#Surface Laptop 3 Review: Can Ice Lake Freeze Out a Core i7-7700HQ From 2016?

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Surface Laptop 3 Review: Can Ice Lake Freeze Out a Core i7-7700HQ From 2016?

Note: While the ExtremeTech publishing system only allows us to list one author per story, sometime-ET author Jessica Hall also spent significant time with the Surface Laptop 3 and contributed her own experiences, thoughts, and evaluation of the laptop to this review.

The Surface Laptop 3 is the third iteration of Microsoft’s “standard” laptop and one of the all-around nicest systems I’ve ever used. I’ve hammered on the Surface Laptop family in the past because I didn’t think the hardware deserved the price premium. I was curious, however, to see what kind of additional value Ice Lake could bring to the system. One of the reasons I dislike the high prices on the first two generations of Surface Laptop is that users were stuck with Intel integrated graphics from the Skylake era. The Core i7-1065G7 brings far more graphics horsepower to the table than previous Intel CPUs — hopefully improving the Surface’s value proposition in the process.

Objectively, the Surface Laptop 3 is a very nice laptop. I’ve had fewer bugs or issues with this system than any OEM laptop I can ever remember testing, and while I can’t claim to love literally every detail, I like it far more than most.

The system we’re reviewing today is technically a Surface for Business laptop rather than the standard consumer Surface, but the only difference as far as I can tell is that Microsoft sells 15-inch systems with Intel CPUs in the Surface for Business section, while its consumer division uses Ryzen CPUs in all 15-inch systems.

Specs: Intel Core i7-1065G7 2256×1504 3:2 Display 16GB RAM 256GB SSD Platinum (Metal) Finish

All Surface for Business systems are currently out of stock at Microsoft.com, but this configuration retails for a base of $1,699. As of 3/25, it was on sale for $1,549.

Note: It is not clear if the Surface Laptop 3 uses a 15W configuration or the optional 25W “TDP Up” mode. We’ve assumed the latter.

The Competitors

I’ve got a pair of laptops here to compare against that should make interesting competition for the Surface Laptop 3. First up, and the oldest system here, is a Razer Blade Stealth from early 2016. Like the Surface Laptop 3, the Razer Blade Stealth is a thin machine with a high-resolution display and an integrated GPU.

Razer Blade Stealth (2016)

Image by PC Mag (4K review unit).

Specs: 12.5-inch, 2560×1440 Display Intel Core i7-6500U (2C/4T, 2.5GHz – 3.1GHz) 8GB LPDDR3-1866 256GB PCIe M.2 SSD

The Razer Blade Stealth (link to current model) is a plausible stand-in for the kind of machine a Surface Laptop 3 customer might be upgrading from. While it has a much smaller panel than the SL3, it emphasized many of the same traits — long battery life, a high-DPI display, thinness, and as much performance as could be squeezed into the form factor.

Next up is a very different type of comparison:

Alienware 13 R3 (late 2016)

Photo by PCMag

Specs: 13.3-inch, 2560×1440 OLED display Intel Core i7-7700HQ (4C/8T, 2.8GHz – 3.8GHz) 16GB DDR4-2400 RAM 512GB PCIe M.2 SSD GeForce GTX 1060 (6GB)

The Alienware 13 R3 (late 2016) was an upper-midrange gaming laptop when new, and it maintains solid frame rates in titles released today. Its 45W CPU means that the Alienware 13 R3 will very likely be faster than the Surface Laptop 3 in any performance tests — the question is, by how much? I also wanted to compare the Surface’s excellent LCD against the OLED panel on the Alienware. How does a relatively early OLED compare with a brand-new LCD after several years of use?

Display Comparison

The Surface Laptop 3’s display is excellent and continues Microsoft’s long trend of top-notch displays in its Surface line. I wasn’t sure if I’d like the 3:2 aspect ratio, but it’s excellent if you work in office applications or value vertical space. I was never bothered by the letterboxing on video content.

I can’t give you specific colorimetry measurements on the panels, but I compared all three systems in identical viewing conditions using the same browser (Chrome) and the same content at both 100 percent and 50 percent system brightness. This does not calibrate the panels to an external standard like 200 nits — it means I compared them at the 50 and 100 percent mark of their own individual ranges.

