"There are artists who draw on iPads, and musicians who make music on iPads, and writers who write novels on iPads, and movie makers who cut their movies on iPads. But the fact that you have to point to these people, the fact that there are articles about these people, shows that they’re unusual."
Unusual in a relative sense, the same way artists and musicians and movie makers are unusual in any segment of society. There are millions and millions of iPad users; of course most of them are going to use their iPads primarily for consumption.
Using a Microsoft Surface is in itself unusual. I remember clearly the one time I saw someone using a Surface. It was an usual event. But on my way to work I see tens (hundreds?) of iPads and an assortment of android tablets and kindles.
My point is, I don't believe there is a large difference between the use cases and potential offered from the many consumer tablets currently available (despite Microsoft's marketing that would lead one to believe that a Surface can truly replace both and iPad and a laptop). Maybe the Surface is better for productivity, but I suspect that for every tech blogger who tried the Surface and found it to be a better laptop replacement than their iPad, there are tons of Surface owners who's use case resembles the stereotypical iPad consumption use case.
Last summer I participated in a startup accelerator in Chicago. My Macbook died in the first week! At the time, I didn't have the funds to purchase another Apple machine. Luckily, my girlfriend had recently purchased a Surface RT with the keyboard cover.
I did not think that the tablet would be able to replace a laptop for "serious" work, but it did. There are a couple of things that allowed me to do this. First, a USB port having the ability to hook it up to "stuff" comes in handy. Second, snapping apps side by side. And, the ability to use the desktop. I could have Excel and a browser window open at the same time. Third, I could access all of Google's apps through Internet Explorer.
I was able to create great decks on Powerpoint, manage large Excel files, use the Google Suite, and multitask like on a laptop. The Surface RT was my main machine for the entire summer. And, at home my lady still used it to watch netflix and surf the web in bed.
In August instead of replacing my Macbook with another Mabook, I purchased a Surface Pro. I run Adobe CC, Ableton Live, Microsoft Office on it everyday. It is my all one in solution.
Windows 8 has a learning curve. It took me about two weeks to fully understand the OS, but I came from an Mac OS background. I recently started working in a digital agency, and we use Windows 7. I have to say Windows 8 makes my workflow easier than 7.
Edit: I forgot to mention the pen! This is one piece of technology that makes me giddy. It works great with OneNote and Photoshop. I grew up with plenty of PDAs with stylus input. But, none of those lived up to the promise of an actual digital pen. Most filled the need to tap small boxes and areas on the screen. The stylus on the Surface Pro makes it feel like a different device when I am in a meeting taking notes. It stops feeling like a laptop or "tablet" and more like a digital notebook.
I recently bought a Lenovo Helix, very similar to the Surface Pro with the Power cover. With WiFi on (i.e., at a coffee shop), I get about 6 or 7 hours of battery life out of it. With WiFi off (i.e., in the car when my wife is driving, or on an airplane), I get more like 10.
It is a little heavier than the Surface Pro (though I've never seen the Surface Pro with the Power cover, so I don't know what the weight is like on that), but I don't mind, it's still lighter than my regular laptop.
It lets me work without compromise. On my Android tablet or iPad, I can only do certain types of work, and it all basically boils down to "can I make an SSH connection?" With a Windows 8 convertible tablet, I can even have a copy of my database locally and be working completely disconnected from the internet. It's pretty amazing.
Though, after this particular project is done, I might install a Linux OS on it, perhaps Ubunutu (though I'm not too keen on vanilla Ubuntu). I need to do some Visual Studio-centric work right now, but after this particular push I'll be able to move things over to Mono/SharpDevelop/etc., then get off Windows permanently.
And that's the important thing. It's not so much that "my tablet runs Windows and the iPad does not". It's "my tablet runs a full operating system that doesn't pigeon-hole me into a 'curated experience' and iOS never will be such."
EDIT: I should say "iOS and Android never will be such".
The digital pen part is the one that keeps tempting me to check out the surface pro 2.
