Microsoft has made a Surface slab that mere mortals can dismantle The Surface Pro X is in the hands of US users and the iFixit crew has already ripped into it. The repairability results might please Microsoft's legions of loyalists but give iPad fanbois pause for thought. While the Surface Pro X components were on display for all to see at Microsoft's Ignite event, the chippery was securely …
Just read a few reviews and it seems to be rubbish basically.
Why couldn't they have dedicated the time to the Surface Pro instead and gave it smaller bezels and a couple of more ports. At least it sells in decent numbers and badly needs a refresh.
Who makes the decision to make these products and why does nobody actually test them before release?
It is a chicken and egg situation.
The PC is a new generation of ARM Windows PCs, but it needs ARM software. Until ARM software starts appearing, running Intel software under emulation is going to be a disappointment.
I.e. the testers are "doing it wrong", to paraphrase Apple. But until common applications start to appear, they can't really do it right.
If ARM software starts appearing. I'm a little surprised we're not seeing more ARM-based servers. That application seems to be an easier way to start. It only needs to have the support of the applications you need to serve. For me that would be a web server and that's it, then I could host my front-end on cheap ARM hardware with a lot of cores for greater efficiency.
I'm not convinced they'll get customer buy in on this, but it would be nice if they did. It opens up the Windows hardware market a lot more.
It depends, a lot of servers today are virtual. You have dozens of virtual servers running on a hypervisor (VMWare ESXi, Microsoft HyperV, KVM, Xen etc.). For that you need a fairly meaty server and ARM just isn't there, with the raw power, yet - at least not in numbers, there are a couple of manufacturers making big ARM server chips, but they are up against AMD Epyc and Intel Xeon Platinum designs.
I have a Rasberry Pi at home running as a DNS server, but apart from that, I haven't seen a bare metal server in several years.
At work we currently have a 3-way VMWare cluster at each site running all the servers we need on top.
Hosting is often the same, dozens of clients running on one physical server.
I think it will come, eventually, but at the moment it is still niche, because of the power/performance ratio. If you need a low powered, dedicated server, there are some options, but for most businesses, they want the most bang they can get for their money.
Depends upon your use case. My 'proper' work is all on virtual machines running on a biggish PC. If I'm using my Surface, it's either to browse web, do email or remote desktop to a work VM. This will be fine for that.
I currently have a Surface Pro 4. Completely over the top for my requirements. I'd certainly consider a lower powered tablet/laptop when it finally dies. That said, current favourite is a Dell XPS rather than another Surface - just too easy to break.
In fact, I've worked on Windows 10 machines with even less. I currently have a machine here with only four gigabytes of memory, and that one works fine. It's probably not the best machine to use when running memory-hungry software like some IDEs, but it does just fine running more standard software under both Windows and Linux, and I rarely notice the difference.
At one point, I had the pleasure of using a cheap Windows tablet with a whole one gigabyte of memory. I did notice that, but the Intel atom it was paired with was the more annoying of the specs. Even with that, however, the device ran. I could write code and read email with ease until I gave it back to its owner and started using my machines again.
Reminds my of our complaints about taking Thinkpads apart when the new models had - horrors of horrors - a flat head screw holding in a modem board that needed to be removed to replace the charge regulation board when us field engineers only had a the company provided set of Philips screwdrivers.
And that’s how I got a Swiss Army knife expensed by the blue elephant.
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