At 100 percent brightness, the Alienware 13 R3 easily beats both the Surface Laptop 3 and the Razer Blade Stealth. This is to be expected, given the nature of an OLED panel, which emits light directly and can, therefore, be completely off when displaying black. LCDs use backlights, which means the depth of black you see on screen is a function of how good your panel is at blocking its own backlight. We watched clips from Stargate: Atlantis, Downton Abbey, and Avengers: Infinity War on all three panels.

While our rankings didn’t change at 50 percent brightness, the degree of difference did. If I was comparing on a 100-point scale, at 100 percent brightness, the three panels might have rated, say, 92 (Alienware OLED), 84 (Microsoft Surface Laptop 3), and 75 (Razer Blade Stealth). At 50 percent brightness, the gap between them would be more like 92, 89, 86.

I don’t typically use the Alienware OLED at full brightness because I’ve been leery of wearing out the panel and my battery. Furthermore, the panel Alienware uses is calibrated for vivid, eye-popping color at the expense of accuracy. This approach has sold Samsung hundreds of millions of Galaxy devices and I enjoy the way color looks on the OLED. But it isn’t very accurate and shouldn’t be mistaken for such.

The 1440p display on the Razer Blade Stealth is the least attractive of the three, but that honestly doesn’t feel like a very fair criticism. The Surface Laptop 3 has the best LCD I’ve ever seen on a laptop and the Alienware is an OLED. The Razer isn’t bad, in any sense; it just isn’t quite up to the standard of the first two.

Audio Comparison

The Surface Laptop 3 speakers are top-notch. You’re never going to get standalone speaker performance out of a laptop, but Microsoft devotes more internal space to its speakers than other companies and you can hear the difference. There’s some additional technical data available in this Reddit thread, though the author points out that his testing was done on demo units in a store.

The Surface Laptop’s speakers (the two silver rectangles). Image by iFixit.

Highs are crisp and clear on the Surface Laptop 3. Distortion from low bass is nonexistent, even at 100 percent volume. The laptop is surprisingly resonant — while the bass response is a bit flat at the bottom, the Surface Laptop 3 doesn’t sound nearly as thin as most laptops do. Mids and vocals are also strong. If you want a laptop with speakers that can plausibly fill a (small) room and sound good doing it, the Surface Laptop 3 is an excellent choice.

We tested the Surface Laptop 3, Alienware R13, and Razer Blade Stealth with the following songs:

Taylor Swift – You Need to Calm Down Velvetine – The Great Divide Allie X – Paper Love The Prodigy: The Day is My Enemy Home Free – Man of Constant Sorrow Disturbed – The Sound of Silence Alan Walker – Sing Me to Sleep ES Posthumus – Nara

Collectively, these pieces of music cover a wide range of styles and frequency ranges. The Surface Laptop 3 excels at all of them. Neither highs nor lows distort, even at maximum volume, in any content we tested.

Compared with the Surface Laptop 3, the Alienware R13 had roughly the same amount of bass but less emphasis and clarity at high frequencies, and isn’t as loud overall. If the Surface Laptop 3 were a 9/10, I’d rate the Alienware as a solid 7 — it’s not quite as good, but you could watch a movie on it with another person and you’d be able to hear everything.

The Razer Blade Stealth just isn’t as nice. While the system has reasonably good tweeters, there’s no bass response to speak of. If we rated sound solutions in terms of their similarity to butter, the Surface Laptop 3 is an actual, bovine-based, butterfat emulsion while the older Alienware is a solid margarine brand you’ve heard of before, like “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.” The Razer, or at least the Razer’s bass response, is best-classified as “Memories of Bass.”

Typing, Trackpad, Feel, and Flexion

The Surface Laptop 3’s keyboard is comfortable to type on. I prefer it to the Alienware 13 and definitely more than the Razer Blade Stealth. The trackpad is far better than either the Razer or the Alienware. Both of these systems have downright awful trackpads that are much too sensitive. If I have to use either of these systems without a mouse, I tend to leave the trackpad off and to rely on the touch screen instead. In contrast, I only use a mouse on the Surface Laptop 3 when I’m gaming.

Marvel of marvels: A trackpad you won’t mind using.