I'm no artist, but having a digital notebook would be really nice. I want something that really comes close to the fidelity and feel of a notebook and a pen. For instance, when I'm sketching out a design or an idea, I like to jot down the ideas, connections, etc, and move them around. I like doodling random notes during meetings, and I also think it would be nice to have that while I'm working through math books.
The Surface Pro came up when I was reading the review of it as an artistic tool written by Gabe from penny arcade. Really tempting now, as well, since I need to get a new windows machine to do some side .net work.
In your opinion, does it feel as good/natural as others have said for hand-writing notes?
I bought one yesterday on the strength of the pen alone. It was an impulse buy and I may return it (14 day return, no-restock-fee), but it is really, really impressive and I'm digging it. It'll also let me build a touch version of my game on a system I can also build on, which is pretty handy. I wasn't looking forward to deploying to Android ten bajillion times.
Also, oh my god is OneNote wonderful with that pen. It is so good.
Mac laptop, Windows tablet, Android phone. My digital ecosystem is confused.
>> Mac laptop, Windows tablet, Android phone. My digital ecosystem is confused.
Is it though? I know a lot of pundits like to use the phrase "Post-PC", but I think of it more like "Post-OS". I am in the exact same boat as you, except that I have a Nexus 7 in addition to my Surface Pro.
Contrast that to 2010, when iOS was much more compelling at the tablet and phone level. Android, Windows Phone and Windows have pretty much caught up, and I love how all this competition has created consumer choice. I can pick the device that best suits my use case for computing, tablet and phone.
In 2010, I was all-in on OSX, iPad and iPhone. Today, just like you, I'm using three OSes. Moving data between the devices is painless. In my mind, there's really no need to go all in with a single company's ecosystem any more.
OS matters way way less than it used to (Think of the bad old days, where Macs couldn't read Windows floppies), but it can still be a pain. For example, Google Music integrates best with Android. Microsoft OneDrive is most slick on Windows. iTunes runs like crap on anything other than OSX.
You can get away with any hodgepodge mix these days if you want, but it's still more convenient to match.
>> iTunes runs like crap on anything other than OSX.
I know a lot of Mac users who would beg to differ.
I use Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive across all my devices, and I don't have many complaints at all. YMMV, of course. My use case is probably much simpler than yours.
It is still quite awful, especially if you have a large media collection.
That said, one benefit to a mostly homogenous ecosystem around apple devices, at least for me, airplay and streaming media across devices with less work (I get lazy about home it issues)
I have a Nexus 7 and a Nexus 10, too. :-P I just don't carry them around all the time. If I keep the Surface Pro, I think that'll take their place - it's not great for reading but I do most of that on my rMBP anyway.
I'm the same way. But I found that the Surface was, compared to the iPad, not as nice for tablet-y things like reading PDFs. And when I wanted to get real work done, the screen was smaller than any 13" or 15" laptop. Using it with a larger display connected was confusing because you couldn't always take advantage of the pen or move seamlessly from one screen to the next. And I missed the Mac's Terminal app -- PowerShell doesn't have tabs.
So don:'t get me wrong, I kept the surface, but my dream tablet is 13-15" with a pen that runs OneNote on Mac ;-)
Oh and for Android dev, turn off Hyper-V and install Intel HAXM to speedily use Intel simulators. That said, for testing on device, it's really fast with Android, no signing issues as with iOS, though they're easily overcome too.
Android emulators are largely junk, even the Intel ones, and they're double-junk for game development to actually take advantage of the platform's features--I need a gesture-capable touch interface to test gesture-capable touch stuff, you know?
I would like a bigger tablet, but I run all my Retina Macs at max resolution so 1920x1080 at 10" isn't really a big deal for me, you know? The biggest complaint I have is the idiotic DPI controls on Windows. They're stupid, and Photoshop is extra-bad at them.
I'm convinced they'd have art students lined up around the block if they had ArtRage, Painter, and Photoshop with the WinTab drivers on display. But instead they hock that "Fresh Paint" program, which isn't bad but is no ArtRage or Painter.
Not as good as pen on paper, but the closest I've ever seen. You should probably go to a store and play with one to see if it suits you. I bought my Surface after I did that.
