tanjtanjtanj 13 hours ago [-]
A couple anecdotes from me:
A (quite large) company that I worked for stopped offering surfaces to employees after the average lifetime over the 3 years they offered them was under 1 year. We even had a terrible batch of Dells at the same time that still handily outlived the surfaces.
Small sample size (N=3) but, nobody I know that works at Microsoft uses a surface or any other Microsoft branded laptop.
RankingMember 13 hours ago [-]
> Whoever is responsible for the sound interface driver in a Dell laptop is unlikely to be a user of that laptop and even less likely to have the capability to get Dell to ship a fixed version
Oh boy, don't get me started on Dell haha. Sure, they've got a better service model (people come to you), but at least in my experience they contract with service people who service multiple brands who can't help but shit-talk Dell. Not very confidence inspiring, particularly when the cause of the issue ends up being a connector not being fully plugged in from the factory.
szundi 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
musictubes 8 hours ago [-]
I have never used any of the Surface products but I do remember how people liked the almost no questions asked replacement policy for them at the Microsoft stores. I knew a guy that worked there and he said it was an all day occurrence.
Krasnol 4 hours ago [-]
I've been managing dozens of Surfaces for work.
Never had any issues with them. Solid hardware and a good alternative to the Lenovo Thinkpads we're also using but "don't look so nice".
866-RON-0-FEZ 8 hours ago [-]
Thunderbolt docks being absolute dogshit is universal across the market, it's not limited to one manufacturer.
Apple doesn't have this problem because they don't even make docks they're so problematic. Enjoy dongles, Mac users.
Modern docks usually run their own internal OS and require frequent reboots to even attempt to appear stable.
The worst part is most use docks to get Ethernet, but docks nearly universally use low quality USB Ethernet controllers internally (vs PCI) making the whole exercise rather pointless.
robotresearcher 5 hours ago [-]
Apple’s displays are docks in that they supply power, usb ports, camera, sound, and recently thunderbolt pass through. They put a big chunk of an old iPad in there to run the thing. Overkill but they own the electronics and software.
rconti 8 hours ago [-]
I've been super happy with my Caldigit TS3 for my various Macs.
musictubes 8 hours ago [-]
Is it too late to point out that what most people call dongles are actually adapters? A dongle doesn’t have any pass through.
aksss 9 hours ago [-]
I remember these issues from earlier Surfaces. I was not impressed. Latest ones are pretty dope tho, IME.
smrtinsert 11 hours ago [-]
I also had a bad experience, but I'm willing to throw all that out of the window after seeing that it had 128 unified memory on a CUDA enabled device. This is an AI native dream machine from what I can tell. I'm almost obligated to buy one.
regexorcist 8 hours ago [-]
Sadly memory bandwidth, which is the bottleneck for AI, is pretty disappointing.
eboy 4 hours ago [-]
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sandreas 4 hours ago [-]
While I somehow like the fact that Microsoft is trying to compete, their problem stays the same: There are too many people involved.
- Nvidia
- Mediatek
- Microsoft
- Windows team
- Surface team
- Marketing team
- ...
The main advantage of Apple is and will be, that they control the hardware AND the software / firmware completely and can make devices that feel completely cohesive.
That's the reason Framework has an advantage over all these Ad driven companies. They are working together with the Linux / Kernel developers to make their products fit - however it is still lacking the completely cohesive nature of the product, because they still loosely depend on Intel / AMD and other Hardware manufacturers.
An example: Every Apple device with a headphone jack since 2013 (probably long before) including iPods, iPhones and MacBooks has that little proprietary chip with ultrasonic chirp authentication integrated to control playback and volume by the EarPods headphone remote. Now there is a USB-C to 3.5mm Adapter as well as USB-C EarPods that still support this... No Windows Laptop has ever had this. The funny thing is, that Linux now supports these USB-C Apple thingies because they register as input and output devices and that the Apple 3.5mm Adapters now also support other brands headphones with Android.
My guess is, that Apple did not invent this to prevent others from implementing it or have something proprietary, but just because the iPod Shuffle used the same connector for Headphones and USB (see page 8 in [1]), so they somehow had to ensure, what type of cable is connected to prevent damage to the iPod.
Another interesting fact:
The iPod classic 2009 does support some of the features (play/pause, next, previous), but lacks support for fast forward and rewind (click + hold, 2 clicks + hold).
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...
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.
jwrallie 8 hours ago [-]
Depending on how easy it is to run Linux on this as opposed to the new MacBooks may make this attractive for Linux users.
Anyway, the whole trend to change from x86 to Arm on laptops is bad news for compatibility. It might be that the era where you can download an iso and expect Linux to run on a random laptop is over, and Linux users will have to stick to only a couple of devices with well known support. Did Valve release a laptop yet?
N-Krause 1 hours ago [-]
> Depending on how easy it is to run Linux on this as opposed to the new MacBooks may make this attractive for Linux users.
Why? Just to get ARM? Buy a brand that actually works with the kernel and distros to get their hardware working with linux. Get your money to the people that actually help the software ecosystem.
When you spent premium, put your money where it makes a difference.
jwrallie 1 hours ago [-]
For laptops, what I had in mind is excellent power management and efficiency, it seems to correlate with ARM but I think most people don’t really care for the details of architecture.
daemin 4 hours ago [-]
One concern I've heard about the move to ARM cores is that it is done in order to lock down the devices more so they're more like a phone rather than a computer.
vbezhenar 2 hours ago [-]
Recent Surface ARM laptops do not seem to be locked in any way.
jo-m 3 hours ago [-]
What does locking down the device have to do with the CPU architecture?
coffe2mug 3 hours ago [-]
ARM based devices don't have boot anything you want like x86 platform - in practice.
tw04 8 hours ago [-]
I get it’s not what you’re asking for, but WSL on windows is a lot more friendly than anything Apple has done in the last decade to assist in Linux support.
rogerrogerr 5 hours ago [-]
WSL is 90% of a good product. They just quit improving it too early. Managing file permissions between Windows and WSL is a nightmare, it does horrific things to your filesystem if it ever runs out of memory, at least once every day a teammate is hitting a readonly filesystem issue. A team of some of the smartest people I know tried to smooth it over enough to be useful and we couldn’t do it.
At my bigco, we have all but given up on it and moved everyone to EC2 or Macs for non-Windows workloads.
al_borland 8 hours ago [-]
WSL is inside Windows. I haven't found the need for anything like this on macOS, as it's Unix and I can just install stuff with Homebrew. When the Unix version of some package didn't do what something else I was running expected, I was able to install coreutils in just a few seconds and carry on.
It seems the issue on Apple hardware is the fight to get Linux booting on bare metal with full support (what Apple supplied for Windows with Bootcamp when moving to Intel), which is the fight Asahi Linux is waging. Is WSL aiding in getting Linux booting from bare metal on proprietary hardware?
2001zhaozhao 8 hours ago [-]
WSL for me was literally a gateway drug to switching fully to Linux. It did work, but took extra system memory, drained battery life, and caused intermittent suspend/resume issues. Just not worth dealing with compared to running native Linux.
tw04 8 hours ago [-]
WSL provides a seamless filesystem experience between windows and Linux which is more than I can say for MacOS. And it’s supported by MS, not a community add-on.
People downvoting me because Microsoft are just silly. It is literally undeniable that Microsoft has done more to provide Linux support in the windows ecosystem than Apple has with MacOS. The closest thing Apple has done to “support” Linux is add a hypervisor without a GUI that they’ll tolerate you using but don’t really support. Try opening up a case with Apple about a Linux issue running a hypervisor.framework Linux vm and let me know how it goes…
Microsoft will absolutely support issues you run into with WSl.
kube-system 1 hours ago [-]
> WSL provides a seamless filesystem experience between windows and Linux which is more than I can say for MacOS.
They must have made major improvements since the last time I used it then, because filesystem issues was the #1 reason I moved away from WSL
denysvitali 2 hours ago [-]
No. I *don't want Windows*. WSL is not an option for me.
In fact, Linux is the only option, and it's what I chose.
Thankfully AI nowadays does an amazing job in issue diagnostic and resolution, and even patches the kernel to make stuff work, so this is the viable solution.
drnick1 7 hours ago [-]
But what is the point of WSL if you can get run the real thing, without performance penalty, bloatware and spyware? WinBoat makes more sense if there is the odd program that does not have a substitute.
wolvesechoes 2 hours ago [-]
> without performance penalty, bloatware and spyware?
And then you install multiple Electron apps.
micromacrofoot 8 hours ago [-]
Apple doesn't have to do anything because it's already unix
pmontra 2 hours ago [-]
It's usually enough but not always. Sometimes it happened that my customers using MacOS or WSL were not able to pass some tests or reproduce some bugs. That was due to some differences between the userland of the Linux servers, which are our build and deployment targets, and what they have on their Macs. I work on a Debian laptop (it used to be Ubuntu) and I can always run on it whatever sw runs on the servers. The languages are Python and Ruby, some bash.
The developers on WSL (the Python project, Django) tend to have a simplified environment. For example they don't run Celery (I never investigated why) and run all the background jobs synchronously or they don't run those jobs at all.
The ones on Macs (the Ruby project, Rails) have the full environment but I remember that they skipped some integration tests because they always failed on their Macs (Capybara and Chromedriver, I don't remember the details.) I was the one running the full test suite. By the way: all the CI services I used in the last 10 years are particularly bad at running those kind of tests. Maybe it's the amount of memory or the timing of the operations and those CI VMs (or containers?) don't play well with the assumptions of the test frameworks. Any language, any framework.
tw04 8 hours ago [-]
Which doesn’t make it Linux, which is what op wants. It’s based on a BSD-based mach kernel. You might as well say someone asking for Linux should just run Irix, because hey, it’s UNIX!
t-3 5 hours ago [-]
Who cares about the kernel? That only matters for hardware support, which is going to be much better with macOS on mac hardware. Macs can easily run 99%+ of the software that people use linux for, because *nix. The only real reasons to require linux in this situation are ideological (free software/GPL vs proprietary Apple) and aesthetic (you're used to X/wayland/systemd/whatever system software and don't like Apple's solution). It would definitely be nice if Apple helped people out by documenting and releasing source for the bootloader and firmware to make it easier to install third-party OSes on their hardware... but they're not a hacker-hobbyist nonprofit doing it for the love, so why would they?
xyst 7 hours ago [-]
And you lost me at proprietary Microsoft drivers.
No way I am spending any money on this future brick.
denysvitali 2 hours ago [-]
I mean, between Qualcomm proprietary drivers and Microsoft, I don't know what's worse.
Thanks god reverse engineering with AI is a thing now, so the path forward looks nicer. But still...
Anyways, the Surface Pro X is such a nice HW. Too bad the company who built it is so bad.
wolvesechoes 2 hours ago [-]
> Too bad the software is awful. Thankfully the Linux Surface community is pretty strong.
And how Linux fix the software problem?
denysvitali 2 hours ago [-]
Running Linux on Surface works. It's not perfect, but it solves the problem. Windows is gone from my Surface Pro X since roughly 2 months after buying it.
I really hope for competition’s sake that Microsoft makes some reforms and cleans up Windows.
Because us nerds like to say “the software is awful,” but really, the bones of Windows are not awful at all. It generally works well, it just takes a lot of work to get all of the BS out of your way.
If you’re looking for open source friendly, just buy a Framework 13 Pro and be done with it.
By the way, the other news from Computex is Dell and HP’s Macbook Neo competition, and they really look legit. So, Apple is waking up the PC industry a bit, showing them that they are endangered. Hopefully Microsoft gets the memo.
denysvitali 2 hours ago [-]
No, Windows is awful. Closed source , buggy and filled with performance bottlenecks. Let's not even talk about the whole requirement for a Microsoft account, TPM or the fact that it's basically a spyware with ads. Why the hell would I want a Candy Crush Soda ad in my OS?!!!
ActorNightly 8 hours ago [-]
>Too bad the software is awful.
I swear, people just live in their echochambers these days. Win 11 pro + WSL2 is literally the best, do it all OS you can get these days.
Most peoples experience is with Windows home, which ironically is about as intrusive as Mac OS. When you get Windows Pro, you can disable all the annoying AI/Advertising shit that comes with Windows, and at that point, you get a system that is cleaner than Mac OS.
Then you install WSL2, which is a full linux environment down to being able to run graphical apps, use gpus natively, and even talk to usb ports.