The Surface Laptop 3 wins the flexion test, displaying absolutely zero despite being a 15-inch laptop. The Alienware has always flexed, on account of the plastic in its construction. The Razer Blade Stealth doesn’t flex, but it’s also the smallest laptop of the three and the least susceptible.

One of the only things I genuinely dislike about the Surface Laptop 3 is the way it handles its Fn keys. On most laptops, the top-most keys are reserved for F1-F12, and the secondary laptop functions are mapped to the FuNction (FN) key. On the Surface Laptop 3, the Fn key is a toggle switch and the media and system control functions are primary. The actual F1-F12 function is secondary.

This works perfectly well for typing, but it rather sucks if you play games like World of Warcraft and want to remap the keys for other purposes. You can use the toggle switch to have F1-F12, but if you then need to take a screenshot, lower the volume, or change the screen brightness, you’ll have to hit the Fn key (to switch back), adjust the desired setting, and then hit the Fn key again to regain use of F1-F12. It’s not remotely handy.

Two other minor complaints: I dislike half-height arrow keys and I detest the power button also being on the keyboard next to the delete key, where you can whack it reaching for Ctrl-Alt-Del. The F1-F12 issue could be an annoyance for anyone who relies on software keystrokes that use those functions but also uses the media buttons at the same time. The other two are strictly personal taste.

Performance Testing

While I’ve included some performance benchmarking in this review, it’s not the primary focus. I’ve spent more time describing various aspects of how the laptop feels and looks compared with emphasizing performance testing. That’s not an accident. Laptops are a much more integrated product than your typical desktop CPU, and while I’m not saying that performance doesn’t matter (obviously it does), we’re taking a look at three systems broadly separated in time and sold into somewhat different markets, not comparing between multiple systems fighting for shelf space today.

With that said, we’re interested in two specific trends: How does the Surface Laptop 3 compare with the Razer Blade Stealth in the 15W / 25W TDP space, and how well does it compete against the 7700HQ — a CPU from several generations back, but with more thermal headroom?

One thing to be aware of, regarding gaming on a Surface: The laptop doesn’t like all of the lower resolution modes it needs to run at in order to deliver playable performance. 1080p works in every title I tested, but some games will run in forced windowed mode with the desktop visible in the background if you pick a resolution the GPU doesn’t like. I was able to find a playable option in every case. The 16:10 aspect ratio is the closest mathematically to the Surface’s 3:2, but 4:3 is an option as well.

Cinebench R20 shows the 7700HQ ahead of the Core i7-1065G7 by about 13 percent in multi-threaded, but the Ice Lake CPU returns the favor in single-threaded, where it leads the 7700HQ by 1.23x. The Razer Blade Stealth does its best, and we should all be kind to it.

PCMark 10’s Extended test appears to show the Core i7-7700HQ with a decisive advantage — but let’s break those tests down and see where it’s coming from.

The Surface Laptop 3 clearly winds up losing the way it does because it’s being run over in Gaming. The gap between the Alienware and Surface is much smaller in every test and the SL3 even wins the Essentials benchmark by a solid margin. This test is clearly lightly threaded given how well the Razer competes, and Ice Lake shines in these scenarios.

The Alienware 13 R3’s SSD is the most-worn and has never been wiped via Secure Erase, which could be degrading its performance a bit. The Surface Laptop 3 clearly benefits from the improvements to PCIe storage over the last few years.

Very few people would run these kinds of 3D renders on a laptop, but I included them for a reason: I wanted to see if relative performance between the Surface Laptop 3 and the Alienware 13 R3 would change as both systems heated up. The answer, in a nutshell, is no. Sustained clock speeds during the Blender 1.0Beta 2 benchmark were 3.39GHz (Alienware), 2.98GHz (Razer) and 2.5GHz (Microsoft). The 7700HQ maintains a consistent leadership position, but neither the Surface nor the Razer shows an unexpected falloff.

GPU performance is tougher to compare. The Razer Blade Stealth might rival a ham sandwich’s performance if you can find a way to render 3DMark with a little mayo and tomato. Ice Lake is capable of achieving genuinely playable frame rates in at least some games, but settings that stretch Intel Gen 11 are a cakewalk for the GTX 1060. There’s not a ton of point to running comparative benchmarks when we know exactly which way they’ll go in every single case.

