Mac to Surface Book: Making the Switch from Mac | Hacker News Reader

Mac to Surface Book: Making the Switch from Mac

microsoft.com

2 pointsqzervaas11 comments

Make the transition? Maybe. Make it now? No.

Wait for version 2.0, at least.

Read Joanna Stern's review for the WSJ.

This is the fourth generation (fifth?) of the Surface. How many versions do you need?

SurfaceBook is 1.0, and the subject of this post. SurfacePro is I think what you are referring to, and is on its 4th iteration.

A review of pre-release hardware with a bug that supposedly isn't in production units.

This is why it's usually a good reason to wait for reviews of production units of any hardware.

Plus the review isn't very well done. "and where are my screen-brightness control keys?" I can see them in the product shot right next to this sentence on the website.

Yea, right. Maybe if it had OS X or Linux on it? I'm sure the hardware is ok, but at least developers need a POSIX compliant environment, and Microsoft does not have anything much to offer these days. It's a new world.

Developers /need/ a POSIX compliant environment you say?

You speak for all of them?

For anything else other than .NET development a POSIX compliant environment is highly advantageous over a Windows environment.

I speak out of experience.

I think any devs making the very unlikely switch to Windows would know what they need to do get their POSIX fix.

In any case, this article seems to be rightly aimed at non devs.

Why would you go this route though? Unless you must do .NET professionally, there's no real reason for devs these days to use anything Windows. It just makes everything much more complicated, and many compromises because of platform readiness of many of the cutting edge projects (everything seems to start today on OSX/Linux).

That's not the point. This is about people switching to Wintel from MacBook (assuming they didn't buy a MacBook pro just to install Windows). Developer that use Mac/OS X use it because it's a UNIX machine, so moving to not POSIX compliant does not make much sense.

Just as there are lots of different types of OS needs, there are lots of different development needs. I develop in Windows and can't work on the software I build in OS X. Or Linux for that matter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com