Ive been on Win11 Pro for 4 years. The only major things that are installed under windows for me are VPN Software, Steam (with games), Ollama, and Browser. Everything else, I run under WSL2.
rrgok 7 minutes ago [-]
W11 Pro is awesome. I think currently it is the best OS.
Professional softwares, WSL2 and awesome native apps (Dopus, AHK2...)
I always try Linux but the fragmented nature just is not for me for desktop usage.
HexDecOctBin 7 hours ago [-]
> you can disable all the annoying AI/Advertising shit
What Stockholm Syndrome is this? Why should you have to do this in the first place?
ActorNightly 4 hours ago [-]
Are you pretending that Apple doesn't spam you with endless advertisements?
VerifiedReports 50 minutes ago [-]
They don't. Anyone who says otherwise doesn't use a Mac.
HexDecOctBin 2 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't know.
fortran77 4 hours ago [-]
I agree. I'm running Windows 11 Arm on an Asus Zenbook A16 right now. Lighting fast. I'm typing this comment while I'm compiling code and having Claude analyze packets coming from Wireshark that's on this machine. It's got 18 cores and 48GB of integrated memory, great battery life, and an OLED screen for $1699
I run Linux in a VM and Docker on it, and WSL2. No problems with anything.
I don't see any ads. I turn a number of "intrusive" features off, but nothing is hacked; these are just settings you can switch off.
(I am running Pro, though.)
denysvitali 2 hours ago [-]
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dartharva 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
VerifiedReports 54 minutes ago [-]
Windows is such offensive trash now that it doesn't matter what you run it on. NO WAY.
timpera 16 minutes ago [-]
"Offensive trash" is a bit much, most organizations use it without too many issues. I think it's pretty good!
darkstarsys 12 hours ago [-]
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.
datahack 5 minutes ago [-]
Combines the usability of Cortana with the legendary reliability of Surface. Order now.
iaaan 13 hours ago [-]
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...
chis 12 hours ago [-]
It's also shockingly twitter-nerd-coded. "The cure for token anxiety", it advertises. To be honest it's hard to see why anyone would buy this product so maybe they decided to take a wild swing with the marketing. The only use is people who really, really, want to run models locally vs getting a much cheaper and higher performance result from a cloud host.
illiac786 12 hours ago [-]
Higher performance, I agree, but cheaper?
I didn’t check how much this costs, but if you use AI locally a lot, it’s going to be amortised pretty quickly. Burning 100$ a month on tokens has become insanely easy. I remember when it was unimaginable for me…
chis 4 hours ago [-]
Speculation is it’ll cost at least $6k for 128GB
ku1ik 1 days ago [-]
„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.
EagnaIonat 1 days ago [-]
The emphasis on the fans kicking off also had a bit of a turn-off.
thewebguyd 15 hours ago [-]
Can't believe they led with that in the promo video. They potentially have whats finally a competitor to an apple silicon MBP, and they lead with fans?? I love my macbooks precisely because they are silent (among other things, obviously).
leonidasv 11 hours ago [-]
When I clicked, I thought that it was going to smash the turbine blades from the animation to suggest something like "all the performance without the thermals," but nope, they just became laptop fans. And seconds later, it started blowing heat/steam out of them!
That's the most uncanny marketing for an ARM laptop I've ever seen.
bahmboo 11 hours ago [-]
Yes the MBP is very quiet when doing easy stuff but run games and heavy duty software and those fans are required to get work done.
mort96 9 hours ago [-]
They are. But the experience of using a MacBook Pro for pretty much any purpose other than gaming is that they’re entirely silent. To the point that it’s an exceptional circumstance when a build job is so intense and so long running that fans kick in.
As such, when you’re marketing your competing product, maybe don’t lead with the fans.
russelg 5 hours ago [-]
Understandable. But if you were attempting to do the same thing as the RTX Spark on a MacBook (i.e. run local models), you would also definitely be hearing those fans. Perhaps not the best marketing play, but it is true to the real experience of using the product for this use case.
3 hours ago [-]
cobalt 7 hours ago [-]
fwiw, I have a snapdragon X laptop running with windows. It basically never runs the fans (at least at audible levels), and I sometimes sit with it on a blanket in bed
ActorNightly 7 hours ago [-]
Some of us like our hardware to last, we don't go out and buy the latest and greatest unrepairable MBP for the sole reason of flexing on our friends and peers while making a big deal about how its silent and can run large local llms at 0.5 tok/sec.
z3ratul163071 4 hours ago [-]
they had competitor also in the Snapdragon X. however the OS is ruined beyond recognition, so no matter what they do, the combo will be bad.
8 hours ago [-]
sandworm101 1 days ago [-]
Ya, i dont know of anyone wanting to run very large AI models in a windows environment. Or, frankly, on a laptop. Why not just VPN into a dedicated server?
thewebguyd 15 hours ago [-]
With BUILD happening tomorrow, I suspect Microsoft is going to have some stuff about local AI there with MS Foundry on Windows/Foundry Local. The timing of this announcement a day before BUILD is obviously intentional.
Suddenly all the Windows K2 stuff makes sense, but I doubt it'll be enough. Its too little too late for Microsoft.
satvikpendem 24 hours ago [-]
I do. I can take my laptop anywhere I want, for example to a coffee shop and run a coding model while eating a croissant without worrying about an internet connection, as the term local model implies.
taffydavid 23 hours ago [-]
And you can warm up the croissant by just placing it on the trackpad while you wait for the LLM to finish
nozzlegear 12 hours ago [-]
The coffee shop doesn't have wifi?
fragmede 9 hours ago [-]
It's not very good and SSH is blocked.
drnick1 7 hours ago [-]
I always use a VPN (to my own home server) for this reason (and other reasons) when connecting to public WiFi.
whywhywhywhy 24 hours ago [-]
How much does a dedicated server with 128GB vram cost a month.
undersuit 11 hours ago [-]
How well will the local LLM run when your laptop is in your bag while you're walking around?
I could be wrong but my understanding is that 24/7 dedicated servers are wildly economically unviable. The reason cloud tends to cost less than local today (other than the subsidization) is because you aren't running models 24/7. So like 6 hours of cloud per weekday might beat the yearly cost of building local machines, but it's not in the same universe if you're running 24/7, as evidenced by two months of H200 rental costing more than the DGX Spark this Laptop is built out of.
mort96 9 hours ago [-]
I mean not that much? You buy the hardware once and then it’s just running for many years
sandworm101 24 hours ago [-]
Less than this laptop.
quitspamming 15 hours ago [-]
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).
ilamont 11 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Everyone except Bill Belichick, who famously hurled his Microsoft Surface to the ground when he was first forced to use it:
> 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
Isn’t that what this is? (Or is supposed to be?)
hnuser123456 11 hours ago [-]
I don't see any real explanation of the CPU in this thing. Is it going to be Grace like on GB200 and Spark?
I would be happy to eat my words "later this year" (per their timeline) but past Surface interactions lead me to believe it will be more of the same as in the past. Bad performance, bad battery life, bad build quality, bad compatibility.
For the sake of competition and options, I really hope to be proven wrong... I just wouldn't bet on it.
dpark 15 hours ago [-]
> bad compatibility
I’m curious what this means. Bad compatibility with Windows software? Or bad compatibility with Linux?
steveBK123 14 hours ago [-]
In some ways.. since Microsoft is known for maintaining backwards compatibility whereas Apple is not, I think 3rd party devs are just not incentivized to care about Windows ARM compatibility.
Further, it doesn't seem like Microsoft made x86 emulation as seamless or performant as Apple did during the various MacOS CPU architecture changes.
Every use case I've looked at has been a minefield of app incompatibility and poor performance under x86 emulation.
I was referring mainly to Windows software, Adobe Illustrator and InDesign were major pain points on the Windows side. Sure though, add Linux compatibility to the list of things that were an issue too.
vulcan01 14 hours ago [-]
This is an ARM device, so presumably compatibility with third-party software.
bigyabai 15 hours ago [-]
Sounds like you aren't familiar with Nvidia's dedication to low-power ARM SOCs. Ever heard of the Nintendo Switch before? The Tegra inside that is a 15w TDP gaming SOC. And it supports CUDA (somehow).
hackyhacky 15 hours ago [-]
> Sounds like you aren't familiar with Nvidia's dedication to low-power ARM SOCs. Ever heard of the Nintendo Switch before? The Tegra inside that is a 15w TDP gaming SOC. And it supports CUDA (somehow).
I think that GP comment is not intending to throw shade at ARM SOCs (many of which are quite nice, including those from Apple an Qualcomm), but specifically the Microsoft products built on them.
bigyabai 14 hours ago [-]
I'm mostly surprised by the insinuation of bad performance or battery life. That's what will be ostensibly solved by putting an Nvidia SOC where a Ryzen or Intel one used to be.
rsynnott 5 minutes ago [-]
Has this chip actually been used in any real product yet? Nvidia has, er, a bit of a historical problem with overpromising and underdelivering with their mobile chips (in particular see the Tegra 2 and Denver); I would be cautious until there are real benchmarks. It's hard to describe any previous Nvidia general-purpose mobile chip as anything other than a failure.
sroussey 14 hours ago [-]
Haha, if only it were so easy. Hardware is… eh… hard.
pier25 14 hours ago [-]
I owned a Surface Book v1 for a couple of days before returning it. It was a garbage device with tons of issues. I will say it had amazing keyboard though.
MisterTea 15 hours ago [-]
I have a surface Go gen 1 and its quote snappy for such a machine though I rarely use it. I personally would not touch an MS Arm device.
chocochunks 11 hours ago [-]
That's what modern Surfaces are. The consumer models have been Qualcomm SnapDragon based since 2024, they are pretty fast, battery life is pretty good and you can do whatever you want. Although native Linux support isn't quite there but I mean MS isn't exactly making it their priority.
xyst 7 hours ago [-]
Skip proprietary Microshit. Go straight to a framework laptop. Load up your favorite distro and never have to worry about poor repairability or non-upgradeable/soldered components
a_vanderbilt 20 hours ago [-]
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.
lnenad 20 hours ago [-]
It's not a valid comparison. Up until this (theoretical) machine, the playing field wasn't equal. Windows laptops in general couldn't really compare in many aspects with Macs since M1 (outside of gaming), batteries were horrible due to bad efficiency, performance wasn't amazing even with the best SKUs, and the distance between the vendor and Microsoft was always impacting different aspects of the finished product. Even with the ARM Surface, the ecosystem still wasn't ready for ARM, the performance was lacking. If this device doesn't cost an arm and a leg, it will offer something that is really the first instance of a Windows device that's a better choice than an M-Macbook in many ways (at least on paper).
threetonesun 19 hours ago [-]
Back when Macs were suffering under poor Intel chips there were valid competitors in battery life and size and weight from Dell. Except they ran Windows, and the trackpad was never as good as a Mac, and you'd find yourself searching for driver updates for things like the built in camera, which also wasn't very good because Dell doesn't have an entire division building amazing tiny cameras for phones.
Microsoft maybe had a chance when they decided to build their own Surface tablets/laptops but trying to make an OS that worked for that but also worked for your corporate issue Lenovo laptops is (as Apple seems to know), impossible.
pathartl 18 hours ago [-]
They were only suffering and had great battery life because they were kneecapping their own machines with improper cooling. It's pretty obvious their last few Intel laptops were intentionally designed so that the M1 would look better in almost every way. It was still an incredible chip, but I personally didn't believe that it was a fair comparison.
loloquwowndueo 19 hours ago [-]
> Dell. Except they ran Windows,
Dell XPS series have been available with Ubuntu since 2012 at the very least.
lnenad 19 hours ago [-]
I mean, yeah ok? Not sure what your point is? This isn't directly related to this machine though. First Nvidia SoC and a much better vertical integration with now non trivial amount of experience in hardware stands to offer something that wasn't avaliable before.
fatata123 17 hours ago [-]
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bryanlarsen 18 hours ago [-]
> Up until this (theoretical) machine,
A little earlier than that. With Intel's Lunar Lake / Panther Lake, x86 laptops are again in the same ballpark as a Mac efficiency-wise. There are reputable reviews where people are getting 16-20 hours of battery life out of them doing real work, in both Windows & Linux.
M5 is probably still better, but at least the x86 machines don't embarrass themselves any more.
thewebguyd 12 hours ago [-]
They still run a bit hotter and louder.
Outside of that though, there's still hit and miss quality on the PC OEM side of things. 1080p screens are still the default for a ton of models, even higher end ones, and the OEMs keep missing the point of why people prefer Apple hardware.
