I’ve been holding off on a laptop refresh at work for a while, but it’s time. The recent Apple events have been less than compelling; I’ve been saying for a long time that Mozilla needs more people in-house living day to day on Windows machines and talk is cheaper than ever these days, so.
I’m taking notes here of my general impressions as I migrate from a Macbook Pro to a Surface Book and Windows 10.
I’ll add to them as things progress, but for now let’s get started.
- I don’t think highly of unboxing fetishism, but it’s hard to argue against the basic idea that your very tactile first contact with a product should be a good one. The Surface Book unboxing is a bit rough, but not hugely so; there’s the rare odd mis-step like boxes that are harder than necessary to open or tape that tears the paper off the box.
- I’ve got the Performance Base on the Surface Pro here; the very slight elevation of the keyboard makes a surprisingly pleasant difference, and the first-run experience is pretty good too. You can tell Microsoft really, really wants you to accept the defaults, particularly around data being sent back to Microsoft, but you can reasonably navigate that to your comfort level it looks like. Hard to say, obvs.
- I’m trying to figure out what is a fair assessment of this platform vs. what is me fighting muscle memory. Maybe there’s not a useful distinction to be made there but considering my notable idiosyncrasies I figure I should make the effort. If I’m going to pretend this is going to be useful for anyone but some alternate-universe me, I might as well. This came up in the context of multiple desktops – I use the hell out of OSX multiple desktops, and getting Windows set up to do something similar requires a bit of config twiddling and some relearning.The thing I can’t figure out here is the organizational metaphor. Apple has managed to make four-fingered swiping around multiple desktop feel like I’m pushing stuff around a physical space, but Windows feels like I’m using a set of memorized gestures to navigate a phone tree. This is a preliminary impression, but it feels like I’m going to need to just memorize this stuff.
- In a multiple desktops setting, the taskbar will only show you the things running in your current desktop, not all of them? So crazymaking. [UPDATE: Josh Turnath in the comments turns out that you can set this right in the “multitasking” settings menu, where you can also turn off the “When I move one window, move other windows” settings which are also crazymaking. Thanks, Josh!]
- If you’re coming off a Mac trackpad and used to tap-to-click, be sure to set the delay setting to “Short delay” or it feels weird and laggy. Long delay is tap, beat, beat, response; if you move the cursor the action vanishes. That, combined with the fact that it’s not super-great at rejecting unintentional input makes it mostly tolerable but occasionally infuriating, particularly if you’ve got significant muscle memory built up around “put cursor here then move it aside so you can see where you’re typing”, which makes it start selecting text seemingly at random. It’s way better than any other trackpad I’ve ever used on a PC for sure, so I’ll take it, but still occasionally: aaaaaaargh. You’re probably better just turning tap-to-click off. UPDATE: I had to turn off tap to click, because omgwtf.
- In this year of our lord two thousand and sixteen you still need to merge in quasi-magic registry keys to remap capslock . If you want mousewheel scrolling to work in the same directions as two-finger scrolling, you need to fire up RegEdit.exe and know the magic incantations. What the hell.
- It’s surprising how seemingly shallow the Win10 redesign is. The moment you go into the “advanced options” you’re looking at the the same dialogs you’ve known and loved since WinXP. It’s weird how unfinished it feels in places. Taskbar icons fire off on a single click, but you need to flip a checkbox five layers deep in one of those antiquated menus to make desktop icons do the same. The smorgasbords you get for right-clicking things look like a room full of mismanaged PMs screaming at each other.
- You also have to do a bunch of antiquated checkbox clickery to install the Unix subsystem too, but complaining about a dated UI when you’re standing up an ersatz Linux box seems like the chocolate-and-peanut-butter of neckbearded hypocrisy, so let’s just agree to not go there. You can get a Linux subsystem on Windows now, which basically means you can have Linux and modern hardware with working power management and graphics drivers at the same time, which is pretty nice.
- Pairing Apple’s multitouch trackpads with Windows only gets you one- and two-fingered gestures. C’mon. Really?
- This is a common consensus here, after asking around a bit. Perplexity that Microsoft would put an enormous (and ultimately successful) effort into re-pinning and hardening the foundations underneath the house, recladding it and putting in an amazing kitchen, but on the 2nd floor the hinges on the wrong side of the doors and there’s a stair missing on the way to the basement.
