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 worked with some of the people responsible for the Surface Book, Surface docks, and specifically the Surface Book's dock. These were hardware people (EEs), not software people, and this was after their time at MS. Unfortunately I don't remember specifics (both because it's been a few years, and because I'd probably have to fuzz details anyway), but... :
Docks are horrifying products. Thunderbolt docks are doubly horrifying. They ordered in every single competing dock they could find, from that era's products, and found that every last one was garbage in some way or other, usually fatally so. The Thunderbolt interface in particular, and the firmware that needed to run on that interface controller, was the source of a lot of issues. None of them were particularly intrinisc to the protocol, but the hardware available was junk and the software available was worse. They couldn't really order up a custom non-garbage IC just for a $100 accessory that sells in limited volume. (Apple, however, could and would; they'd also demand to control the whole stack. This shows.)
They were very proud they got the thing working as well as they did, even though they all knew it was still pretty much trash. It was still better than the competition. Which is sad, but what can you do?
(At least it wasn't the Wi-Fi chip. The Surface Book's Wi-Fi adapter was chosen by higher-ups as the same one used in the XBox, presumably for sourcing reasons. It is trash. Again, much blood, sweat, and tears were spilled making it work as well as it does.)
(I also have the exact circuit for the LED that lights up on the charger cable. Apparently it was a big deal, which I find hilarious.)
My team (Microsoft Band) discovered the reason why the surface's keyboard sometimes wouldn't work when connected. There was a hardware bug in the cortex MCU the keyboard used involving waking from deep sleep. One of our FW engineers spent several months figuring it out and eventually reported it to the manufacturer, and to the Surface team. IIRC it was something about wake on interrupt in a specific deep sleep mode and also something around timing.
It was a rather nasty bug. Firmware is full of nightmare scenarios like that.
I've been using the Apple USB-C multi port adapter thing since I got one free from a previous job, it seems overpriced since I can see a lot of similar ones much cheaper from competitors, but I've also never had an issue with it in any configuration on any device including non Apple ones. While I regularly see people having issues with the cheaper ones from Dell or Amazon sellers. So maybe you really are getting something extra when you pay for the Apple one.
The fact they are stuck with the concept of a dock being something the computer needs to physically sit in is just funny to me. I have a "dock" for my MBP that is just a little box that everything connects to that doesn't leave my desk. When I connect my MBP to it, I just plug in the single cable to it. If the cable goes bad, it hasn't in the 3+ years of use, I would just swap out the cable.
I’ve been doing this for about a decade with thunderbolt 2 then 3 (and backwards compat with 4).
I’ve had one cable begin to fray in all that time (a thunderbolt 4 caldigit cable). It swapped it out for an Apple cable and kept going.
I’ve used OWC docks, which aren’t known to be the best, but have worked great for charging, usb, Ethernet, FireWire, display (both over daisychained thunderbolt and display port), and SD cards. The only thing I have used them for extensively is audio. My monitor is a Thunderbolt 2 monitor with USB breakout. In between it and the dock is a two drive SATA enclosure.
I recently threw an extra Thunderbolt 3 dock I had on a USB-4 mini computer running Linux and it worked without any issue.
I’m sure there may be things that don’t work well, but its worked for me. I even wrote an app to have a global hot key to eject all my attached disks (DriveLight). Press the key combo, wait for the eject sound, pull the cable and go.
There are many windows laptops that have usb-c docks that don't physically dock. They are more accurately called port replicators. My work laptop is a Dell with one.
> They ordered in every single competing dock they could find, from that era's products, and found that every last one was garbage in some way or other, usually fatally so.
It is so hard to believe that when more than 1000 employees at my employers are also using at least one dock (Dell and Thinkpad both) and using them very well.
We are talking about a situation some years past. I member there were USB docks that if you had them attached to external power and ethernet, but not a laptop, they'd instant-kill the network by sending garbage frames that would cause switches to fault off.
Only around 2024-ish the situation with USB and TB docks seemed to stabilize.
I had a CalDigit TB dock -- maybe 2021-ish? -- that every time I unplugged my MacBook would take my internet offline. I thought I was insane. How is that even possible? But I finally gave up and returned it.
I have a brand new TV where if I plug the HDMI into my M4 MBP, MacOS ceases to have any functioning WiFi capability. Unplug the HDMI and internet returns instantly.
That's probably because your TV has support for Ethernet over HDMI enabled. Run ifconfig to check if there's a new (and, possibly, default-routed) interface when you plug that TV in.
I remember getting my first CalDigit TB dock and being excited - everyone seemed to love them. I expected it to largely Just Work.
That thing Didn't Work more than it Worked, but options were slim. Eventually it fully died about 14 months in. I didn't even bother checking to see what the warranty terms were. TS3 Plus, back in 17 or 18. What a piece of shit.
Sounds like it's a good thing I didn't bother trying again in the early 2020s and only recently bought a new dock.
Very similar story here. Went through two Caldigit TB hubs most recently a TB4. Soooo many issues. The same Ethernet issue described above, a failure to provide the rated PD power, and the TB linked monitor connection was dodgy af. A very expensive lesson. Add to this the confusing (and deceptive) jumble of TB cable standards. I have so many supposed TB3,4 and 5 rated cables I could probably circle my house. You have to hand Apple one thing and that’s the consistency of their hardware due to tight control of the stack and supply chain. You get far fewer of these sorts of issues.
Yes, this would have been around 2015. (When I said "Surface Book" I meant the original!)
Docks were bad, bad products in those days. They were no longer the dedicated bulky-but-reliable things of years past, or the modern finally-debugged dongles we've got now.
This was Intel's Alpine Ridge and it was hell. (At least, I think that was the one. Certainly, it was hell!)
Plenty of cases where Surface isn't. Microsoft like to think they can make hardware but they're no better than other OEM and it's clearly not a focus for them
When I worked at Microsoft (years ago), some employees had Surface laptops. They frequently had issues where the laptop just wasn't working right and required rebooting, at the start of a meeting where they wanted to connect the Surface laptop to a projector. Always the Surfaces, never the Lenovos. One of the Surface things split into two parts, the screen (containing the actual computer) and the keyboard. There was something weird about connecting and disconnecting those parts, some motorized docking/undocking mechanism, that caused problems.
Then Microsoft had the episode where some of their Surface hardware would not reliably stay in sleep mode and cooked itself while being transported in a bag. At the time, Microsoft tried to excuse this by claiming that "a fundamental Computer Science problem" needed to be solved to fix this issue. Strange how other manufacturers could do this without overcoming unsolvable problems in frontier CS research.
While I'm usually a die-hard Microsoft fanboi, I have concluded that their Surface line is terrible.
This is even more of a knock to Microsoft but the overheating during sleep issue can affect any windows laptop made in the last 5 or so years. The cause is nothing surface specific, it’s Microsoft enforcing “Modern standby” and blocking S3/S4 sleep states in windows. My best understanding is that some bug causes the system to stay awake after one of the periodic wake ups to check for updates/notifications that happen in modern standby.
I went through a period of using a Macbook Pro with a dock. At the time the best option seemed to be the Caldigit TS3. It's a sleek device but luckily someone else was footing the bill because:
- 3 of them failed on me. THREE;
- You really learn how bad cables are. I got in the habit of ordering 2-3 at a time because experience taught me that at least 1 of them would be bad or die;
- It exposed just how bad the USB-C situation was (and still is). Is this just a power cable? Or you want data too? How about an alt mode so you can do DisplayPort passthrough? Well good luck with all that. There's no cue that the cable can do any of that. And if a cable can, it's typically 3 feet or less in length, expensive and prone to failure.
A lot of people don't know how complex a modern USB-C or Thunderbolt cable really is. It typically has a chip in each end of the cable. So the failure mode is not just the cable, it's the two chips as well. Bend or twist the cable too much. Gone. Damage the head of the cable. Gone.
Oh and USB-C is made more complex because it can be plugged in either way. The cable and the chips at either end and the controller on either side need to be able to seamlessly handle all 4 combinations (or 2 of the cable is truly symmetric pin-wise; it might be, I'm not sure).
I hope that this tech is more stable now but I honestly doubt that it is.
I'm reminded of an old quote I heard (not sure from who) that said we went from a world where no cables fit but if they did, it worked, to a world where the cable always fit but nothing works. That's USB-C in a nutshell.
Docks have to handle a lot of bandwidth. Even passthrough requires bandwidth. It's a nice idea but it's a hard problem.
I’m a little surprised to see how much trouble people in this thread have had with the Cal Digit TS3.
Mine works pretty well — have used it with three Intel MacBooks in the past and now currently two different Apple Silicon MacBooks.
One of the Intel MBPs did not like it. Would reboot every time I unplugged it from the dock. I blamed that MacBook for that one, since nothing else was ever a problem. I sent every crash report to Apple, along with some choice words that my $2,500 MacBook should be able to handle connecting to a very commonly owned TB Dock. Eventually they did fix it and it stopped being an issue.
Has ended up one of the more reliable pieces of tech gear in my life, especially given the absolute mad complexity of TB3 behind the scenes.
My absolute favorite fact about the Surface is that if the battery runs out, the Surface Dock power is unable to bootstrap it. You have to plug in a charger
Not sure if that's still the case but truly astonishing
To be fair, my MacBook Pro had the same issue - if the battery was dead, charging via USB-C wouldn't work, it would need the MagSafe charger. Presumably because the USB controller needs power in order to negotiate power delivery.
Never had this issue with any of my MBP. I never even have magsafe available, couldn't tell you where a USB-C to magsafe cable is in my house if my life depended on it.
While not quite what you are saying here, I have found that I like usbc charging on my 15in m3 MacBook Air way more than its magsafe. The magsafe is always falling out as soon as I move the computer on and off my lap and is another cable that I can only use for one purpose. Nowhere near as good as it was back in the early 2010s macbook days...
MacBooks recently had this bug that you had to connect it to LAN in order to initialize it, or return it to the shop. It's not all perfect in Apple world.
Still, Windows is a problem here. I wonder what the monthly fee is to get rid of the ads?
Interesting. I've had exactly the opposite experience. The Surfaces I've owned (3 so far, over the last 8 years) have been much more reliable than the other Windows laptops I've used over the same time period (mostly at work). To the point I bought myself one for work and didn't bother trying to expense it because I was so happy to have a laptop I could rely on (and I could use it for personal use once it was "retired"). Not invalidating your experiences, but they've been really solid for me.
Thunderbolt docks being absolute dogshit is universal across the market, it's not limited to one manufacturer.
Apple doesn't have this problem because they don't even make docks they're so problematic. Enjoy dongles, Mac users.