If you don't need handwriting recognition (I don't personally, but it is nice to have), I've found that Stylus Labs Write to be better than the App Store's version of OneNote (http://www.styluslabs.com/). It seems to have a little less lag than OneNote for note taking also. FWIW, Write is cross platform, and I imagine it would work great on something like a Galaxy Note.
The full version of OneNote, however, is worth the cost of admission. Works fantastic with the Stylus and is way better than the Win8 App store version.
I've used a Cintiq for years, and it has the exact same issue with tracking the pen near the edges. If anything, it's worse than the Surface. So it never occurred to me that there might be a solution. Thank you for the link!
When you calibrate, you also need to make sure you hold the pen vertically. Even after the more detailed calibration, you'll get a few minor issues, but it's way better than the 8 point calibration.
Landscape vs Portrait will also cause issues, because the angle of the pen is different, and causes tracking issues. It's imperfect, but I still love how good the pen is on the Surface compared to all the tablets that don't have a Wacom digitizer.
The one gotcha, especially if you go for a heavily discounted Surface Pro 1, is battery life when compared to the likes of an iPad. If you can deal with that, the Surface Pros are fantastic devices.
I figured that might be the case. If I got one I'd go with the Surface Pro 2, more than likely.
I also plan on keeping the iPad around. lstamour mentioned this in another post, but weight-wise, I'm assuming I'll still prefer it for reading pdf's and such. That's actually the main reason I got an iPad to begin with. I wanted to be able to read tech books, pdf's, papers, etc on something electronic and iPad beat everything else I tried.
> I was able to create great decks on Powerpoint, manage large Excel files, use the Google Suite, and multitask like on a laptop
The fact we consider such uses to be stretching the abilities of a 5-core 32-bit 500 megahertz processor coupled to half a dozen gigabytes of RAM and attached to gigabytes of blazing fast storage, that displays data using a multi-core SIMD supercomputer just for pushing pixels speak a lot about how ludicrously inefficient our use of computing resources is.
With this kind of computer power, our parents designed Hydrogen bombs, ICBMs, supersonic fighters and spaceships.
>With this kind of computer power, our parents designed Hydrogen bombs, ICBMs, supersonic fighters and spaceships.
You can still write bare-metal code and run it on modern hardware with a thin OS that has functionality on par with the ones from that era.
Question is, why would you want to? What specific tangible development cost/time (or other) benefits do you get out of it?
>Now we make great Powerpoint decks...
Powerpoint is also a vector art editor, a word processor, a spreadsheet tool, a multimedia player, a language translator, a restricted web browser, a script engine, etc, etc.
you did all of that on a Surface RT? Impressive, because Excel and Powerpoint are unusably slow on RT.
Source:
We've developed a business app for Win 8, development was co-sponsered by MS and Intel. We have a very succesful iPad app in our vertical, it allowed large swaths of our customer base to switch to iPads for their fieldforce.
MS themselves acknowledged that if you want to handle "large Excel" files, the RT is the wrong device.
The Surface Pro 2 finally has the performance.
I understand your enthusiasm, switching from a 2005 MB Pro to any device in 2013 is mindblowing. Just hold back with a little bit too much hyperbole, the RT was an underspecced consumer device, Office support on it was an afterthought and a paniced scramble for the dev team (as documented here on HN a while ago).
Yes, I was able to do all that on the RT. I never planned on using it as my main machine, but I had no choice. Using an ARM powered device to handle an entire workload is not ideal. You are right it was not the fastest or best spec'd machine. When the time came instead of buying another RT, I purchased a Pro.
because Excel and Powerpoint are unusably slow on RT.
I guess if you're using pivot tables or vlookups on massive datasets you might have a point. But I use Excel every day on my Surface RT and it performs very well.
My wife had her computer blink out for a couple weeks and while the problem was getting fixed she hooked up her ~10 year old netbook she bought back then for ~$300 to a monitor/kb/mouse and after windows updated the ancient XP and office installs, was back to work pretty quick. It was absolutely fine for office work and basic web surfing, full screen videos were a little rough but they worked...she even got some dev work done on it.