Several are coming out with 8GB machines now at macbook Neo price points with....1920x1200 screens, probably a low quality panel, and questionable trackpad. Again, missing the entire point of the Neo.
wiseowise 19 hours ago [-]
I have Surface copilot whatever. The battery life is great. OS is a complete garbage. No amount of HW thrown at windows will fix its issues.
drfloyd51 19 hours ago [-]
That is a lot of misdirection that doesn’t address the main point of the of OC.
This fancy new device still runs windows. And that is a non starter from many people.
spjt 19 hours ago [-]
As if the reason people don't like Windows is because the ads on their desktop weren't loading fast enough.
stetrain 19 hours ago [-]
ARM Windows laptops are a pretty different scenario now than when the Surface came out. They have pretty seamless x86/64 emulation built in similar to when Apple started their Mac transition to ARM. In contrast the OG ARM Surface didn't run any existing Windows software.
Most people could pick up a modern Windows ARM laptop and everything they do would work just fine, just potentially with less heat and longer battery life than their older Windows laptop.
The primary annoyances would be Windows itself and its ad and engagement driven UI reminding you about Copilot and Edge every chance it gets.
trollbridge 19 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't call it "seamless"; a lot of Windows applications don't work. An example is some software packages common in the construction industry which want to install all kinds of ancient x86-only thing likes old ODBC drivers. So that wipes out one of the compelling reasons to have a Windows laptop. Quickbooks (Enterprise Desktop) is another example of one; not supported on ARM, although with some hacking you can get it to sort of work.
layer8 11 hours ago [-]
And for many others, the appeal of a Windows PC is that it doesn’t run macOS. But I agree that ARM is still a caveat for those machines, in particular long-term driver support.
usernamed7 10 hours ago [-]
this reads to me as a false equivalence. Choosing a Mac is opting into a specific alternative. Choosing Windows is just taking the default.
Marsymars 9 hours ago [-]
What do you mean by the OG ARM Surface? The Surface RT from 2012, or the later Qualcomm-powered ones? The Qualcomm-powered ones are vastly more capable than than Surface RT was.
I've been using a Qualcomm ARM laptop for the past year, and pretty much everything I use runs natively on it.
xyst 7 hours ago [-]
Very true, it’s a shame apple software and OS has gone to shit lately.
I have been leaning more into framework myself. My current devices are aging out but I am in a place where I am fully separated from apples walled in garden so switching is easy
ramesh31 19 hours ago [-]
>For many, the appeal of a Mac is that it isn't running Windows
Pretty much. I broke down and finally bought my first Windows machine in over a decade to play Subnautica 2. It was so infuriating to use I returned it a week later. You literally have to hack it with shell commands to bypass Microsoft login now. Never again.
pqtyw 17 hours ago [-]
> You literally have to hack it with shell commands
Well on macOS you need to do the same to install and/or run applications so its not that fat ahead.
newdee 9 hours ago [-]
This is false in my experience. You can use the cli to clear the quarantine bit, or you can take the (admittedly annoying) trip to system preferences to override. This is rarely something I need to do; most software is already signed and notarised.
Also not at all equivalent to being forced into linking an online account before being allowed to use your computer at all.
toraway 8 hours ago [-]
You can still bypass the login requirement for Win 11 and that annoyance only happens once during install vs. every time you try to run a non-notarized app.
It’s easily in my top 3 most hated things about my MacBook. Plus, knowing Apple and the history of that “feature”, it will only ratchet towards becoming even more of a pain over time (it was actually tolerable back before they removed the hotkey to bypass).
For me, after running Win11debloat one time Win 11 disappears into the background 95% of the time, like an OS should. Unfortunately I don’t the luxury of doing something equivalent on MacOS without completely disabling SIP.
qzx_pierri 8 hours ago [-]
Stop giving Microsoft free passes. The fact that you even need a workaround is the issue.
thewebguyd 7 hours ago [-]
Local account on Win11 isn't a workaround, its a fully supported option but only on Windows 11 Pro. Its a work around on home edition. The UI to get there on Pro isn't intuitive (Other Options->Domain Join Instead->Create local account), but it's there and 100% supported.
Still unacceptable for home edition users, but Microsoft has been segregating its userbase and features into Home/Pro/Enterprise for decades.
newtonianrules 13 hours ago [-]
Subnautica 2 runs great on Linux via Steam/Proton. My HTPC/Steam Machine and gaming rig are both running Linux now. ;)
expedition32 19 hours ago [-]
How do you use an Apple device without taking part in their ecosystem?
zuhsetaqi 19 hours ago [-]
You can use a Mac just fine without using any services from Apple.
18 hours ago [-]
Schiendelman 19 hours ago [-]
Their ecosystem is, frankly, much better. I won't bother with Windows but I certainly don't mind icloud.
evolve2k 19 hours ago [-]
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.
oaiey 3 hours ago [-]
The whole forum here is bashing Windows for being thermal / performance disaster compared to apple products. I do not see how a laptop running Linux will evade the same fate (at least the bashing :).
adamtaylor_13 12 hours ago [-]
The biggest problem here is the operating system. If they could fix that, this might be enticing.
didibus 12 hours ago [-]
If they put Linux on it I'd buy it, but with Windows 11, no thanks.
cowmix 12 hours ago [-]
I bought the Snapdragon Elite X over a year ago based on the promises of Qualcomm to bring solid Linux drivers at some point. Fast forward to today, Linux for that SoC is still a hot mess.
IshKebab 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah never buy based on future promises.
mft_ 11 hours ago [-]
Maybe I'm being overly hopeful, but given the DGX Spark only runs Linux, and this is apparently a sibling in a laptop form factor, maybe it won't be too difficult to get Linux up and running effectively? Probably (a lot) more easily than Asahi on Apple Silicon, anyway.
gaboot 10 hours ago [-]
I'm sure someone can get the CPU/GPU running but things like wifi/bluetooth/USB ports will be rough since they will presumably integrated with the chip in a non-standardized ARM way. Almost all of the ARM laptops are basically unusable with GNU/Linux.
fragmede 10 hours ago [-]
Which ones have you tried? Right now I'm on an MediaTek Kompanio Ultra 910.and wifi/USB/sleep/hibernate works. DT is going to be the death of ARM, but the real challenge has been to get the GPU to work under Firefox.
2OEH8eoCRo0 10 hours ago [-]
One of the hassles with ARM machines is that you might technically be able to boot Linux on it but your Thunderbolt, display out, wireless, etc. will lack support and not work.
That's not Linux, that's a VM running Linux on Windows. Not very satisfying if you want the real thing, or want a real Linux DE.
ActorNightly 4 hours ago [-]
>that's a VM running Linux on Windows
While thats true, its not what you think it is. WSL1 was VM in a traditional sense, it ran under windows. When you install WSL2, it basically changes your computer core OS to be a bare metal hypervisor (specialized version of Hyper V). Its the same concept as any cloud provider letting people provision VMs that run at native performance on the actual hardware. So WLS2 can talk to hardware like Graphics cards natively, and request ram on demand.
You can also install windows managers in WSL2. For example https://github.com/Lamarcke/i3-on-wsl. You can also install rainmeter on windows https://www.rainmeter.net/ if you want customizability. You can make windows look exactly like mac os with that.
oaiey 3 hours ago [-]
WSL 1 was not a VM in a traditional sense. WSL 1 was a Windows subsystem which translated Linux syscalls into NT syscalls (e.g. file open). NT has capabilities there from its origins in the 90s supporting in theory user spaces for posix/os2/...
jtrn 10 hours ago [-]
Indeed. Never buying a windows computer ever again. Every time I use it I get angry.
carlosjobim 8 hours ago [-]
Hopefully it will be possible to hackintosh it. You can hackintosh almost any computer these days.
jlarocco 11 hours ago [-]
Agreed. I'm trying to buy a laptop right now (Lenovo's checkout refuses to take my card?!?), and I would try one of these if it could run Debian.
Will never buy one if it's Windows only, though.
xyst 7 hours ago [-]
They could fix that but that means losing market share. Microshit shareholders don’t like that
simonsarris 18 hours ago [-]
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.
thewebguyd 15 hours ago [-]
Same experience. I still have one of the Snaprdagon X1 Elite surface laptops for the few times i need a windows machine, it's nice. It's about the closest you'll get to a MacBook in Windows land.
Also unlike the rest of HN, I don't have complete hatred of Windows. I wouldn't mind picking up one of these, but I'm almost certain the price is going to be somewhere between unaffordable and completely ridiculous.
shlewis 24 hours ago [-]
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.
taffydavid 23 hours ago [-]
When will these companies realize nobody wants to talk to an AI? The reason we begrudgingly pick up the phone is because some problem is not solvable through the website. The last thing we want at that point is an automated system parroting the website back to us, or telling us to go there ourselves
j16sdiz 20 hours ago [-]
They don't care.
Support call center is operation cost. They did they math and think this will save them more money than losing a few angry or disappointed customer.
Night_Thastus 14 hours ago [-]
And they're right. If terrible support were an obstacle even slightly, they'd have all gone out of business decades ago.
mysterydip 22 hours ago [-]
I guess if you see customer service as a checkbox you have to have, and also a cost center skimming from your bottom line, you will do whatever to make it as cheap and hostile as possible.
bryanrasmussen 14 hours ago [-]
Some percentage of telephone service, service chat etc. is stuff that could be easily found via the website, I know 98% of the time when I call it is just not possible to resolve through reading the documentation on someone's site (the last 2% it is, but the site sucks so much I don't want to try) and I'm sure it's the same for you and probably for most of HN, but having worked at a help and documentation service for a major telephony provider in Denmark I do know there are statistics that in fact show most of the stuff could be found on the site, people just don't want to take the time.
At that point the main problem for a service is to figure out when they are dealing with someone who could solve the problem through the website, and when they are dealing with someone whose problem is too complicated to be solved that way. Although it also seems like many people don't want to spend the money on doing that analysis and serving their customers, as you have pointed out.
pancsta 21 hours ago [-]
Linux surface is awful, but also not actually Surface Surface. I did it, it sucked. I went back to windows and everything works primo, exempt its windows. So while I agree, I dont. PSA: wayvnc
jbj 12 hours ago [-]
What made it awful? I have been using a Surface Pro with fedora as my main portable device for the last 2 years and enjoyed it.
theandrewbailey 13 hours ago [-]
I work at an ewaste recycling company. We're inundated with Surfaces often, from Gos and Pros, to Hubs (the TV-sized touchscreens). You haven't played solitare until you've played it on an 84-inch touchscreen.
I use a Surface Go at home (running BlissOS) and a Surface Pro as my work "laptop" (running Debian KDE). I forget which generations they are, but they're probably 8-ish years old, so if they haven't died yet, they're probably good. They both work well for what I use them for, and are better laptops than actual laptops for what I need a laptop to do.
frankfrank13 13 hours ago [-]
Hilarious, "Designed for serviceability" is one of the headline features about 3/4 down
In recent times support is part of what I consider when I buy Apple products. It is by no means the best but I can always get a human at whatever time of day and they will listen to my problem and attempt to address it.
But as for getting rubber feet, I'm sure it's some backwards process with Apple too, if at all possible.
thewebguyd 15 hours ago [-]
I thought maybe they were available with the new self service repair portal for Apple but nope, you have to order the entire bottom case.
flir 14 hours ago [-]
Apple does positive scripting ("I understand that must feel frustrating, I had a similar issue once, I'm going to solve your problem"), but at least I can reach a human, even if that human talks like they've been brainwashed by a cult.
My ISP has actual techies answering the phone, and their approach is more "well that's a bit crap, I can have an engineer there by Thursday". I've only needed them a couple of times in a decade, but I've been left with a mile-wide grin both times. As long as that's true, I'm a customer for life.
tanjtanjtanj 13 hours ago [-]
The last time I called Apple the phone service employee hit me with “I understand your issue as I am also a student” when I replied that I wasn’t a student he then followed it up with “Oh, neither am I”
tacticalturtle 12 hours ago [-]
My phone slipped out of my pocket as I was getting into my car, and I unknowingly ran over it.
When I submitted an AppleCare replacement request for it, the employee said “Oh man, I hate it when that happens!” and approved it.
