Microsoft introduces Windows 10 X for dual-screen devices(techcrunch.com) |
Microsoft introduces Windows 10 X for dual-screen devices(techcrunch.com) |
Anyway, the only thing that keeps Windows relevant even today is its classic Win32 API applications. Everything else they tried to do has always been half-baked. I'm not optimist for the future of the platform.
> The company stresses that this is not a new operating system but takes Windows 10 as you know it today and makes it more adaptable to other form factors.
> When I asked Satya Nadella whether Microsoft ever thought about reviving a true Windows mobile OS, he told me: "The operating system is no longer the most important layer for us...What is most important for us is the app model and the experience."
https://twitter.com/LaurenGoode/status/1179421631506210822
Update: my apologies, this is for the other dual screen device announced today (lots of new products!). They are releasing an Android phone with a similar hinge setup.
𝔜𝔢 𝔞𝔯 𝔫𝔬𝔴 𝔚𝔦𝔫𝔡𝔬𝔴𝔰 10𝔵 𝔡𝔢𝔳𝔢𝔩𝔬𝔭𝔯.
Windows 10 X just sounds like reverse macOS (MacOS X 10.x)
I have been irritated by the X-trend for a while, but now it's really getting insane.
"dessert". Easy mnemonic: It's so sweet they had to give it two S's :) (thanks Justin McElroy)
Also why would that ever happen...
"This product brings together the absolute best of Microsoft, and we're partnering with Google to bring the absolute best of Android in one product," Microsoft Product Chief Panos Panay said. "This is industry pushing technology."
From https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-unveils-999-surface-pro-...
Edit: I'm realizing there are multiple new devices. The Surface Neo is a new two-screen laptop running Windows. The Surface Duo is a two-screen Android phone.
That's obvious. But I would like Microsoft to release boot-loader unlock keys for those Windows Phone devices, so that android enthusiasts can build ROMs for some of those capable hardware.
The UX?
Ask Samsung. Use a Samsung phone and you are wrapped in their experience. Pairing BT headsets is different, the S-Pen is truly unique and rather well integrated. The camera is unique and for quite awhile was cutting edge and one of the reasons to buy a Samsung phone.
The custom Samsung UI started out pretty bad, but over time it got good. People are used to it, using other Android phones feels a bit off to them, and a fair number of their UX improvements have been since become part of Android itself.
I had an interview for head of IT at danger, but I had a really really bad flu at the time.
I performed poorly on an interview I would have normally nailed, but it was one of the worst sicknesses I have had, and I didn’t have the frame of mind to reschedule....
So I totally regret that. Had I rescheduled, I would have changed my life path.
And clearly they are in the wrong, but they can't do anything about it anyway, as their platform efforts on mobile faltered.
However Windows 10 tablets are winning the hearts of tablet users not willing to pay for Apple experience, not Android tablets that usually only have upscaled phone apps as option for most apps.
I know I am being irrational but my perspective is very different for a phone introduced at $500+ vs one at sub $200.
If they could find a way to eat the losses and sell it at sub $200, a lot of people would buy the phone. That and nobody asked for the weird 3D view thing or whatever it was called.
I'm slightly surprised they haven't taken another shot at a high volume, low price Fire phone. For further device distribution purposes (to layer services on). Why bother to continue with tablets and not do anything in phones. I've been assuming it's because of the stink of that failure, they're biding their time.
Pro, Book, Laptop, Studio, Hub, RT/2/3/Go, Neo, Duo, Headphones, Earbuds
Also several mouses, keyboards, dial, type/touch/power covers, dock stations, pens... I must be missing something :-)
Then they have their dev keynote where they explain how these apps are really all based on shared technology and can all be made using the same new frameworks and then released to each app store for users.
Like Lenovo Thinkpad, Jeep Wrangler, Samsung Galaxy, or whatever else you want to cite as an example.