Modern docks usually run their own internal OS and require frequent reboots to even attempt to appear stable.
The worst part is most use docks to get Ethernet, but docks nearly universally use low quality USB Ethernet controllers internally (vs PCI) making the whole exercise rather pointless.
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.
I have never used any of the Surface products but I do remember how people liked the almost no questions asked replacement policy for them at the Microsoft stores. I knew a guy that worked there and he said it was an all day occurrence.
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 also had a bad experience, but I'm willing to throw all that out of the window after seeing that it had 128 unified memory on a CUDA enabled device. This is an AI native dream machine from what I can tell. I'm almost obligated to buy one.
Too bad the software is awful. Thankfully the Linux Surface community is pretty strong. Proprietary Microsoft drivers don't make it easy, but we're getting there...
I'll buy another one if there's some commitment from Microsoft to be more open source friendly, but since this will never happen, they can keep their HW.
Depending on how easy it is to run Linux on this as opposed to the new MacBooks may make this attractive for Linux users.
Anyway, the whole trend to change from x86 to Arm on laptops is bad news for compatibility. It might be that the era where you can download an iso and expect Linux to run on a random laptop is over, and Linux users will have to stick to only a couple of devices with well known support. Did Valve release a laptop yet?
I swear, people just live in their echochambers these days. Win 11 pro + WSL2 is literally the best, do it all OS you can get these days.
Most peoples experience is with Windows home, which ironically is about as intrusive as Mac OS. When you get Windows Pro, you can disable all the annoying AI/Advertising shit that comes with Windows, and at that point, you get a system that is cleaner than Mac OS.
Then you install WSL2, which is a full linux environment down to being able to run graphical apps, use gpus natively, and even talk to usb ports.
Ive been on Win11 Pro for 4 years. The only major things that are installed under windows for me are VPN Software, Steam (with games), Ollama, and Browser. Everything else, I run under WSL2.
I really hope for competition’s sake that Microsoft makes some reforms and cleans up Windows.
Because us nerds like to say “the software is awful,” but really, the bones of Windows are not awful at all. It generally works well, it just takes a lot of work to get all of the BS out of your way.
If you’re looking for open source friendly, just buy a Framework 13 Pro and be done with it.
By the way, the other news from Computex is Dell and HP’s Macbook Neo competition, and they really look legit. So, Apple is waking up the PC industry a bit, showing them that they are endangered. Hopefully Microsoft gets the memo.
I get it’s not what you’re asking for, but WSL on windows is a lot more friendly than anything Apple has done in the last decade to assist in Linux support.
WSL is inside Windows. I haven't found the need for anything like this on macOS, as it's Unix and I can just install stuff with Homebrew. When the Unix version of some package didn't do what something else I was running expected, I was able to install coreutils in just a few seconds and carry on.
It seems the issue on Apple hardware is the fight to get Linux booting on bare metal with full support (what Apple supplied for Windows with Bootcamp when moving to Intel), which is the fight Asahi Linux is waging. Is WSL aiding in getting Linux booting from bare metal on proprietary hardware?
WSL for me was literally a gateway drug to switching fully to Linux. It did work, but took extra system memory, drained battery life, and caused intermittent suspend/resume issues. Just not worth dealing with compared to running native Linux.
WSL provides a seamless filesystem experience between windows and Linux which is more than I can say for MacOS. And it’s supported by MS, not a community add-on.
People downvoting me because Microsoft are just silly. It is literally undeniable that Microsoft has done more to provide Linux support in the windows ecosystem than Apple has with MacOS. The closest thing Apple has done to “support” Linux is add a hypervisor without a GUI that they’ll tolerate you using but don’t really support. Try opening up a case with Apple about a Linux issue running a hypervisor.framework Linux vm and let me know how it goes…
Microsoft will absolutely support issues you run into with WSl.
Which doesn’t make it Linux, which is what op wants. It’s based on a BSD-based mach kernel. You might as well say someone asking for Linux should just run Irix, because hey, it’s UNIX!
I'm on my third Surface Pro (an 11 this time) and basically love it. Tablet form factor, lightweight, multitouch, with a real desktop OS (I mean not ipad's iOS). Decent battery life. True, it's not perfect: slow to wake, the touchpad stops working once in a while & needs to be reset. Missing a GPS chip. But it runs Adobe, Resolve, Chrome of course, msys2, and Linux (WSL2) quite well. I love the absolutely gorgeous HiDPI screen.
The software emulator system is a little weird (arm64/arm64EC/arm64X, with no true universal x64/arm64 binary) for software developers, but it basically works fine from a user perspective.
I say all this as someone whose daily driver is an Arm M1 Macbook Pro, also nice but not a tablet and quite heavier. I don't use a dock, just a simple USBC hub with a magnetic USBC connector.
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...
It's also shockingly twitter-nerd-coded. "The cure for token anxiety", it advertises. To be honest it's hard to see why anyone would buy this product so maybe they decided to take a wild swing with the marketing. The only use is people who really, really, want to run models locally vs getting a much cheaper and higher performance result from a cloud host.
I didn’t check how much this costs, but if you use AI locally a lot, it’s going to be amortised pretty quickly. Burning 100$ a month on tokens has become insanely easy. I remember when it was unimaginable for me…
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).
> 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.
Everyone except Bill Belichick, who famously hurled his Microsoft Surface to the ground when he was first forced to use 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.
In some ways.. since Microsoft is known for maintaining backwards compatibility whereas Apple is not, I think 3rd party devs are just not incentivized to care about Windows ARM compatibility.
Further, it doesn't seem like Microsoft made x86 emulation as seamless or performant as Apple did during the various MacOS CPU architecture changes.
Every use case I've looked at has been a minefield of app incompatibility and poor performance under x86 emulation.
I was referring mainly to Windows software, Adobe Illustrator and InDesign were major pain points on the Windows side. Sure though, add Linux compatibility to the list of things that were an issue too.
Sounds like you aren't familiar with Nvidia's dedication to low-power ARM SOCs. Ever heard of the Nintendo Switch before? The Tegra inside that is a 15w TDP gaming SOC. And it supports CUDA (somehow).
> Sounds like you aren't familiar with Nvidia's dedication to low-power ARM SOCs. Ever heard of the Nintendo Switch before? The Tegra inside that is a 15w TDP gaming SOC. And it supports CUDA (somehow).
I think that GP comment is not intending to throw shade at ARM SOCs (many of which are quite nice, including those from Apple an Qualcomm), but specifically the Microsoft products built on them.
I'm mostly surprised by the insinuation of bad performance or battery life. That's what will be ostensibly solved by putting an Nvidia SOC where a Ryzen or Intel one used to be.
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.
That's what modern Surfaces are. The consumer models have been Qualcomm SnapDragon based since 2024, they are pretty fast, battery life is pretty good and you can do whatever you want. Although native Linux support isn't quite there but I mean MS isn't exactly making it their priority.
„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).
When I clicked, I thought that it was going to smash the turbine blades from the animation to suggest something like "all the performance without the thermals," but nope, they just became laptop fans. And seconds later, it started blowing heat/steam out of them!
That's the most uncanny marketing for an ARM laptop I've ever seen.
They are. But the experience of using a MacBook Pro for pretty much any purpose other than gaming is that they’re entirely silent. To the point that it’s an exceptional circumstance when a build job is so intense and so long running that fans kick in.
As such, when you’re marketing your competing product, maybe don’t lead with the fans.
Some of us like our hardware to last, we don't go out and buy the latest and greatest unrepairable MBP for the sole reason of flexing on our friends and peers while making a big deal about how its silent and can run large local llms at 0.5 tok/sec.
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.
I could be wrong but my understanding is that 24/7 dedicated servers are wildly economically unviable. The reason cloud tends to cost less than local today (other than the subsidization) is because you aren't running models 24/7. So like 6 hours of cloud per weekday might beat the yearly cost of building local machines, but it's not in the same universe if you're running 24/7, as evidenced by two months of H200 rental costing more than the DGX Spark this Laptop is built out of.
For many, the appeal of a Mac is that it isn't running Windows. I'm not seeing how this won't be a repeat of the OG ARM Surface, just with a higher spec'd GPU.
It's not a valid comparison. Up until this (theoretical) machine, the playing field wasn't equal. Windows laptops in general couldn't really compare in many aspects with Macs since M1 (outside of gaming), batteries were horrible due to bad efficiency, performance wasn't amazing even with the best SKUs, and the distance between the vendor and Microsoft was always impacting different aspects of the finished product. Even with the ARM Surface, the ecosystem still wasn't ready for ARM, the performance was lacking. If this device doesn't cost an arm and a leg, it will offer something that is really the first instance of a Windows device that's a better choice than an M-Macbook in many ways (at least on paper).
Back when Macs were suffering under poor Intel chips there were valid competitors in battery life and size and weight from Dell. Except they ran Windows, and the trackpad was never as good as a Mac, and you'd find yourself searching for driver updates for things like the built in camera, which also wasn't very good because Dell doesn't have an entire division building amazing tiny cameras for phones.
Microsoft maybe had a chance when they decided to build their own Surface tablets/laptops but trying to make an OS that worked for that but also worked for your corporate issue Lenovo laptops is (as Apple seems to know), impossible.
They were only suffering and had great battery life because they were kneecapping their own machines with improper cooling. It's pretty obvious their last few Intel laptops were intentionally designed so that the M1 would look better in almost every way. It was still an incredible chip, but I personally didn't believe that it was a fair comparison.
I mean, yeah ok? Not sure what your point is? This isn't directly related to this machine though. First Nvidia SoC and a much better vertical integration with now non trivial amount of experience in hardware stands to offer something that wasn't avaliable before.
A little earlier than that. With Intel's Lunar Lake / Panther Lake, x86 laptops are again in the same ballpark as a Mac efficiency-wise. There are reputable reviews where people are getting 16-20 hours of battery life out of them doing real work, in both Windows & Linux.
M5 is probably still better, but at least the x86 machines don't embarrass themselves any more.
Outside of that though, there's still hit and miss quality on the PC OEM side of things. 1080p screens are still the default for a ton of models, even higher end ones, and the OEMs keep missing the point of why people prefer Apple hardware.
Several are coming out with 8GB machines now at macbook Neo price points with....1920x1200 screens, probably a low quality panel, and questionable trackpad. Again, missing the entire point of the Neo.
And for many others, the appeal of a Windows PC is that it doesn’t run macOS. But I agree that ARM is still a caveat for those machines, in particular long-term driver support.
ARM Windows laptops are a pretty different scenario now than when the Surface came out. They have pretty seamless x86/64 emulation built in similar to when Apple started their Mac transition to ARM. In contrast the OG ARM Surface didn't run any existing Windows software.
