Agreed on geekbench and benchmarks in general. They are way too often cherry picked to fit a narrative.
That being said, we haven’t actually seen or tested a gen 3 yet. OTOH i think most people’s sense of WOA in general is based on launch performance when nearly nothing was native.
64bit emulation is much faster than 32 bit was (though not to Apple’s Rosetta levels) and generally speaking MS has continued to improve native performance where it’s roughly equal to 10th gen core i3-low end core i5 levels when running fully native apps. Of course, finding fully native apps is still challenging as even significant parts of office still run in emulation, though the big three, Word , Excel, and Power Point core executables now are.
We will definitely be testing the heck out of gen 3 when systems are released
Thurrott and company are on a rant against Monica Chin’s article today:
Basically all three of them are going off the scale how this is a total waste of Microsoft’s time and attention because NO ONE really wants a convertible Windows tablet…with lots of bombastic rhetoric and more than the usual amount of Thurrott I KNOW EVERYTHING!
I just turned it off - I am so sick of that pompous know-it-all jacka$$…It’s thinking like his that is handing the market to Apple…
The one objection we hear consistently about both the Surface Pro and Go is that if you genuinely use them as a “lap”-top, they aren’t great and most people have issues with stability on their lap due to the hinge and “floppy” nature of the keyboard covers.
They aren’t wrong, but OTOH I wonder how big a use case that really is. I can probably count on my fingers the number of times I’ve had to use the Surface, or for that matter any laptop truly on my lap, because, among other factors I find the view angle low and uncomfortable for more than just a few minutes.
The only thing anyone should be criticizing The Verge for (this week at least) is their godawful redesign. I mean it’s a bold choice for a news site to choose unreadable fonts and colors, but I’d imagine they’d prefer people keep using their site instead.
I’ve not read any of the articles yet, but I will say- I use my laptop on my lap all the time, and it has been a key deciding factor about why I’ve never ended up keeping a Surface when I’ve tried it out.
My laptops do all things for me- they’re for work, play, video, browsing, etc. I use it during work hours and after hours and weekend hours. So, yes, going on my lap is a clear part of things. Not the only part, but an important part. We snuggle up and watch TV in bed, or prop it on a lap on the couch or on the footstool and watch TV together as a family on it. So, having it stand vertically (not at an angle, with a hinge) is key. And having it be lapable is key. And the keyboard is fine- as an attached keyboard. But I never thought it was stellar or anything.
Also, it’s part of the reason I never ended up keeping an iPad as my main device. I’ve never enjoyed the sort of gorilla-neck I get when using it in my lap as a tablet. I much prefer to look at the vertical screen of a laptop that is weighted in the keyboard. It’s much better ergonomically. Additionally, I’ve never cared for any of the iPad keyboards. They’re either too floppy with the screen being too heavy, or they’re like the Magic Keyboard, which is too tight to the screen vertically, IMO. Perhaps this next gen MK with the new potential design will finally elevate the screen high enough for heavy-handed typists like myself? I dunno.
Either way, for now-- if it aint broke, don’t fix it. Laptops have served me well for over a decade, and I’ve not found anything yet that’s worked as well.
Having said that, my wife loves her Surface Pro and has had many of them over the years. But she basically only uses it for work. And at home, we had to find a special lap-pad that holds the screen in place vertically with the keyboard still attached. It was the only way to make it lappable.
Those seem to be accurate, from the latest we’ve heard with MS positioning the 8Cx version as the mobility/connectivity/battery life option and the Intel versions as the performance option.
It will be interesting to see what if any changes MS makes to the housing of either Pro 9 as Alder Lake seems like it will present cooling challenges and 5G and its associated antennas might be problematic in the current mostly metal housing.
BTW: The one thing that Notebook Check might be getting wrong is if the 5g chipset will be integrated or separate. They appear to be basing that solely on the ThinkPad which we hear has it separate only because the integrated SOC wasn’t quite ready, eg. it’s more like 8CX gen 2.5.
And given how tight the space already is in the Pro 8/X integration makes sense.
And last but not least, there may not be an 11 inch after all, at least being called Surface Pro 9, but they may have reverted to the plan to have it appear as a next gen Surface Go.
Of course, all of the above is a distillation of the latest rumors and so should be taken as such
Our graphic designer has a theory that The Verge may have gotten too far out in front of a trend.
In other words, the new site design (typography issues aside) seems to be designed primarily for smartphones in dark mode and not for conventional desktop/laptop displays. You can see what she’s talking about in how narrow/vertical most of the text in the articles are.
Total aside, but I finally figured out why the tray bump on the SP8 doesn’t bother me, in fact it is a good hand hold, because I carried these from 7th grade until 3L law school with a Bic jammed in the spiral:
That’s fascinating to me! Different bodies and use cases, I suppose!
For sure, with my short little legs, there is no easy way to fit it on my lap comfortably. LOL! Perhaps it’s that my lap is too small, or that my legs tend to tilt downwards because they’re reaching for the ground. My inseam is like 28/29", so it really is pretty short for a grown male. But with the extra long length needed to accommodate the kickstand (compared to a normal laptop), it never really ended up working well for me.
But I’m glad that there are folks who are using the SP line as a laptop and are digging it. :
Yes, short legs are part of my issue with using the Surfac Pro/Go on my lap. And for that matter likely why I don’t use any laptop often on my lap because of those same short legs. I feel like I’m looking down at too much of an angle to be comfortable with my neck for an extended period of time.
OTOH, my son takes after my wife’s side of the family with long legs (he was already my height at age 13) and uses his Go on his lap about half of the time.
This reminds me of something I frequently remind my engineers is that just because something doesn’t work for you, doesn’t preclude it being perfect for someone else.
So tying back to the sub topic that started this detour, the Surface Pro 3 was a revelation to me because it was the first full computer that I could effectively use for my (possibly idiosyncratic) preferred work style which is on my feet and moving around.
I actually think that the answer for me is more likely to come from Lenovo or Samsung. If it does, it’ll have to be entirely by accident as no one appears to be focused on this device’s size, which I consider optimal. I seriously think I’ll have to keep the Go until something better comes along. It still does what I need it to. LTE is the only hang up I have but I’ll probably be getting a 5G phone when the galaxy S23 Ultra comes along.
Maybe the Pro 9 5G will change my mind … but I think not.
Only one reason - because WOA is so inferior at this point, and M1 smokes all other ARM-comers, that the embarrassment factor would be too much to stand…
Agreed. And just to throw in my two cents, the Surface Pros and even the Surface Go don’t work on my lap not just because the keyboard is floppy, but because the kickstand digs into my leg and becomes very painful to me after a while. YMMV.
Different bodies and use cases, I suppose!