Cool, thanks.
...I'll be a couple weeks at least, but when the time comes, I'll hit you up.
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Microsoft Announces Intel Atom-Based Surface 3 With Windows 8.1 for $499
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That's what iOS is though; it is OS X. It just happens to be coded with cocoa touch instead of cocoa to enable the touchiness of it. I think that's another reason why they're designing their own chips bc they have some great ideas on how move forward a low power yet power app-based basic consumer platform that will benefit from that mentality.
The new Macbook (even though it is running a core-m CPU) is a low power machine and it will do most things that most consumers do. One day though, I see the "fully designed by Apple" on the bottom of every case. It might be nice but then it might just lead them to where they were before switching to Intel from PPC.
Are you trying to say the only difference between iOS and OSX is one is touch friendly and the other isn't?
OS X as an operating system is a UNIX (BSD) operating system with Aqua as the UI on top of it. The API (widgets/libraries) built into Aqua for writing UI applications is Cocoa.
OS X was then ported over as a starting point for iOS. The underlying operating system is still UNIX (BSD). I suspect the Aqua layer was minimized since there is not much of a UI for iOS... just applications that run in a window which is the UI itself. The same interface was optimized as a consumption UI called Cocoa Touch. Cocoa and Cocoa Touch likely have a lot in common.
They serve different use cases. Microsoft's view of the world is that everything is the same and if they are not they will be forced to be the same.
I personally use the different devices differently so I am more in the Apple market.... Others may want things more the Microsoft way and that is fine for them. Understand though it would not take much to make OS X touch, just integrating in gesture recognizer libraries into OS X.... but for people like me who work with my hands on the keyboard and sit far enough from the monitor, I would find touch to be a hinderance (tiring).... for my computer usage. Dell has indicated that a majority of its users it queried in research related to the Dell XPS 13.... also have no interest in touch computers.... so not all Windows users are thrilled with being forced into a more touch centric world.
2GB is plenty for a basic Windows 8 machine. No one expects to run Photoshop or Visual Studio of this device.
I support many different clients, most with Windows, some with a mix, one with a lot of Mac's, and many where the employees have personal Macbooks they need connected to the office, and MS Office is what everyone uses.
"Plenty" is a stretch. 4GB is plenty for a basic Win 8 machine. 2GB is really scraping the bottom of the barrel though. I get why MS did this, the price point offered for the 2GB model gets peoples attention and gets them in the door, where they can hopefully (for their own good) be upsold to the 4GB model.
The problem is that a majority of people are going to walk out the door with the 2GB model, then try and run applications that were not written to fit on a tablet because it is "full Windows", and it's reputation will suffer.
You will also get a bunch of reviews on the base model and it will also have an affect. Short-sighted, shoot your own foot that they have been guilty of in the past.
Meh. I didn't say people were going to run large desktop apps on it but thats the point. 2/64 is putting you into a corner of usage. But 2GB of RAM on the Air 2, an 64GB of storage is a very nice tablet. You can run Photoshop for iPad, and a ton of other apps. You can play all of the most recent mobile games, and have a ton of nice apps like Office, too.
But a full OS on that same specs isn't that great of a user experience. People buying the Surface 3 are going to be VERY limited whereas a new iPad is a beast of a machine for a mobile OS and all the mobile apps that come with it. Even a 128GB machine these days is pretty light on storage. A good iTunes library, and some apps will eat all the free space on the base model.
I think that was true once upon a time before SSD's, but today SSD's are so fast that I don't think too many people would notice when one's being used for swap files.
I think the low amount of ram as a bottleneck is being blown way out of the water.
The SSD may be orders of magnitude faster than hard drives (assuming they go for the ones used in higher end laptops) but it is still many many orders of magnitude slower than memory. It would also wear out the SSD quicker -- since using it for constant caching will wear it out (not sure the timing, depends on the SSD) after a certain number of reads and writes (and slow down over that period). Doing so to save $30 in manufacturing costs just seems silly.
I think 2GB is a little too constrained for Windows. Even running basic apps, I think 4GB is better and if you're running photoshop or other things, 8GB will be what you want. Of course I don't expect too many people to be running PS on the Surface 3. Their are other more powerful better solutions.
The second, I would not be so confident of that. I still see many posts asking how they can code an app on the iPad
... and that is when it is just not available....
I would actually expect that Visual Studio would be able to run if there were the proper amount of RAM.
I have an early Mac Mini (Early 2009 - Intel Core 2 Duo P7350 @ 2Ghz - Running Yosemite) which was immediately upgraded to 4GB of memory and a faster hard drive.... In trying to visualize the new Macbook I ran geekbench 3 on it and the single core performance was on par with Surface 3 (multi core the Surface 3 is a bit better).... if it had a reasonable SSD in it it would probably feel reasonably performant for most things.... So with 4GB, unless Visual Studio is an absolute dog, it should run fine. [Sidenote: the new Macbook is 2x the benchmark, etc.]
Not having enough RAM is a common cause of poor performance....
