Laptops in the year 20XX

And you keep saying Surface Book 4 which confuses the shit out of me.

1 Like

I’m actually getting the Jurface Book Gro 5

That the one with the new Jraphics card?

Okay, also coming from Apple land, those are way bigger release bugs than I expected. I thought you were talking about “sometimes the photos app takes too long to launch” or “mail app not connecting very well”.

Apps?

I treat these things like pure computers. :wink: Just a desktop I can carry around.

1 Like

The “.exe” for MacOS is “.app” so “mail.app” is just the default email program. I didn’t mean it comes from an app store.

[quote=“lukeburrage, post:26, topic:283, full:true”]
The “.exe” for MacOS is “.app” so “mail.app” is just the default email program. I didn’t mean it comes from an app store.
[/quote]Haha. I wasn’t playing dumb either. I assumed you meant app like app store apps, since Windows now also has a stupid integrated app store full of useless nonsense.

I’ve installed various Windows apps, and they’re always buggy or otherwise worthless.

I think, with Windows laptops, there’s a certain level of tolerance to quirks that has to be maintained, far moreso than with Macs. Windows desktops don’t have issues like that anymore, nor do more generic laptops, but tablets are all unique snowflakes ready to fail you in surprising ways.

I have / had a friend at University who bought the Surface Pro 4 on release, the wake on sleep issues was something he said he resolved by replacing suspension of the OS with just shutting down because it’s running off an SSD. However his issue was resolved with the first round of patches.

Otherwise I was pretty jealous of his ability to take notes or write out maths equations as required while also being able to do the regular VM and dual boot into Linux.

This is kind of strange to me as in Windows 10 or Gnorme 3 on Arch Linux (using my touch screen laptop in either), if the OS has detected that I have been tapping the screen rather than using the mouse it will start popping up with the touch keyboard.

I have since changed it to force keyboard usage.
Weird that in the hybrid device it isn’t set to touch input but I guess there may be a need to allow other wireless keyboards to attach while it is in touchscreen mode.
I guess it needs to know when it’s not connected to a keyboard wired or not to default to touch screen. While in a laptop because the keybaord is connected at all times, if you stop using the trackpad it understands you want to use the screen instead.

When it works as intended, I’m pretty happy with it. I just wish they’d spent as much time on integration, UX, and testing as they clearly did on physical design.

Yeah I agree however every OS is released with bugs, it’s the most complex thing to write. Then on top of that if you’re also trying to make a touchscreen design that isn’t fully fleshed out it becomes a problem when in touch screen mode.

Windows 8 was ahead of its time (and Gnome 3 was even further ahead) for most people as they couldn’t comprehend a touchscreen on a laptop or desktop, if people had adopted that and worked through all the UX issues at that time Windows 10 touch interface would be close to the finesse of the mouse and keyboard interface.

I haven’t come across a Surface user in person who has been disappointed with their purchase but I can’t judge without owning one. My 4 year old laptop works fine for what it does but if I had an excess amount of cash laying around or I get a job which requires a lot of laptop use I will likely be able to try it out with either a Surface Pro 5 or Surface Book or I might just get the latest rendition of the Dell XPS 13, however I do want to know what the tablet only mode feels like, especially for reading comics or reading in general (versus say some of the new Android and Chrome OS tablets and hybrids coming up).

I have a professional opinion that most uses of touchscreen UX on hybrid tablet PCs are poorly thought out, similarly to how 3D or freespace gesture devices were in their brief time.

Normal people need a tablet with a pure touch interface designed for the simple tasks typically performed on a tablet. The iPad is perfect for this.

Normal people who do a little more need a real OS, and are best served by a traditional laptop.

Hybrid tablets (i.e., running a full Operating System and similarly equipped to a traditional laptop) are a specialized domain for power users with specific needs. They will never fully serve those needs well in all cases.

Further, many tasks are simply unsuited to touch interfaces, or at least are unsuited without radical re-imagining of the UX.

And I am saying this has been THE MOST buggy experience on a new & native system I have had in 27 years of computer use. This is coming from a person professionally skilled in design and programming. The experience was parallel to a mid-90s Linux install on a laptop with extensive unsupported hardware – which is fine, if that’s what you’re signing up for. I was regularly tempted to office space it. It was an early adopter experience for what should, by now, be an established brand, experience, and QA process.[quote=“sK0pe, post:30, topic:283”]
I can’t judge without owning one
[/quote]
your money.

1 Like

I would have to disagree as I’ve seen 2 people sit for 30 minutes trying to work out how Facebook works on an Apple Surface then try for another 20 minutes to work out how to connect the Apple Surface to their own wifi.
I’ve often also asked Apple Surface owners for their MAC address to allow them on the MAC filtered portion of my network and shared in their confusion of where to find the trivial information.

I would call it far from “perfect”. However I would be more agreeable to recommending a completely native touch screen UX to one that attempts to do both.

When I use a touchscreen laptop personally, I very rarely touch the trackpad and prefer using the touch screen.

What is an Apple Surface? I’m so confused.

2 Likes

No offense but those people sound technogically inept. I will concede that for some reason iOS calls it the “wifi address” but for Christs sake a second of googling will resolve all that stuff. Floundering for inordinate amounts of time with trivial information is silly.

If you think having a MAC address filtered network is normal for “people who need a tablet with a pure touch interface designed for the simple tasks typically performed on a tablet” then I think you’re not living in the real world.

1 Like

Your perception of the real world may be different to my own. My world doesn’t replace actual technology with buzz words and magic.

I mean I knew what a MAC address was within days of our family creating a network at home when I was around 12 or 13 and my brother learned at the same time he is 4 years younger.

While I believe that many Universities are not in the real world, many students need to understand how to access this address for some basic things that allow them to connect to services specific to the school. These students are indeed very real and although they don’t understand the technology of why or what a MAC address does, they understand they need to be able to access it.

When you first open up an unconnected device on an Android phone and select Wifi, it has the MAC address right there (pull down the UI shade and press the wifi icon) because it knows you want to connect to a wifi network and have not been able to connect which is why you went into wifi settings.

I can’t remember the process for one of my Mother’s friends who visited me with an iPhone 7 Pro even though he works in IT. He couldn’t find it for about 10 minutes.

None taken.
Well yeah but these are the people that are being provided with technology that they profess to be well versed in. When one tried to look on Google, they eventually realised that they weren’t connected even though the wifi network’s name was apparently showing in the UI somewhere.

I’m still not sure what your point is, or what it is you were referring to as a Apple Surface.

Are you saying that you think an iPad having a mouse pointer would mean the MAC address would be listed in the place you would expect?

Simply stating that there is no perfect touch based UI and UX on the market yet.

If “perfect ui/ux” means “shows me the MAC address when connecting to wifi” then I think we’re going to disagree about many things.

A college with a decent IT department will have walkthrough instructions for getting connected, including finding the MAC address on most popular devices. (Source: worked for college IT as a student.)

2 Likes