I figure that’s the script, or maybe he had a chronic issue of running over his own phone.
commandersaki 13 hours ago [-]
Yeah the support is scripted and annoying a lot of the time. There's always a song and dance like having you remove your VPN (mine is split tunnel but they don't care) to verify some failure case, loading profiles, etc. - but at some point when all avenues are exhausted they will escalate to an engineer and make detailed notes, and usually follow ups which might be with another engineer usually has a full understanding of your situation. A few times they've managed to fix these issues but it can take months.
For hardware issues too it's pretty good, though I've only ever dealt with the Genius bar, and never done a mail in of the product in question.
For software I've never really seen this kind of service at scale, e.g. with Microsoft. And for hardware, it's essentially chatbots in a loop these days which I experienced with Lenovo trying to get support for a laptop that wouldn't power on (never managed to get a human to support me and gave up).
sunaookami 10 hours ago [-]
>My ISP has actual techies answering the phone
Lucky you. My ISP is so incompetent they connected me to another customer when they wanted to connect me to another support agent (Vodafone).
jjkaczor 15 hours ago [-]
I would be 3d-printing some janky feet in TPU before submitting myself to that process. Even if they "wear-out/fall-off", I can print some more.
jauntywundrkind 18 hours ago [-]
I wonder how much Microsoftisms are going to be thrown into the Surface Ultra.
Surface-linux has done a ton of work to get some support, but yeah: they are quite the special devices:
> In contrast to other devices, however, some newer Surface devices route their keyboard and touchpad input via this controller. Unfortunately, every new Surface device requires some (usually small) patch to enable support for it, since devices managed by SAM are generally not auto-discoverable.
After all, I'm still using it. But I'd have ditched the laptop if it weren't for the linux kernel. Can't thank them enough.
bmitc 14 hours ago [-]
Isn't that a little unfair? You'd have an even worse experience running Linux on a MacBook.
shlewis 11 hours ago [-]
I had no problem with it not supporting Linux, like I said, it was expected and if anything, I'm to blame.
buu700 14 hours ago [-]
It sounds interesting from a hardware perspective, but yeah, IMO no one other than Apple has the luxury of shipping a PC with second-class Linux support anymore. If the Linux experience is anything less than perfect, it's DOA.
Also, USB-A in 2026? Really? That was already an automatic disqualifier for me at the start of the decade.
lastdong 1 days ago [-]
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.
dgellow 23 hours ago [-]
My surface book 2 has the best feeling keyboard I ever used on a laptop. And I still really like the overall unique form factor and 3:4 display with touch support.
But it didn't age too well, the battery is giving up and the SSD is pretty slow. Plus windows being a real slug doesn't make the experience that great anymore
which is NTrig --- or do you use a Wacom AES stylus? (bought a Bamboo AES stylus, but it wouldn't work w/ my Toshiba Encore 2 Write 10)
Or are you genericizing "Wacom" as "active digitizer stylus"?
lastdong 13 hours ago [-]
Exactly that, same basic functionality as a Wacom, active digitizer stylus.
t_mahmood 1 days ago [-]
And I have one that I use as thin client for my desktop, Linux made it usable! 10 year old surface pro 3, 8 to 9hr battery life, takes less than 20s to boot up to Gnome, no issues browsing on Firefox, it's a solid device on the go. And to my total surprise, it retained charge even after almost a month of no usage.
lastdong 23 hours ago [-]
That is great battery life! I also wanted to try Linux, but I think I’ll lose the wacom feature. I also use it as a thin client for my Linux machines, and jointly with my Mac means I have access to all platforms.
t_mahmood 23 hours ago [-]
I believe Linux supports Wacom tablets pretty well, I have one which worked without any issues, and buttons can be fully customized. The pen broke though, so it's now collecting dust, and I'm not in situation to replace it.
Unfortunately for Surface pro, some parts of the touch screen was damaged during battery replacement. But the parts that works, works well.
Could it be that new tech that passes air over the board without a fan? Was announced last year, I forget what it was called
soggybread 19 hours ago [-]
You're likely thinking of a Piezo fan or solid state fan. It uses a thin membrane that vibrates and moves air though small spaces. Frore Systems had their Airjet Mini make the rounds in reviews and demos a couple years ago (2?).
hbn 19 hours ago [-]
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.
pseudosavant 13 hours ago [-]
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.
rnxrx 10 hours ago [-]
They implied it might have options with < 128G of memory. That could significantly reduce the price of components. There's also the very real possibility that the whole venture is being subsidized by Microsoft - or even NVIDIA itself - as a bid to get into a different space. Even with that, though, I doubt it will be cheap.
steveBK123 15 hours ago [-]
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..
runjake 14 hours ago [-]
"Enterprise" people. There's this whole other world of legacy enterprise software where people do things that run companies, write large-scale software with an ancient version of .NET, and run this software on Windows servers.
trollbridge 14 hours ago [-]
... who can't run half of their large-scale software with an ancient version of .NET on Arm.
runjake 14 hours ago [-]
... yet they still struggle to try and port their code to a newer .net version that does run on ARM. And do a bunch of other work tasks that can utilize this hardware.
(But, you bring up a great point, regardless!)
trollbridge 13 hours ago [-]
Here is a particularly irritating example. Cabinet Vision, some CAD type of software.
Requires ancient .NET. That actually is available for Arm though.
Required Jet DB driver 2010, which doesn’t exist on Arm, although it’s only needed for the installer.
Requires SQL Server embedded 2012 and 2016, which don’t exist on Arm at all. Yep, both versions.
Also required PowerShell version 2, which was deprecated in 2017, although they magically figured out how to fix that once Windows 10 was EOL’d and Win. 11 doesn’t support v2.
The vendor has zero plans to ever support this on Arm.
They will eventually get their lunch eaten by a new competitor who decides to just release a macOS version.
runjake 12 hours ago [-]
I try to avoid Microsoft products these days (modern dotnet is pretty nice though), but from my past experience, I believe every bit of this and have run into all of these with other software, including the requiring of multiple versions of MSSQL Embedded, which is just unholy.
trollbridge 6 hours ago [-]
Not really Microsoft’s fault, except that their exceptional backwards compatibility means vendors get away with requiring 16-year-old libraries.
albertgoeswoof 15 hours ago [-]
It’s in the first line of the article. It’s for people that make the world, obviously
criddell 13 hours ago [-]
> the software I might want to use doesn’t support arm
Doesn't Windows come with something like Apple's Rosetta to do on the fly translation? I expect it wouldn't work with games, but most other kinds of software should work.
Rosetta worked quite well for Apple so I would expect Microsoft could do something similar.
thewebguyd 12 hours ago [-]
Yes, its called prism, supposedly Microsoft is making improvements to it also specifically to go along with this release.
It's not as good as Rosetta 2 was, but its still pretty good.
Problem is not everything runs through emulation though. There's still a lot of edge cases for super old enterprise crap.
criddell 11 hours ago [-]
I kind of find it hard to believe they would use the name prism...
When I read it, the first thing I thought of is the NSA program named PRISM.
Anyway, I was curious so I googled for differences between the Apple and Microsoft programs and Apple included x86 translation circuitry on their CPU. I wonder why Microsoft didn't do the same?
thewebguyd 11 hours ago [-]
Probably because MS wasn't involved in the silicon at all. The Snapdragon X Elite was entirely Qualcomm/Nuvia. Not sure why they skipped it though.
bsimpson 15 hours ago [-]
I remember when they first pivoted from multiperson multitouch tables to tablets. It sounded like a really cool device - even got me to walk into a Microsoft store.
Then I realized that it used the same shitty Windows with the same shitty registry that I had mostly avoided for my whole life to that point. I certainly wasn't jumping in on that tablet.
slabtickler 14 hours ago [-]
creative industry/enterprise. similar to Asus ProArt line and high end ThinkPad workstations
ActorNightly 7 hours ago [-]
>Who is the target market for this?
People who actually do real work and are interested in gaming, unlike people who just buy Macbooks to run VsCode and browse the web.
Analemma_ 14 hours ago [-]
I mean, I used to be - with the disclaimer that I worked at Microsoft for a while (left in 2019), there was a hot minute when Surface devices were good and on an upward trajectory to become great. Microsoft was doing interesting things with new form factors and interface devices-- the Surface Book, Studio and Dial weren't all hits, but they were some of the only noteworthy experiments in PCs-- and they actually cared about build quality in a way pretty much no other PC manufacturer did.
Then Panay left, Windows 11 has been a debacle, and Nadella seems to give zero fucks about anything which isn't Copilot or Azure, so the Surface momentum that they spent so much time building has just coasted to a complete stop. It's sad.
WillAdams 14 hours ago [-]
Moreover, the Surface Pro 1 and 2 used Wacom EMR styluses --- still regret not getting one, but then Samsung did the Galaxy Book 12 (which was about perfect), so I was _finally_ able to replace my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4110 (the Toshiba Encore 2 Write was a necessary stop-gap).
These days I use a Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 (w/ a spare which I panick bought when I wasn't sure if they would do a Book 4 --- now they're up to a 5), Kindle Scribe Colorsoft, Samsung Galaxy Note 10+, and have a Wacom One on my MacBook (both of which need upgrading....)
Joe_Boogz 12 hours ago [-]
> coasted to a complete stop
I’m not sure how you say that on a release that is literally about new surface hardware
mzmzmzm 19 hours ago [-]
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.
SXX 10 hours ago [-]
Nvidia is only slightly better than Apple when its come to providing hardware documentation.
And their hardware is much more locked down. E.g it cant be reverse engineered as easy as Apple Silicone because Nvidia GPUs basically run own OS inside themself.
So practically only Nvidia able to build open source drivers for this, but so far it looks like it will take them another decade with current rate.
madduci 14 hours ago [-]
My thought as well. As a Linux or BSD machine, this is a portable beast
commandersaki 17 hours ago [-]
Honestly I was ready to mock this thing out of existence, but I think you're on to something as there is a contingent that wants the Macbook Pro style laptop to run Linux and I think they'd be happy to settle with a copycat.
Alas, it is a laptop from Microsoft so hardware support in Linux is probably going to be painful as always.
Hard to say whether you'll get the Macbook Pro experience though.
thewebguyd 7 hours ago [-]
That's me. The PC OEMs have been woefully lacking ever since the M1 came out, and even prior to then. Still shipping crappy 1080p panels and garbage trackpads today.
I just want the Macbook Pro experience, but Linux. Good, high rez, high quality and accurate display, nice trackpad, keyboard, nice speakers, quiet and cool.
Apple's the only one making good laptops now and it sucks (I say as I type from my macbook). I tolerate macOS, I don't love it.
swiftcoder 19 hours ago [-]
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
Gigachad 19 hours ago [-]
I’d wait for some actual reviews before celebrating. Because I just doubt this is as good as they are hyping. And it will still run the same windows ad ridden broken OS.
With 128gb memory this thing is going to cost a fortune.
tencentshill 15 hours ago [-]
That's what the Surface was supposed to be. It's Microsoft's example design for the other OEMs to strive for.
sceptic123 19 hours ago [-]
But they pretty much just copied the MBP (and added USB-A)
swiftcoder 19 hours ago [-]
Heh, I mean, for the last few years, most PC manufacturers haven't been able to accomplish that much
neals 1 days ago [-]
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.
readthenotes1 23 hours ago [-]
I have only had three and they have been very good. Still using one as my daily driver.
First one had a battery bulge and got a free replacement to the current version. I think that went from 2016 to 2017. That one actually lost a battery bank and I got another upgrade to the 2018 version. The keyboard died on that one for some reason and they just replaced it for free.
I could understand if platform decay has occurred since 2018 though. But for a while, it was excellent.
scosman 7 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
throwaway_7678 1 days ago [-]
"The world is full of makers. Only a few make the world."
What does this mean ? How can you make the world ?
commandersaki 16 hours ago [-]
In FreeBSD it was `make world` in /usr/src.
Bloody cperciva put an end to that.
KeplerBoy 1 days ago [-]
It means nothing. The LLM thought it was edgy.
LiamPowell 1 days ago [-]
LLMs are not yet capable of generating the level of marketing wankery seen here.
dgellow 24 hours ago [-]
What do you mean, that's pretty much everything LLMs generate
"Nothing wasted. Everything intentional."
That's the most ChatGPT line ever, where everything has to be a cringy punchline
"A machine like this should not sit still. It should be pushed. Taken to the edge. Used to make real what others call impossible."