Most people could pick up a modern Windows ARM laptop and everything they do would work just fine, just potentially with less heat and longer battery life than their older Windows laptop.
The primary annoyances would be Windows itself and its ad and engagement driven UI reminding you about Copilot and Edge every chance it gets.
I wouldn't call it "seamless"; a lot of Windows applications don't work. An example is some software packages common in the construction industry which want to install all kinds of ancient x86-only thing likes old ODBC drivers. So that wipes out one of the compelling reasons to have a Windows laptop. Quickbooks (Enterprise Desktop) is another example of one; not supported on ARM, although with some hacking you can get it to sort of work.
What do you mean by the OG ARM Surface? The Surface RT from 2012, or the later Qualcomm-powered ones? The Qualcomm-powered ones are vastly more capable than than Surface RT was.
I've been using a Qualcomm ARM laptop for the past year, and pretty much everything I use runs natively on it.
>For many, the appeal of a Mac is that it isn't running Windows
Pretty much. I broke down and finally bought my first Windows machine in over a decade to play Subnautica 2. It was so infuriating to use I returned it a week later. You literally have to hack it with shell commands to bypass Microsoft login now. Never again.
This is false in my experience. You can use the cli to clear the quarantine bit, or you can take the (admittedly annoying) trip to system preferences to override. This is rarely something I need to do; most software is already signed and notarised.
Also not at all equivalent to being forced into linking an online account before being allowed to use your computer at all.
You can still bypass the login requirement for Win 11 and that annoyance only happens once during install vs. every time you try to run a non-notarized app.
It’s easily in my top 3 most hated things about my MacBook. Plus, knowing Apple and the history of that “feature”, it will only ratchet towards becoming even more of a pain over time (it was actually tolerable back before they removed the hotkey to bypass).
For me, after running Win11debloat one time Win 11 disappears into the background 95% of the time, like an OS should. Unfortunately I don’t the luxury of doing something equivalent on MacOS without completely disabling SIP.
Would love to see many more manufacturers read this as the slight taht it is from Microsoft and to follow Lenovos lead in making windows a paid add-on, going with a big Linux distro as the default.
Maybe instead of hardware they should just stick to the knitting and deal with their quality issues around both the OS and the Office suite right now.
I bought the Snapdragon Elite X over a year ago based on the promises of Qualcomm to bring solid Linux drivers at some point. Fast forward to today, Linux for that SoC is still a hot mess.
Maybe I'm being overly hopeful, but given the DGX Spark only runs Linux, and this is apparently a sibling in a laptop form factor, maybe it won't be too difficult to get Linux up and running effectively? Probably (a lot) more easily than Asahi on Apple Silicon, anyway.
I'm sure someone can get the CPU/GPU running but things like wifi/bluetooth/USB ports will be rough since they will presumably integrated with the chip in a non-standardized ARM way. Almost all of the ARM laptops are basically unusable with GNU/Linux.
Which ones have you tried? Right now I'm on an MediaTek Kompanio Ultra 910.and wifi/USB/sleep/hibernate works. DT is going to be the death of ARM, but the real challenge has been to get the GPU to work under Firefox.
One of the hassles with ARM machines is that you might technically be able to boot Linux on it but your Thunderbolt, display out, wireless, etc. will lack support and not work.
I know it feels snarky but I didn't ever expect to read that Microsoft was pairing with MediaTek to make an ARM cpu to run Windows. So many years of the WinTel hegemony I guess :-).
I've had several Surface devices over the years, the original SurfaceBook, and a Surface Pro 4 and Surface Pro 6. The Pro 4 was the most reliable and the Pro 6 was prone to overheat. But execution in the mechanical build was quite good.
That said the battery in my SurfaceBook went all Spicy Pillow on me, the Pro 4's power slot ended up dying, and the Pro 6 just stopped responding one day (it was a work laptop so I just gave it back but still). I'm still waiting to see how folks with Macbooks experience the end of life.
If MediaTek would partner with Framework to make a motherboard I'd totally try it out :-).
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 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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
The last time I called Apple the phone service employee hit me with “I understand your issue as I am also a student” when I replied that I wasn’t a student he then followed it up with “Oh, neither am I”
Yeah the support is scripted and annoying a lot of the time. There's always a song and dance like having you remove your VPN (mine is split tunnel but they don't care) to verify some failure case, loading profiles, etc. - but at some point when all avenues are exhausted they will escalate to an engineer and make detailed notes, and usually follow ups which might be with another engineer usually has a full understanding of your situation. A few times they've managed to fix these issues but it can take months.
For hardware issues too it's pretty good, though I've only ever dealt with the Genius bar, and never done a mail in of the product in question.
For software I've never really seen this kind of service at scale, e.g. with Microsoft. And for hardware, it's essentially chatbots in a loop these days which I experienced with Lenovo trying to get support for a laptop that wouldn't power on (never managed to get a human to support me and gave up).
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
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.
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.
They implied it might have options with < 128G of memory. That could significantly reduce the price of components. There's also the very real possibility that the whole venture is being subsidized by Microsoft - or even NVIDIA itself - as a bid to get into a different space. Even with that, though, I doubt it will be cheap.
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.
I believe Linux supports Wacom tablets pretty well, I have one which worked without any issues, and buttons can be fully customized. The pen broke though, so it's now collecting dust, and I'm not in situation to replace it.
Unfortunately for Surface pro, some parts of the touch screen was damaged during battery replacement. But the parts that works, works well.
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?).
"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.
... 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.
Here is a particularly irritating example. Cabinet Vision, some CAD type of software.
Requires ancient .NET. That actually is available for Arm though.
Required Jet DB driver 2010, which doesn’t exist on Arm, although it’s only needed for the installer.
Requires SQL Server embedded 2012 and 2016, which don’t exist on Arm at all. Yep, both versions.
Also required PowerShell version 2, which was deprecated in 2017, although they magically figured out how to fix that once Windows 10 was EOL’d and Win. 11 doesn’t support v2.
The vendor has zero plans to ever support this on Arm.
They will eventually get their lunch eaten by a new competitor who decides to just release a macOS version.
I try to avoid Microsoft products these days (modern dotnet is pretty nice though), but from my past experience, I believe every bit of this and have run into all of these with other software, including the requiring of multiple versions of MSSQL Embedded, which is just unholy.
> 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 kind of find it hard to believe they would use the name prism...
When I read it, the first thing I thought of is the NSA program named PRISM.
Anyway, I was curious so I googled for differences between the Apple and Microsoft programs and Apple included x86 translation circuitry on their CPU. I wonder why Microsoft didn't do the same?
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....)
My first thought on seeing this was that it could be great for Linux. If the hardware is a little more standard than Apple's, it wouldn't need all the tricks Asahi has figure out. Finally you could have the best performance without compromising on fine details.
Nvidia is only slightly better than Apple when its come to providing hardware documentation.
And their hardware is much more locked down. E.g it cant be reverse engineered as easy as Apple Silicone because Nvidia GPUs basically run own OS inside themself.
So practically only Nvidia able to build open source drivers for this, but so far it looks like it will take them another decade with current rate.
Honestly I was ready to mock this thing out of existence, but I think you're on to something as there is a contingent that wants the Macbook Pro style laptop to run Linux and I think they'd be happy to settle with a copycat.
Alas, it is a laptop from Microsoft so hardware support in Linux is probably going to be painful as always.
Hard to say whether you'll get the Macbook Pro experience though.
They can put whatever hardware they want in it, Windows knows know bounds in undermining the overall package. I don't want a faster processor to run user-hostile adware that's constantly trying to upsell me, and uses dark patterns to trick me into switching off my chosen alternatives to their bad products every time there's a minor update. I don't want to run it at all.
I'm pretty happy to see someone else making a serious play in the ultra-premium notebook market. For way too long Apple has basically only been in competition with the much heavier "desktop replacement"/gaming laptops, or the flimsy/plasticky likes of Dell and LG with questionable trackpads. Real competition in this space could be a great thing for consumers
I’d wait for some actual reviews before celebrating. Because I just doubt this is as good as they are hyping. And it will still run the same windows ad ridden broken OS.
With 128gb memory this thing is going to cost a fortune.
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.
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.
A Spark-like machine in a laptop form factor is certainly exciting and interesting competition for Apple. I wonder about Linux compatibility, given NVidia's history with proprietary drives. I am absolutely not willing to go back to Windows, though.
I used a surface book II for years all the while hoping it would die. It didn’t, which says something I guess. What sucked: the hinge, the split battery, mysterious problems with screen detach, the magnetic power connector, glossy screen. What didn’t: screen ratio.
Whatever they all do, they can never, ever match the quality of Apple! I've bought many Macs so far, and many Windows machines (Dell, Sony, 1st and 2nd Gen of Surface) as well. All of those Windows machines died within less than 2 years, while the Macs, which were bought more than 10 years ago, are still working fine. So, I'm not going to buy a new Windows machine anytime soon.
> Whatever they all do, they can never, ever match the quality of Apple!
It's a pretty low bar to meet.
Every Mac I've owned has had a hardware failure. Keyboard (x3). Dead trackpad. Display backlight. Logic board. LCD failure. Multiple drive failures. One Apple TV that shit the bed. Many within warranty, some not.
Apple's warranty service is pretty good, but to gloat about "quality"... it's more like when Sonny Corleone throws money at the guy's feet after he smashes his camera.
IIUC this is using lower bandwidth RAM than macs, and will run windows, with uncertain linux support (it's spotty even on the dedicated linux boxes that this chip is based on). So less of a "rival" and more "metoobutworse"...
Microsoft has always made great hardware, often with partners or acquisitions. If they don't run (traditional) Windows - like the phones - they are really good; if they do run desktop Windows we've gone from useable-but-handicapped to completely unacceptable IMO. They also tend to be side projects within MS; I'd suspect this thing saw the light of day because it was sold as a way to pump more AI at their mostly captive audience.
I'm surprised they released this thing. Brand perception is probably a lot more important to Nvidia than whatever sales they could get from this thing, and if it's basically just DGX Spark, it's likely to underwhelm.
I've heard there's still a large backlog of both software problems, and hardware problems with the platform. The software problems could be fixed with time, but they'll still give a shitty first impression. I'd have thought Nvidia would just bury this and try again with a successor run of silicon with a new design.
This thing seems practically destined to just be a repeat of the Snapdragon laptop debacle.
A lot of enterprise customers still buy windows workstations.
When I worked in an IT dept, Dell XPS and Windows Surfaces were given to C levels who asked for Macs but were told they wouldn’t be supported into the windows ecosystem (exchange, office, Active Directory etc).