Someone posted a rant here[1] that I think about often, about Microsoft's muddying the waters of Skype, Skype for Business, OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, Windows 10, Windows 10 N, which are all different, incompatible, broken products that you would think fit together but truly don't. It's frustrating as both a consumer and an IT admin, and diminishes my faith in anything they do on this side of the market.
ive given apple credit for the new iphone naming scheme, but the iphone x, xs, xr, x max, xs max naming conventions absolutely appear designed to confuse. i dont think air, nothing, pro are all that great either, with no suffix being the standard lowest end of the three. +, pro, max, etc all get used interchangeablyish. sometimes its Apple, sometimes its i (legal probably drove this dichotomy.)
I've been eyeing the Asus Zenbook Pro Duo[1] ever since they've been announced (currently using a Macbook Pro 2015). I usually carry around an Asus portable second screen for my laptop in my backpack and this dual screen laptop trend is exactly what I wanted! I'm definitely upgrading to a dual screen option next.
Although I have no hope from Apple, I'm still waiting to see what the next MBP iteration would be. All they need to do is stretch that stupid touchbar enough to be a respectable second screen.
Still I'd personally rather use efficient tiling software + tabbing between spaces than have to look down at distractions. I'm amazed no major OS developer has tried to deliver this as an advanced mode. It's the type of thing that would benefit from direct OS integration.
Most of the MacOS tiling software have occasional awkward moments with Spaces and fullscreen mode.
The sloppy window management in macOS combined with the scarce selection of laptops (of which none are really good in my opinion) has led me to try win10 as my development environment.
i3-like on Windows would have been great!
Especially when WSL2 is out ~next year, that extra screen above the keyboard would be amazing for displaying eg Terminal - with VSCode or Studio in the main screen. So many options.
The top model is not afraid of its price point, sadly, but it sure is a Hero configuration.
I still pine for i3 though.
Remember the Thinkpad W701ds? With its retractable second screen, this was a thing of beauty:
https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_fill,f_a...
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/msJwcKy4PQQ/maxresdefault.jpg
https://static.bhphoto.com/images/images1000x1000/1276679060...
https://live.staticflickr.com/1707/24571574422_aeeb09181f_b....
It is true that pressing a button is ever so slightly slower than moving your eyes. But considering all the benefits from saving a whole screen (double battery life! reduced manufacturing cost! smaller device size!), dual screenage is really just a gimmick.
All you need is a button dedicated to "screen" switching in software.
- But... on the go? Yes, I want the biggest possible screen, but also the best possible keyboard+trackpoint. So the new Surface Neo feels less than ideal.
I am open to possibility that a breakthrough in UI will make this attractive, and/or that brand-new, unimagined-today use-cases will come up; but today, I don't see how / for what I'd use dual screen with soft keyboard:
1. When I'm consuming media, portability is key AND I can only really focus on one screen (book, show) at the time 2. When I'm creating, I need a fast, comfortable, efficient method of inputing data. Today it's keyboard+trackpoint (when on the go), and I cannot imagine a useful way to type on dual screen that doesn't also make one of the screens pointless. So for me, today, transformable tablets (with hardware detachable keyboard, the way Asus Transformer used to be) is the sweet spot.
But I'm eager to be proven wrong over the course of time. I fear this may be a Catch-22 device, if insufficient software/use-cases are available by the time hardware comes out, and it just fizzles out...
Conversely, what Asus is doing where I can have my cake and eat it too (second screen AND hardware keyboard, though it doesn't look great and no trackpoint), feels like the way to go / immediately useful / good transition device.
Apple touch bar, done right :-)
this is not a laptop. this is a portable desktop
As long as I can have my terminal down there or my Lightroom film strip or a Youtube podcast open, that's a lot better experience than just one screen. Yes, it's a compromise from an actual desktop environment, but still a huge step up from not having any extra screen.
You can use an iPad as a second screen for a MacBook. It still gives you a traditional keyboard and single screen when you don’t need that, and you can use just the second screen as a computing device on its own. I haven’t used this setup but I assume Apple would say this is the best of both worlds already. Is there something that you think is missing from their solution?