I really hope no human would write something like that
LiamPowell 24 hours ago [-]
I don't think I've ever seen LLM output as bad as this output. They sometimes write like that, but not every second sentence.
thewebguyd 15 hours ago [-]
> I really hope no human would write something like that
I see you haven't interacted with marketing people. I can 100% believe that some marketing person wrote the copy.
taffydavid 24 hours ago [-]
> I really hope no human would write something like that
Sorry to shatter your hopes but any garbage an LLM writes is mimicry of some human written garbage that came before.
It can only write cringe because we taught it what cringe looks like
tencentshill 19 hours ago [-]
Don't you understand? They fired their marketing copy writers, that's over $550k/year in savings! Imagine how much they can save tomorrow.
disillusioned 24 hours ago [-]
Contrast hooks everywhere.
baal80spam 15 hours ago [-]
> "A machine like this should not sit still. It should be pushed. Taken to the edge."
"Taken to the edge, and pushed off this edge. To garbage bin."
tanseydavid 12 hours ago [-]
>> What does this mean ? How can you make the world ?
Ask Shakti, Shiva's creative sister.
ray_v 13 hours ago [-]
so, they made a device that targets only a handful of people? They should stop letting copilot write their ad copy.
jimt1234 12 hours ago [-]
> The world is full of makers. Only a few make the world.
Reminds me of all that "Lions. Not Sheep." gear I see people rockin'. LOL
fragmede 1 days ago [-]
Be a creator instead of a consumer.
throwaway_7678 1 days ago [-]
But it implies it's not for ordinary makers. Only for the "world makers".
"It belongs in the hands of world makers."
frangonf 24 hours ago [-]
They are targeting the kind of makers that use Excel and Teams more than make.
lupajz 1 days ago [-]
$$$
14 hours ago [-]
po1nt 1 days ago [-]
The biggest downside of this product is Windows
ray_v 13 hours ago [-]
The second biggest is Microsoft's track record with hardware
ChuckMcM 8 hours ago [-]
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 :-).
MBCook 6 hours ago [-]
Prominent dual fans?
Hell no. Who would think that’s a good idea?
One of the absolutely best things about the MacBook Pro is that it’s silent when you’re not really pushing it. It’s incredibly rare for me to hear them on my M4 Pro. Normal work, including compiling, using docker, my IDE, etc. almost never does it unless I do something big over and over and over.
I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a single sound out of my M3 Air. I think it has a fan. I know my M1 didn’t.
Make the coolest computer you want. If noise is a prominent feature I will never go within 10 feet of it.
locusofself 6 hours ago [-]
The M3 air has no fan either, which is a big reason I bought it, as I record acoustic music and having no fan is the best.
truekonrads 2 hours ago [-]
Surface devices last 6 months in tropical climate like Singapore and then something breaks.
gchamonlive 14 hours ago [-]
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.
cenal 7 hours ago [-]
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.
andreygrehov 6 hours ago [-]
Microsoft doesn't get it. People don't buy MacBooks because they're powerful. People buy MacBooks because they love macOS.
jolt42 5 hours ago [-]
Eh, I like MacBooks because they've been bulletproof. Any PC I suspect it might just go kaput whenever it feels like it, except for maybe a ThinkPad, but they cost more than a MacBook.
DeathArrow 29 minutes ago [-]
They brag about the Nvidia superchip:
>The custom NVIDIA superchip challenges both Qualcomm and Apple
But it seems NVIDIA didn't have enough in house know how and they needed MediaTek to develop the chip.
>20-core NVIDIA Grace CPU (Arm architecture, co-developed with MediaTek)
cesarvarela 12 hours ago [-]
> 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?
thewebguyd 12 hours ago [-]
solid glass haptic trackpad instead of a clicky, mechanical piece of junk one?
dcrazy 12 hours ago [-]
The only MacBook sold with a mechanical trackpad in the past eight years is the MacBook Neo.
thewebguyd 11 hours ago [-]
Right, I meant most PC OEMs are still shipping janky mechanical trackpads in all but the highest end models.
whatever1 1 days ago [-]
No price? I guess over 3k for 128GB ram and Nvidia spark.
mrheosuper 1 days ago [-]
I read somewhere, $4k for 64gb ram
sixothree 5 hours ago [-]
The current Surface Pro is >$3600 for 64 GB of RAM. This number sounds completely reasonable. One year ago this month I bought 128 GB of DDR5 RAM for $300. I can't help but feeling annoyed by the state of the market.
10 hours ago [-]
KeplerBoy 1 days ago [-]
Also RAM was still quite a bit cheaper when the DGX was announced back in early '25.
forthefuture 1 days ago [-]
Is it possible to be cheaper than the DGX Spark? Because that's $4,700. I would think Spark + Laptop would be necessarily more expensive.
15 hours ago [-]
NitpickLawyer 19 hours ago [-]
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"...
skeeter2020 19 hours ago [-]
Microsoft has always made great hardware, often with partners or acquisitions. If they don't run (traditional) Windows - like the phones - they are really good; if they do run desktop Windows we've gone from useable-but-handicapped to completely unacceptable IMO. They also tend to be side projects within MS; I'd suspect this thing saw the light of day because it was sold as a way to pump more AI at their mostly captive audience.
benoau 19 hours ago [-]
Apparently 300 GB/sec so basically on par with the M5 Pro but half the M5 Max.
It'd be alright with Linux, probably better than a MBP if you're working heavily with AI (but no other reason to buy it TBH).
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.
chrisvenum 19 hours ago [-]
A lot of enterprise customers still buy windows workstations.
When I worked in an IT dept, Dell XPS and Windows Surfaces were given to C levels who asked for Macs but were told they wouldn’t be supported into the windows ecosystem (exchange, office, Active Directory etc).
Sadly after all these years the MDM story for macs is still trash.
eigenspace 18 hours ago [-]
Just because enterprise customers buy windows workstations, does not mean they'd be interested in buying these windows workstations.
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
anigbrowl 11 hours ago [-]
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.
geerlingguy 19 hours ago [-]
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.
dogma1138 19 hours ago [-]
It might be more of a Linux problem than a chip problem…
my123 16 hours ago [-]
For the DGX Spark and OEM variants a big issue is that the ConnectX-7 is just not designed to have low power idle but instead to be efficient when loaded.
NVIDIA already lowered power draw at idle by 18W with a currently out of tree driver leveraging PCIe hotplug for the NIC earlier this year.
I think that quite a bit more people bought those to use them without the ConnectX than what NVIDIA expected.
dogma1138 12 hours ago [-]
I’m pretty sure 400 gig nics aren’t in the cards for these thin and lights…
delusional 47 minutes ago [-]
This thing is going to cost north of $15k possibly even $30k.
sourcecodeplz 42 minutes ago [-]
Nah, $5k
4rt 10 hours ago [-]
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.
frankfrank13 13 hours ago [-]
Oh thank god it has a co-pilot button
dgellow 24 hours ago [-]
That copy reeks of AI generated text... for a premium, luxury laptop. What a shame.
taffydavid 24 hours ago [-]
They probably just don't have any humans left in marketing that can write original copy. They've all been fired or has their brains turned to mush from using copilot all day every day
tracerbulletx 10 hours ago [-]
Or their souls eviscerated by receiving nothing but criticism for any attempt to think or apply their creative passion.
LastTrain 9 hours ago [-]
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.
23 hours ago [-]
poisonborz 24 hours ago [-]
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.
SXX 9 hours ago [-]
Asahi is possible because Apple actively supported booting unsigned OS.
Chances for Microsoft and Nvidia combo doing the same are questionable. Better look for other non-Microsoft laptops on the same platform.
z3ratul163071 4 hours ago [-]
at a time when they are speculating with 1TB of ram for the new macs, they release new hardware with max 128GB addressable ram.
crazy.
strix halo was released more than a year ago.
setgree 7 hours ago [-]
> Hardware of that caliber requires a highly optimized operating system to function properly.
But unfortunately, you get Windows
Havoc 20 hours ago [-]
Unusable website. Can’t get past the full screen consent dialog (iPhone)
Abhijith_MB 16 hours ago [-]
Hey, I'm the managing editor of the site. The issue has been fixed; it was due to how we tried to render local fonts on iPhone, which conflicted with the CMP (consent pop-up for privacy/cookie in the EU). Please try loading the site again and let me know if it works for you.
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!
zitterbewegung 11 hours ago [-]
I bet it will be something like a MacBook Pro but with a windows logo. I wouldn’t expect much different considering the other surfaces look practically the same including the keyboard . Not that that is a bad thing .
altern8 10 hours ago [-]
The keyboard is pretty much the only thing you can see, and I see that they're still doing that horrible arrow layout.
whh 11 hours ago [-]
Car manufacturers did this but it was usually when the car was going to be a bit of a minger.
It is not too far fetched to see NVIDIA acquiring Microsoft for the vertically integrated advantages Apple enjoys.
[edit:typo]
zx8080 7 hours ago [-]
You know what, MS? Go to hell with the architecture and CPU vendor-lock.
We need and want an open, modular architecture, and currently it's not ARM, it's x86/64. Because I can't go buy CPU retail and replace it at home.
Edit: oh cool, CPU is MediaTek. No-no, I would stay as far as possible from it.
Thank you, but no, thanks.
mandeepj 9 hours ago [-]
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.
866-RON-0-FEZ 9 hours ago [-]
> Whatever they all do, they can never, ever match the quality of Apple!
It's a pretty low bar to meet.
Every Mac I've owned has had a hardware failure. Keyboard (x3). Dead trackpad. Display backlight. Logic board. LCD failure. Multiple drive failures. One Apple TV that shit the bed. Many within warranty, some not.
Apple's warranty service is pretty good, but to gloat about "quality"... it's more like when Sonny Corleone throws money at the guy's feet after he smashes his camera.
drnick1 6 hours ago [-]
You must be treating your hardware extremely poorly because all the Windows laptops that have used have lasted many years and were retired before they stopped working due to a hardware defect. In every case however, Linux replaced Windows after the first boot.
atlanta90210 13 hours ago [-]
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.
victor22 6 hours ago [-]
Too late, even the MacBook Pros are mostly pointless now.
I switched from a M2 Pro with 24gb ram to the new 8gb Neo and I kid you not, they perform just the same 99.5% of the time.
8 hours ago [-]
LeoPanthera 9 hours ago [-]
The primary reason to buy Macs isn't the hardware, it's macOS.
sixothree 5 hours ago [-]
I'm sure people want this to be true. But it's simply not true. People are learning to accept MacOS to use the hardware. People are buying the Neo because it's cheap. People are buying the Air because it's better hardware than similarly priced computers.
Worse than all of that, long-time Mac users are abandoning the OS.
whycome 8 hours ago [-]
I don’t trust Microsoft after how they abandoned the Surface Book
rewgs 2 hours ago [-]
Perhaps this will end up being the mythical MacBook-like hardware that I can install Linux on (Asahi notwithstanding).
tastyfreeze 15 hours ago [-]
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.
mizzao 15 hours ago [-]
What is the CPU/GPU architecture of this and how could a collaboration between whoever made it and Nvidia possibly outperform Apple Silicon?
trynumber9 12 hours ago [-]
MediaTek designed X925 + A725 CPU. It's already been benchmarked in the GB10 products. It is not even close. Like 0.75x SPECint 2017 of the M5.
mawadev 12 hours ago [-]
I'm starting to have a sour taste in my mouth whenever I read microsoft and nvidia
liendolucas 24 hours ago [-]
> 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.
trollbridge 14 hours ago [-]
Microsoft mice were always of exceptional quality...
... until the Surface era, when they either had bizarre designs that didn't work well (like Arc) or else were of cheap build quality and had problematic Bluetooth chipsets.
The first Bluetooth mouse I got was Microsoft's circa 2002, which was an amazing piece of tech back then.
speedgoose 24 hours ago [-]
I guess that if I have to ask for the price, it’s not for me.
reval 9 hours ago [-]
Does the unified memory work in WSL2?
ShinyLeftPad 23 hours ago [-]
What happens if you vibe code an entire hardware product?
xnx 18 hours ago [-]
It's a shame that, outside of garish "gaming" laptops, 17" screens are very rare.
cutler 8 hours ago [-]
Macbook Pro rival running ..... Windows?! I'd take a bottom of the line Macbook over anything running 'doze.
blueboo 15 hours ago [-]
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.)
tastyfreeze 15 hours ago [-]
That is the opposite of my rule for game consoles. Always buy v1. It is most likely to have unfixable hardware exploits allowing for homebrew use later in its life.