When I saw the Razer Blade Stealth unable to hit playable frame rates in a nine-year-old game, I decided to save both it and I some torture and dropped it from our other comparisons.

Shadow of Mordor offers frame rates that are multiples of the base resolution of the display, making it impossible to find a common resolution between the two systems. The 1280×960 resolution on the Surface Laptop 3 is 1.2MP, while 1696×964 works out to ~1.6MP for the GTX 1060. Despite this decidedly unequal workload, the Alienware wallops the Ice Lake CPU. At the same time, however, Shadow of Mordor is playable at these settings on the 1065G7.

Finally, here’s Metro Last Light Redux. Again, the Surface Laptop 3 isn’t capable of putting up a fight against the GTX 1060, but it delivers the playable frame rates that the Razer Blade Stealth is incapable of approaching.

Here’s how I’d think about GPU performance:

If the most gaming you’re going to do is WoW Classic, League, Stardew Valley, or FTL — in other words, very old games or very, very lightweight ones — older Intel GPUs like the Razer Blade Stealth’s are adequate. For most intents and purposes, systems like the Razer Blade Stealth do not play games.

If you want a system that could be described as “gaming-adjacent,” with the capability to run some older AAA games at reasonable frame rates/detail levels, the Surface Laptop 3 has enough graphics power to get the job done. It’s a laptop that can run some games, but not a gaming laptop.

If you want an actual gaming laptop, buy a laptop with a discrete GPU. The GTX 1060 is four years old this year and beats the pants off the 1065G7, but draws vastly more power to do it.

Battery Life

Note: The 4K version of the Razer Blade Stealth from 2016 was widely panned for poor battery life. The QHD version wasn’t nearly as bad. While it didn’t set any records, it wasn’t abysmal, either.

Amusingly, while the Alienware 13 R3 started with a much larger battery than either of the other systems, according to PCMark 10 it’s also quite degraded, at 30 percent wear. The remaining capacity is 53.8, almost in-line with the other two systems. The Surface Laptop 3 has a 46Whr battery while the Razer Blade Stealth is only slightly smaller, at 44Whr.

We used PCMark 10’s Video and Office battery life benchmarks for our testing. All systems were set to Balanced performance, with screen brightness at 50 percent. Wi-Fi was left connected, with all three laptops in maximum “Battery Saver” mode.

We can’t make any statements regarding industry battery life trends from 2016 to 2020 using just one data point from each time period, but there are a few things about the Surface Laptop 3 that impressed me. It’s not just that the battery run-time is significantly longer than the Razer Blade Stealth; it’s that the overall experience of using the laptop is also much better.

Fan Noise

The Razer Blade Stealth is completely silent in normal, low-power operation and can ramp its fans to a deeply obnoxious pitch. This laptop’s sonic signature is proof that a quiet dental drill is not necessarily a better dental drill.

I have permanent hearing damage in my left ear caused by previous close-range chronic exposure to white noise and am leery about how much fan noise I expose my ears to now as a result. The Alienware 13 R3 is so loud when gaming, I will not use the laptop for that purpose without capping the frame rate at 30-40 fps.

To be crystal clear: The Alienware 13 R3 has nothing to do with the fact that I have hearing loss and I am not claiming that using the laptop in its default configuration will cause hearing loss.

Limiting the Alienware to a reasonable noise level also limits how much of an improvement the GTX 1060 can provide. In games like World of Warcraft, which I played on both systems, I typically limit the Alienware to 35fps in order to keep the fan noise to a tolerable level and my lap from igniting. Gamers who typically play with headphones on don’t need to worry about any of this, obviously.

The Surface Laptop 3 doesn’t pack anywhere near the GPU performance of the Alienware 13 R3, but it doesn’t get anywhere near as loud, either. While the fan pitch is higher than I like, it doesn’t have the Razer Blade Stealth’s drilling note.

Performance Analysis: More Than Meets the Eye

There are some really interesting trends in the data that we’ve gathered. Reviews from 2016 show that the Razer Blade Stealth’s CPU performance was well-regarded. Compared with the Surface Laptop 3, however, the Razer is a putz. Part of that is because Intel stepped up to quad-core chips with Coffee Lake, but not all of it. Ice Lake’s single-threaded performance is 1.36x higher than the Core i7-6500U and some of that gain is going to carry over into multi-threaded scenarios.

