And if RAM gets cheaper again, it will stay at this pricepoint.
i have only ever seen one of these family of devices, a literal decade ago
I saw one around ten years ago. My boss bought it, used it for a week and bought a new mac.
OS was the main issue for him.
I used one in school a couple years ago, and I can’t deny it was pretty great for it. I like to handwrite my notes, and any math-heavy assignments are way easier to just handwrite, so I used it so all my notes and homework and textbooks could be saved digitally and automatically get backed up to cloud storage. I still use it occasionally as a super light and portable laptop occasionally, but I use a desktop far more often these days.
I had a Surface Pro 4 when I went to university. I always said if it wasn’t for the note taking there was no way I would recommend it. It had all kinds of software issues and eventually it just straight died while I was studying one day. I don’t think I’ve ever had a computer die like that, eventually they just get replaced by being obsolete.
I never really had any issues with mine. I did have it die after about two years when it just stopped charging and/or turning on, never was quite sure where the issue was. But I bought it refurbished and on a steep discount, so I felt I got my money’s worth out of it at least and that that was just an inherent risk of cheap refurbished tech. My only real complaint was that it managed the battery really poorly when I tried to put Linux on it, but it ended up being useful to keep one Windows machine around for the occasional one off use, so even that worked out for me in the long run. As someone who’d prefer to run Linux on everything I can, I have to admit I had like zero problems with it until it died.
But if I had to use one with Windows 11 on it, I’d rather learn to live on my smartphone.
i honestly don’t know who these things are for. I’ve never seen anyone using one in person. why the fuck would you put windows on a tablet
There was a very weird placement on Supernatural on some episodes with a “tech genius”. Very jarring how forced it was.
Everyone in the Netflix daredevil universe uses it.
Fisk must be a major shareholder in Microslop.
I have a surface pro 4. I love these machines. You can use it like a tablet, you can use it like a laptop. It’s great for drawing and taking notes by hand.
The only problem is Windows, but that’s not a big problem for the average person. The price of the new ones is a problem but I think the form factor is awesome.
It’s like a better iPad in a way, since you could run full-scale desktop programs on it, and use it like a desktop.
I wouldn’t be too surprised if things like surfaces were one of the reasons why Apple seems to be making a push to try and make the iPad functional as a computer on its own.
“Only problem” is quite a stretch. Those devices are borderline unrepairable.
I love my Surface Snapdragon X. Battery life up the wazoo and I use it largely as a thin client to windows and linux systems so it lasts forever.
I did debloat it heavily though.
And someone will probably say why not install Linux on it, to which I say…for everything I use I’ve yet to find a Linux distro that works without hours of custom efforts. I work 7 days a week and don’t have time to dive down rabbit holes every day to fix shit like my mouse, or my bluetooth ear buds, or RDP, or parsec, or nomachine, or wifi.
install the terminal version of claude code and ask it to configure your computer for you. you might think I’m joking until you do this
If ever going to try this, ask to make it a script fully explained, then read it and fully backup before you run.
Yeah…no. I leverage AI tooling daily, but I’m not about to go that far.
I had this impression as well, until I had to troubleshoot some problems I was having with the screen. Did not give it root access, but it run a bunch of analysis on the system and within a few minutes it was spitting out configuration files that I just had to copy in the correct directories.
Doing the same myself would have taken me a day on the arch wiki. I’ve been using Linux for years, when I was on X I was editing the Xorg.conf without looking up the documentation. If you know exactly what the problem is, you’ll fix it faster that way. However, if you don’t troubleshoot many systems often it is unlikely that you have a structured approach to identifying the problem. LLMs can be quite organised in doing that.
ive been using Linux for 20 years. my assumption is that your barrier is tedious linux usability problems.
my suggestion specifically would be to give it research powers and regular non-root access, have it write configs and answer questions about your system, suggest alternative packages to install etc.
Alright, I’ll give this a go on a VM first. If it can solve my RDP-like issues I’ll be supremely happy - but to my knowledge, Linux just doesn’t support such a thing the way I want to use it.
I’ll test this on Ubuntu, Mint, Pop, and Debian to start but let me know if there is a distro you recommend.
i am an extreme fan of arch, even if for no other reason than the AUR
im not sure about rdp but i remember vnc being the cross platform standard years ago. i have a comet wifi kvm giving me access to a mac mini because i need it for certain tools
Why would you put it on any computer?
I can think of two reasons, but I can’t think of any for putting it on a tablet
I would love to have one as a novelty item for installing Linux on it, I always thought using Linux on touchscreen is super cool. but it’s expensive as fuck
a friend of mine sold me his semi-new Surface Laptop Go (the original model), and for 400€ it’s a super cool touch screen laptop, using Gnome is super slick, and I am fine to be restricted at 250gb ssd/8gb ram.
but paying it more than double the price would be insane imho
I bought a thinkpad on eBay and it surprised me by being a touch screen version and it just kind of gets in the way you pick up the laptop to move it and you’re clicking the mouse all over the place. i disabled it after drawing about 4 cocks
My friends love them. It’s more like a laptop than a tablet and they love using the touchscreen as apart of their PC experience. Battery life needs work, at least the Intel ones that they were using.
I have yet to convert them to Linux. I’m working on it though.
Lol, just as Apple released their lowest cost laptop ever at $600
Not really sure how big of a difference it makes but isn’t the memory on the Neo on the same die as the processor? The A18 Pro is also likely a lot of old binned chips that they’ve been collecting for a year. I wouldn’t be surprises if this completely isolated them from the rising memory costs. Apple really lucked out on the timing of their release. Not that the Neo wouldn’t have been an amazing value regardless either way.