I sometimes wonder if the "Corporate VP" (whatever that means) believes his own jerk-off marketing
officialchicken 24 hours ago [-]
I have no doubt that huffing their own farts until euphoria hits is considered a critical skill.
sleepybrett 14 hours ago [-]
why are they showing off the fans? how hot does this thing run?
SXX 9 hours ago [-]
They say GPU performance of mobile 5070 RTX and that GPU alone is 50W.
Obviously it only hot under load.
basisword 19 hours ago [-]
It's not a rival. It could be the greatest computer ever made and I'm still not using Windows.
noir_lord 19 hours ago [-]
At this point I don't know what the performance delta would need to be between "fastest I can get that lets me run linux" and "fastest I can get with windows" other than massive.
I genuinely do not want to deal with windows that much.
Fortunately since my computing needs are met by a fast x86/GPU I don't have to make that choice.
whh 11 hours ago [-]
Too bad it runs Windows.
NordStreamYacht 19 hours ago [-]
Will this help strengthen the ARM Linux ecosystem?
ElectronCharge 18 hours ago [-]
Most commenters here are focused on the Microsoft hardware, but the article mentions systems from several other manufacturers using the same hardware. Some of them, Dell and Lenovo in particular, have good Linux support.
Nvidia has also supported Linux well in general, so let's hope there's an attractive Linux option soon!
Personally I'd be just as happy with a small form factor desktop with the same hardware.
commandersaki 17 hours ago [-]
Nvidia has also supported Linux well in general
I don't really know, maybe in recent times. All I'm reminded of is Linus giving Nvidia the finger.
dainiusse 3 hours ago [-]
doa
xyst 7 hours ago [-]
If it doesn’t have the repairability of a framework. I’m out.
steviee 1 days ago [-]
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...
vrganj 19 hours ago [-]
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.
DennisP 18 hours ago [-]
CUDA support is another reason, if you have a particular need for that.
varispeed 10 hours ago [-]
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.
BoredPositron 10 hours ago [-]
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.
gamblor956 10 hours ago [-]
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.
rllearneratwork 5 hours ago [-]
you actually can run 120B (see Nemotron-3-Super) model in NVFP4 on DGXSpark, so I'd imagine it'll run here as well
stalfosknight 12 hours ago [-]
PCs still have USB-A ports? USB-A is old enough to drink.
fragmede 1 days ago [-]
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?
trynumber9 13 hours ago [-]
It's the same configuration as GB10. 20 core MediaTek 3nm part which is competitive with a AMD's 2025 16 core 4nm part with similar power draw.
My understanding is that it’s got a bespoke 20 core Nvidia Vera CPU - unified RTX Vera Rubin Spark chip. Seems like Nvidia trying to copy Apple M-series chip
int0x29 24 hours ago [-]
Isn't it a mediatek CPU with an Nvidia GPU on the same package? At least thats what most of the reporting for nvidia laptop chips has been saying.
TiredOfLife 18 hours ago [-]
It's the same chip that is in DGX Spark (it was delayed by 1-2 years). Blackwell GPU on one chiplet and Mediatek cpu with off the shelf cores
taffydavid 1 days ago [-]
I could be wrong but I don't think there are any arm machines with nvidia GPU yet, I think that would be a first.
So it's probably Intel
fragmede 1 days ago [-]
Nvidia's current flagship product is Nvidia GB200 NVL72, which is a super computer the size of however many racks you can afford, with 72 Blackwell CPUs and 36 Grace ARM CPUs to a rack. At the other end of the spectrum, is the Nvidia Jetson series, which is a GPU attached to an Nvidia Grace ARM CPU.
Yeah that's definitely it. So that makes this an arm device with nvidia GPU. It's not the first as you pointed out, but it would be a more consumer shaped example - a laptop that normal people might be able to afford
dmitrygr 14 hours ago [-]
Completely garden-variety normal ARM-designed cores:
Cortex-X925 and Cortex-A725
ghjseccx3305 1 days ago [-]
Windows…
jauntywundrkind 1 days ago [-]
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.
baggachipz 19 hours ago [-]
"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"
transcriptase 19 hours ago [-]
Yeah I feel like I just read an advertisement someone adapted from marketing materials.
Gigachad 19 hours ago [-]
Because that’s exactly what it is.
dmitrygr 14 hours ago [-]
> Built on Windows
aaaaand... scene!
No thank you, and goodbye
olyjohn 12 hours ago [-]
Most people who use this won't have a choice. It will be forced on them by employers.
thewebguyd 6 hours ago [-]
I don't think many employers (that still issue Windows laptops to people) are going to be dropping $4.5k+ for their users at scale.
There's companies out there still handing out cheap 8GB Dells with 1080p screens.
RankingMember 14 hours ago [-]
Yeah what bizarro world is their marketing team living in where that's something to tout?
rowanG077 19 hours ago [-]
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.
neonstatic 8 hours ago [-]
If it runs Windows then it's dead on arrival.
aniceperson 14 hours ago [-]
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.
einpoklum 24 hours ago [-]
Surface Laptop Ultra Ripoff: Made for World(-Class) Suckers.
hirvi74 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Rover222 19 hours ago [-]
Imagine thinking the rivalry is about hardware and not software...
Same for IOS vs Android.
thewebguyd 6 hours ago [-]
I mean, it's both. PC OEM laptops have sucked for 6+ years that Apple silicon has been out. Apple makes the best laptops on the market.
I'm glad the PC industry is hopefully waking up, finally. I'd like to see some good hardware with Linux support. That's all I've wanted, a macbook pro experience on Linux.
modelhub 6 hours ago [-]
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12 hours ago [-]
raadore 19 hours ago [-]
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aykutseker 18 hours ago [-]
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bbg2401 20 hours ago [-]
TFA has a few more tidbits than I've seen elsewhere but it's mostly LLM-induced, hype-driven marketing bilge.
Anyway, what I like of this machine is the 15" screen with a keyboard without a numberpad: the center of the body of the user can be aligned with the center of the screen. The screen seems to be particularly bright, which is good. There are claims of good self repairability, we will see when it starts to sell.
I'd wait a few years before buying one machine in this product line. I want to see how Windows on ARM will play out in terms of compatibility. My build targets are all Intel servers (Linux), so I don't want to have surprises. I would have to wait years anyway because I would run Linux and I think that it takes more effort to port Linux to new ARM hardware that to new Intel one (ACPI etc.) WSL is not an option because I still have Windows around it and it's even more unpleasant than having to deal a Mac GUI.
Let's say that if this were an Intel laptop I'd be tempted to buy it, if the hands on reviews will be good.
Repairability is important, but why repair something when you can only use terrible, soon out of support operating, which spy on you? (This means practically any OS vendored by large corporations)
For ARM systems openness boils down to the custom boot process, and of course the driver support. Has ARM PC vendors standardized on a boot standard yet? I cal recall the horror on reading articles how Raspberry Pi boot was working, or how M1 Mac bootloader is locked down.
Oh you mean like the incredible MacBook Pros of the last two generations that have been selling like hotcakes and have a surprisingly similar design to this device? "Redmond, start your photocopiers" never gets old.
Docks are horrifying products. Thunderbolt docks are doubly horrifying. They ordered in every single competing dock they could find, from that era's products, and found that every last one was garbage in some way or other, usually fatally so. The Thunderbolt interface in particular, and the firmware that needed to run on that interface controller, was the source of a lot of issues. None of them were particularly intrinisc to the protocol, but the hardware available was junk and the software available was worse. They couldn't really order up a custom non-garbage IC just for a $100 accessory that sells in limited volume. (Apple, however, could and would; they'd also demand to control the whole stack. This shows.)
They were very proud they got the thing working as well as they did, even though they all knew it was still pretty much trash. It was still better than the competition. Which is sad, but what can you do?
(At least it wasn't the Wi-Fi chip. The Surface Book's Wi-Fi adapter was chosen by higher-ups as the same one used in the XBox, presumably for sourcing reasons. It is trash. Again, much blood, sweat, and tears were spilled making it work as well as it does.)
(I also have the exact circuit for the LED that lights up on the charger cable. Apparently it was a big deal, which I find hilarious.)
It was a rather nasty bug. Firmware is full of nightmare scenarios like that.
I believe it. From all my years as a sysadmin, docks were by far the second largest source of headaches (after printers). Super high failure rate, all kinds of quirks, shoddy power delivery. And these weren't some cheap amazon basics dongles, I'm talking the $250+ docks from Dell, Lenovo, etc.
But no, we had to install random drivers on our machines, get blue screens and have to plug and unplug the printers until they get reset properly.
Compatibility marks/certifications like AirPrint (2010) define how to advertise your IPP printer and its features, such as whether you can directly send a PDF. IPP Everywhere is perhaps the most notable open alternative to AirPrint.
That exists, it’s called IPP.
It costs more money to make a printer with good firmware, and you're more likely to throw away a buggy printer and buy a new one with new special ink cartridges.
It's not just firmware.
I’ve had one cable begin to fray in all that time (a thunderbolt 4 caldigit cable). It swapped it out for an Apple cable and kept going.
I’ve used OWC docks, which aren’t known to be the best, but have worked great for charging, usb, Ethernet, FireWire, display (both over daisychained thunderbolt and display port), and SD cards. The only thing I have used them for extensively is audio. My monitor is a Thunderbolt 2 monitor with USB breakout. In between it and the dock is a two drive SATA enclosure.
I recently threw an extra Thunderbolt 3 dock I had on a USB-4 mini computer running Linux and it worked without any issue.
I’m sure there may be things that don’t work well, but its worked for me. I even wrote an app to have a global hot key to eject all my attached disks (DriveLight). Press the key combo, wait for the eject sound, pull the cable and go.
It is so hard to believe that when more than 1000 employees at my employers are also using at least one dock (Dell and Thinkpad both) and using them very well.
Today I swap the power brick on my Dell thunderbolt dock when it acts up. Given the hours of use and how many times it's been plugged/unplugged from various laptops/etc (it worked great off an AMD desktop PC with thunderbolt on the rear I/O), I think my employer should buy me a knew one out of respect.
We had those early "blessed by Apple" USB-C LG monitors. Garbage when it came to connectivity. Same with docks and the like.
We're now 9 years later so... I think it's all better now than before.
Only around 2024-ish the situation with USB and TB docks seemed to stabilize.
Thanks for finally answering this mystery for me.
Okay, today I learnt.
That thing Didn't Work more than it Worked, but options were slim. Eventually it fully died about 14 months in. I didn't even bother checking to see what the warranty terms were. TS3 Plus, back in 17 or 18. What a piece of shit.
Sounds like it's a good thing I didn't bother trying again in the early 2020s and only recently bought a new dock.
Docks were bad, bad products in those days. They were no longer the dedicated bulky-but-reliable things of years past, or the modern finally-debugged dongles we've got now.
This was Intel's Alpine Ridge and it was hell. (At least, I think that was the one. Certainly, it was hell!)
Plenty of cases where Surface isn't. Microsoft like to think they can make hardware but they're no better than other OEM and it's clearly not a focus for them
Then Microsoft had the episode where some of their Surface hardware would not reliably stay in sleep mode and cooked itself while being transported in a bag. At the time, Microsoft tried to excuse this by claiming that "a fundamental Computer Science problem" needed to be solved to fix this issue. Strange how other manufacturers could do this without overcoming unsolvable problems in frontier CS research.
While I'm usually a die-hard Microsoft fanboi, I have concluded that their Surface line is terrible.
It gets so hot in my bag I actually worry about it starting a fire one day. I now take it out every night.
Obviously I tried googling but no dice. Nothing changed, settings seem in order, no idea what to do.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...
But I completely understand why it didn't meet market expectations and the 8/8.1 UI fell off a cliff. If you weren't willing tyo overhaul how you interacted with a Windows device and use it as designed, or needed something that was better at any given feature the surface tablet presented, it was not the right option.
I would love an option for the 8.1 style start screen on Windows 11, at least for a touch screen laptop. It really worked for me and how I used a computer at that point in time. I have an 8.1 install iso hanging around in case it comes up.
Yep, that's the Surface Book (original). I've got one, and mine still works! Somehow.
That detach mechanism is insane. As far as I've been able to put together (I haven't done a patent search or anything, just heard bits from people who'd know), there's no motor involved... it's way weirder. I believe the thing actually heats up a nitinol shape-memory alloy latch in the base so it detaches from the tablet piece. That heating is why it takes a couple seconds. But then reattachment is instant, so it's just something clicking in to place. And you can't reattach immediately, because the base has to cool down (just a few seconds, short enough that you never notice unless you're deliberately messing with it). Black magic!