The Alienware 13 R3 is a really interesting match-up against the Core i7-1065G7. Statistically, it’s about 1.13x – 1.2x faster than the top-end Ice Lake CPU. There are two ways to look at those results and both are valid.

First, the Alienware 13’s 35W CPU has held up far better than the Core i7-6500U. It’s unambiguously faster than the Core i7-1065G7 in every rendering test and most of PCMark 10. If you want to buy a laptop with a good chance of lasting some years, a higher TDP CPU is obviously helpful.

Second, Intel has done an excellent job improving Ice Lake’s performance-per-watt. The Core i7-1065G7 has a 15W TDP with a 25W option while the Core i7-7700HQ is a 45W chip. While TDP can’t be treated as a proxy for power consumption, the Surface Laptop 3 is scarcely thicker than the Razer Blade Stealth but provides dramatically more performance.

As far as GPU performance is concerned, the Razer Blade Stealth isn’t capable of any meaningful gaming whatsoever. It can handle titles like WoW Classic or League of Legends, barely. You won’t mistake the Intel Core i7-1065G7’s GPU for a discrete card, but you can do some gaming on this solution, especially at lower resolutions. The Alienware’s GTX 1060 remains a potent performer, but if you care about fan noise you may find yourself locking down your frame rates.

Each of these three systems represents a different balance between performance, battery life, noise, and weight. The Razer Blade Stealth is the lightest, smallest laptop, but it also has weak battery life and an unfortunately tuned fan, with no gaming capabilities.

The Alienware 13 R3 has a gorgeous display and by far the highest gaming performance, while the Surface Laptop 3 blends the benefits of a metal construction and a 15W/25W CPU for better battery life with a 10nm SoC from Intel and a much-improved iGPU.

A Fabulously Balanced Laptop

The Surface Laptop 3 isn’t a gaming laptop, but it can play older titles and modern games with more modest GPU requirements. It won’t blow your socks off, but it’s a much faster solution than any previous GPU Intel has ever shipped.

Gaming is the weakest link in the Surface Laptop 3’s armor, and when even gaming performance has improved by this much, that chink isn’t very wide. We’ll see what happens with AMD’s Ryzen Mobile 4000 15W CPUs when those arrive, of course, but Intel has still delivered very real improvements over its own previous GPU architecture.

Is it perfect? No. The price is high for the limited amount of included storage and Microsoft wants a whopping $400 for 256GB(!) of additional SSD capacity. Objectively speaking, there are other laptops with better specs than this one for less money. If you want to game, specifically, there are laptops in this price range with much faster GPUs. At the same time, the Surface Laptop lineup has improved in some significant ways since the first systems shipped. According to iFixit, the Surface Laptop 3 is also far more repairable than the original. The Surface Laptop earned iFixit’s first 0/10 score, while the SL3  is rated 5/10.

But what the Surface Laptop 3 does offer is a remarkably well-balanced system. Sound, audio, keyboard, and trackpad are all excellent, and the 3:2 form factor is much nicer for Word or Excel than 16:9. The GPU performance uplift and overall CPU performance increase relative to 2016 is downright impressive, and we’re glad to see Intel fielding a much better GPU overall with Ice Lake in 2020.

Now Read:

AMD and Intel Go Head to Head in the Surface Laptop 3

Best Games for Laptops and Low-End PCs in 2020

Global PC Sales Could Fall 30 Percent in 1H 2020, Economic Outlook Bleak

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/308262-surface-laptop-3-review from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/03/surface-laptop-3-review-can-ice-lake.html

#Surface Laptop 3 Review: Can Ice Lake Freeze Out a Core i7-7700HQ From 2016?

[lippyawards]

Surface Laptop 3 Review: Can Ice Lake Freeze Out a Core i7-7700HQ From 2016?

Note: While the ExtremeTech publishing system only allows us to list one author per story, sometime-ET author Jessica Hall also spent significant time with the Surface Laptop 3 and contributed her own experiences, thoughts, and evaluation of the laptop to this review.

