Desktop Tourism My 20-year-old son is an aspiring athlete who spends a lot of time in the gym and thinks nothing of lifting 100 kilograms in various directions. So I was a little surprised when I handed him Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Studio and he declared it uncomfortably heavy.
At 1.8kg it's certainly not among today's lighter laptops. That matters, because the device's big design selling point is a split along the rear of its screen that lets it sit at an angle that covers the keyboard and places its touch-sensitive surface in a comfortable position for prodding with a pen. The screen can also fold completely flat to allow the laptop to serve as a tablet.
Below is a .GIF to show that all in action.
The hinges that make the above possible swing wonderfully well and the laptop – which was announced in September – clicks into each position nicely … on the way down. It's less easy to put the screen back into clamshell configuration after using it in tablet mode.
Doing so exposes one of the machine's worst features: a multitude of sharp edges that make it hard to physically grasp.
Most laptops use a tapered, wedge-like shape with rounded edges where it matters: where one rests one's wrists. The Surface Laptop Studio instead cuts away almost immediately, leaving the base looking like a sharp-edged rectangular block with a keyboard sat on top. Microsoft has done this to accommodate a magnetic contact along the side that holds and charges the Surface Pen it offers for pen-based input, and maybe to accommodate the machine's vents. Microsoft didn't provide me with a pen so I couldn't test if that works well.
But I did use the machine for other duties and did not enjoy the experience because its two sets of edges have not been gently rounded. Instead they're crisp enough that I found the top one cut into my wrists when typing. Handling the machine is uncomfortable and a little fraught. Combined with its weight, it just isn't natural to consider using it as a tablet.
It's as if Microsoft has at some point forgotten that laptops – and this one in particular – are made to be handled. Between the weight and the sharp edges, it is hard to recommend this machine to anyone for its intended purpose of hands-on content creation. Especially if you do not want your wrists cut into.
Microsoft's beauty shot of the Surface Laptop Studio … Note the hard edges
Windows 11 doesn't help. It's nicely unobtrusive in desktop mode but has dropped Windows 10's meek tablet mode. The notion that desktop-sized icons designed for use with a mouse translate to touch-screens for prodding with fingers is bafflingly counterintuitive.
Battery life of a modest four and one quarter hours through my normal use was the final nail in the coffin.
The laptop offers other annoyances, which start as soon as you turn it on. The camera is not very good at facilitating Microsoft's preferred facial biometric for logins. I found I needed to be within 30cm of the camera to make it work reliably for authentication – an inconvenience when I set the machine to one side and connected it to an external monitor.
The absence of a USB-A slot is regrettable, because it means the machine ignores users' existing peripherals and for many will force the purchase of a USB-C dongle. My two such dongles – which have done years of loyal and uninterrupted duty – proved unreliable when using this device.
None of my previous Desktop Tourism adventures produced the same instability in the cheap and cheerful USB-C dongles I buy from Amazon.
Desktop tourism? PCs and alternative devices have increasingly diversified into myriad and marvelous forms, so I've decided that in 2022 I'll use a different one each month and share the experience. This article is the latest part in this series of mini-reviews.
Microsoft persists in offering its own fin-like power connector – an option I've found frustratingly easy to knock out accidentally on previous Surface devices. Thankfully both USB-C slots can accept power input, so you won't be tied to Microsoft power packs. I found myself appreciating that the Surface charger's magnetic coupling could one day save the laptop, but I also adore the ubiquity of USB-C charging. Microsoft's probably got the balance right by offering both – and perhaps showed up USB-C as more likely to lead to a laptop's untimely demise.
The machine is pleasingly swift, as you'd expect from a 10nm four-core 11th-gen Intel Core i7-11370H processor that can touch 3.3GHz, plus an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 GPU and 32GB of RAM.
I ran my usual semi-torturous test – downscaling a five-minute 4K video to 1080p using Handbrake – and the machine did the job in 4 minutes, 29 seconds. In an Ubuntu virtual machine under VMware Workstation Pro, again using Handbrake, the job took 12 minutes and eleven seconds.
Those times compare favorably to the Core i9-powered ASUS machine that kicked off the Desktop Tourism adventure and reflect the fact this laptop performs very nicely – if you don't want to carry or draw on it.
The 2400x1600, 14.4-inch screen renders colors with pleasing precision. The camera turns on quickly and handles low light well. I enjoyed the speakers and found the keyboard was not an impediment. The large haptic touchpad does everything such devices ought.
Overall the Surface Laptop Studio was a pleasure to use as an everyday machine. But it was designed to offer convenient and cunning access to pen computing, not pleasingly speedy productivity apps. Because it misses the brief, it's hard to recommend the machine. But if your budget stretches to $1,400 and you want a fine-looking laptop that will build muscle and is sharp in unusual ways, this machine will do a job. ®
After offering free G Suite apps for more than a decade, Google next week plans to discontinue its legacy service – which hasn't been offered to new customers since 2012 – and force business users to transition to a paid subscription for the service's successor, Google Workspace.
"For businesses, the G Suite legacy free edition will no longer be available after June 27, 2022," Google explains in its support document. "Your account will be automatically transitioned to a paid Google Workspace subscription where we continue to deliver new capabilities to help businesses transform the way they work."
Small business owners who have relied on the G Suite legacy free edition aren't thrilled that they will have to pay for Workspace or migrate to a rival like Microsoft, which happens to be actively encouraging defectors. As noted by The New York Times on Monday, the approaching deadline has elicited complaints from small firms that bet on Google's cloud productivity apps in the 2006-2012 period and have enjoyed the lack of billing since then.