Sadly after all these years the MDM story for macs is still trash.
Optimized for multi core.. like windows is out of the box for x86 and ARM already? What did they do manually set cores=20? Such optimal. Many Cores! This will be the third attempt at Windows on ARM.. hopefully this is the one
i've only ever owned a 'Surface Laptop 2' and for the time it was excellent, the keyboard and trackpad were both superior to my macbook pro of the time, the screen was great in both brightness and the 3:2 ratio. it was great value.
from all the comments on here it seems like that model was an anomaly and the rest of the product lineup is often pretty lacking.
If it's still based on the chip in the DGX Spark, idle power draw remains a problem to be solved. My Spark pulls down 40W when doing nothing under Ubuntu.
For the DGX Spark and OEM variants a big issue is that the ConnectX-7 is just not designed to have low power idle but instead to be efficient when loaded.
NVIDIA already lowered power draw at idle by 18W with a currently out of tree driver leveraging PCIe hotplug for the NIC earlier this year.
I think that quite a bit more people bought those to use them without the ConnectX than what NVIDIA expected.
I bet it will be something like a MacBook Pro but with a windows logo. I wouldn’t expect much different considering the other surfaces look practically the same including the keyboard . Not that that is a bad thing .
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.
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> Microsoft explicitly tuned Windows 11 to extract the absolute best performance from the new silicon architecture.
My lie detector is going off.
> The containment features sandbox local agents like Hermes and OpenClaw so they cannot interfere with your core operating system.
Wait, isn't that kind of the point of using local agents like OpenClaw? I thought people wanted the agents accessing all kinds of applications, files, etc.?
> Legacy application compatibility is equally crucial. Microsoft optimized the Prism emulation layer specifically for the new microarchitecture. Prism utilizes the raw power of the silicon and recent AVX and AVX2 instruction set extensions to run older x86 applications smoothly under emulation.
Okay, this is pretty nice. I'll give Microsoft credit for this one. It might save my company a lot of heartache one day in the near future.
All in all, this rig is going to be quite expensive. In a lot of ways, it probably is better than a MacBook Pro. However, as a diehard Apple fanboy, it is not enough for me to consider the jump.
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.
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.
…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.
I had the original surface and later a surface book from my employer. Both devices were horrible the digitizer for pen input was horrific. The software support was on a standstill for 6 months at a time with minimal updates later on. I won't touch first gen Microsoft hardware anymore except maybe their mice.
Surfaces are great devices. My Pro 3 still gets 7 hours of battery life.
We use newer Surface laptops at work, even the artists, developers, and executives (note we are not a tech company). The laptops aren't very fast but they can take a lot of physical abuse and the batteries last all day. We don't need the top of the line, and forcing our developers to use lower powered computers actually improves the quality of the apps because they get to experience how our apps work for most of our customers and take performance into account from the beginning.
At this point I don't know what the performance delta would need to be between "fastest I can get that lets me run linux" and "fastest I can get with windows" other than massive.
I genuinely do not want to deal with windows that much.
Fortunately since my computing needs are met by a fast x86/GPU I don't have to make that choice.
Most commenters here are focused on the Microsoft hardware, but the article mentions systems from several other manufacturers using the same hardware. Some of them, Dell and Lenovo in particular, have good Linux support.
Nvidia has also supported Linux well in general, so let's hope there's an attractive Linux option soon!
Personally I'd be just as happy with a small form factor desktop with the same hardware.
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.
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...
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.
Yeah that's definitely it. So that makes this an arm device with nvidia GPU. It's not the first as you pointed out, but it would be a more consumer shaped example - a laptop that normal people might be able to afford
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.
Too bad linux x86 on arm story is still terrible. Fex is great in a sense but getting it run is a herculean feat, with pagesize mismatched requiring a VM.
"Copilot, write me a drivel article which could have been a 3-line press release, but instead use every unnecessary superlative you can conjure. Ignore any possible criticism and pretend this device is the second coming of Computer Christ"
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 worked with some of the people responsible for the Surface Book, Surface docks, and specifically the Surface Book's dock. These were hardware people (EEs), not software people, and this was after their time at MS. Unfortunately I don't remember specifics (both because it's been a few years, and because I'd probably have to fuzz details anyway), but... :
Docks are horrifying products. Thunderbolt docks are doubly horrifying. They ordered in every single competing dock they could find, from that era's products, and found that every last one was garbage in some way or other, usually fatally so. The Thunderbolt interface in particular, and the firmware that needed to run on that interface controller, was the source of a lot of issues. None of them were particularly intrinisc to the protocol, but the hardware available was junk and the software available was worse. They couldn't really order up a custom non-garbage IC just for a $100 accessory that sells in limited volume. (Apple, however, could and would; they'd also demand to control the whole stack. This shows.)
They were very proud they got the thing working as well as they did, even though they all knew it was still pretty much trash. It was still better than the competition. Which is sad, but what can you do?
(At least it wasn't the Wi-Fi chip. The Surface Book's Wi-Fi adapter was chosen by higher-ups as the same one used in the XBox, presumably for sourcing reasons. It is trash. Again, much blood, sweat, and tears were spilled making it work as well as it does.)
(I also have the exact circuit for the LED that lights up on the charger cable. Apparently it was a big deal, which I find hilarious.)
My team (Microsoft Band) discovered the reason why the surface's keyboard sometimes wouldn't work when connected. There was a hardware bug in the cortex MCU the keyboard used involving waking from deep sleep. One of our FW engineers spent several months figuring it out and eventually reported it to the manufacturer, and to the Surface team. IIRC it was something about wake on interrupt in a specific deep sleep mode and also something around timing.
It was a rather nasty bug. Firmware is full of nightmare scenarios like that.
I've been using the Apple USB-C multi port adapter thing since I got one free from a previous job, it seems overpriced since I can see a lot of similar ones much cheaper from competitors, but I've also never had an issue with it in any configuration on any device including non Apple ones. While I regularly see people having issues with the cheaper ones from Dell or Amazon sellers. So maybe you really are getting something extra when you pay for the Apple one.
The fact they are stuck with the concept of a dock being something the computer needs to physically sit in is just funny to me. I have a "dock" for my MBP that is just a little box that everything connects to that doesn't leave my desk. When I connect my MBP to it, I just plug in the single cable to it. If the cable goes bad, it hasn't in the 3+ years of use, I would just swap out the cable.
I’ve been doing this for about a decade with thunderbolt 2 then 3 (and backwards compat with 4).
I’ve had one cable begin to fray in all that time (a thunderbolt 4 caldigit cable). It swapped it out for an Apple cable and kept going.
I’ve used OWC docks, which aren’t known to be the best, but have worked great for charging, usb, Ethernet, FireWire, display (both over daisychained thunderbolt and display port), and SD cards. The only thing I have used them for extensively is audio. My monitor is a Thunderbolt 2 monitor with USB breakout. In between it and the dock is a two drive SATA enclosure.
I recently threw an extra Thunderbolt 3 dock I had on a USB-4 mini computer running Linux and it worked without any issue.
I’m sure there may be things that don’t work well, but its worked for me. I even wrote an app to have a global hot key to eject all my attached disks (DriveLight). Press the key combo, wait for the eject sound, pull the cable and go.
There are many windows laptops that have usb-c docks that don't physically dock. They are more accurately called port replicators. My work laptop is a Dell with one.
> They ordered in every single competing dock they could find, from that era's products, and found that every last one was garbage in some way or other, usually fatally so.
It is so hard to believe that when more than 1000 employees at my employers are also using at least one dock (Dell and Thinkpad both) and using them very well.
We are talking about a situation some years past. I member there were USB docks that if you had them attached to external power and ethernet, but not a laptop, they'd instant-kill the network by sending garbage frames that would cause switches to fault off.
Only around 2024-ish the situation with USB and TB docks seemed to stabilize.
I had a CalDigit TB dock -- maybe 2021-ish? -- that every time I unplugged my MacBook would take my internet offline. I thought I was insane. How is that even possible? But I finally gave up and returned it.
Thanks for finally answering this mystery for me.
I have a brand new TV where if I plug the HDMI into my M4 MBP, MacOS ceases to have any functioning WiFi capability. Unplug the HDMI and internet returns instantly.
That's probably because your TV has support for Ethernet over HDMI enabled. Run ifconfig to check if there's a new (and, possibly, default-routed) interface when you plug that TV in.
I remember getting my first CalDigit TB dock and being excited - everyone seemed to love them. I expected it to largely Just Work.
That thing Didn't Work more than it Worked, but options were slim. Eventually it fully died about 14 months in. I didn't even bother checking to see what the warranty terms were. TS3 Plus, back in 17 or 18. What a piece of shit.
Sounds like it's a good thing I didn't bother trying again in the early 2020s and only recently bought a new dock.
Very similar story here. Went through two Caldigit TB hubs most recently a TB4. Soooo many issues. The same Ethernet issue described above, a failure to provide the rated PD power, and the TB linked monitor connection was dodgy af. A very expensive lesson. Add to this the confusing (and deceptive) jumble of TB cable standards. I have so many supposed TB3,4 and 5 rated cables I could probably circle my house. You have to hand Apple one thing and that’s the consistency of their hardware due to tight control of the stack and supply chain. You get far fewer of these sorts of issues.
Ayup, it was a topic on HN at least twice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31268134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12339902
Yes, this would have been around 2015. (When I said "Surface Book" I meant the original!)
Docks were bad, bad products in those days. They were no longer the dedicated bulky-but-reliable things of years past, or the modern finally-debugged dongles we've got now.
This was Intel's Alpine Ridge and it was hell. (At least, I think that was the one. Certainly, it was hell!)
> It was still better than the competition
Plenty of cases where Surface isn't. Microsoft like to think they can make hardware but they're no better than other OEM and it's clearly not a focus for them
When I worked at Microsoft (years ago), some employees had Surface laptops. They frequently had issues where the laptop just wasn't working right and required rebooting, at the start of a meeting where they wanted to connect the Surface laptop to a projector. Always the Surfaces, never the Lenovos. One of the Surface things split into two parts, the screen (containing the actual computer) and the keyboard. There was something weird about connecting and disconnecting those parts, some motorized docking/undocking mechanism, that caused problems.
Then Microsoft had the episode where some of their Surface hardware would not reliably stay in sleep mode and cooked itself while being transported in a bag. At the time, Microsoft tried to excuse this by claiming that "a fundamental Computer Science problem" needed to be solved to fix this issue. Strange how other manufacturers could do this without overcoming unsolvable problems in frontier CS research.
While I'm usually a die-hard Microsoft fanboi, I have concluded that their Surface line is terrible.
