Another year, another Surface. Microsoft introduces a new Surface Pro every year or so and I dutifully buy a new one every time. I've lost count of how many old ones I have stuffed into a filing cabinet in my study.
Why do I buy a new unit so often? In general, it's because I spend at least six or seven hours using it every day, so I want to have the latest and greatest. More specifically, it's because I get suckered endlessly into hoping that the latest model will finally have decent battery life.
They never do. Every new generation of Intel processors is slightly more efficient, but that only produces about 30 minutes of extra life per generation. Last year Microsoft switched to an ARM processor and I was hopeful that would finally do the trick. It didn't.
Ditto for the Surface Pro 11, the second generation to use an ARM processor. And while all of these small improvements have added up over the years, the Pro 11 still gets only 7-8 hours of real-life use.
But! Microsoft made another change in the newest Surface: it now has an OLED screen instead of the older LCD screen. As near as I can tell, the screen looks about the same but it's considerably brighter. That means I can turn down the screen brightness compared to the older models.
And that finally made the difference. Combined with years of incremental improvements, the lower screen brightness means I finally get about 9-10 hours of use on a single charge. That's almost always enough to get me through an entire day.
So that's that: After eleven iterations the Surface Pro is finally an all-day tablet. Huzzah!
POSTSCRIPT: Anything else to say, Kevin? Not really. I guess it still doesn't play games very well, but I wouldn't know. Aside from that, everything works fine aside from a few minor bugs in handling touch input. The new Snapdragon processor is noticeably faster than the Pro 10, which is nice. The screen looks good, as always. It's also still heavy, as always.
I'm curious about why you chose a Surface. Does it integrate better with your other software? Does it have some important features? I've heard that they are pretty good, but the iPad has been getting very good battery life for years now, so I doubt that is your primary criterion.
I've owned both a Surface Pro (3rd-gen, so quite a while ago) and a recent ipad (m1) and I don't think they are really apples-to-apples (haha). Surface can be used as a laptop and a tablet. The ipad is a great tablet but not a great laptop replacement. It will work for some basic tasks and great for media consumption, but it's a touch-first interface, so using any kind of pointer device is awkward. It's really just an oversized iphone.
That makes sense. The Surface is probably the best switch hitter out there.
Windows haters are going to chime in any minute now...
intel machines are fine, but every iteration of windows keeps adding bloatware and surveillance 'features' i'd rather not have to spend time uninstalling
the final straw for me was win11 disabling vertical taskbars
so while i still have a couple laptops with windows, i mainly run a linux host/vm's on my primary machine since backups are much easier for vm's
and if you happen to get spyware on a vm (or crowdstrike-type nonsense), just reinstall from backups
easy peasy
Windows haters are going to chime in any minute now...
I used Windows machines for quite a few years. I finally broke down and went over to the dark side three years ago because the one advantage I thought it offered—lower prices—no longer seemed accurate. Maybe I just had a spate of bad luck, but I went through a several year period where hardware issues, pricey repairs and bricked machines that needed replacing made me take a hard look at the sums and conclude Apple these days is not just better—it's literally cheaper. The rapacious capitalists of Cupertino seem to do an infinitely better job at quality control.
Anyway, in my case I'm much more a "disappointed" ex-Windows user than a Windows "hater" as such.
I'm confused why Kevin would buy a new one every year or so. There are very rarely big changes that would change the user experience in that time frame.
Well, he’s got the disposable income for it, so why not?
Bored guys without children gotta spend money on something (which also explains the relatively recent telescope/photography hobby).
as do bored guys and gals *with* children
July 23 (Reuters) - Vice President Kamala Harris opened up a marginal two-percentage-point lead over Republican Donald Trump after President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign and passed the torch to her, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found.
That compares with a marginal two-point deficit Biden faced against Trump in last week's poll before his Sunday exit from the race.
The new poll, conducted on Monday and Tuesday, followed both the Republican National Convention where Trump on Thursday formally accepted the nomination and Biden's announcement on Sunday he was leaving the race and endorsing Harris.
Harris, whose campaign says she has secured the Democratic nomination, led Trump 44% to 42% in the national poll, a difference within the 3-percentage-point margin of error.
Harris and Trump were tied at 44% in a July 15-16 poll, and Trump led by one percentage point in a July 1-2 poll, both within the same margin of error.
