Microsoft Surface Laptop 3

This is good news. I was about 95% of the way to purchasing a 14" MBP this weekend. The 13" is what I really want, having had a late 2013 13" model prior. I'm on a surface laptop 3 at the moment, but its pretty garbage compared to my experience with Apple previously. The keyboard is already starting to go out on me after barely 2 years of light use. I don't even write software on this thing. Assuming Apple doesn't shank this refresh with a stealth removal of magsafe or Fn key swap for touchbar, I'll be somewhere at the front of the line on launch day.

Hey folks, author of the Twitter thread here. It's pretty funny how a pair of crappy videos I recorded in 5 minutes have gone viral and landed here. I obviously did not expect that this would happen and is why I didn't give a second thought to the comparison. There are many wrong things in there (including inaccuracies, as some have reported), and Twitter really doesn't give room to nuance. (Plus my notifications are now unusable so I can't even reply where necessary.) I don't want to defend the "computers of 20 years ago" because they sucked in many aspects. Things have indeed gotten better in many ways: faster I/O, better graphics and insanely fast networks are a few of them, which have allowed many new types of apps to surface. Better languages and the pervasiveness of virtual machines have also allowed for new types of development and deployment environments, which can make things safer. Faster CPUs do enable things we couldn't do, like on-the-fly video transcoding and the like. The existence of GPUs gives us graphics animations for free. And the list goes on. BUT. That still doesn't mean everything is better. UIs have generally gotten slower as you can see. There is visible lag even in fast computers: I noticed it on a ~2021 Z4 workstation I had at work, I noticed it on an i7 Surface Laptop 3 I had, and I still notice it on the Mac Pro I'm running Windows 11 on (my primary machine). It's mind-blowing to me that we need super-fast multi-core systems and GBs of RAM to…

Just a few weeks ago I replaced my Surface Laptop 3 with a M1 MacBook and couldn't agree more regarding hardware. I can't speak for any xbox branded stuff, but any MS-branded computer I've ever owned has been trash. Microsoft might be terrible at this hardware business, but they do have a powerful presence in the developer & business community. I still feel like Microsoft is the strongest software company on earth. Consider that not even the confines of this M1 MacBook prevent me from being able to compile & run my .NET apps without modification. Apple's hypothetical hegemony does not cross over in the same way. Until Apple can get me to look at their Xcode offerings and think "wow fuck visual studio, GitHub, et. al.", I do not think their takeover of the computing world will begin.

Also thinking the same, looking for a monitor for my Surface Laptop 3 (Running Linux) and realising the lack of HDMI port really makes this a challenge USB C for a monitor lacks options currently, so am looking at dongle hell.