This is even more of a knock to Microsoft but the overheating during sleep issue can affect any windows laptop made in the last 5 or so years. The cause is nothing surface specific, it’s Microsoft enforcing “Modern standby” and blocking S3/S4 sleep states in windows. My best understanding is that some bug causes the system to stay awake after one of the periodic wake ups to check for updates/notifications that happen in modern standby.
My work laptop just started doing this 3 weeks ago! It's insane. Rather new machine too.
It gets so hot in my bag I actually worry about it starting a fire one day. I now take it out every night.
Obviously I tried googling but no dice. Nothing changed, settings seem in order, no idea what to do.
the split thing got updates that juat made it unable to be removed except while the device is restarting
but also, it was really easy to accidentally lock the screen while removing it, at which point youd put it back on to get the password filled in again
that and if the battery got low, youd be stuck with it in the wrong configuration, so the screen would get scratched
Microsoft has built some good hardware over the years. The problem with this is that it runs windows. The hardware is probably nice.
clearly they werent mechanical engineers - the dock bent my pro-3 and shattered the screen
the clamp around setup was a very poor choice
Not an EE but I'll add an anecdote as a user.
I went through a period of using a Macbook Pro with a dock. At the time the best option seemed to be the Caldigit TS3. It's a sleek device but luckily someone else was footing the bill because:
- 3 of them failed on me. THREE;
- You really learn how bad cables are. I got in the habit of ordering 2-3 at a time because experience taught me that at least 1 of them would be bad or die;
- It exposed just how bad the USB-C situation was (and still is). Is this just a power cable? Or you want data too? How about an alt mode so you can do DisplayPort passthrough? Well good luck with all that. There's no cue that the cable can do any of that. And if a cable can, it's typically 3 feet or less in length, expensive and prone to failure.
A lot of people don't know how complex a modern USB-C or Thunderbolt cable really is. It typically has a chip in each end of the cable. So the failure mode is not just the cable, it's the two chips as well. Bend or twist the cable too much. Gone. Damage the head of the cable. Gone.
Oh and USB-C is made more complex because it can be plugged in either way. The cable and the chips at either end and the controller on either side need to be able to seamlessly handle all 4 combinations (or 2 of the cable is truly symmetric pin-wise; it might be, I'm not sure).
I hope that this tech is more stable now but I honestly doubt that it is.
I'm reminded of an old quote I heard (not sure from who) that said we went from a world where no cables fit but if they did, it worked, to a world where the cable always fit but nothing works. That's USB-C in a nutshell.
Docks have to handle a lot of bandwidth. Even passthrough requires bandwidth. It's a nice idea but it's a hard problem.
I’m a little surprised to see how much trouble people in this thread have had with the Cal Digit TS3.
Mine works pretty well — have used it with three Intel MacBooks in the past and now currently two different Apple Silicon MacBooks.
One of the Intel MBPs did not like it. Would reboot every time I unplugged it from the dock. I blamed that MacBook for that one, since nothing else was ever a problem. I sent every crash report to Apple, along with some choice words that my $2,500 MacBook should be able to handle connecting to a very commonly owned TB Dock. Eventually they did fix it and it stopped being an issue.
Has ended up one of the more reliable pieces of tech gear in my life, especially given the absolute mad complexity of TB3 behind the scenes.
Yeah, I've had 3 CalDigit docks (USB-C Dock, TS4 and Element 5) and they've all been bulletproof.
I will note that mine have all functioned as docks for effectively-stationary PCs, so there's basically zero cable wear happening.
My absolute favorite fact about the Surface is that if the battery runs out, the Surface Dock power is unable to bootstrap it. You have to plug in a charger
Not sure if that's still the case but truly astonishing
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/surface-dock/tro...
To be fair, my MacBook Pro had the same issue - if the battery was dead, charging via USB-C wouldn't work, it would need the MagSafe charger. Presumably because the USB controller needs power in order to negotiate power delivery.
Never had this issue with any of my MBP. I never even have magsafe available, couldn't tell you where a USB-C to magsafe cable is in my house if my life depended on it.
While not quite what you are saying here, I have found that I like usbc charging on my 15in m3 MacBook Air way more than its magsafe. The magsafe is always falling out as soon as I move the computer on and off my lap and is another cable that I can only use for one purpose. Nowhere near as good as it was back in the early 2010s macbook days...
In my specific case, the laptop was already at low (<10%) battery when I closed the lid, and it sat for several days without a top-up.
I've owned many MacBooks and have never experienced this. I usually just dump the MagSafe in the attic and use USB-C for everything.
I had a similar issue with the Nikon Z5 full frame camera. It can be charged via the built-in USB-C socket only if the battery still has some charge.
If the battery is fully dead, you have to remove it and charge it using the separate battery charger.
That means you can't travel with only a USB-C cable.
there is a hidden paperclip button you can unlock it with
MacBooks recently had this bug that you had to connect it to LAN in order to initialize it, or return it to the shop. It's not all perfect in Apple world.
Still, Windows is a problem here. I wonder what the monthly fee is to get rid of the ads?
Not sure what you're talking about. Almost no one has Ethernet anymore. This would be national news-level failure.
Interesting. I've had exactly the opposite experience. The Surfaces I've owned (3 so far, over the last 8 years) have been much more reliable than the other Windows laptops I've used over the same time period (mostly at work). To the point I bought myself one for work and didn't bother trying to expense it because I was so happy to have a laptop I could rely on (and I could use it for personal use once it was "retired"). Not invalidating your experiences, but they've been really solid for me.
Counter-point the Surface Studio was one of the best PCs for drafting and design we've ever owned.
and love the 3:2 monitor aspect ratio
Yeah that was really the cherry on top. Just sublime to use.
Thunderbolt docks being absolute dogshit is universal across the market, it's not limited to one manufacturer.
Apple doesn't have this problem because they don't even make docks they're so problematic. Enjoy dongles, Mac users.
Modern docks usually run their own internal OS and require frequent reboots to even attempt to appear stable.
The worst part is most use docks to get Ethernet, but docks nearly universally use low quality USB Ethernet controllers internally (vs PCI) making the whole exercise rather pointless.
Is it too late to point out that what most people call dongles are actually adapters? A dongle doesn’t have any pass through.
I've been super happy with my Caldigit TS3 for my various Macs.
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.
I have never used any of the Surface products but I do remember how people liked the almost no questions asked replacement policy for them at the Microsoft stores. I knew a guy that worked there and he said it was an all day occurrence.
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.
I remember these issues from earlier Surfaces. I was not impressed. Latest ones are pretty dope tho, IME.
I also had a bad experience, but I'm willing to throw all that out of the window after seeing that it had 128 unified memory on a CUDA enabled device. This is an AI native dream machine from what I can tell. I'm almost obligated to buy one.
Sadly memory bandwidth, which is the bottleneck for AI, is pretty disappointing.
The Surface line is, HW-wise, very good IMHO.
Too bad the software is awful. Thankfully the Linux Surface community is pretty strong. Proprietary Microsoft drivers don't make it easy, but we're getting there...
https://github.com/linux-surface/surface-pro-x
I'll buy another one if there's some commitment from Microsoft to be more open source friendly, but since this will never happen, they can keep their HW.
And you lost me at proprietary Microsoft drivers.
No way I am spending any money on this future brick.
Depending on how easy it is to run Linux on this as opposed to the new MacBooks may make this attractive for Linux users.
Anyway, the whole trend to change from x86 to Arm on laptops is bad news for compatibility. It might be that the era where you can download an iso and expect Linux to run on a random laptop is over, and Linux users will have to stick to only a couple of devices with well known support. Did Valve release a laptop yet?
>Too bad the software is awful.
I swear, people just live in their echochambers these days. Win 11 pro + WSL2 is literally the best, do it all OS you can get these days.
Most peoples experience is with Windows home, which ironically is about as intrusive as Mac OS. When you get Windows Pro, you can disable all the annoying AI/Advertising shit that comes with Windows, and at that point, you get a system that is cleaner than Mac OS.
Then you install WSL2, which is a full linux environment down to being able to run graphical apps, use gpus natively, and even talk to usb ports.
Ive been on Win11 Pro for 4 years. The only major things that are installed under windows for me are VPN Software, Steam (with games), Ollama, and Browser. Everything else, I run under WSL2.
> you can disable all the annoying AI/Advertising shit
What Stockholm Syndrome is this? Why should you have to do this in the first place?
I really hope for competition’s sake that Microsoft makes some reforms and cleans up Windows.
Because us nerds like to say “the software is awful,” but really, the bones of Windows are not awful at all. It generally works well, it just takes a lot of work to get all of the BS out of your way.
If you’re looking for open source friendly, just buy a Framework 13 Pro and be done with it.
By the way, the other news from Computex is Dell and HP’s Macbook Neo competition, and they really look legit. So, Apple is waking up the PC industry a bit, showing them that they are endangered. Hopefully Microsoft gets the memo.
I get it’s not what you’re asking for, but WSL on windows is a lot more friendly than anything Apple has done in the last decade to assist in Linux support.
WSL is inside Windows. I haven't found the need for anything like this on macOS, as it's Unix and I can just install stuff with Homebrew. When the Unix version of some package didn't do what something else I was running expected, I was able to install coreutils in just a few seconds and carry on.
It seems the issue on Apple hardware is the fight to get Linux booting on bare metal with full support (what Apple supplied for Windows with Bootcamp when moving to Intel), which is the fight Asahi Linux is waging. Is WSL aiding in getting Linux booting from bare metal on proprietary hardware?
WSL for me was literally a gateway drug to switching fully to Linux. It did work, but took extra system memory, drained battery life, and caused intermittent suspend/resume issues. Just not worth dealing with compared to running native Linux.
WSL provides a seamless filesystem experience between windows and Linux which is more than I can say for MacOS. And it’s supported by MS, not a community add-on.
People downvoting me because Microsoft are just silly. It is literally undeniable that Microsoft has done more to provide Linux support in the windows ecosystem than Apple has with MacOS. The closest thing Apple has done to “support” Linux is add a hypervisor without a GUI that they’ll tolerate you using but don’t really support. Try opening up a case with Apple about a Linux issue running a hypervisor.framework Linux vm and let me know how it goes…
Microsoft will absolutely support issues you run into with WSl.
Apple doesn't have to do anything because it's already unix
Which doesn’t make it Linux, which is what op wants. It’s based on a BSD-based mach kernel. You might as well say someone asking for Linux should just run Irix, because hey, it’s UNIX!
