
The Story of Surface Book - prostoalex
http://www.wired.com/2015/10/surface-book-behind-the-scenes/
======
mmastrac
First of all, this is a beautiful piece of hardware.

I hate that I have to ask this, but do these ship with locked bootloaders? If
they don't, they might be a candidate for beautiful Hackintoshes or Linux
laptops. I just can't bring myself to run something that isn't unix under the
hood and OSX has been a pretty decent balance of openness/unixness/ecosystem
with a pretty nice looking UI and a thriving software market. I haven't tried
Windows 10, but I suspect I'd be just as unhappy with it as I was with Windows
9 on a Surface.

I'm still a fan of the MacBook hardware, but a detachable screen is something
you just won't see out of the Apple camp. I would love to have a laptop that
converts into a tablet for light use/presentation/travel. A Hackintosh would
be ideal, but I'd easily consider a Linux distro if it meant I could use
something like this.

It didn't ship with USB-C ports (shame), but it sounds like you might be able
to buy an upgraded "bottom" and take advantage of that when it ships (that's
huge!):

[http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2015/10/23/surface-book-
user...](http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2015/10/23/surface-book-user-
upgrade/)

~~~
Analemma_
No x86 computer ships with locked bootloaders, it's part of the spec that you
have to be able to disable SecureBoot in the BIOS.

Having said that, I don't think Linux will be a good fit for this device.
People will first have to reverse-engineer the locking mechanism (which is
done in software in Windows). That'll probably happen quickly, but then
there's the issue of the hybrid graphics, which Linux has never played well
with IME. That's assuming Linux drivers will be available for the dGPU at all;
it's apparently a custom part from Nvidia and there may not even be a binary
blob for them on Linux.

~~~
great_kraken
This really is the problem. The amount of hardware wizardry going on here is
going to be nearly impossible to support on GNU/Linux or any POSIX-like OS
without support from Microsoft. Unfortunately, they don't "get" this, and they
operate in a vacuum where they believe that the software they create is just
the best thing for everyone.

I honestly have no idea how they operate under this presumption. Are they
unaware of the millions of developers using Macbooks purely for this reason?

~~~
dman
Why single out Microsoft here? Which other commercial vendor is going out of
their way to enable bootstrapping OSS code on their platform?

~~~
Domenic_S
Apple gave us boot camp and Windows drivers for MBPs

~~~
vezycash
Note: Apple license forbids installation of Mac OS on non Apple hardware. If
Microsoft did the same, Apple would not have been able to provide the drivers
and boot camp.

One other thing. Apple NEEDED to ease the transition for Windows users.
Without the above factors their laptop sales would be a fraction of what it is
today

------
m52go
> how to set a vision long enough that a $900 million writedown doesn’t break
> you

Goodness. That probably means there was much more than 9 figures of losses in
total. The trust MSFT places in Panay and his team must be _gargantuan_.

I really wonder what MSFT's upper-limit of tolerable losses was for the
Surface program.

~~~
dump100
Perseverance is one of the key MS strength, they don't easily give up once
they start, considering their history of getting things right by v3, it makes
sense. There are exceptions, but still MS is a company mostly for long haul.

~~~
Tloewald
This is definitely a MS strength, although there have been some notable
exceptions (e.g. Silverlight and Expression Studio).

------
neals
I love MS and will have a SP4 tomorrow.

I was blown away by the Surface Book presentation and my first reaction was "I
want one".

But if you think about it, the product makes no sense. The bottom part holds
all the battery, so you want to have it attached. But the top part has 3 hours
of portability, so you don't want to have it attached. But the bottom part has
a dGPU, so you might need that, some times. But the top part runs very well
without the dGPU, so you don't need that.

It's just weird to me. It just wants to be everything I don't need. I'll take
my SP4 with a dock and a keyboard and be just as happy.

~~~
criddell
You make it sound like it's two cup holders away from being a Homer J. Simpson
design.

~~~
neals
Now there's a product I'd buy!

------
otterpro
For Surface Books, the price point seems to be off. It's priced higher than
Macbook pro, and thus I have to justify the need for SB's exceptional
portability. A MBP with i5/128GB typically sells for $1299 (but often cheaper
from non-Apple online stores) , while the similar spec SB costs $1499. A MBP
i7 costs $2000 while SB costs $2700+.

I'd also want it to be Unixy, so my thought is to just run VM and use the
Windows 10 only as a VM host, but nothing else. However, that'd be kind of a
waste for such a machine.

