Apple made a similar switch from one proprietary charging connector (magsafe 1) to another proprietary connector (magsafe 2) and it's a compatibility hassle between computers. For Surfaces it's an even bigger mess, because like you said, MS doesn't make them anymore. A coworker of mine had the same situation with a Surface Pro 1. Computer still works fine, but the power cord died, and good luck getting a replacement quickly. If you do find a 3rd party version, good luck with not burning your house down.
Real question to people in the know - is this truly the case?
I get that the port is industry standard, but are there electrical protections put in place?
If I use a 100W non-Apple charger on a MacBook Pro that uses a 63W charger will it damage the battery? Will a USB-C phone charger (with presumably very low wattage) work as well (albeit slower)?
While I really like that TB/USB3 ports are standard, it is incredibly confusing to laypeople with respect to understanding all the nuances.
It'd be hard for me to buy anything that uses a proprietary charger ever again. This includes iPhones and Surface Books. And I've already committed to not buying anything that uses older versions of USB either -- it's all C for me.
My SP2 charger cable frayed near the power brick and I ended up just ripping the whole thing apart, cutting the cable & resoldering it. The enclosure was replaced with an off-the-shelf one. Looks ugly, but I didn't want to pay 100NZD for a third-party replacement.
Even if I wasn't an iOS developer, my other two jobs are Audio Production/editing and Video Production/editing.
While I could almost happily toss Final Cut out the window (we all know what a disaster the FCP7 -> FCPX transition was, and my friends in the industry tell me Premiere is where it's at right now), I am highly, highly dependant on Logic.
I've been using Logic in some shape or form for more than a decade, I picked up my first Mac Mini G4 in 2004(5?) and proceeded to learn Garageband inside out and backwards, got all the Jam Packs (which are now included in Logic, they used to be $99/apiece and now all 6 are included in Logic for $199...go figure) and got completely used to making music this way. (I moved to actual Logic from GB in 2008-2009.)
I've tried Ableton, and can't get past it's convoluted UI and complete lack of bundled instruments (Logic comes with more than 50GB of included content, and recently added a phenomenal new synth called Alchemy), Pro Tools is expensive and almost requires better than top-of-the-line Mac hardware, etc, etc.
The amount of time it would take me to switch, and learn another DAW, after 10 years of experience, I'd never get back.
I can open Logic, pick up a MIDI instrument, select some of the phenomenal built-in sounds, get a USB mic and have a freakin' awesome track down in like a half-hour.
Possible with Ableton or Pro Tools? Of course. But I'm not about to throw 10 years of experience out the window.
Combine that with xCode and it's iOS-specific toolkit, Final Cut (which I'm finally used to) and I get this really shitty realization that I'm going to be stuck with this software for a long, long, time and am basically just at the mercy of Apple's business decisions.
Care to elaborate as why you think Logic is a long-term mistake? You think Apple is transitioning away from support?
From my experience doing web development, msys2 + PuTTY/Pagent give me pretty much everything I need. I don't even use bash; everything I need is available from cmd.exe, including tools like ls & grep.
Microsoft isn't going to say so, but you can get an Office365 gift card for like $20 on eBay. That gives you the Office apps plus a good chunk of storage on OneDrive and some Skype credit for a year.
It wasn't as painful of a transition as I expected. I guess it helps that so much of my life is in the cloud these days anyway.
This seems like an excellent reason to not be using Windows as your underlying OS. The rampant privacy and security issues should be enough to keep any business from trusting it. The lack of a compelling reason to choose it should be the end of the story.
Git for Windows drops in a command line ssh client pre-configured for Pagent auth, and git itself can pull keys from Pagent as well. I just needed to tweak my path so that ssh client gets used instead of msys2's.
I'm with you. I can't stand the actual PuTTY app itself.
The biggest hurdle I had with switching was the muscle memory of cmd-[char] vs. ctrl-[char], and tangentially the Windows-specific productivity keyboard shortcuts (mainly win-[char]) and Mac-specific ones.
The second-biggest hurdle is the different mouse movement kinetics on each platform.
These are still "hurdles": I have a Macbook at work, and a Macbook Air and Windows desktop at home. I basically can't do external keyboard + mouse at work for fear of screwing up my muscle memory for when I use my Windows desktop.
All this to say, it's not the camera, graphics card, detachable screen, or whatever is highlighted on this page that makes the switch hard. It's the low level stuff.
Personally what I’d love to do is disable acceleration on the computer side, and have my own hardware intermediary between the mouse and the computer, on which I can implement whatever sensor input -> pixel movement logic I want. For example, having a button to hold down for more precise movement, and another button to hold down to convert movement to scrolling.
At this point though, I don't think it's hardware - it's the ui that keeps me from really loving Windows 10 on the Surface Book. Windows 10 doesn't allow me to natively enable three-finger window drag. It's also cumbersome to full screen my apps (e.g. my editor, terminal, etc) on Windows 10 in order to swipe back and forth through them.
As a developer, MacOS CLI was the biggest advantage over Windows. Now, you have the full Ubuntu CLI at your fingertip including apt-get install. No VM. It's a big selling point.
I switched a year or so ago, and I use Cmder (conemu) as a substitute for Terminal (and it's great, btw). Didn't have to change my habits at all. On the other hand, I'm far from being a "hard core" terminal user.
[0] http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/2/13490774/apple-macbook-pro...
We've come full circle!
It's not like it was an accidental choice, you knew that you'll have to buy whatever Apple serves you in whatever form they want as long as you want to service that platform.