I'm on my third Surface Pro (an 11 this time) and basically love it. Tablet form factor, lightweight, multitouch, with a real desktop OS (I mean not ipad's iOS). Decent battery life. True, it's not perfect: slow to wake, the touchpad stops working once in a while & needs to be reset. Missing a GPS chip. But it runs Adobe, Resolve, Chrome of course, msys2, and Linux (WSL2) quite well. I love the absolutely gorgeous HiDPI screen. The software emulator system is a little weird (arm64/arm64EC/arm64X, with no true universal x64/arm64 binary) for software developers, but it basically works fine from a user perspective. I say all this as someone whose daily driver is an Arm M1 Macbook Pro, also nice but not a tablet and quite heavier. I don't use a dock, just a simple USBC hub with a magnetic USBC connector.
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...
It's also shockingly twitter-nerd-coded. "The cure for token anxiety", it advertises. To be honest it's hard to see why anyone would buy this product so maybe they decided to take a wild swing with the marketing. The only use is people who really, really, want to run models locally vs getting a much cheaper and higher performance result from a cloud host.
Higher performance, I agree, but cheaper?
I didn’t check how much this costs, but if you use AI locally a lot, it’s going to be amortised pretty quickly. Burning 100$ a month on tokens has become insanely easy. I remember when it was unimaginable for me…
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).
> 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.
Everyone except Bill Belichick, who famously hurled his Microsoft Surface to the ground when he was first forced to use it:
https://youtu.be/djB2xgALGfI?si=xX-hMibm9OLLAJZ4&t=10
> 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?)
I don't see any real explanation of the CPU in this thing. Is it going to be Grace like on GB200 and Spark?
N1x, Nvidia's laptop ARM GPU cpu board.
https://www.techtimes.com/articles/317428/20260530/nvidia-ar...
> (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.
> bad compatibility
I’m curious what this means. Bad compatibility with Windows software? Or bad compatibility with Linux?
In some ways.. since Microsoft is known for maintaining backwards compatibility whereas Apple is not, I think 3rd party devs are just not incentivized to care about Windows ARM compatibility.
Further, it doesn't seem like Microsoft made x86 emulation as seamless or performant as Apple did during the various MacOS CPU architecture changes.
Every use case I've looked at has been a minefield of app incompatibility and poor performance under x86 emulation.
For music production for example - https://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/articles/windows-on-arm...
I was referring mainly to Windows software, Adobe Illustrator and InDesign were major pain points on the Windows side. Sure though, add Linux compatibility to the list of things that were an issue too.
This is an ARM device, so presumably compatibility with third-party software.
Sounds like you aren't familiar with Nvidia's dedication to low-power ARM SOCs. Ever heard of the Nintendo Switch before? The Tegra inside that is a 15w TDP gaming SOC. And it supports CUDA (somehow).
> Sounds like you aren't familiar with Nvidia's dedication to low-power ARM SOCs. Ever heard of the Nintendo Switch before? The Tegra inside that is a 15w TDP gaming SOC. And it supports CUDA (somehow).
I think that GP comment is not intending to throw shade at ARM SOCs (many of which are quite nice, including those from Apple an Qualcomm), but specifically the Microsoft products built on them.
I'm mostly surprised by the insinuation of bad performance or battery life. That's what will be ostensibly solved by putting an Nvidia SOC where a Ryzen or Intel one used to be.
Haha, if only it were so easy. Hardware is… eh… hard.
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.
That's what modern Surfaces are. The consumer models have been Qualcomm SnapDragon based since 2024, they are pretty fast, battery life is pretty good and you can do whatever you want. Although native Linux support isn't quite there but I mean MS isn't exactly making it their priority.
„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).
When I clicked, I thought that it was going to smash the turbine blades from the animation to suggest something like "all the performance without the thermals," but nope, they just became laptop fans. And seconds later, it started blowing heat/steam out of them!
That's the most uncanny marketing for an ARM laptop I've ever seen.
Yes the MBP is very quiet when doing easy stuff but run games and heavy duty software and those fans are required to get work done.
They are. But the experience of using a MacBook Pro for pretty much any purpose other than gaming is that they’re entirely silent. To the point that it’s an exceptional circumstance when a build job is so intense and so long running that fans kick in.
As such, when you’re marketing your competing product, maybe don’t lead with the fans.
Some of us like our hardware to last, we don't go out and buy the latest and greatest unrepairable MBP for the sole reason of flexing on our friends and peers while making a big deal about how its silent and can run large local llms at 0.5 tok/sec.
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.
And you can warm up the croissant by just placing it on the trackpad while you wait for the LLM to finish
The coffee shop doesn't have wifi?
It's not very good and SSH is blocked.
How much does a dedicated server with 128GB vram cost a month.
How well will the local LLM run when your laptop is in your bag while you're walking around?
You can get an H200 (141GB) here for $2,700/mo: https://deploybase.ai/articles/h200-price
I could be wrong but my understanding is that 24/7 dedicated servers are wildly economically unviable. The reason cloud tends to cost less than local today (other than the subsidization) is because you aren't running models 24/7. So like 6 hours of cloud per weekday might beat the yearly cost of building local machines, but it's not in the same universe if you're running 24/7, as evidenced by two months of H200 rental costing more than the DGX Spark this Laptop is built out of.
I mean not that much? You buy the hardware once and then it’s just running for many years
Less than this laptop.
For many, the appeal of a Mac is that it isn't running Windows. I'm not seeing how this won't be a repeat of the OG ARM Surface, just with a higher spec'd GPU.
It's not a valid comparison. Up until this (theoretical) machine, the playing field wasn't equal. Windows laptops in general couldn't really compare in many aspects with Macs since M1 (outside of gaming), batteries were horrible due to bad efficiency, performance wasn't amazing even with the best SKUs, and the distance between the vendor and Microsoft was always impacting different aspects of the finished product. Even with the ARM Surface, the ecosystem still wasn't ready for ARM, the performance was lacking. If this device doesn't cost an arm and a leg, it will offer something that is really the first instance of a Windows device that's a better choice than an M-Macbook in many ways (at least on paper).
Back when Macs were suffering under poor Intel chips there were valid competitors in battery life and size and weight from Dell. Except they ran Windows, and the trackpad was never as good as a Mac, and you'd find yourself searching for driver updates for things like the built in camera, which also wasn't very good because Dell doesn't have an entire division building amazing tiny cameras for phones.
Microsoft maybe had a chance when they decided to build their own Surface tablets/laptops but trying to make an OS that worked for that but also worked for your corporate issue Lenovo laptops is (as Apple seems to know), impossible.
They were only suffering and had great battery life because they were kneecapping their own machines with improper cooling. It's pretty obvious their last few Intel laptops were intentionally designed so that the M1 would look better in almost every way. It was still an incredible chip, but I personally didn't believe that it was a fair comparison.
> Dell. Except they ran Windows,
Dell XPS series have been available with Ubuntu since 2012 at the very least.
I mean, yeah ok? Not sure what your point is? This isn't directly related to this machine though. First Nvidia SoC and a much better vertical integration with now non trivial amount of experience in hardware stands to offer something that wasn't avaliable before.
I have Surface copilot whatever. The battery life is great. OS is a complete garbage. No amount of HW thrown at windows will fix its issues.
> Up until this (theoretical) machine,
A little earlier than that. With Intel's Lunar Lake / Panther Lake, x86 laptops are again in the same ballpark as a Mac efficiency-wise. There are reputable reviews where people are getting 16-20 hours of battery life out of them doing real work, in both Windows & Linux.
M5 is probably still better, but at least the x86 machines don't embarrass themselves any more.
They still run a bit hotter and louder.
Outside of that though, there's still hit and miss quality on the PC OEM side of things. 1080p screens are still the default for a ton of models, even higher end ones, and the OEMs keep missing the point of why people prefer Apple hardware.
Several are coming out with 8GB machines now at macbook Neo price points with....1920x1200 screens, probably a low quality panel, and questionable trackpad. Again, missing the entire point of the Neo.
That is a lot of misdirection that doesn’t address the main point of the of OC.
This fancy new device still runs windows. And that is a non starter from many people.
As if the reason people don't like Windows is because the ads on their desktop weren't loading fast enough.
And for many others, the appeal of a Windows PC is that it doesn’t run macOS. But I agree that ARM is still a caveat for those machines, in particular long-term driver support.
this reads to me as a false equivalence. Choosing a Mac is opting into a specific alternative. Choosing Windows is just taking the default.
ARM Windows laptops are a pretty different scenario now than when the Surface came out. They have pretty seamless x86/64 emulation built in similar to when Apple started their Mac transition to ARM. In contrast the OG ARM Surface didn't run any existing Windows software.
Most people could pick up a modern Windows ARM laptop and everything they do would work just fine, just potentially with less heat and longer battery life than their older Windows laptop.
The primary annoyances would be Windows itself and its ad and engagement driven UI reminding you about Copilot and Edge every chance it gets.
I wouldn't call it "seamless"; a lot of Windows applications don't work. An example is some software packages common in the construction industry which want to install all kinds of ancient x86-only thing likes old ODBC drivers. So that wipes out one of the compelling reasons to have a Windows laptop. Quickbooks (Enterprise Desktop) is another example of one; not supported on ARM, although with some hacking you can get it to sort of work.
What do you mean by the OG ARM Surface? The Surface RT from 2012, or the later Qualcomm-powered ones? The Qualcomm-powered ones are vastly more capable than than Surface RT was.
I've been using a Qualcomm ARM laptop for the past year, and pretty much everything I use runs natively on it.
>For many, the appeal of a Mac is that it isn't running Windows
Pretty much. I broke down and finally bought my first Windows machine in over a decade to play Subnautica 2. It was so infuriating to use I returned it a week later. You literally have to hack it with shell commands to bypass Microsoft login now. Never again.
> You literally have to hack it with shell commands
Well on macOS you need to do the same to install and/or run applications so its not that fat ahead.
This is false in my experience. You can use the cli to clear the quarantine bit, or you can take the (admittedly annoying) trip to system preferences to override. This is rarely something I need to do; most software is already signed and notarised.
Also not at all equivalent to being forced into linking an online account before being allowed to use your computer at all.
You can still bypass the login requirement for Win 11 and that annoyance only happens once during install vs. every time you try to run a non-notarized app.
It’s easily in my top 3 most hated things about my MacBook. Plus, knowing Apple and the history of that “feature”, it will only ratchet towards becoming even more of a pain over time (it was actually tolerable back before they removed the hotkey to bypass).
For me, after running Win11debloat one time Win 11 disappears into the background 95% of the time, like an OS should. Unfortunately I don’t the luxury of doing something equivalent on MacOS without completely disabling SIP.
Stop giving Microsoft free passes. The fact that you even need a workaround is the issue.
Subnautica 2 runs great on Linux via Steam/Proton. My HTPC/Steam Machine and gaming rig are both running Linux now. ;)
How do you use an Apple device without taking part in their ecosystem?