Fifty-six vulnerabilities – some deemed critical – have been found in industrial operational technology (OT) systems from ten global manufacturers including Honeywell, Ericsson, Motorola, and Siemens, putting more than 30,000 devices worldwide at risk, according to the US government's CISA and private security researchers.
Some of these vulnerabilities received CVSS severity scores as high as 9.8 out of 10. That is particularly bad, considering these devices are used in critical infrastructure across the oil and gas, chemical, nuclear, power generation and distribution, manufacturing, water treatment and distribution, mining and building and automation industries.
The most serious security flaws include remote code execution (RCE) and firmware vulnerabilities. If exploited, these holes could potentially allow miscreants to shut down electrical and water systems, disrupt the food supply, change the ratio of ingredients to result in toxic mixtures, and … OK, you get the idea.
Someone is trying to steal people's Microsoft 365 and Outlook credentials by sending them phishing emails disguised as voicemail notifications.
This email campaign was detected in May and is ongoing, according to researchers at Zscaler's ThreatLabz, and is similar to phishing messages sent a couple of years ago.
This latest wave is aimed at US entities in a broad array of sectors, including software security, security solution providers, the military, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, and the manufacturing and shipping supply chain, the researchers wrote this month.
A drought of AMD's latest Threadripper workstation processors is finally coming to an end for PC makers who faced shortages earlier this year all while Hong Kong giant Lenovo enjoyed an exclusive supply of the chips.
AMD announced on Monday it will expand availability of its Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000 CPUs to "leading" system integrators in July and to DIY builders through retailers later this year. This announcement came nearly two weeks after Dell announced it would release a workstation with Threadripper Pro 5000 in the summer.
The coming wave of Threadripper Pro 5000 workstations will mark an end to the exclusivity window Lenovo had with the high-performance chips since they launched in April.
Workers at an Apple Store in Towson, Maryland have voted to form a union, making them the first of the iGiant's retail staff to do so in the United States.
Out of 110 eligible voters, 65 employees voted in support of unionization versus 33 who voted against it. The organizing committee, known as the Coalition of Organized Retail Employees (CORE), has now filed to certify the results with America's National Labor Relations Board. Members joining this first-ever US Apple Store union will be represented by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM).
"I applaud the courage displayed by CORE members at the Apple store in Towson for achieving this historic victory," IAM's international president Robert Martinez Jr said in a statement on Saturday. "They made a huge sacrifice for thousands of Apple employees across the nation who had all eyes on this election."
Apple's Intelligent Tracking Protection (ITP) in Safari has implemented privacy through forgetfulness, and the result is that users of Twitter may have to remind Safari of their preferences.
Apple's privacy technology has been designed to block third-party cookies in its Safari browser. But according to software developer Jeff Johnson, it keeps such a tight lid on browser-based storage that if the user hasn't visited Twitter for a week, ITP will delete user set preferences.
So instead of seeing "Latest Tweets" – a chronological timeline – Safari users returning to Twitter after seven days can expect to see Twitter's algorithmically curated tweets under its "Home" setting.
As the world continues to grapple with unrelenting inflation for many products and services, the trend of rising prices is expected to have the opposite impact on memory chips for PCs, servers, smartphones, graphics processors, and other devices.
Taiwanese research firm TrendForce said Monday that DRAM pricing for commercial buyers is forecast to drop around three to eight percent across those markets in the third quarter compared to the previous three months. Even prices for DDR5 modules in the PC market could drop as much as five percent from July to September.
This could result in DRAM buyers, such as system vendors and distributors, reducing prices for end users if they hope to stimulate demand in markets like PC and smartphones where sales have waned. We suppose they could try to profit on the decreased memory prices, but with many people tightening their budgets, we hope this won't be the case.
Having successfully appealed Europe's €1.06bn ($1.2bn) antitrust fine, Intel now wants €593m ($623.5m) in interest charges.
In January, after years of contesting the fine, the x86 chip giant finally overturned the penalty, and was told it didn't have to pay up after all. The US tech titan isn't stopping there, however, and now says it is effectively seeking damages for being screwed around by Brussels.
According to official documents [PDF] published on Monday, Intel has gone to the EU General Court for “payment of compensation and consequential interest for the damage sustained because of the European Commissions refusal to pay Intel default interest."
Facebook owner Meta's pivot to the metaverse is drawing significant amounts of resources: not just billions in case, but time. The tech giant has demonstrated some prototype virtual-reality headsets that aren't close to shipping and highlight some of the challenges that must be overcome.
The metaverse is CEO Mark Zuckerberg's grand idea of connected virtual worlds in which people can interact, play, shop, and work. For instance, inhabitants will be able to create avatars to represent themselves, wearing clothes bought using actual money – with designer gear going for five figures.
Apropos of nothing, Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg is leaving the biz.
Amid the renewed interest in Arm-based servers, it is easy to forget that one company with experience in building server platforms actually brought to market its own Arm-based processor before apparently losing interest: AMD.
Now it has emerged that Jim Keller, a key architect who worked on Arm development at AMD, reckons the chipmaker was wrong to halt the project after he left the company in 2016.
Keller was speaking at an event in April, and gave a talk on the "Future of Compute", but the remarks were unreported until picked up by WCCF TECH.
The SOFIA aircraft has returned to New Zealand for a final time ahead of the mission's conclusion later this year.
The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) is a modified Boeing 747SP aircraft, designed to carry a 2.7-meter reflecting telescope into the stratosphere, above much of Earth's infrared-blocking atmosphere.
A collaboration between NASA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), development began on the project in 1996. SOFIA saw first light in 2010 and achieved full operational capability in 2014. Its prime mission was completed in 2019 and earlier this year, it was decided that SOFIA would be grounded for budgetary reasons. Operations end "no later than" September 30, 2022, followed by an "orderly shutdown."
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