A Mac let's you write for iOS and Android. Windows doesn't.
shoe's on the other foot now.
if MS had done a better job in mobile, there'd be more reason to target windows for regular joe consumers, but they lost that market (for now anyway?). :(
Parallels/BootCamp?
Programming, design? Oh is the keyboard as a laptop replacement?
The amount of times I have heard people say that a particular notebook is "Way" cheaper than a MacBook Pro only to point out to them they are comparing a dual core i7 to a quad core i7 is just ridiculous. When they then look at quad core i7 notebooks the prices become much closer if not end up being the same.
Granted there is not much information but if the above is correct then you are better off getting a Dell XPS, at least they run about £1800 for the i7 quad core with 512SSD.
And developers keep insisting that all we use is Vim and a terminal, which you can do just as well with Linux Services for Windows.
Here's a retina one for comparison: http://core0.staticworld.net/images/article/2013/10/15in-rmb...
Macbook that Microsoft used in its ad has been discontinued for 3+ years.
Lower down the page they show something newer.
They have profits in the tens of billions of dollars for the past several years. Unless they suddenly see an actual mass exodus, rather than just poor sales of their current hardware, then there's no need for them to panic. Especially considering most (guess on my part, based on anecdata) of their users don't even buy new hardware that often. An Apple laptop easily lasts 4+ years, at least since I've been buying their hardware (circa 2006).
I also use Windows at the office for AutoCAD because the Mac version is inferior to the Windows counterpart. Our machines and OS are modern, but I want to carve my eyes out with a spork on a daily basis using Windows 10.
THAT BEING SAID, we've got our eyes on the Surface Studio for the boss to use. We'll see how I feel then. I still have a copy of Adobe Master Collection cs6 that I paid good money for with, no Windows machine to use it on!
I prefer:
* Smaller radius corners. The Mac and iPhone have always appeared too rounded.
* Less tapering. I like that the Surface Book's contact surface (no pun intended) is basically its entire area (notwithstanding the rubberized feet). I don't like that the Macs taper inward. I think Apple corrected this on the newest MacBook Pro, however.
* Less visual emphasis on the keyboard. I don't like the Mac's dark keys on a silver plane. I prefer that Surface Book's keyboard matches the metal color.
* Less obnoxious branding. I like that the Surface Book has just a reflective Windows logo on the back and no branding on the front. I have never liked the glowing Apple logo on Macs and I applaud Apple for ditching that. But for 2016, they added a big "MacBook Pro" on the bottom edge of the screen which is also tacky.
* This one is a particularly big pet peeve: a chamfered edge for the track-pad that matches the width of the trackpad. I've never understood why the chamfered edge on the MacBook is so narrow. I like not having a sharp edge digging into my wrist even when I am a bit sloppy with my arm positioning.
That's saying nothing of the software. But to be brief on software, I am so happy that Windows is (slowly) providing a dark look and feel. Applications that use the latest Microsoft design thinking look great to my eye. Admittedly they are very slow at bringing old apps up to snuff—there are a number of legacy apps that still look as they did on Windows 8 or earlier. MacOS has always looked too "bubbly" to my eye.
My personal laptop is a Surface Book, though I use a workstation for normal day-to-day work.
I tend to use desktops to organize tasks or task sets. (one for email, jira, time tracking. Another for the set the current ticket I'm working on: editor, browser, logs, query tool, and maybe others for incidentals that pop up: research, support questions etc...) Mutli-desktop has become my goto technique for off loading a large chunk of mental state.
[1]: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2015/04/16/virtu...
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-in/sysinternals/cc817881.as...
Try convincing the thousands of companies that have their engineers working on macbooks. It is way more efficient to have everyone on a team use the same OS and hardware (for obvious reasons) therefore I don't think Apple is even phased at all with these Microsoft comparison tactics.
Maybe the ecosystem will change in the next 10 yrs. After all, history does repeat itself. For now, I'm sticking with my macbook for home and my company issued macbook for work.
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre".
Of course if you use it regularly and hate it you can safely ignore what I just said. I'd be curious as to what you hate about it though.
1999(highest price before MacBooks go 15 inch, for a bit less you can sacrifice 256GB storage and get a dGPU on the Surface)
Surface - "6th generation core i5"(no mention of clock speed), 256GB SSD, 8GB ram(no mention of speed), Touch Screen, Whatever the fuck they call their shitty excuse to build a facial recognition database Seriously, literally the only thing to change for this model appears to be the SSD.
MacBook Pro - 2.9GHz i5, 512GB SSD, 8GB 2133MHz RAM, Intel Iris 550 graphics (at least twice as many GFLOPS as the HD graphics), trackpad w/force touch and good drivers, unlock w/ Apple Watch, touch bar and Touch ID(w/their secure enclave so the NSA can't log your fingerprint)
After that it just becomes unfair because the MacBooks become 15 inch and their dGPU has 2GB memory instead of the Surface's 1GB(which is the only actual spec I can find on the surfaces graphics)
https://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msca/en_CA/pdp/Surface-...
If you hit "COMPARE SURFACE DEVICES" on that page you'll get detailed specs.
They compare the main screen of the Surface to the lower screen (touch bar) of the MBP. That's just a shady comparison. At least be honest.
The main screen of the MBP does in fact have a resolution 227 pixels per inch
Edit: ie. main screen (3000x2000) / main screen (2560x1600)
But they are trying to make it look like they are comparing the two devices' screens. Definitely misleading.