Also, I'm not too into the Apple ecosystem and don't own an ipad so would have to get an ipad just to use it as a second screen. I think it could work for some but an integrate dual screen solution is exciting.
I'm really looking forward to having it as part of the next OS update.
Can't say I have multi-screen.. but I have wanted more screen real estate.
One thing I think could happen is to make laptops that let you fold the screen out, thus letting you have a larger screen while still maintaining a small physical footprint.
I travel a lot with this full backpack and if I can reduce that second screen, I'd jump on that!
The touchbar is totally under-utilized by Apple. Golden Chaos demonstrates that it just needs a new and appropriate sign language and immediately gets much more useful.
With Golden Chaos I use my touchbar to see my current email count, whats playing plus media controls, calender, time, weather, battery – and if I press a modifier key a whole universe of shortcuts opens up. My only addition - and the most heavily used function - is a button to push my current window to the other monitor. So my touchbar effectively is my tool to utilize my second screen more easily.
Of course, the compromise in picture quality is still a deal breaker for me.
However, while the Surface is certainly light-weight enough, it is too small when you type on the keyboard. Being just barely larger than a large phone is insufficient, in terms of both screen space and keyboard space. I can't type on so small a keyboard without giving myself wrist pain. It just doesn't seem like a serious laptop replacement.
Anyway this setup gives me the best of both worlds. I get a nice trackpoint and keyboard, one really good display at all times, and a second display when I really need it. My iPad is thin and lightweight enough that I always have it with me in my laptop bag anyway.
Only downside is Duet Display can be a bit resource intensive.
I can't imagine doing a lot of things without a keyboard that require multiple screens
Still, I did laugh at some of the marketing: "Celestial Blue futuristic sense"
edit: But why did they have to include Alexa. Dammit.
Honestly the OS is way more interesting than the hardware.
Not ideal, but it's something.
It was incomplete and useless device so it didn't go well. However, Microsoft didn't give up. After three iterations Microsoft finally made Surface Pro 3, which was the first useful Windows tablet with a cleverly designed keyboard and a great 3:2 ratio screen. The surface line finally took off and third-parties began to make "surface-like" products since then.
Microsoft is not like Apple. They don't make perfect products at the beginning, but they eventually nailed it after some iterations (I know they still have software issues though.) So I will wait and see what Microsoft will make in the next generations.
But as a non-windows user, I'm wondering what these hardware specific Windows changes are going to do to the Linux ecosystem. I'm sure, display output to these multiple displays would likely work OOB; but the availability of an app ecosystem which can make use of these dual displays offering unique productivity advantages would be questionable.
Most content (web pages, documents, code) is longer than it is wide, so any more square ratio is going to be an improvement over these silly "movie" ratio 16:9 screens. MS's 3:2 ratio screens are an improvement, but.. we can do more!
Hell, I'd <insert "shut up and take my money" meme> LOVE a 1:1 screen on a laptop! Imagine a 15" diagonal 1:1 screen, which would be as wide as a current 12" laptop or so, just a ton taller. Anything with text on that would be glorious.
If you're reading content that's longer than it is wide then why are you telling the browser to be full screen? Practically every desktop environment makes it easy to snap windows to half the screen, even better with a tiling WM.
Personally the only "innovation" I want is a return of the 10" form factor, they also happen to have the aspect ratios you're after.
For example, tapping a link on one screen opens the browser on the opposite screen, always.
That simply doesn't happen on vanilla Windows 10, as the OS isn't aware of the concept of multiple displays at that level. To most of Windows, you appear to simply have a single large display when you are using multiple displays. There are plenty of things with multiple monitor awareness, but it isn't inherent as it is with 10 X.
I am one of these weirdos that has been waiting patiently for many years for Microsoft to release a new phone and would have been first in line to buy one, until I received this news.
There is just no way I am going to buy a Android that broadcast everything back to Google. Microsoft have completely missed the ball on this one. At least towards the Microsoft users that are not comfortable with sending everything towards Google.