The Surface Laptop 3 is the third iteration of Microsoft’s “standard” laptop and one of the all-around nicest systems I’ve…

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Microsoft Announces New Surface Go 2 and Surface Book 3

Microsoft has made two long-awaited updates to its Surface lineup. On the low-end, there’s the new Surface Go 2, which is slightly larger and substantially faster than its predecessor. There’s also a new premium Surface Book 3 with an even higher price tag than the Surface Book 2 and the latest flagship Intel chips. 

The Surface Go was Microsoft’s attempt to take a bite out of the iPad’s increasing productivity market share. That device had its fair share of shortcomings, but Microsoft has addressed some pain points with the Surface Go 2. This device is a little thinner than the first-gen device, and the screen is a bit bigger at 10.5 inches. The display resolution is just 1,920 x 1,280 (3:2 ratio), much lower than the Surface Book 3. However, that’s better than most computers in the mid-range. There’s a USB-C port this time, but Microsoft’s Surface Connect port lives on. 

Inside, the Surface Go 2 has either an Intel Pentium Gold 4425Y or an 8th gen Intel Core m3. Microsoft says it’s up to 64 percent faster than the old Surface Go with the m3 chip, but you’re still limited to either 4GB or 8GB of RAM. The base model with the Pentium CPU and 4GB of RAM is $399, but that doesn’t include the keyboard cover, which adds another $129 to the price. You can use the Surface Go 2 as a tablet, but it’s not as comfortable or capable as an iPad in that respect. 

The Surface Book 3 is at the opposite end of Microsoft’s Surface lineup. This laptop is for power users who will keep it attached to the keyboard most of the time. The screen portion (either 13.5 or 15-inch) detaches for use as a tablet, but there’s a second battery in the keyboard to keep the device running for up to 17.5 hours (for the larger model). Regardless of the size you choose, the display will be much sharper than the one you get on the Surface Go 2. The 13.5-inch is 3,000 x 2,000 and the 15 is 3,240 x 2,160. Those are both 3:2 aspect ratios rather than widescreen 16:9 like most laptops, which is a win in my book. 

The hardware options reflect the increased price. Both versions of the Surface Book 3 have 10th Gen Intel Core CPUs — the larger of the two has a Core i7, 16GB of RAM, and GTX 1660 Ti GPU with 6GB of graphics memory. The smaller one has a Core i5 (8GB of RAM) with integrated graphics or a Core i7 (16GB of RAM) with a GTX 1650. There are two USB-A ports, a USB-C with Power Delivery 3.0, and a pair of Surface Connect ports. 

This computer starts at a whopping $1,599 for the 13.5-inch. The 15-inch costs at least $2,300. Completely decked out with 32GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD storage, it runs $3,400. The Surface Headphones 2 and Surface Earbuds are also available today for $249 and $199, respectively. 

Now read:

Microsoft May Not Ship Dual-Screen Surface Neo in 2020 After All

Surface Laptop 3 Review: Can Ice Lake Freeze Out a Core i7-7700HQ From 2016?

Microsoft Reorganizes Windows Under Surface, Panos Panay

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/computing/310214-microsoft-announces-new-surface-go-2-and-surface-book-3 from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/05/microsoft-announces-new-surface-go-2.html

#Microsoft Announces New Surface Go 2 and Surface Book 3

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Microsoft Said to Be Pivoting Windows 10X to Single-Screen Devices

When Microsoft demoed Windows 10X (pronounced like the letter X, not the Roman numeral 10) last year, the company declared that this version of Windows was specifically intended for dual-screen devices like the upcoming Surface Pro Neo (now delayed until after 2020, as covered by my colleague Ryan Whitwam). Now that’s changing, with Windows 10X reportedly being retooled for single-screen devices as well.

Windows 10X is a bit like Windows 10 S, in that it offers a different set of capabilities and functions than the standard Windows 10 model, but that’s where the similarities stop. Windows 10X, for example, will support running at least some Win32 applications in containers. Windows 10X features a reinvented shell, with a brand-new taskbar and Start Menu experience.

The image below, from Windows Central, shows the Start Menu with the taskbar below it. Instead of grouping items from the left-hand side of the screen, the Start button, pinned tasks, and running tasks are centered on the display when running in touch mode. Switch to a mouse, and the system will group the icons in the more traditional left-hand-side fashion.

