Better battery, LTE and a removable SSD in Microsoft's Surface Pro 7+ As the faithful await new hardware in 2021, Microsoft has quietly updated its Surface Pro 7 with a removable SSD and beefier battery life. Aimed squarely at biz customers, Microsoft claims the update boosts the Pro 7's comparatively weedy battery life to 15 hours, an increase of 4.5 hours according to the Windows giant. The …
FTFA: Also of great interest to the corporate world will be the removable SSD that can be switched out on-site, and those SSDs "will be available to commercial customers through authorized resellers beginning with US distribution."
To me, that reads as "we've managed to find a way to make the SSD a non-standard component, specific to this device. Forget about buying any old NVMe M2 stick and putting it in - you will need to buy the bespoke module from us only at a vast $markup/GB".
Perhaps I'm just too cynical?
I thought the same thing when reading it, possibly because I'm currently considering whether to buy the custom SSD to repair an Apple laptop or just put it aside for later. I really hope they haven't done that, and I've misread things like this before, but hopefully there will be extra details about it somewhere. I looked around for someone who bothered to ask this question when they got the press release, but all the news articles I find just say "replaceable" with no more detail.
I really love my old business class Dell laptop because of the easily accessible hard drive slot on the side.
I leave the plastic cover off the drive bay and have a stack of SSD's with different OS's on them for whatever I may be doing at the moment.
I pop 'em in like an old Atari game cardridge.
You need to design yourself an auto-changer carousel, like those 6-CD changers that used to be installed in cars (or a Wurlitzer jukebox, for those of us even older). With a random shuffle function.
"Oooh, which OS is it going to be today?"
whirrrr-click-CLUNK
"It's... oooh, BeOS. Didn't even think I had that. Still, for productivity and selection of apps, beats yesterday's 'Rumours' by Fleetwood Mac..."
As well as fanless i3 and i5-based units, Microsoft insists that the thermal design should avoid the hairdryer tendencies of the i7 fan with the cooling blades spinning up for "the most intensive workloads
Well, given that the fanless i5 unit thermally throttles down to 400MHz and stays there within 10min of running any sort of intensive task I'll stick with the hairdryer!
Behaviour is substantially worse when plugged in than on battery, the fast charge circuitry puts a tremendous thermal stress on the system that the fanless units cannot cope with, so if you're plugged in for eg a long zoom call, it is guaranteed to rapidly overheat.
I think the record we got was a 45 second delay between broadcast and receipt in Zoom when side by side testing, although the call never actually dropped.
Are not the same as normal hours. My SP4 was advertised as having “8 hour” battery life; it had nothing of the sort. They just make up the numbers. The number then was for streaming video on WiFi, I generally got about 4 hours. To their credit, Edge had rather lower battery use than Chrome, although it made up for that by being horrible, and Chrome quickly caught up.
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