I'm not 100% sure of any of the above, except the use of nitinol somewhere. That's right, the weirdest piece of the conjecture is the only one I've got hard confirmation of. Like I said, black magic.
To be fair, I've had exactly this with a Dell, MSI and a Razer laptop in the last few years. The only way I can reliably get it to stop waking up while asleep(and never going back to sleep) is disable sleep entirely and use hibernation instead. It's insane that such a basic functionality seems to be broken across a whole range of hardware.
but also, it was really easy to accidentally lock the screen while removing it, at which point youd put it back on to get the password filled in again
that and if the battery got low, youd be stuck with it in the wrong configuration, so the screen would get scratched
the clamp around setup was a very poor choice
I went through a period of using a Macbook Pro with a dock. At the time the best option seemed to be the Caldigit TS3. It's a sleek device but luckily someone else was footing the bill because:
- 3 of them failed on me. THREE;
- You really learn how bad cables are. I got in the habit of ordering 2-3 at a time because experience taught me that at least 1 of them would be bad or die;
- It exposed just how bad the USB-C situation was (and still is). Is this just a power cable? Or you want data too? How about an alt mode so you can do DisplayPort passthrough? Well good luck with all that. There's no cue that the cable can do any of that. And if a cable can, it's typically 3 feet or less in length, expensive and prone to failure.
A lot of people don't know how complex a modern USB-C or Thunderbolt cable really is. It typically has a chip in each end of the cable. So the failure mode is not just the cable, it's the two chips as well. Bend or twist the cable too much. Gone. Damage the head of the cable. Gone.
Oh and USB-C is made more complex because it can be plugged in either way. The cable and the chips at either end and the controller on either side need to be able to seamlessly handle all 4 combinations (or 2 of the cable is truly symmetric pin-wise; it might be, I'm not sure).
I hope that this tech is more stable now but I honestly doubt that it is.
I'm reminded of an old quote I heard (not sure from who) that said we went from a world where no cables fit but if they did, it worked, to a world where the cable always fit but nothing works. That's USB-C in a nutshell.
Docks have to handle a lot of bandwidth. Even passthrough requires bandwidth. It's a nice idea but it's a hard problem.
Mine works pretty well — have used it with three Intel MacBooks in the past and now currently two different Apple Silicon MacBooks.
One of the Intel MBPs did not like it. Would reboot every time I unplugged it from the dock. I blamed that MacBook for that one, since nothing else was ever a problem. I sent every crash report to Apple, along with some choice words that my $2,500 MacBook should be able to handle connecting to a very commonly owned TB Dock. Eventually they did fix it and it stopped being an issue.
Has ended up one of the more reliable pieces of tech gear in my life, especially given the absolute mad complexity of TB3 behind the scenes.
I will note that mine have all functioned as docks for effectively-stationary PCs, so there's basically zero cable wear happening.
Not sure if that's still the case but truly astonishing
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/surface-dock/tro...
Or was it actually working but charging only on 5V and taking a long time to wake up?
If the battery is fully dead, you have to remove it and charge it using the separate battery charger.
That means you can't travel with only a USB-C cable.
Still, Windows is a problem here. I wonder what the monthly fee is to get rid of the ads?
The backrooms version of an Apple Store… I’ve been to precisely one and it was, indeed, a sad experience.
You’d also need to pay me a lot to use Windows. I even have an assigned Windows virtual desktop at work, but I also have a MacBook for actual work - the VDI is only used for the stuff that doesn’t quite work right on Macs.
Hardware, Frameworks has replaced any other OEM in the market for me. You have to pay me to use Dell, HP, Microsoft, Asus, Apple, ...
A (quite large) company that I worked for stopped offering surfaces to employees after the average lifetime over the 3 years they offered them was under 1 year. We even had a terrible batch of Dells at the same time that still handily outlived the surfaces.
Small sample size (N=3) but, nobody I know that works at Microsoft uses a surface or any other Microsoft branded laptop.
Oh boy, don't get me started on Dell haha. Sure, they've got a better service model (people come to you), but at least in my experience they contract with service people who service multiple brands who can't help but shit-talk Dell. Not very confidence inspiring, particularly when the cause of the issue ends up being a connector not being fully plugged in from the factory.
Never had any issues with them. Solid hardware and a good alternative to the Lenovo Thinkpads we're also using but "don't look so nice".
Apple doesn't have this problem because they don't even make docks they're so problematic. Enjoy dongles, Mac users.
Modern docks usually run their own internal OS and require frequent reboots to even attempt to appear stable.
The worst part is most use docks to get Ethernet, but docks nearly universally use low quality USB Ethernet controllers internally (vs PCI) making the whole exercise rather pointless.
That's the reason Framework has an advantage over all these Ad driven companies. They are working together with the Linux / Kernel developers to make their products fit - however it is still lacking the completely cohesive nature of the product, because they still loosely depend on Intel / AMD and other Hardware manufacturers.
An example: Every Apple device with a headphone jack since 2013 (probably long before) including iPods, iPhones and MacBooks has that little proprietary chip with ultrasonic chirp authentication integrated to control playback and volume by the EarPods headphone remote. Now there is a USB-C to 3.5mm Adapter as well as USB-C EarPods that still support this... No Windows Laptop has ever had this. The funny thing is, that Linux now supports these USB-C Apple thingies because they register as input and output devices and that the Apple 3.5mm Adapters now also support other brands headphones with Android.
Source? Can't find any good source on this.
My guess is, that Apple did not invent this to prevent others from implementing it or have something proprietary, but just because the iPod Shuffle used the same connector for Headphones and USB (see page 8 in [1]), so they somehow had to ensure, what type of cable is connected to prevent damage to the iPod.
Another interesting fact:
The iPod classic 2009 does support some of the features (play/pause, next, previous), but lacks support for fast forward and rewind (click + hold, 2 clicks + hold).
1: https://cdsassets.apple.com/live/6GJYWVAV/user/locale/de-de/...
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.
Anyway, the whole trend to change from x86 to Arm on laptops is bad news for compatibility. It might be that the era where you can download an iso and expect Linux to run on a random laptop is over, and Linux users will have to stick to only a couple of devices with well known support. Did Valve release a laptop yet?
Why? Just to get ARM? Buy a brand that actually works with the kernel and distros to get their hardware working with linux. Get your money to the people that actually help the software ecosystem.
When you spent premium, put your money where it makes a difference.
At my bigco, we have all but given up on it and moved everyone to EC2 or Macs for non-Windows workloads.
It seems the issue on Apple hardware is the fight to get Linux booting on bare metal with full support (what Apple supplied for Windows with Bootcamp when moving to Intel), which is the fight Asahi Linux is waging. Is WSL aiding in getting Linux booting from bare metal on proprietary hardware?
People downvoting me because Microsoft are just silly. It is literally undeniable that Microsoft has done more to provide Linux support in the windows ecosystem than Apple has with MacOS. The closest thing Apple has done to “support” Linux is add a hypervisor without a GUI that they’ll tolerate you using but don’t really support. Try opening up a case with Apple about a Linux issue running a hypervisor.framework Linux vm and let me know how it goes…
Microsoft will absolutely support issues you run into with WSl.
They must have made major improvements since the last time I used it then, because filesystem issues was the #1 reason I moved away from WSL
Thankfully AI nowadays does an amazing job in issue diagnostic and resolution, and even patches the kernel to make stuff work, so this is the viable solution.
And then you install multiple Electron apps.
The developers on WSL (the Python project, Django) tend to have a simplified environment. For example they don't run Celery (I never investigated why) and run all the background jobs synchronously or they don't run those jobs at all.
The ones on Macs (the Ruby project, Rails) have the full environment but I remember that they skipped some integration tests because they always failed on their Macs (Capybara and Chromedriver, I don't remember the details.) I was the one running the full test suite. By the way: all the CI services I used in the last 10 years are particularly bad at running those kind of tests. Maybe it's the amount of memory or the timing of the operations and those CI VMs (or containers?) don't play well with the assumptions of the test frameworks. Any language, any framework.
No way I am spending any money on this future brick.
Thanks god reverse engineering with AI is a thing now, so the path forward looks nicer. But still...
Anyways, the Surface Pro X is such a nice HW. Too bad the company who built it is so bad.
And how Linux fix the software problem?
https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface
Because us nerds like to say “the software is awful,” but really, the bones of Windows are not awful at all. It generally works well, it just takes a lot of work to get all of the BS out of your way.
If you’re looking for open source friendly, just buy a Framework 13 Pro and be done with it.
By the way, the other news from Computex is Dell and HP’s Macbook Neo competition, and they really look legit. So, Apple is waking up the PC industry a bit, showing them that they are endangered. Hopefully Microsoft gets the memo.
I swear, people just live in their echochambers these days. Win 11 pro + WSL2 is literally the best, do it all OS you can get these days.
Most peoples experience is with Windows home, which ironically is about as intrusive as Mac OS. When you get Windows Pro, you can disable all the annoying AI/Advertising shit that comes with Windows, and at that point, you get a system that is cleaner than Mac OS.
Then you install WSL2, which is a full linux environment down to being able to run graphical apps, use gpus natively, and even talk to usb ports.
Ive been on Win11 Pro for 4 years. The only major things that are installed under windows for me are VPN Software, Steam (with games), Ollama, and Browser. Everything else, I run under WSL2.
Professional softwares, WSL2 and awesome native apps (Dopus, AHK2...)
I always try Linux but the fragmented nature just is not for me for desktop usage.
What Stockholm Syndrome is this? Why should you have to do this in the first place?
I run Linux in a VM and Docker on it, and WSL2. No problems with anything.
I don't see any ads. I turn a number of "intrusive" features off, but nothing is hacked; these are just settings you can switch off.
(I am running Pro, though.)
I didn’t check how much this costs, but if you use AI locally a lot, it’s going to be amortised pretty quickly. Burning 100$ a month on tokens has become insanely easy. I remember when it was unimaginable for me…
That's the most uncanny marketing for an ARM laptop I've ever seen.
As such, when you’re marketing your competing product, maybe don’t lead with the fans.
Suddenly all the Windows K2 stuff makes sense, but I doubt it'll be enough. Its too little too late for Microsoft.
I could be wrong but my understanding is that 24/7 dedicated servers are wildly economically unviable. The reason cloud tends to cost less than local today (other than the subsidization) is because you aren't running models 24/7. So like 6 hours of cloud per weekday might beat the yearly cost of building local machines, but it's not in the same universe if you're running 24/7, as evidenced by two months of H200 rental costing more than the DGX Spark this Laptop is built out of.
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).
Everyone except Bill Belichick, who famously hurled his Microsoft Surface to the ground when he was first forced to use it:
https://youtu.be/djB2xgALGfI?si=xX-hMibm9OLLAJZ4&t=10
Isn’t that what this is? (Or is supposed to be?)
https://www.techtimes.com/articles/317428/20260530/nvidia-ar...
I would be happy to eat my words "later this year" (per their timeline) but past Surface interactions lead me to believe it will be more of the same as in the past. Bad performance, bad battery life, bad build quality, bad compatibility.
For the sake of competition and options, I really hope to be proven wrong... I just wouldn't bet on it.
I’m curious what this means. Bad compatibility with Windows software? Or bad compatibility with Linux?
Further, it doesn't seem like Microsoft made x86 emulation as seamless or performant as Apple did during the various MacOS CPU architecture changes.
Every use case I've looked at has been a minefield of app incompatibility and poor performance under x86 emulation.
For music production for example - https://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/articles/windows-on-arm...
I think that GP comment is not intending to throw shade at ARM SOCs (many of which are quite nice, including those from Apple an Qualcomm), but specifically the Microsoft products built on them.
Microsoft maybe had a chance when they decided to build their own Surface tablets/laptops but trying to make an OS that worked for that but also worked for your corporate issue Lenovo laptops is (as Apple seems to know), impossible.
Dell XPS series have been available with Ubuntu since 2012 at the very least.
A little earlier than that. With Intel's Lunar Lake / Panther Lake, x86 laptops are again in the same ballpark as a Mac efficiency-wise. There are reputable reviews where people are getting 16-20 hours of battery life out of them doing real work, in both Windows & Linux.
M5 is probably still better, but at least the x86 machines don't embarrass themselves any more.
Outside of that though, there's still hit and miss quality on the PC OEM side of things. 1080p screens are still the default for a ton of models, even higher end ones, and the OEMs keep missing the point of why people prefer Apple hardware.