Windows 10X on the other hand sounds like an amazing OS. I would have loved to see that on the phone (with android app support to get the app ecosystem going), instead we get a two screen device with a huge bezel in the middle so the screens cannot appear as 1 screen.
I am sorry Microsoft, but my money stays in my pocket.
I have never felt Microsoft has abused this trust I have given them. I have never thought that they have used my information for purposes I am not comfortable with.
I have this thing against advertisement agencies. I don't trust them. I felt the same even before Google was there even before my life became digital. It is not something new that I try to limit the information I give to advertisement agencies.
Edit: spelling
[1] https://blogs.windows.com/devices/2019/10/02/surface-reveals...
I have two external displays, one over thunderbolt and one HDMI, and the Mac seems to have no trouble putting my windows where they belong whether I'm on just the laptop screen, just one external monitor or both.
What I've found though is the trick seems to be to make sure you have all your monitors plugged in before you log in. I always make the monitor changes when my laptop is locked.
I'm pretty sure that MS is looking forward to using this technology, but also wants to get into the market as soon as possible. It'll be interesting to see what kinds of new form factors MS will bring into the market in coming years; they have been pretty innovative in this area.
This has been a many-years struggle and I wish Windows would get this right first. Never had the same kind of problems with macOS.
Are you cloning the display? That'll require scaling of some type.
If you want to only use the external display that should work fine, if you "close" the Surface it should be smart enough to not go to sleep and instead to just route everything to the external screen.
If you are extending, then Windows 10 has supported monitors with different DPI scaling factors for awhile as well. The option isn't that apparent. Right click desktop, display settings, you can select a monitor and set the DPI scaling on that particular display.
If you are cloning the Surface's display to an external, then yeah, you'll have a hard time about it. High DPI + different aspect ratio.
I'll say that the scaling problems have overall improved and most of the time it works. But it still breaks randomly and often enough that I notice.
RDP is a bit trickier if you're connecting to an old-ish server but I found a way round that too.
I think it's really weird they didn't talk even slightly how 10 X will fit into the Windows family down the road. I guess it's a hardware event, but everything Microsoft has been held back by the software lately, so that's really what I want to hear about.
The idea of a second screen above the keyboard does not appeal to me. I have a Macbook Pro with a touch bar and in general I dislike it (even though I have written a custom dock for it, which allows me to reclaim some main screen real estate from the macOS Dock). I understand that this new MSFT screen is bigger and potentially more useful, but the problem of having to look down on the second screen above the keyboard would still be there.
(I am aware of macOS Sidecar.)
Razer is working on exactly this: https://www.razer.com/project-valerie
EDIT: Another alternative would be to be able to slide the main screen halfway to the side thus allowing a second screen next to it for a dual screen setup.
The nice thing about the Surface is that you can use it as a full Windows laptop as well and with the keyboard add on it looks like the Neo should work for that as well. Given these devices are quite expensive but also very portable it's nice to have that all in one functionality, particularly when taking short work trips.
Each side can be an inch thick, I don't care, as long as the battery lasts a while.
Hopefully they won't decide it is never needed.
Edit: It appears to do exactly this.
Few Intel insiders I knew were talking about Lakefield as almost like a "saviour" product for Intel waning consumer electronics marker appeal.
[1] - http://10gui.com/video/
iPhone - no 3g, no GPS, no third party apps, couldn’t shoot video, and no flash for cameras. My feature phone had all of this at the time. Between 2G and AT&Ts network it was a hard pass for me. Not to mention the 4GB of memory. I did end up getting two iPod Touches before the iPhone 4.
iPad - it wasn’t apparent until the next year, but the original iPad was sorely crippled by having only 256MB of RAM compared to the iPhone 4 that came out three months later with 512MB of RAM. The iPhone ran iOS 4-7. The iPad could only run iOS 5.
Apple Watch - slow, no GPS and apps were terrible with the first version of WatchOS. They were only a little better with watchOS 2. The third generation were the first good ones.
First gen Watch was trash and I completely regret that purchase, furthermore, I can't believe Apple even released it in that state. It was literally unusable for me, with some taps taking multiple seconds (!!!) to respond. It was unbearable.