- I’m not surprised the Windows Store isn’t the go-to installer mechanism yet – that’s true on Macs, too – but my goodness pickings there are pretty slim. Somehow I have to go visit all these dodgy-looking websites to get the basic-utilities stuff sorted out, and it feels like an outreach failure of some kind. This is vaguely related to my next point, that:
- The selection of what does vs. doesn’t come preinstalled is… strange. I feel like Microsoft has space to do something really interesting here that they’re not capitalizing on for some reason. Antitrust fears? I dunno. I just feel like they could have shipped this with, say, Notepad++ and a few other common utilities preinstalled and made a lot of friends.
- The breakaway power cables are fantastic. A power brick with fast-charge USB built in and freeing up slots on the machine proper is extremely civilized. You can be sitting with your legs crossed and have the power plugged in, which I sincerely miss being able to do with underpowered 1st-gen Macbook Air chargers back in the mists of prehistory.
- The Surface Dock is basically perfect. Power, Ethernet, two DisplayPorts and four USB ports over that same breakaway cable is excellent. If you’ve ever used a vintage IBM Thinkpad docking station, this is something you’ve been wishing Apple would make for the better part of a decade.
- I assumed “Skype Preview” was a preview version of Skype. I wanted (and pay for) the whole thing, so I immediately uninstalled that and installed normal Skype, which it turns out is really outdated-looking and ugly on Win10. I was bewildered about why a premiere Microsoft-owned thing like Skype would look ugly on their flagship OS, so I did some research and discovered that “Skype Preview” isn’t a preview version of Skype. It’s the prettified modern Win10 version. So I reinstalled it and uninstalled Skype. I’m sure this is somehow my fault for not understanding this but in my defense: words mean things.
- This hardware is really nice. The hinge works great, eject to tablet is crisp and works well, reversing it to the easel setup is both surprisingly good and for-real useful.
Anyway, this is where I am so far. More notes as I think of them.
Update:
- Definitely turn off the two-finger-tap-to-right-click option – if you don’t and you’ve got fat hands like mine, sometimes it will get into a state where everything is a right-click, which is inexplicable and upsetting.
- I saw my first tripped-over USB-C cable send a Macbook crashing to the floor today. I suspect it will not be the last.
Further updates:
- It turns out there’s a (baffling!) option to turn a click on the lower right corner of the trackpad into a right-click, which is just super-weird and infuriating if you don’t know it’s there and (apparently?) turned on by default.
- The trick to reversing mousewheel scrolling only is here, and involves RegEdit, finding all the instances of FlipFlopWheel in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\HID\ and changing them from 0 to 1. Very user friendly.
- A lot of network-related stuff in the Unix subsystem doesn’t work right or at all yet, but my understanding is that this is fixed in the Insider builds.
- A nice as having the Unix subsystem is, the terminal thing you use to get to it is infuriating retro-bizarro DOS-window garbage. [UPDATE: bwinton has introduced me to Cmder, a console emulator for Windows that is vastly better than the Ubuntu default in every observable respect. Use that instead.]
- Unexpected but pleasant: CPU in the lid instead of the base means your lap doesn’t overheat.
Further-er updates:
- A nice touch: searching for common OSX utility names with the taskbar brings you directly to their Windows counterparts, like “grab” brings you to the snippets tool.
- It’s surprising how often the “how do I do [something]?” links in the Settings dialog box take you to the same undifferentiated and completely un-navigable Windows 10 support page. Really rookie stuff, like they fired the intern responsible three weeks into their placement and just forgot about it.
- It’s really frustrating how both of those experiences coexist basically everywhere in this OS. Nice, elegantly-deployed and useful touches in some places, arbitrarily broken or ill-considered jank in others.
Further Updates 4: The Furthening;
- There’s now a Surface Book User Guide, and it’s got some good information in it. For example, fn-del and fn-backspace adjust screen brightness, something I’ve missed from my Macbook. Also, fn-space for screenshots is nice enough, though the provided snipping tool is better (better than OSX Grab, too.)
- You can use AutoHotKey scripts to remap what pen-clicking does, turning it into a passable presenter’s tool. Which is kind of neat.