Image by Windows Central

The new OS variant is said to also feature an all-new setup experience, a new action center, and a capability known as “Compose Mode” which switches the laptop from consumption-based to productivity-based. Compose Mode starts automatically when a keyboard is connected to the device, and it allows for more laptop-centric features like multi-windowed apps.

It’s not entirely clear if Microsoft is making this pivot because of issues directly related to Covid-19. It may be that the company has been unable to finish features on its expected timelines in order to ship Windows 10X on schedule and that the switch to single-screen devices will simplify the OS development process. According to Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet, the containerized Win32 support that Microsoft demonstrated in February of this year simply wasn’t all that good, as far as compatibility is concerned. Also, applications that affect system files, partition hard drives, or require access to functions outside their own sandbox won’t function.

According to Foley, “Officials didn’t discuss how well/badly Win32 apps worked when virtualized on 10X, but the inside word was that the team had a long way to go to make this something ‘normal’ users would understand and accept, as compatibility levels were not great.” The impact on battery life isn’t expected to be heavy, because the Win32 container system is only loaded if it’s actually needed — but that, in turn, implies that users may only see maximum advantage from devices if they don’t plan to run a lot of Win32 apps.

If you’re thinking all of this adds up to “What, exactly is Windows 10X for?” well, you’re on the same page as the rest of us. As a dual-screen OS also intended for foldable devices, Windows 10X seemed to have a distinct purpose. Retooling it as a single-screen OS makes sense if Microsoft wants to position it against Chromebooks, I guess? That’s not the worst idea, but again, the question of whether Windows has a software ecosystem to make the OS attractive seems like it could be a problem.

Microsoft hasn’t had much luck pushing Windows into form factors where it wasn’t previously established, and the delays and pivots aren’t expected to impact the Android-based Surface Duo, shipping later this year. Intel’s Lakefield chips have certain capabilities that only Windows 10X is optimized to use, for example.

The Covid-19 outbreak has screwed up everyone’s launch timelines and product roadmaps, so it’s a pretty good idea to take all these reports with a grain of salt right now. Companies are still discovering which products they’ll need to push back, and some of those decisions may depend on questions like “How effectively can team members still collaborate while working from home?” With everyone still adjusting to our collective new reality, the answers to these questions may not even be known yet. From the tenor of reporting at ZDNet, it seems as if Microsoft may have committed to an aggressive launch timeframe for the software, only to come up short due to unforeseen circumstances.

Now Read:

Windows 10 Update Fixes VPN, Proxy Connection Internet Issues

Surface Laptop 3 Review: Can Ice Lake Freeze Out a Core i7-7700HQ From 2016?

Microsoft Shows Off UI Designs for Dual-Screen Windows 10X

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/computing/309084-microsoft-said-to-be-pivoting-windows-10x-to-single-screen-devices from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/04/microsoft-said-to-be-pivoting-windows.html

#Microsoft Said to Be Pivoting Windows 10X to Single-Screen Devices

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Microsoft May Not Ship Dual-Screen Surface Neo in 2020 After All

The Surface Neo will run Windows 10X, a tweaked version of Microsoft's operating system for dual-screen devices.

Microsoft gave us a preview of its dual-screen future late last year with the Surface Duo and Neo, but that future might be further away than we thought. According to a new report, Microsoft’s Chief Product Officer Panos Panay told his teams that the Windows-based Surface Neo won’t ship in 2020 as initially planned. The company also won’t allow its partners to ship any dual-screen devices with Windows 10X this year. 

The Surface Neo is a striking device that harkens back to the Microsoft Courier concept that sparked excitement a decade ago. It sports a pair of 9-inch screens with a 360-degree hinge. When open side-by-side, the Neo has a 13-inch diagonal display space. Microsoft plans to release a keyboard dock that sits on top of one of the displays, making it more like a traditional laptop. 

Microsoft said recently that its supply chain was being affected by the coronavirus pandemic, but several weeks later it had hinted that things had stabilized. That gave observers hope that the company’s new Surface projects would remain on-track. However, it sounds like the Neo’s issue is software-related rather than hardware. 

With everything Microsoft is promising (see the video below), it clearly needs to make some changes to Windows, which has only rudimentary dual-screen support currently. That’s the goal of Windows 10X, or rather, it was. Long-time Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley says the company’s new priority is to get the streamlined Windows 10X working on single-screen devices. This could enable less expensive, Chromebook-like Windows laptops to take off, says Foley. 