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The impact of adding an extra 2GB of RAM goes beyond the manufacturing cost. With hibernation, that added RAM results in more storage usage. It may also have an impact on battery life, as that memory needs power to remain.
But that of course assumes that there are only technical reasons for the decision. Companies often offer tiered configurations with the hope that the next upper tier is enticing enough to up-sell to the more expensive config. Microsoft is no different in this regard. With the current pricing structure, a person who balks at the entry level price for a Surface Pro 3 may find themselves willing to spend the same amount for a Surface 3... we can't underestimate the power of incremental pricing.
I own a variety of Windows tablets. RAM has never been the bottleneck nor has had a noticeable impact on performance.
On my Insignia 8" Windows tablet, 1GB RAM is adequate for the modern UI apps. Running legacy win32 software on an 8" screen gave me flashbacks of my attempts to do that on the old Asus eePC netbooks. Running old win16 apps fly on this thing.
My Acer Aspire Switch 11 has a 4GB/128GB configuration. I've been impressed with how much headroom there is with just 4GB... but I've also seen the impact to storage space to accommodate the pagefile, hibernation file, etc. This is one area where I believe Windows is NOT ready to be a tablet OS. It needs to do a better job of cleaning up temporary files and keeping the OS footprint size stable.
The 2GB/64GB model is most likely intended to be used simply as an iPad-like consumption device. Yes, the capability of running legacy software is a draw, but more in the theoretical than in the practical.
Anyone attempting to use the base model as traditional notebook will soon discover that the 64GB storage is completely inadequate for those purposes. A user will run out of storage to install apps far more quickly than any impact of having 2GB RAM.
Why do people keep saying this? With 2gb on my old clovertrail tablet I ran PhotoShop with no issues, although this is not with overly large files. With 2gb I had no issues with any every day computing task, running MS office, browsing the internet with multiple tabs open, checking email, running programs, apps, games, etc. This is on a processor 2 generations old and win8/8.1, where win10 is supposed to be a very nice leap in memory usage. Heck even windows tablets with 1gb run quite nicely with everyday computing stuff.
I would love 4gb in the base model, sure why not. But I don't think 2gb is scraping the bottom of the barrel at all.
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What apps or programs won't run on 2gb ram?
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You're saying a windows tablet user able to run the FULL version of PhotoShop will be handicapped versus an iPad user who can run PhotoShop for iPad?!?!? That doesn't make sense IMO.
You're right to a point, but you'd be hard pressed to claim that the people who are out buying the $499 S3 are going to be doing any more with it than they would the equivalent 16GB iPad Air 2. Most of them will be running Office, One Note, and web browsing with maybe a couple of tabs open. All things it does smoothly even with a measly 2GB ram. In terms of storage, you're getting more with the S3 for about the same price.
The only issue is that the S3 has access to apps that can bog it down, while the Air 2 doesn't.
You don't think they tested this before launching a new product?
You also don't think that they didn't spend a good bit of time under the hood tweaking the OS to perform better on the chipset?
You do realize that OSX is not exactly identical on every machine as well, right? There are optimizations for different hardware profiles and models in OSX that let the OS work and feel the same across the hardware line....
Now MS is making their own hardware and they also made the OS.... the issue with windows was always how it had to support such vast configurations options. If you want to get brutally honest, that's been it's flaw all along... and it's also one of the biggest reasons macs have a better feel and experience to the end user.
Now, where the end user might see issues is with NON microsoft software. Ironically, that's usually the point people see issues with OSX as well.... just saying.
Not many, the problem is the Windows Operating System does not leave much memory available without significant paging with 2GB installed.... leaving applications with a fraction of that memory.
I hear a lot of talk about them "saving" $30 to hit a price point of $499 for the sake of sales, when what they should be worrying about is selling devices on the fringe that do nothing to help their reputation. There are lots of crap manufactures out there with Windows devices, Microsoft should be focusing on being the "quality devices" that run Windows. If it means the base model sells for $529 instead of $499.... so be it.
Have you used one in the real world? I've used plenty of clovertrail and baytrail tablets, I'd say with my sad penchant for buying tablets and returning them I've probably used 3/4 of all of them. You can run multiple programs on the desktop, multiple apps, internet with 20+ tabs open, etc etc at the SAME TIME and get no slowdown, no app refreshes, no tab refreshes, etc.
Even the crappiest windows tablet runs great on 2gb. I just bought a couple of "unbranded" (yes that's the brand name) 2gb baytrail tablets from Cowboom to use for new patients to input information for freakin $79 each, I'm quite surprised at how robust they are. I run Adobe Acrobat X on them, which is a notorious hog, with a 20+ page fill in form document and it runs very smoothly.
And this is with win 8.1, win10 is supposed to be much more streamlined all around. Takes up less space, is much more RAM efficient, etc.
Interesting quote from the surface team about the surface 3:
Q13 How would you say the Surface 3 holds up to Photoshop and do you still run the Wacom tech inside for those of us who want to do some drawing? I'm on the fence.
Photoshop - Given variety of content and scenarios, best answer is relative to SP3 i3. For PC Mark 8 Creative Tests S3 performance is 80% of SP3 i3.