You can use a Mac just fine without using any services from Apple.
Their ecosystem is, frankly, much better. I won't bother with Windows but I certainly don't mind icloud.
Would love to see many more manufacturers read this as the slight taht it is from Microsoft and to follow Lenovos lead in making windows a paid add-on, going with a big Linux distro as the default.
Maybe instead of hardware they should just stick to the knitting and deal with their quality issues around both the OS and the Office suite right now.
The biggest problem here is the operating system. If they could fix that, this might be enticing.
If they put Linux on it I'd buy it, but with Windows 11, no thanks.
They did put linux on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux
I bought the Snapdragon Elite X over a year ago based on the promises of Qualcomm to bring solid Linux drivers at some point. Fast forward to today, Linux for that SoC is still a hot mess.
Yeah never buy based on future promises.
Maybe I'm being overly hopeful, but given the DGX Spark only runs Linux, and this is apparently a sibling in a laptop form factor, maybe it won't be too difficult to get Linux up and running effectively? Probably (a lot) more easily than Asahi on Apple Silicon, anyway.
I'm sure someone can get the CPU/GPU running but things like wifi/bluetooth/USB ports will be rough since they will presumably integrated with the chip in a non-standardized ARM way. Almost all of the ARM laptops are basically unusable with GNU/Linux.
Which ones have you tried? Right now I'm on an MediaTek Kompanio Ultra 910.and wifi/USB/sleep/hibernate works. DT is going to be the death of ARM, but the real challenge has been to get the GPU to work under Firefox.
One of the hassles with ARM machines is that you might technically be able to boot Linux on it but your Thunderbolt, display out, wireless, etc. will lack support and not work.
Hopefully it will be possible to hackintosh it. You can hackintosh almost any computer these days.
Indeed. Never buying a windows computer ever again. Every time I use it I get angry.
Agreed. I'm trying to buy a laptop right now (Lenovo's checkout refuses to take my card?!?), and I would try one of these if it could run Debian.
Will never buy one if it's Windows only, though.
I know it feels snarky but I didn't ever expect to read that Microsoft was pairing with MediaTek to make an ARM cpu to run Windows. So many years of the WinTel hegemony I guess :-).
I've had several Surface devices over the years, the original SurfaceBook, and a Surface Pro 4 and Surface Pro 6. The Pro 4 was the most reliable and the Pro 6 was prone to overheat. But execution in the mechanical build was quite good.
That said the battery in my SurfaceBook went all Spicy Pillow on me, the Pro 4's power slot ended up dying, and the Pro 6 just stopped responding one day (it was a work laptop so I just gave it back but still). I'm still waiting to see how folks with Macbooks experience the end of life.
If MediaTek would partner with Framework to make a motherboard I'd totally try it out :-).
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 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.
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.
And they're right. If terrible support were an obstacle even slightly, they'd have all gone out of business decades ago.
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.
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 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...
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.
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.
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.
The last time I called Apple the phone service employee hit me with “I understand your issue as I am also a student” when I replied that I wasn’t a student he then followed it up with “Oh, neither am I”
My phone slipped out of my pocket as I was getting into my car, and I unknowingly ran over it.
When I submitted an AppleCare replacement request for it, the employee said “Oh man, I hate it when that happens!” and approved it.
I figure that’s the script, or maybe he had a chronic issue of running over his own phone.
Yeah the support is scripted and annoying a lot of the time. There's always a song and dance like having you remove your VPN (mine is split tunnel but they don't care) to verify some failure case, loading profiles, etc. - but at some point when all avenues are exhausted they will escalate to an engineer and make detailed notes, and usually follow ups which might be with another engineer usually has a full understanding of your situation. A few times they've managed to fix these issues but it can take months.
For hardware issues too it's pretty good, though I've only ever dealt with the Genius bar, and never done a mail in of the product in question.
For software I've never really seen this kind of service at scale, e.g. with Microsoft. And for hardware, it's essentially chatbots in a loop these days which I experienced with Lenovo trying to get support for a laptop that wouldn't power on (never managed to get a human to support me and gave up).
>My ISP has actual techies answering the phone
Lucky you. My ISP is so incompetent they connected me to another customer when they wanted to connect me to another support agent (Vodafone).
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
What made it awful? I have been using a Surface Pro with fedora as my main portable device for the last 2 years and enjoyed it.
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.
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.
Isn't that a little unfair? You'd have an even worse experience running Linux on a MacBook.
I had no problem with it not supporting Linux, like I said, it was expected and if anything, I'm to blame.
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.
If it doesn’t have the repairability of a framework. I’m out.
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.
They implied it might have options with < 128G of memory. That could significantly reduce the price of components. There's also the very real possibility that the whole venture is being subsidized by Microsoft - or even NVIDIA itself - as a bid to get into a different space. Even with that, though, I doubt it will be cheap.
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
>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.
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.
I believe Linux supports Wacom tablets pretty well, I have one which worked without any issues, and buttons can be fully customized. The pen broke though, so it's now collecting dust, and I'm not in situation to replace it.
Unfortunately for Surface pro, some parts of the touch screen was damaged during battery replacement. But the parts that works, works well.
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?).
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!)
Here is a particularly irritating example. Cabinet Vision, some CAD type of software.
Requires ancient .NET. That actually is available for Arm though.
Required Jet DB driver 2010, which doesn’t exist on Arm, although it’s only needed for the installer.
Requires SQL Server embedded 2012 and 2016, which don’t exist on Arm at all. Yep, both versions.
Also required PowerShell version 2, which was deprecated in 2017, although they magically figured out how to fix that once Windows 10 was EOL’d and Win. 11 doesn’t support v2.
The vendor has zero plans to ever support this on Arm.
They will eventually get their lunch eaten by a new competitor who decides to just release a macOS version.
I try to avoid Microsoft products these days (modern dotnet is pretty nice though), but from my past experience, I believe every bit of this and have run into all of these with other software, including the requiring of multiple versions of MSSQL Embedded, which is just unholy.
> 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.
Yes, its called prism, supposedly Microsoft is making improvements to it also specifically to go along with this release.
It's not as good as Rosetta 2 was, but its still pretty good.
Problem is not everything runs through emulation though. There's still a lot of edge cases for super old enterprise crap.
I kind of find it hard to believe they would use the name prism...
When I read it, the first thing I thought of is the NSA program named PRISM.
Anyway, I was curious so I googled for differences between the Apple and Microsoft programs and Apple included x86 translation circuitry on their CPU. I wonder why Microsoft didn't do the same?
Probably because MS wasn't involved in the silicon at all. The Snapdragon X Elite was entirely Qualcomm/Nuvia. Not sure why they skipped it though.
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....)
> coasted to a complete stop
I’m not sure how you say that on a release that is literally about new surface hardware
My first thought on seeing this was that it could be great for Linux. If the hardware is a little more standard than Apple's, it wouldn't need all the tricks Asahi has figure out. Finally you could have the best performance without compromising on fine details.
Nvidia is only slightly better than Apple when its come to providing hardware documentation.
And their hardware is much more locked down. E.g it cant be reverse engineered as easy as Apple Silicone because Nvidia GPUs basically run own OS inside themself.
So practically only Nvidia able to build open source drivers for this, but so far it looks like it will take them another decade with current rate.
My thought as well. As a Linux or BSD machine, this is a portable beast
Honestly I was ready to mock this thing out of existence, but I think you're on to something as there is a contingent that wants the Macbook Pro style laptop to run Linux and I think they'd be happy to settle with a copycat.
Alas, it is a laptop from Microsoft so hardware support in Linux is probably going to be painful as always.
Hard to say whether you'll get the Macbook Pro experience though.
They can put whatever hardware they want in it, Windows knows know bounds in undermining the overall package. I don't want a faster processor to run user-hostile adware that's constantly trying to upsell me, and uses dark patterns to trick me into switching off my chosen alternatives to their bad products every time there's a minor update. I don't want to run it at all.
I'm pretty happy to see someone else making a serious play in the ultra-premium notebook market. For way too long Apple has basically only been in competition with the much heavier "desktop replacement"/gaming laptops, or the flimsy/plasticky likes of Dell and LG with questionable trackpads. Real competition in this space could be a great thing for consumers
I’d wait for some actual reviews before celebrating. Because I just doubt this is as good as they are hyping. And it will still run the same windows ad ridden broken OS.
With 128gb memory this thing is going to cost a fortune.
That's what the Surface was supposed to be. It's Microsoft's example design for the other OEMs to strive for.
But they pretty much just copied the MBP (and added USB-A)
Heh, I mean, for the last few years, most PC manufacturers haven't been able to accomplish that much
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.
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.
A Spark-like machine in a laptop form factor is certainly exciting and interesting competition for Apple. I wonder about Linux compatibility, given NVidia's history with proprietary drives. I am absolutely not willing to go back to Windows, though.
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.
It means nothing. The LLM thought it was edgy.
LLMs are not yet capable of generating the level of marketing wankery seen here.
What do you mean, that's pretty much everything LLMs generate
"Nothing wasted. Everything intentional."
That's the most ChatGPT line ever, where everything has to be a cringy punchline
"A machine like this should not sit still. It should be pushed. Taken to the edge. Used to make real what others call impossible."
I really hope no human would write something like that
> I really hope no human would write something like that
I see you haven't interacted with marketing people. I can 100% believe that some marketing person wrote the copy.
I don't think I've ever seen LLM output as bad as this output. They sometimes write like that, but not every second sentence.
Don't you understand? They fired their marketing copy writers, that's over $550k/year in savings! Imagine how much they can save tomorrow.
> I really hope no human would write something like that
Sorry to shatter your hopes but any garbage an LLM writes is mimicry of some human written garbage that came before.
It can only write cringe because we taught it what cringe looks like
Contrast hooks everywhere.
> "A machine like this should not sit still. It should be pushed. Taken to the edge."
"Taken to the edge, and pushed off this edge. To garbage bin."
>> What does this mean ? How can you make the world ?
Ask Shakti, Shiva's creative sister.
so, they made a device that targets only a handful of people? They should stop letting copilot write their ad copy.
> The world is full of makers. Only a few make the world.
Reminds me of all that "Lions. Not Sheep." gear I see people rockin'. LOL
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."
They are targeting the kind of makers that use Excel and Teams more than make.
$$$
I used a surface book II for years all the while hoping it would die. It didn’t, which says something I guess. What sucked: the hinge, the split battery, mysterious problems with screen detach, the magnetic power connector, glossy screen. What didn’t: screen ratio.
It is not too far fetched to see NVIDIA acquiring Microsoft for the vertically integrated advantages Apple enjoys.
