Comment by steveBK123

3 hours ago

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..

"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.

    • ... yet they still struggle to try and port their code to a newer .net version that does run on ARM. And do a bunch of other work tasks that can utilize this hardware.

      (But, you bring up a great point, regardless!)

      2 replies →

> 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.

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.

  • > coasted to a complete stop

    I’m not sure how you say that on a release that is literally about new surface hardware

  • 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....)