👹
And it uses literally the same exact hardware as the iPhone 🤣
Seems you let you bias take over rather than actually knowing why you’re talking about.
I honestly feel that’s less of a diss on the Neo and more of a statement on how overpowered phones are now, especially considering the limitations placed on mobile OSes.
Some of the same hardware, yes.
But also - the CPU/GPU in the iPhones are insane.
Compared against a bunch of laptops in the price class from dell, HP, etc and the single-core performance is like 50% higher on the iPhone CPU in the macbook neo.
I can’t wait for more ARM CPUs that hit these specs for a reasonable price.
ARM cpus are great for battery life and aren’t saddled with decades of legacy support, what they are not is a physics bending device. It’s not a geekbench benchmark that is going to change the reality of physics. Now, if one’s use of a computing device is circumscribed to opening web pages, then the iPhone is the device for you. Also, don’t forget to breathe in and breathe out.
As someone who was very excited about ARM several years ago and still is using ARM for half of my homelab equipment, it’s unfortunately rapidly become irrelevant. x86 CPUs can now run as efficiently at the same TDP while still beating it in performance with all the benefits of x86. Unless something unforeseen changes, I probably won’t be buying any more ARM machines for homelab/server use. Still using what I already own, of course.
RISC-V seems cool though, but not sure that it will be more attractive than x86.
I’m still excited, ARM is still a gen ahead of x86 in power constrained situations, for energy efficiency, where peak compute is not a requirement. That illusion fades away fast though, when one multitasks or needs a non hardware accelerated pipeline. For single purpose devices like game consoles, that advantage in power consumption looks mighty sweet. Let’s see what AMD conjures up for the next gen PS6 or as a response to Lunar lake. The mobile ecosystem, especially Apple, have a vertical integration that makes HW development more agile as they are not saddled by decades of legacy support and tech debt.
This seems nonsensical to me. It’s physically impossible for ARM competitors to match the performance of Apple ARM?
Not to mention that we’re talking about their lowest-specced CPU here and there are far more powerful ones.
Those single core performance numbers are entirely benchmaxxed and don’t reflect real world performance or reality at all
EDIT: downvoters in denial. They get better synthetic Geekbench numbers compared to some of the latest desktop x86 processors (“beats” 7950X and “meets” 9950X), but get absolutely smoked by those same processors in real use. Maybe your only use of a computer is running Geekbench idk.
Not exactly, it’s a binned version. 5 GPU cores instead of the 6 on the iPhone. Still, it’s pretty impressive for what it’s able to do.
TIL that they still made these
The slightly older ones make great Linux tablets. I use mine for comics.
Heck, my surface pro 3 makes a great Linux machine. Still tweaking it but the touchscreen works just fine with Mint, so even an old one could probably do just fine.
As long as you don’t mind the webcam not working, which except for the oldest models seemed to be a constant with the Surface tablets.
Edit: i mean in Linux, as these camera modules are near impossible to support.
Saves me the trouble of putting a piece of tape over the camera
On Linux? Why?
Because I’m paranoid.
I remember when the first Surface released and Gabe from Penny Arcade was like “wtf this is better than iPad for drawing. why aren’t they advertising this aspect of it?”
I don’t know if that’s still true, but I always tucked it in the back of my mind when I was looking for drawing tablets.
My Go 3 with fedora runs like a charm
Which Surface Pro version do you recommend? Are you using Ubuntu Touch?
I use a Surface Pro 6, I know of a guy with an 8 on Fedora. Mine’s on Cachy with Gnome.
There is a custom kernel you may need to get, https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface
Gnome kind of makes sense for touch.
I just threw Cachy onto an old Inspiron for a computer to have near me while recording instruments, but a Surface Pro would actually be much better.
How’s battery and did MS fix those shit house chargersthey had back when I had a Surface Pro 2?
Mine’s okay, the two little contact idea they had is finicky but a little jiggle and it’s good, I do keep the contacts clean, little rubbing alcohol.
Even as a Surface owner, this came as a surprise. Had no idea they were still in the hardware business.
Pricing for surfaces was already illogically high, why not add more fuel to the fire?
But already cost like $1k. I can’t figure why anyone would want one. It’s like they took the worst things about a tablet and the worst things about a laptop and put them together.
MS: How many feet do we have because I LOVE SHOOTING THEM!
Micro$lop*
I wasnt even aware that Surface hardware was still a thing.
Surprising good for small companies that don’t want to deal with hardware maintenance but are already in the m365 ecosystem.
Updates for drivers, firmware, etc comes right from windows update and not from a 3rd party app like dell/hp/lenovo business-oriented devices do.
I work for an org with ~1700 Surface Laptop 7 ARM deployed. They are actually really nice. Managing them with Intune is a breeze (including BIOS management), and Windows ARM is actually getting 3rd party app support now (Thanks, Apple!)
Yes, yes. Microslop, I know. But we are talking end user computing here.
I have a lot of win32 to deal with so not exactly ARM friendly but with recent hardware cost increases I’m aiming to support ARM by end of year and begin a real transition next year unless intel can pull a rabbit out of the x86 hat again. Panther lake has me cautiously optimistic.
perfect timing
Isn’t Microsoft big enough they could just… make more RAM?
They don’t make RAM, there’s only a very few companies that actually make the chips that go into RAM. Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung basically make up the entire market and they’re not afraid to use that to their advantage.
They’ve been literally convicted of price fixing in the past as a cartel.
This comment is absolutely true, Samsung made almost as much profit as NVIDIA last year, boosted by memory sales. Their margins also skyrocketed. Everyone knows what that means.
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Dedotated or not dedotated?
But on a serious note, no that would solve problems; they’re doing AI and subscriptions instead.