Oh man, try to remember how the first iPhone was. It was the most useless thing in the world. It didn’t have app store!
The lesson is to iterate, iterate and iterate
This is not a shame, this is the logical consequence of all to lies told to the Windows Phone community, which could have bootstrapped UWP but was totally demotivated when UWP was released.
But the main reason is the stupid decision to make UWP available only on Windows 10, at a time where Win7 had the highest marketshare. Microsoft should focus on making WPF multi-platform if it wants developer to be excited again to develop native software on Windows.
The Duo is the Android phone.
The Windows X tablet is called the Neo.
Surface Pro 1 - February 2013
Surface Pro 2 - October 2013 (that's not a typo)
Surface Pro 3 - June 2014
For example, perfect butterfly keyboards.
Heck my Mac-mini overheats and throttles itself not by reducing the CPU clock but apparently by having a system process just take ownership of the CPU and NO-OP things until the system cools down, bringing everything including the UI down to a crawl.
An absolutely horrible user experience.
The famous display snow that happened for years when plugging external monitors into Macbooks.
Also, some keys double type :( Perfect my ass.
PS: I know you are being sarcastic
https://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+courrier+tablet
I think Microsoft does this a lot. They persist and usually succeeds. Most of the time.
This is not limited to hardware: early versions of SQL Server were far from perfect, but they kept improving on it. Makes some kind of sense if you have deep pockets and your product targets a very lucrative market.
Windows 10 has multi-monitor support, good touch and pen support, etc. It's already in the OS. It doesn't need a special version to add support for them at all. If it's about the way the interaction with the screens occur, just make that a mode people can switch Windows 10 to.
Like.. I have 3 monitors, but their auto configurations for the dual screen laptop would make no sense on my PC I assume.
As we're sharing links, this was a great write up: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-wsl-2/
Can't wait for it to roll out officially with 20H1.
But - you can put those to the side of your regular monitor.
It's replacing the keyboard ("underneath" / looking down from my primary screen) completely with a full-size second screen, that I don't see myself doing just yet.
The upcoming version of MacOS supports this natively but it's not clear to me yet how it will compare with Duet.
The iPad display also gets its own touchbar instance, and it makes way more sense as a thin touch control strip at the bottom of the screen than it does as a function key replacement.
If Microsoft could have grown Bing as big as Google by doing everything Google did that you distrust, they absolutely would have done so. They would have done it with Windows Phone, too. And they still will, if they can, eventually.
I'm not here to start an argument, just to suggest you re-examine your loyalties if you think Microsoft isn't going to screw you if it makes them $5.
Like so many here, I also wonder, why they don't become more like Apple in terms of privacy.Google would have no answer if Microsoft was a privacy-first company.
As I posted elsewhere:
> One of the reasons I'm excited about a built-in second screen is, I don't need to carry another extra device (second screen or iPad). I mean even if I need to use an ipad, I'm currently slouching on my couch. I need a flat surface to keep that ipad/screen at the right angle. Sounds petty but it's just very convenient to have more real estate on your lap (or on a flight or cafe table).
(I think I wrongly assumed it wasn’t out yet since I hadn’t heard of a new ARM-based Surface release.)
The point is, if you have two screens on your device, it would be useful to be able to unhinge one (possibly still tethered) to make it more convenient and comfortable for a second person to view what's on your device.
I would absolutely buy something like that for doing in person usability testing with prototypes in settings outside a usability lab.
>I would absolutely buy something like that for doing in person usability testing with prototypes in settings outside a usability lab.
This sounds like an extremely niche use case.
And you know, all the software stacks across multiple disciplines required to actually make games and movies and TV shows and music.
It’s a great market for Microsoft, Adobe, Avid, etc but not for any new entrants.
You also have to wonder at their commitment, WPF wasn't that old when they started dicking about with Metro. WPF didn't even feel finished. Why invest huge amounts of time and effort in a platform you don't think they have a long term commitment to.
Not sold on this reasoning.
