“The Microsoft Surfacebook Is a Piece of Shit” Rant of the Century

November 1, 2018

Computer/ Tech Related, Rants

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I have a Gen 1 Surface Book that I had to beg for and pull strings at work to get (replacing a banged up, 3 year old Lenovo). Honestly… I wanted it so badly. I needed a hardware upgrade, my Lenovo was a plastic piece of shit that was literally falling apart (but was a solid performer) and I was ready for something sleek. Something I could bring to tech meetups, conferences etc without looking like a poor. I had it less than a year… I know the Surfacebook 2 is out (with no USB-C, what the actual fuck Microsoft), but when you work at a corporate assed company, you don’t get cutting edge shit. I was fine with that… I was super happy to finally have a sleek looking laptop – Microsoft’s MacBook competitor… And it’s a fucking piece of shit. I tried hard to like it, but it stinks on ice.

My first pet peeve is that it’s fucking slow… That’s right. It’s a DUAL CORE i7 Skylake processor. The fuck? Dual core? They made dual core laptops in 2007. I was literally in college when dual core laptops came out. My goddamn router and raspberry pi have more cores. So I literally had an older Lenovo that was a quad core i7 (albeit the previous generation of Intel chips), but it had 8 threads and more processing power… What effed this thing in the A were the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerability patches. Intel’s firmware patches in combination with Windows 10’s software mitigations literally made it run 25% slower – no exaggeration… On top of that Google Chrome (which is also on my shit list as of late), started sandboxing each tab into its own process which made that run shittier and used 15% more RAM (and it was already a fucking memory hog)… So much for advancing technology. You literally buy a device, and omg all of a sudden there’s a vulnerability and now we’re going to patch it and make it 25% slower. We’re literally regressing in time…

Next problem. It has a weird 3000 x 2000 HiDPI display. Cool, right? It’s equivalent to Apple’s Retina Display? For sure not. This is singlehandedly my number one pet peeve with this. 90% of applications cannot handle multi-monitor, mixed DPI setups. What do I mean by this? Well… When you have a 15″ screen at 3000×2000 pixels, you need to set OS scaling to 150,175 or 200% or else it looks like a microscopic asshole. When you have other displays connected, those are not necessarily high DPI, so they are scaled to 100%. So MSFT in recent updates to Windows 10 added an API that helps develops scale their apps on. And everyone on the Windows DPI team is a fucking moron because it works like shit and/or no software developers actually take the time to implement it roperly. Like Google. The number one used app and number one offender of this problem.Chrome is buggy af on this display and no one from Google seems to give a shit (I almost went on a tangent on this here, but there’s a whole other blog about it if you care, which you probably don’t because no one reads this shit). Microsoft’s solution? Use Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps from the MSFT store. Fuck outta hea… 90% of enterprise apps are not available as a UWP binary…While native Windows 10 apps are cool and I’m a fan of them, they are not practical for business applications. CHROME, Visual Studio, VS Code, SQL Server Management studio – all of these apps have problems on high DPI, multi-monitor displays.

Next problem: Less than one year into having it? One of the goddamn batteries fails… That’s right. The Surface Book has two batteries… One in the screen (which also contains the processor, SSD, RAM etc), and one in the keyboard (which is the main battery that holds 75% of the charge)… As we all know, battery technology is shit and hasn’t improved since the 90s and the battery in my screen flat out dies. Dead. 0% and not charging. Which means I can’t even detach the screen anymore because the software says I don’t have any battery (not that I detatched it much because that was also a gimmicky piece of shit). I had two Lenovos in 8 years… Between them both, the battery only failed one time… But a brand new, ~1 year old Surface Book had one fail way too soon.

eat a dick

 

So we had a new hire and he got some new Lenovo. Typical plastic-bodied piece of shit with the clit mouse (which I actually prefer, because all touchpads suck balls). And I looked at it and not only is it the latest generation i7 which isn’t as affected by the Spectre/Meltdown patches that slowed it to shit, but it has a USB-C charger and two USB-C ports… Meanwhile, Microsoft, in 2018, releases the

So your official portfolioso.com review of the Surface Book (1 or 2) is that it’s a goddamn piece of shit, embarrassment which you should not buy. While, I dislike Apple and MacOS, you cannot deny that Apple’s hardware (ie – MacBook) is sexy and you’re better off getting one of those and dual booting to Windows if you must use the Windows ecosystem. And I bet it’s not a piece of shit like the Surface Book, which launches with outdated peripherals and is put to shame by someChinese Lenovo piece of shit with a bad body but is actually a solid performer.


PS – Random rant on how software is buggy: What the actual fuck is going on in the technology world? Between Microsoft’s shitty Windows Update bugs, Google Chrome going from awesome to shit in 10 years, Android App bugs, Nest bugs, Waze bugs… Everything stinks. You know what the problem is? Too many people are overpaid product owners / UX Designers. These people are fucking morons. All they care about is releasing new features… No one cares about speed, performance and stability. No one.. And I’m fucking sick of it. You know how many times as of late I tried to do something that should have taken me 20 seconds and I struggle with it for hours due to bad UX, bugs and idiocy? Every single day of the week and twice on Sundays.