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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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
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 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.
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...
„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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
"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.
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.
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.
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....)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
…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.)
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Hilarious, "Designed for serviceability" is one of the headline features about 3/4 down
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-lapt...
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
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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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.
Isn't that a little unfair? You'd have an even worse experience running Linux on a MacBook.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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).
> 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?)
> (Or is supposed to be?)
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.
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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.
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.
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...
„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.
The emphasis on the fans kicking off also had a bit of a turn-off.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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How much does a dedicated server with 128GB vram cost a month.
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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..
> 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.
"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.
... who can't run half of their large-scale software with an ancient version of .NET on Arm.
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It’s in the first line of the article. It’s for people that make the world, obviously
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.
creative industry/enterprise. similar to Asus ProArt line and high end ThinkPad workstations
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.
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....)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>Wacom on the go
?!?
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"?
Exactly that, same basic functionality as a Wacom, active digitizer stylus.
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
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.
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.
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What's this nonsensical video on the product page that allegedly shows an "all new thermal system"? https://videos.ctfassets.net/jy9s7k22hbg4/44R1LH71xb8uO4c9dD...
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
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?).
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.
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.
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.
"The world is full of makers. Only a few make the world."
What does this mean ? How can you make the world ?
In FreeBSD it was `make world` in /usr/src.
Bloody cperciva put an end to that.
so, they made a device that targets only a handful of people? They should stop letting copilot write their ad copy.
It means nothing. The LLM thought it was edgy.
LLMs are not yet capable of generating the level of marketing wankery seen here.
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Be a creator instead of a consumer.
But it implies it's not for ordinary makers. Only for the "world makers".
"It belongs in the hands of world makers."
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Oh thank god it has a co-pilot button
The biggest downside of this product is Windows
The second biggest is Microsoft's track record with hardware
No price? I guess over 3k for 128GB ram and Nvidia spark.
I read somewhere, $4k for 64gb ram
Also RAM was still quite a bit cheaper when the DGX was announced back in early '25.
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.
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.
That copy reeks of AI generated text... for a premium, luxury laptop. What a shame.
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
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.
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.)
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.
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...
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.
It's a shame that, outside of garish "gaming" laptops, 17" screens are very rare.
> 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.
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.
I guess that if I have to ask for the price, it’s not for me.
What happens if you vibe code an entire hardware product?
why are they showing off the fans? how hot does this thing run?
> Built on Windows
aaaaand... scene!
No thank you, and goodbye
Yeah what bizarro world is their marketing team living in where that's something to tout?
I sometimes wonder if the "Corporate VP" (whatever that means) believes his own jerk-off marketing
I have no doubt that huffing their own farts until euphoria hits is considered a critical skill.
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?
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.
https://www.servethehome.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/cpu2...
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
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.
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
https://www.theverge.com/news/940275/nvidia-n1x-laptop-proce...
Completely garden-variety normal ARM-designed cores:
Cortex-X925 and Cortex-A725
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
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.
Nevermind, it's totally this chip/board.
https://www.techtimes.com/articles/317428/20260530/nvidia-ar...
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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.
Surface Laptop Ultra Ripoff: Made for World(-Class) Suckers.
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