~~~
Tloewald
It's not really exceptionally portable either. It weighs nearly twice as much
as a Macbook.

~~~
AaronFriel
The 12-inch Macbook you're referring to has a Core M-5Y31 processor, with a
normal clock rate of 1.1GHz and up to 2.4GHz turbo (but it won't stay at
2.4GHz long.) It also has no discrete GPU, and the integrated GPU is also
significantly slower to maintain thermal and power limits. The highest end
Macbook has a slightly higher clock (1.2GHz, 2.6GHz turbo).

The Surface Book competes with the Macbook Pro, and the Core i5-6300U in the
base model it has a normal clock rate of 2.4GHz, equal to the turbo of the
base model Macbook. The thermal power limit is about three times as much, and
the integrated GPU is newer, supports 4K displays, and has a higher clock rate
than the turbo of the Macbook.

In no way is the Surface Book trying to compete with the Macbook.

~~~
vezycash
Don't forget the touch screen and pen computing for those who care.

One thing I'm not happy with though is the push for higher resolution screens
at the expense of battery life. At a lower resolution, would the clipboard
last 5-7 hours?

Would the Sp4 last more than 10 hours?

Or am I a minority who cares more about battery life than screen resolution?

~~~
widowlark
IIRC, they were able to increase the pixel density because of the screen they
are using, which uses less power than the SP3, so it would probably be about
equal.

------
xixixao
2 points: Panay's presentation was the best presentation from MS I have ever
seen. It was about 100 times better than any MS presentation I have seen so
far. Second, this is a nice write-up, and it is a promo, but for some of its
honesty I'm surprised it makes out the SB as such a miracle. It is not
particular thin and that might matter more than a lack of a kickstand.

------
raylan_givens
Does anyone have a source or any numbers on how Microsoft's revenue is split
among its departments? I'd be curious to see how much of their revenue is from
their hardware vs. software now.

~~~
dcohenp
Apparently hardware would be under their "More Personal Computing" Segment:
[https://www.microsoft.com/Investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Ear...](https://www.microsoft.com/Investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Earnings/SegmentResults/P3/FY16/Q1/Performance.aspx)

They don't break it down per-product, but the whole segment was $9.1B revenue
out of $20.4B for the quarter. And the only hint we get about this product
specifically is:

"Devices revenue decreased $1.8 billion or 49%, mainly due to lower revenue
from phones, driven by the shift in strategy for the phone business, as well
as lower Surface revenue. Phones revenue decreased $1.5 billion or 58%, as we
sold 5.8 million Lumia phones and 25.5 million other non-Lumia phones in the
first quarter of fiscal year 2016, compared with 9.3 million and 42.9 million
sold, respectively, in the prior year. Surface revenue decreased $236 million
or 26%, primarily driven by the release of Surface Pro 3 in June 2014."

------
dump100
Has anyone used touch screen as a whiteboard during skype call or teleconf,
how good it is? Sometimes, a real whiteboard is not good enough with camera.

~~~
soylentcola
Not so much a touchscreen but I've used plenty of stylus/digitizer setups for
this purpose over the years and they work as well as you'd expect. At one job,
we used normal PCs with simple Wacom tablets for annotation of slides during
love Adobe Connect sessions and the only complaint was from some users who
hadn't yet become comfortable with looking at a monitor while drawing on a
surface (sort of like learning to use a mouse or touch-type for the first
time).

At my current job, we have Sympodium monitors at lecture podiums so you can
draw directly on the screen. These are also not touch screens but make use of
an active digitizer like the Surface products and traditional drawing tablets.

Likewise, I've got a Gen 1 Surface Pro which works just as well for the same
sort of thing. Basically, as long as framerate doesn't need to be as high as
video, it's fine. Usually the "slides" portion of those conferences (whether
web-based or using VTC appliances) is set to use a lower framerate for
bandwidth purposes while the "camera" portion will attempt to hit more video-
like framerates. But otherwise, it's pretty useful and something of a standard
in the educational live conferences I've worked on.