[edit:typo]
The biggest downside of this product is Windows
The second biggest is Microsoft's track record with hardware
Whatever they all do, they can never, ever match the quality of Apple! I've bought many Macs so far, and many Windows machines (Dell, Sony, 1st and 2nd Gen of Surface) as well. All of those Windows machines died within less than 2 years, while the Macs, which were bought more than 10 years ago, are still working fine. So, I'm not going to buy a new Windows machine anytime soon.
> Whatever they all do, they can never, ever match the quality of Apple!
It's a pretty low bar to meet.
Every Mac I've owned has had a hardware failure. Keyboard (x3). Dead trackpad. Display backlight. Logic board. LCD failure. Multiple drive failures. One Apple TV that shit the bed. Many within warranty, some not.
Apple's warranty service is pretty good, but to gloat about "quality"... it's more like when Sonny Corleone throws money at the guy's feet after he smashes his camera.
IIUC this is using lower bandwidth RAM than macs, and will run windows, with uncertain linux support (it's spotty even on the dedicated linux boxes that this chip is based on). So less of a "rival" and more "metoobutworse"...
Microsoft has always made great hardware, often with partners or acquisitions. If they don't run (traditional) Windows - like the phones - they are really good; if they do run desktop Windows we've gone from useable-but-handicapped to completely unacceptable IMO. They also tend to be side projects within MS; I'd suspect this thing saw the light of day because it was sold as a way to pump more AI at their mostly captive audience.
Apparently 300 GB/sec so basically on par with the M5 Pro but half the M5 Max.
It'd be alright with Linux, probably better than a MBP if you're working heavily with AI (but no other reason to buy it TBH).
https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu-nvidia_n1x
I'm surprised they released this thing. Brand perception is probably a lot more important to Nvidia than whatever sales they could get from this thing, and if it's basically just DGX Spark, it's likely to underwhelm.
I've heard there's still a large backlog of both software problems, and hardware problems with the platform. The software problems could be fixed with time, but they'll still give a shitty first impression. I'd have thought Nvidia would just bury this and try again with a successor run of silicon with a new design.
This thing seems practically destined to just be a repeat of the Snapdragon laptop debacle.
A lot of enterprise customers still buy windows workstations. When I worked in an IT dept, Dell XPS and Windows Surfaces were given to C levels who asked for Macs but were told they wouldn’t be supported into the windows ecosystem (exchange, office, Active Directory etc). Sadly after all these years the MDM story for macs is still trash.
Just because enterprise customers buy windows workstations, does not mean they'd be interested in buying these windows workstations.
MS page: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/surface/devices/surface-lapt...
Optimized for multi core.. like windows is out of the box for x86 and ARM already? What did they do manually set cores=20? Such optimal. Many Cores! This will be the third attempt at Windows on ARM.. hopefully this is the one
I don’t trust Microsoft after how they abandoned the Surface Book
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.
The primary reason to buy Macs isn't the hardware, it's macOS.
Oh thank god it has a co-pilot button
> It’s well known that the Surface trackpads are among the best in the industry, surpassing even MacBooks in several aspects
What aspects are these?
solid glass haptic trackpad instead of a clicky, mechanical piece of junk one?
The only MacBook sold with a mechanical trackpad in the past eight years is the MacBook Neo.
Right, I meant most PC OEMs are still shipping janky mechanical trackpads in all but the highest end models.
i've only ever owned a 'Surface Laptop 2' and for the time it was excellent, the keyboard and trackpad were both superior to my macbook pro of the time, the screen was great in both brightness and the 3:2 ratio. it was great value.
from all the comments on here it seems like that model was an anomaly and the rest of the product lineup is often pretty lacking.
If it's still based on the chip in the DGX Spark, idle power draw remains a problem to be solved. My Spark pulls down 40W when doing nothing under Ubuntu.
It might be more of a Linux problem than a chip problem…
For the DGX Spark and OEM variants a big issue is that the ConnectX-7 is just not designed to have low power idle but instead to be efficient when loaded.
NVIDIA already lowered power draw at idle by 18W with a currently out of tree driver leveraging PCIe hotplug for the NIC earlier this year.
I think that quite a bit more people bought those to use them without the ConnectX than what NVIDIA expected.
I’m pretty sure 400 gig nics aren’t in the cards for these thin and lights…
Macbook Pro rival running ..... Windows?! I'd take a bottom of the line Macbook over anything running 'doze.
I don't know if it's on purpose, but I've seen a few images and videos and I can't figure out what the laptop looks like.
Why are all the pictures so dark? You can't see it!
I bet it will be something like a MacBook Pro but with a windows logo. I wouldn’t expect much different considering the other surfaces look practically the same including the keyboard . Not that that is a bad thing .
The keyboard is pretty much the only thing you can see, and I see that they're still doing that horrible arrow layout.
Car manufacturers did this but it was usually when the car was going to be a bit of a minger.
100%. Viz, Ferrari Luce: https://www.ferrari.com/en-EN/auto/ferrari-luce
Ironically, "luce" means light in Italian
Does the unified memory work in WSL2?
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
Or their souls eviscerated by receiving nothing but criticism for any attempt to think or apply their creative passion.
If it runs Windows then it's dead on arrival.
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.
Asahi is possible because Apple actively supported booting unsigned OS.
Chances for Microsoft and Nvidia combo doing the same are questionable. Better look for other non-Microsoft laptops on the same platform.
Unusable website. Can’t get past the full screen consent dialog (iPhone)
Hey, I'm the managing editor of the site. The issue has been fixed; it was due to how we tried to render local fonts on iPhone, which conflicted with the CMP (consent pop-up for privacy/cookie in the EU). Please try loading the site again and let me know if it works for you.
You need an adblocker
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/adguard-pro-safari-ad-blocker/...
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.
> Microsoft explicitly tuned Windows 11 to extract the absolute best performance from the new silicon architecture.
My lie detector is going off.
> The containment features sandbox local agents like Hermes and OpenClaw so they cannot interfere with your core operating system.
Wait, isn't that kind of the point of using local agents like OpenClaw? I thought people wanted the agents accessing all kinds of applications, files, etc.?
> Legacy application compatibility is equally crucial. Microsoft optimized the Prism emulation layer specifically for the new microarchitecture. Prism utilizes the raw power of the silicon and recent AVX and AVX2 instruction set extensions to run older x86 applications smoothly under emulation.
Okay, this is pretty nice. I'll give Microsoft credit for this one. It might save my company a lot of heartache one day in the near future.
All in all, this rig is going to be quite expensive. In a lot of ways, it probably is better than a MacBook Pro. However, as a diehard Apple fanboy, it is not enough for me to consider the jump.
I'm starting to have a sour taste in my mouth whenever I read microsoft and nvidia
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.
What is the CPU/GPU architecture of this and how could a collaboration between whoever made it and Nvidia possibly outperform Apple Silicon?
MediaTek designed X925 + A725 CPU. It's already been benchmarked in the GB10 products. It is not even close. Like 0.75x SPECint 2017 of the M5.
> 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.
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.
Too bad it runs Windows.
It's a shame that, outside of garish "gaming" laptops, 17" screens are very rare.
PCs still have USB-A ports? USB-A is old enough to drink.
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?
They say GPU performance of mobile 5070 RTX and that GPU alone is 50W.
Obviously it only hot under load.
You would have to pay me to get one and I would still not use it.
There is something about Microsoft's reverse Midas touch.
I had the original surface and later a surface book from my employer. Both devices were horrible the digitizer for pen input was horrific. The software support was on a standstill for 6 months at a time with minimal updates later on. I won't touch first gen Microsoft hardware anymore except maybe their mice.
Surfaces are great devices. My Pro 3 still gets 7 hours of battery life.
We use newer Surface laptops at work, even the artists, developers, and executives (note we are not a tech company). The laptops aren't very fast but they can take a lot of physical abuse and the batteries last all day. We don't need the top of the line, and forcing our developers to use lower powered computers actually improves the quality of the apps because they get to experience how our apps work for most of our customers and take performance into account from the beginning.
It's not a rival. It could be the greatest computer ever made and I'm still not using Windows.
At this point I don't know what the performance delta would need to be between "fastest I can get that lets me run linux" and "fastest I can get with windows" other than massive.
I genuinely do not want to deal with windows that much.
Fortunately since my computing needs are met by a fast x86/GPU I don't have to make that choice.
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.
Will this help strengthen the ARM Linux ecosystem?
Most commenters here are focused on the Microsoft hardware, but the article mentions systems from several other manufacturers using the same hardware. Some of them, Dell and Lenovo in particular, have good Linux support.
Nvidia has also supported Linux well in general, so let's hope there's an attractive Linux option soon!
Personally I'd be just as happy with a small form factor desktop with the same hardware.
Nvidia has also supported Linux well in general
I don't really know, maybe in recent times. All I'm reminded of is Linus giving Nvidia the finger.
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.
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...
Does it run Linux well? That's the only reason not to get a MBP.
Personally, I got a HP Zbook G1A, which is HP's take on an MBP based on (x86, but unified memory!) Strix Halo.
Battery life could be better, but pretty happy otherwise. Local LLM perf is great and I get to run an OS that doesn't drive me crazy.
CUDA support is another reason, if you have a particular need for that.
> Built on Windows
aaaaand... scene!
No thank you, and goodbye
Most people who use this won't have a choice. It will be forced on them by employers.
Yeah what bizarro world is their marketing team living in where that's something to tout?
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...
https://www.theverge.com/news/940275/nvidia-n1x-laptop-proce...
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
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...
Yeah that's definitely it. So that makes this an arm device with nvidia GPU. It's not the first as you pointed out, but it would be a more consumer shaped example - a laptop that normal people might be able to afford
Completely garden-variety normal ARM-designed cores:
Cortex-X925 and Cortex-A725
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.
Too bad linux x86 on arm story is still terrible. Fex is great in a sense but getting it run is a herculean feat, with pagesize mismatched requiring a VM.
Windows…
"Copilot, write me a drivel article which could have been a 3-line press release, but instead use every unnecessary superlative you can conjure. Ignore any possible criticism and pretend this device is the second coming of Computer Christ"
Yeah I feel like I just read an advertisement someone adapted from marketing materials.
Because that’s exactly what it is.
Surface Laptop Ultra Ripoff: Made for World(-Class) Suckers.
Imagine thinking the rivalry is about hardware and not software... Same for IOS vs Android.
TFA has a few more tidbits than I've seen elsewhere but it's mostly LLM-induced, hype-driven marketing bilge.
A slightly more sober announcement is available at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352627.
"world makers", quite sober ;)
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352627