Tbh, if the video performance was a little faster and it had an extra GB of RAM, she'd be perfectly fine with it as her day to day...and it fits okay in one of her larger purses.
It's absolutely amazing how overpowered our machines are these days, there's almost no sense to it.
> I could have Excel and a browser window open at the same time.
My developer coworkers — whether on Linux or Windows — multitask by ALT-TAB'ing between maximized windows (so, basically fullscreen). If they have multiple monitors, they use each one with a full-screen app. They never use Aero snap, they never have floating windows. The first thing they do when opening a program is double-click on the titlebar (possibly putting it on the monitor of their choosing before).
Conversely I can't work without Mission Control, and use Moom liberally (~ Aero snap on steroids)
You have posted 10 positive Microsoft reviews in the past year which corresponds to approximately 10%-20% of your posts. Are you paid to do this or just really into the company?
So are you paid to question why people like ms products by their competitors? Accusing people like this is rather childish.. unless your 'proof' takes the form "someone likes a product which nobody is supposed to like.."
Let me get this straight. You believe that a multi-billion dollar company hires people to post multiple comments on a forum (which less than 1% of their total customers read) under the same username, and only 10% of those are positive (assuming its true, i have zero interest in digging through anyones comment history) - per year - just so a small percentage of people reading those comments might go out and buy a product without doing further research?
>Surely you know how common it is for people to be hired to pose as bloggers who are in fact paid representatives of specific companies or political causes?
No, actually, I don't know how common it is.
>As to the OP being paid to doubt your sincerity, just ask yourself what his motive might be -- who might pay for that to happen. In other words, exercise common sense.
Um.. I am not the person who posted the original comment (or the article).
>Yes, unless it's justified by evidence. It's justified by evidence.
You have a bizarre definition of evidence. The "evidence" in this case is the subjective opinion of one person who is interpreting the subjective opinion of another. There is no actual evidence that anyone was actually paid for anything. People using the "I can't think of anything else" argument don't convince me.
The author's point about impedance between the iPad's design and creative tasks is not made in the context of statistically unlikely tasks such as writing poems or Caribbean reef diving travelogues or skydiving tutorials. His point is about creation that falls within a standard deviation or two of ordinary life:
Consider a creative task that almost everybody has to do: writing a job application.
Like responding to a business email or writing a Perl script to process network log files, there tends not to be some app that facilitates the work and iOS by design intent does not facilitate mashups.
Historically this divide between Windows and Apple's in house operating systems might be said to go all the way back to the development of OLE and Apple's proposed long-dead OpenDoc.
Unusual in a relative sense, the same way artists and musicians and movie makers are unusual in any segment of society. There are millions and millions of iPad users; of course most of them are going to use their iPads primarily for consumption.
What you are saying is correct, but does not address the author's point, which is that the subset of artists/musicians/etc. who mainly use iPads for their creative/productive output is still very small.
Using a Microsoft Surface is in itself unusual. I remember clearly the one time I saw someone using a Surface. It was an usual event. But on my way to work I see tens (hundreds?) of iPads and an assortment of android tablets and kindles.
Why was using the Surface unusual, beyond the fact that seeing one was unusual?
You're right that Surfaces themselves are uncommon. However, people who use their devices for productivity are probably a lot more common among Surface owners than among iPad owners.
Unusual in a relative sense, the same way artists and musicians and movie makers are unusual in any segment of society. There are millions and millions of iPad users; of course most of them are going to use their iPads primarily for consumption.
Using a Microsoft Surface is in itself unusual. I remember clearly the one time I saw someone using a Surface. It was an usual event. But on my way to work I see tens (hundreds?) of iPads and an assortment of android tablets and kindles.
My point is, I don't believe there is a large difference between the use cases and potential offered from the many consumer tablets currently available (despite Microsoft's marketing that would lead one to believe that a Surface can truly replace both and iPad and a laptop). Maybe the Surface is better for productivity, but I suspect that for every tech blogger who tried the Surface and found it to be a better laptop replacement than their iPad, there are tons of Surface owners who's use case resembles the stereotypical iPad consumption use case.