Good news if you still consider polls reliable, especially ones that are four months out from the election.
well, i don't know anyone who's claiming this number is the final word on november
but if it showed her down 10 points that might be cause for concern
and two up isn't bad considering she's been in the race for 48 hours
are i polls reliable at this point? who knows, but i do think the shift toward harris is probably real. btw the election is three months away; early voting even sooner.
jd's campaign bus rolls over in chicago
lmfao.
I suppose this is as good a place as any to share this:
https://blabbermouth.net/news/steven-wilson-struggles-to-hear-that-its-not-him-singing-a-i-created-songs-this-is-uncanny-almost-surreal
I find it depressing. I have disagreed with Kevin as to how fast AI is coming and I still don’t think it will be as fast as he seems to think. But it’s also coming faster than I think and I wonder what it will do to human creativity.
The full article quotes several rock musicians. Here’s the Steven Wilson quote:
‘For the last few years when I've been asked in interviews about the future of music, I've talked about a scenario I fully expect to happen whereby musicians wouldn't be needed anymore, and neither would pre-recorded tracks. Music will be made in real time for listeners by artificial intelligence depending on their requirements at that moment. You will choose the singer that you want to sing the song for you (Freddie Mercury, Aretha Franklin, John Lennon whoever),the subject matter you want them to sing about, and the musical genre. And it will generate that piece of music for you in real time, at which point you can choose to save it away for a future listen, share it with your friends, or erase it. For me personally things just took a big step further in that direction with several artificial intelligence created Steven Wilson tracks that have been brought to my attention. I don't know who created them or what their motivation was, but even I really struggle to hear that it's not me singing these songs. No matter what I might think about the quality of the music, this is uncanny, almost surreal.“
What do you do with the old Surface tablets?
You make tea.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/broken-linux-laptop-makes-for-a-fine-smart-tv-alternative/
There's also the fact that on OLED, black is off. On LCD, it doesn't matter. So if you use a dark theme, that saves battery life too.
But I'm done with all this. Microsoft keeps pushing more and more ads my way. It is getting harder and harder to set up a new computer without being forced into a Microsoft account. I'm just fed up with Microsoft's Apple act.
I started using a KUbuntu laptop as my primary working machine a couple of month ago. So far, it is OK. Linux and LibreOffice are somewhat less polished than Microsoft's software and you still have to go to the command line more than is really necessary. And when it updates, it doesn't overwrite all my preferences with Microsoft's. I'm damn tired of switching my image viewer back to Irfanview twice a month. And the battery life is no worse and possibly better than that godforsaken Dell XPS POS i was using.
Microsoft can kiss my taint. Dell can kiss my ass.
welcome to the dark side 😉
i've used linux since 1993 (slackware, distributed on a couple dozen 3.5 inch 1.44mb floppies)
i had to use windows at work for some projects and every time it updated it blew away the static routes i had defined on that machine
i finally wrote a little shell script that i would run after a windows update to redefine everything... grumble
You keep the old ones in a filing cabinet? Is there no local charity that will take them and distribute them to needy children?
If you switch to Linux, it will run faster, and last longer.
Yuck, Surface and Windows the worst of both worlds.
Try these out -- https://tinypatchofsky.com/linux-astrophotography-software
A nice Linux desktop and a decent Linux laptop could be set up for less cost and more fun to experiment and learn on.
https://www.acer.com/us-en/chromebooks/acer-chromebook-spin-714-cp714-2wn would work for most tasks as well.
Coincidentally, I just got a new one too. It is a little “laggier” than my old Surface. And it seems to take longer to come to life out of sleep mode.
I'm typing this on a very nice LG Gram with a beautiful OLED screen and no more than 4-5 hours battery life. I also have a Macbook Air M2, with a slightly less nice screen and easily 12 hour battery life. Both have great build quality, but the LG cost about 50% more than the Mac. The LG runs large math programs roughly 2x faster, but I run those infrequently, and 2x isn't enough to justify less than half the battery life always. The Macbook will also charge happily from a 45W charger, while the LG has a 65W charger. Smaller is more portable, and cables are lighter too. The UIs are different, it's hard to jump between them, but not impossible. As a 40 year PC user, I recommend trying a Mac.
11!!! My work just upgraded me to a 9. Honeslty as long as it keeps battery for meetings I'm usually plugged in otherwise. Can only be an improvement, I don't know what number my previous device was but at 6 years old it was always a miracle if the battery lasterd an hour.