A particular focus of Microsoft’s efforts is to get “containerized” apps working smoothly on Windows 10X. Microsoft wants to require all applications on Windows 10X to run in containers. Thus, Win32, Universal Windows Platform (UWP), and web apps would have improved security and performance on Windows 10X. The virtualization of Win32 apps is allegedly a difficult engineering issue, though. 

Microsoft has not delayed the release of the smaller Surface Duo, at least based on current reports. This dual-screen phone runs on Android as Microsoft has given up on the Windows 10 Mobile platform. One benefit of that is that Android already has many of the necessary pieces in place for advanced dual-screen functionality, and Microsoft can make the necessary customizations rather easily. So, this device will probably still show up later in the fall.

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from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/computing/309068-microsoft-may-not-ship-dual-screen-surface-neo-in-2020-after-all from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/04/microsoft-may-not-ship-dual-screen.html

#Microsoft May Not Ship Dual-Screen Surface Neo in 2020 After All

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Microsoft Might Kill the Classic Control Panel Soon, Will Hopefully Fix Settings First

Ever since Windows 8, Microsoft has shipped two methods of changing system settings. In the beginning, the new Settings menu was a joke. Over the last eight years, it’s slowly become more functional and has subsumed more of Control Panel’s capabilities. According to Windows Central, that could be about to change.

There are Feature IDs in the latest build of Windows 10 that would replace or redirect current Control Panel traffic back to the Settings application. Windows Central writes:

These feature IDs are HideSystemControlPanel, SystemControlPanelFileExplorerRedirect, and SystemControlPanelHotkeyRedirect. All these feature IDs are disabled in the latest public builds, but they do exist, suggesting that Microsoft is testing it internally.

This isn’t going to be a near-term change — Windows Central thinks it’d be H1 2021 at the earliest, and that was before Covid-19 screwed up everyone’s everything. The question of whether Settings is good enough to get rid of Control Panel is an interesting one. Familiarity bias means that we’re likely to be predisposed towards using CP over the newer Settings app, but how much do we still need the OG version?

The short answer: Yes.

The longer answer: Yes, right now, but not if Microsoft puts some work into migrating current Control-Panel-only functions.

There are still some places in the Settings menu where changing low-level settings under the hood requires you to open the Control Panel-equivalent screen. The Power menu under Settings gives you the basics right up front:

Choose “Additional Power Settings” and the OS opens the Control Panel “Power Settings” page for you. There are a number of functions that aren’t mapped to Settings yet, including reprogramming what buttons do and fine-tuning the OS’ various power-saving measurements.

One possibility is that Microsoft would remove Control Panel without removing any of its secondary windows or reskinning them to match Windows 10. There’s no reason Microsoft couldn’t remove the Control Panel interface and relocate “Administrative Tools” to a link inside the existing Settings tool.

I can’t claim to have performed some kind of exhaustive survey of Microsoft’s UI implementation, but one thing I’ve noticed in the past is that Microsoft has kept its more data-dense UI elements in the older-style Windows format while the Settings page is reserved for simpler options and presentation. Redesigning everything Control Panel accesses to follow this formula is probably a non-starter. There are some places where data needs to be presented densely to be handled in reasonable fashion:

The Display page already shows some data on how this might go. You can access the ‘Advanced’ sections, which keep their old-style formatting, but you don’t need to open the actual “Display” section of Control Panel to do it — you can use the Settings page to access this menu.

My guess is that Microsoft will continue slowly moving functionality over to Settings, but that we’ll see “old style” Windows UI elements for a while yet — possibly forever, for settings buried deep under the hood. As for whether this will be a net improvement for Windows, I think moving back to a unified system in which all controls are found under the same app would be an improvement at this point. During the Windows 8 era, you could ignore Settings in almost all cases. Now with Windows 10, there’s a split between Control Panel and Settings. Better to move things over to Settings, intelligently, rather than require people to shuffle forever between the two.

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from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/computing/308314-microsoft-might-kill-classic-windows-control-panel-soon from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/03/microsoft-might-kill-classic-control.html

#Microsoft Might Kill the Classic Control Panel Soon #Will Hopefully Fix Settings First