One of the things I completely fail to understand is why most people I work with close their laptop displays when docked to secondary monitors.
I have a 34" 3440x1440 ultrawide monitor at home on my desk, and I use that plus my Macbook's display.
At work, I use 24x 24" 1440p monitors, and I use thoes plus my Surface Pro's 12" display.
When I'm out and about, on my Macbook or on my Surface, I definitely miss the extended displays. A lot.
1) Software screen switching is not instantaneous
2) Moving your head is lower friction than pressing a button (and more likely a key chord)
3) Humans have very good spatial awareness and multiple screens have this affordance that a button would not.
There’s more to life than Mac OS X.
3) you can still have a spatial layout of workspaces even with one viewport.
Glancing from one screen to another is easier and lower mental overhead and you can look for input in your peripheral like text appearing without losing current context. You can also read from one screen while typing in another which is impossible in a non visible workspace.
If your one-and-only screen is touch, you have to lift your arms up away from your buttons to press anything. No matter how much of an impost it is to have to look down a little, I'd say it's still less than having to lift your hand away from the buttons into your eyeline.
What does it do with two screens that couldn’t be done with one screen divided into two halves?
There's also the part near the end where you play as Akane directly, and you play with the DS turned upside down in your hands, but that's more minor versus the fact that the entire game actually takes place on a meta level.
It may even be the case that MS's long-lived flagship products (Office, VS) are not completely free of it.
Of course other phones had browsers, they were just pain to use and iPhone was revolutionary device compared to even most feature rich flagship device. It’s an opinion you may disagree with, but you’re in minority.
>Did you forget large touchscreen, no physical buttons and no need for stylus?
iPhones did have physical home button and O2 XDA II from 2003 has the same touchscreens size as original iPhone. Also you are forgetting that first capacitive touchscreens were awful. Qwerty keyboard or resistive touchscreen were just nicer to use. And you didn't have to use stylus. Most people who I know used stylus in few very specific applications and they just use finger for most tasks but to be fair you had to be very precise.
Having said that, is there any good evidence of a fair comparison of dual screen vs a fast switching single screen. Most Mac and Windows setups make switching so tedious and slow it’s pretty obvious that dual would be more productive.
I would not be surprised that a truly friction minimized single screen setup (total switching latency from input to display <100ms... which is technically easily achievable (and done in many special purpose devices... just not in PC software).. and ergonomic switching key would approach dual screen in productivity. I mean, this is the typical setup I and many others use on a Linux laptop for dev work. By the time someone gets MC on OS X up, I can literally switch “screens” 3 or 4 times.
I enjoy a multimonitor (4) setup, but I’m not about to trade off battery life and space for it on the road.
Frankly it’s just easier and cheaper to buy a second monitor with state of the art, for most people. I get that. I use OSX and Windows too.
Also, I would expect more than 2 monitors to increase the gap.
It's also probably not well suited for software development work, but it'd be a killer operator's console.
I played the hell out of my DS, but the second screen was mostly a crappy input mechanism.
Home broadband adoption was already 40% (https://www.pewinternet.org/2006/05/28/home-broadband-adopti...)
I will never call any Apple stuff revolutionary, it's just not. It's an improvement over existing things.
On the other hand, seeing that I always have my phone with me, I don’t need my cellular connection with my iPad either and I could save that $20 a month.
I do wonder if even T-mobile would be as generous with data with a laptop as they would with a tablet.
It's come to a point where all serious productivity work I do is done on my Windows computer.
I've also recently ventured into building my own PC and realized how much power you can get for peanuts with the right configuration. My last Ryzen 3700x build is faster than any Mac I've ever owned and costs 1/3rd.
Between all this and the horrible butterfly keyboard, I might be off the Apple train for good
Win10 has all I need. Alt+tab shows me Windows, not apps. Win+arrow keys will maximize, minimize, etc. Win+alt+arrow keys moves windows between displays.
https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/blob/master/src/modul...
It was mentioned in a FancyZones thread a few months ago.
(Commercial product).
Maybe you found a way around this!