Several are coming out with 8GB machines now at macbook Neo price points with....1920x1200 screens, probably a low quality panel, and questionable trackpad. Again, missing the entire point of the Neo.
This fancy new device still runs windows. And that is a non starter from many people.
Most people could pick up a modern Windows ARM laptop and everything they do would work just fine, just potentially with less heat and longer battery life than their older Windows laptop.
The primary annoyances would be Windows itself and its ad and engagement driven UI reminding you about Copilot and Edge every chance it gets.
I've been using a Qualcomm ARM laptop for the past year, and pretty much everything I use runs natively on it.
I have been leaning more into framework myself. My current devices are aging out but I am in a place where I am fully separated from apples walled in garden so switching is easy
Pretty much. I broke down and finally bought my first Windows machine in over a decade to play Subnautica 2. It was so infuriating to use I returned it a week later. You literally have to hack it with shell commands to bypass Microsoft login now. Never again.
Well on macOS you need to do the same to install and/or run applications so its not that fat ahead.
Also not at all equivalent to being forced into linking an online account before being allowed to use your computer at all.
It’s easily in my top 3 most hated things about my MacBook. Plus, knowing Apple and the history of that “feature”, it will only ratchet towards becoming even more of a pain over time (it was actually tolerable back before they removed the hotkey to bypass).
For me, after running Win11debloat one time Win 11 disappears into the background 95% of the time, like an OS should. Unfortunately I don’t the luxury of doing something equivalent on MacOS without completely disabling SIP.
Still unacceptable for home edition users, but Microsoft has been segregating its userbase and features into Home/Pro/Enterprise for decades.
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.
While thats true, its not what you think it is. WSL1 was VM in a traditional sense, it ran under windows. When you install WSL2, it basically changes your computer core OS to be a bare metal hypervisor (specialized version of Hyper V). Its the same concept as any cloud provider letting people provision VMs that run at native performance on the actual hardware. So WLS2 can talk to hardware like Graphics cards natively, and request ram on demand.
You can also install windows managers in WSL2. For example https://github.com/Lamarcke/i3-on-wsl. You can also install rainmeter on windows https://www.rainmeter.net/ if you want customizability. You can make windows look exactly like mac os with that.
Will never buy one if it's Windows only, though.
Also unlike the rest of HN, I don't have complete hatred of Windows. I wouldn't mind picking up one of these, but I'm almost certain the price is going to be somewhere between unaffordable and completely ridiculous.
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.
Support call center is operation cost. They did they math and think this will save them more money than losing a few angry or disappointed customer.
At that point the main problem for a service is to figure out when they are dealing with someone who could solve the problem through the website, and when they are dealing with someone whose problem is too complicated to be solved that way. Although it also seems like many people don't want to spend the money on doing that analysis and serving their customers, as you have pointed out.
I use a Surface Go at home (running BlissOS) and a Surface Pro as my work "laptop" (running Debian KDE). I forget which generations they are, but they're probably 8-ish years old, so if they haven't died yet, they're probably good. They both work well for what I use them for, and are better laptops than actual laptops for what I need a laptop to do.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-lapt...
But as for getting rubber feet, I'm sure it's some backwards process with Apple too, if at all possible.
My ISP has actual techies answering the phone, and their approach is more "well that's a bit crap, I can have an engineer there by Thursday". I've only needed them a couple of times in a decade, but I've been left with a mile-wide grin both times. As long as that's true, I'm a customer for life.
When I submitted an AppleCare replacement request for it, the employee said “Oh man, I hate it when that happens!” and approved it.
I figure that’s the script, or maybe he had a chronic issue of running over his own phone.
For hardware issues too it's pretty good, though I've only ever dealt with the Genius bar, and never done a mail in of the product in question.
For software I've never really seen this kind of service at scale, e.g. with Microsoft. And for hardware, it's essentially chatbots in a loop these days which I experienced with Lenovo trying to get support for a laptop that wouldn't power on (never managed to get a human to support me and gave up).
Lucky you. My ISP is so incompetent they connected me to another customer when they wanted to connect me to another support agent (Vodafone).
Surface-linux has done a ton of work to get some support, but yeah: they are quite the special devices:
> In contrast to other devices, however, some newer Surface devices route their keyboard and touchpad input via this controller. Unfortunately, every new Surface device requires some (usually small) patch to enable support for it, since devices managed by SAM are generally not auto-discoverable.
There is a huge feature matrix, so at least you sort of know what you are getting. Amazing work from open source folks! https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/wiki/Supporte...
Also, USB-A in 2026? Really? That was already an automatic disqualifier for me at the start of the decade.
But it didn't age too well, the battery is giving up and the SSD is pretty slow. Plus windows being a real slug doesn't make the experience that great anymore
?!?
https://surfacetip.com/surface-laptop-studio/
notes:
>Supports Microsoft Pen Protocol (MPP)
which is NTrig --- or do you use a Wacom AES stylus? (bought a Bamboo AES stylus, but it wouldn't work w/ my Toshiba Encore 2 Write 10)
Or are you genericizing "Wacom" as "active digitizer stylus"?
Unfortunately for Surface pro, some parts of the touch screen was damaged during battery replacement. But the parts that works, works well.
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..
(But, you bring up a great point, regardless!)
Requires ancient .NET. That actually is available for Arm though.
Required Jet DB driver 2010, which doesn’t exist on Arm, although it’s only needed for the installer.
Requires SQL Server embedded 2012 and 2016, which don’t exist on Arm at all. Yep, both versions.
Also required PowerShell version 2, which was deprecated in 2017, although they magically figured out how to fix that once Windows 10 was EOL’d and Win. 11 doesn’t support v2.
The vendor has zero plans to ever support this on Arm.
They will eventually get their lunch eaten by a new competitor who decides to just release a macOS version.
Doesn't Windows come with something like Apple's Rosetta to do on the fly translation? I expect it wouldn't work with games, but most other kinds of software should work.
Rosetta worked quite well for Apple so I would expect Microsoft could do something similar.
It's not as good as Rosetta 2 was, but its still pretty good.
Problem is not everything runs through emulation though. There's still a lot of edge cases for super old enterprise crap.
When I read it, the first thing I thought of is the NSA program named PRISM.
Anyway, I was curious so I googled for differences between the Apple and Microsoft programs and Apple included x86 translation circuitry on their CPU. I wonder why Microsoft didn't do the same?
Then I realized that it used the same shitty Windows with the same shitty registry that I had mostly avoided for my whole life to that point. I certainly wasn't jumping in on that tablet.
People who actually do real work and are interested in gaming, unlike people who just buy Macbooks to run VsCode and browse the web.
Then Panay left, Windows 11 has been a debacle, and Nadella seems to give zero fucks about anything which isn't Copilot or Azure, so the Surface momentum that they spent so much time building has just coasted to a complete stop. It's sad.
These days I use a Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 (w/ a spare which I panick bought when I wasn't sure if they would do a Book 4 --- now they're up to a 5), Kindle Scribe Colorsoft, Samsung Galaxy Note 10+, and have a Wacom One on my MacBook (both of which need upgrading....)
I’m not sure how you say that on a release that is literally about new surface hardware
And their hardware is much more locked down. E.g it cant be reverse engineered as easy as Apple Silicone because Nvidia GPUs basically run own OS inside themself.
So practically only Nvidia able to build open source drivers for this, but so far it looks like it will take them another decade with current rate.
Alas, it is a laptop from Microsoft so hardware support in Linux is probably going to be painful as always.
Hard to say whether you'll get the Macbook Pro experience though.
I just want the Macbook Pro experience, but Linux. Good, high rez, high quality and accurate display, nice trackpad, keyboard, nice speakers, quiet and cool.
Apple's the only one making good laptops now and it sucks (I say as I type from my macbook). I tolerate macOS, I don't love it.
With 128gb memory this thing is going to cost a fortune.
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.
First one had a battery bulge and got a free replacement to the current version. I think that went from 2016 to 2017. That one actually lost a battery bank and I got another upgrade to the 2018 version. The keyboard died on that one for some reason and they just replaced it for free.
I could understand if platform decay has occurred since 2018 though. But for a while, it was excellent.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/products/rtx-spark/
> 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.
What does this mean ? How can you make the world ?
Bloody cperciva put an end to that.
"Nothing wasted. Everything intentional."
That's the most ChatGPT line ever, where everything has to be a cringy punchline
"A machine like this should not sit still. It should be pushed. Taken to the edge. Used to make real what others call impossible."
I really hope no human would write something like that
I see you haven't interacted with marketing people. I can 100% believe that some marketing person wrote the copy.
Sorry to shatter your hopes but any garbage an LLM writes is mimicry of some human written garbage that came before.
It can only write cringe because we taught it what cringe looks like
"Taken to the edge, and pushed off this edge. To garbage bin."
Ask Shakti, Shiva's creative sister.
Reminds me of all that "Lions. Not Sheep." gear I see people rockin'. LOL
"It belongs in the hands of world makers."
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 :-).
Hell no. Who would think that’s a good idea?
One of the absolutely best things about the MacBook Pro is that it’s silent when you’re not really pushing it. It’s incredibly rare for me to hear them on my M4 Pro. Normal work, including compiling, using docker, my IDE, etc. almost never does it unless I do something big over and over and over.
I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a single sound out of my M3 Air. I think it has a fan. I know my M1 didn’t.
Make the coolest computer you want. If noise is a prominent feature I will never go within 10 feet of it.
>The custom NVIDIA superchip challenges both Qualcomm and Apple
But it seems NVIDIA didn't have enough in house know how and they needed MediaTek to develop the chip.
>20-core NVIDIA Grace CPU (Arm architecture, co-developed with MediaTek)
What aspects are these?
It'd be alright with Linux, probably better than a MBP if you're working heavily with AI (but no other reason to buy it TBH).
https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu-nvidia_n1x
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.
NVIDIA already lowered power draw at idle by 18W with a currently out of tree driver leveraging PCIe hotplug for the NIC earlier this year.
I think that quite a bit more people bought those to use them without the ConnectX than what NVIDIA expected.
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.
Chances for Microsoft and Nvidia combo doing the same are questionable. Better look for other non-Microsoft laptops on the same platform.
crazy.
strix halo was released more than a year ago.
But unfortunately, you get Windows
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/adguard-pro-safari-ad-blocker/...
Why are all the pictures so dark? You can't see it!
[edit:typo]
We need and want an open, modular architecture, and currently it's not ARM, it's x86/64. Because I can't go buy CPU retail and replace it at home.
Edit: oh cool, CPU is MediaTek. No-no, I would stay as far as possible from it.
Thank you, but no, thanks.
It's a pretty low bar to meet.
Every Mac I've owned has had a hardware failure. Keyboard (x3). Dead trackpad. Display backlight. Logic board. LCD failure. Multiple drive failures. One Apple TV that shit the bed. Many within warranty, some not.
Apple's warranty service is pretty good, but to gloat about "quality"... it's more like when Sonny Corleone throws money at the guy's feet after he smashes his camera.
I switched from a M2 Pro with 24gb ram to the new 8gb Neo and I kid you not, they perform just the same 99.5% of the time.
Worse than all of that, long-time Mac users are abandoning the OS.
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.
... until the Surface era, when they either had bizarre designs that didn't work well (like Arc) or else were of cheap build quality and had problematic Bluetooth chipsets.
The first Bluetooth mouse I got was Microsoft's circa 2002, which was an amazing piece of tech back then.
…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.)
Obviously it only hot under load.
I genuinely do not want to deal with windows that much.
Fortunately since my computing needs are met by a fast x86/GPU I don't have to make that choice.
Nvidia has also supported Linux well in general, so let's hope there's an attractive Linux option soon!
Personally I'd be just as happy with a small form factor desktop with the same hardware.
I don't really know, maybe in recent times. All I'm reminded of is Linus giving Nvidia the finger.
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.
There is something about Microsoft's reverse Midas touch.
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.
https://www.servethehome.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/cpu2...
So it's probably Intel
Nevermind, it's totally this chip/board.
https://www.techtimes.com/articles/317428/20260530/nvidia-ar...
Cortex-X925 and Cortex-A725
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.
aaaaand... scene!
No thank you, and goodbye
There's companies out there still handing out cheap 8GB Dells with 1080p screens.
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.
I'm glad the PC industry is hopefully waking up, finally. I'd like to see some good hardware with Linux support. That's all I've wanted, a macbook pro experience on Linux.
A slightly more sober announcement is available at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352627.