So today is my birthday and my ever loving wife has surprised me with a Surface Book. It's the first non linux / OS-X laptop we have had in the house for at least 5 years.
Normally a windows laptop wouldn't of interested me in the slightest, hell, any type of laptop these days really. However, when the surface book came out, it immediately intrigued me. It's the first laptop I had seen in a long time which tried to do something different. I was very tempted, however the better angels in my head stopped me from grabbing one. Mostly as I was worried that it would be a toy for me, my daily work and daily development is so Linux based, that even using OSX causes me pains due to it's idiosyncrasies compared to Linux. And when some of the teething issues came up, rather ironically on the software side, my temptation died down even more.
It was surprising when my wife said we should go to the windows store. I actually wanted to go because I was really tempted by the Dell Curved Monitor, I knew they had one there (I'm a total sucker for monitors). Once we were there, she said we should grab the surface pro. It was a strange experience actually, as I have brought home so many cool gadgets and all my girls have become numb to the new tech and don't normally show any huge interest, especially in something like a new laptop. But the girls were all over the surface book. All three of them loved the pen, tablet / laptop idea, it was strange to see them interested in a laptop.
The windows store is an interesting place, you get the feeling that it wants to be an apple store so badly, but doesn't quite pull it off. The whole experience was good, but rough around the edges in many areas.
After I was convinced to get the laptop, which I grudgingly admit didn't take much to convince me. The buying experience was definitely a mixed one, While we had a great attendant and they had the surface book we wanted in stock. But the whole process was a bit rough, we asked to get the receipt emailed to us, however that never actually happened. Also they offered the VIP service, which comprised them installing all the latest firmware and OS patches, it also comes with the added incentive of a $50 gift card, so what the heck, we went for it. We were told it'll ideally take an hour or 2, maximum of 3, and they will call us when it would be done. Unfortunately that phone call didn't come and by 5 o'clock we decided just to go back to pick it up.
So now I'm sitting here typing on my new brand shiny windows laptop. I've had mixed feelings about a windows, as my main workstation is a ubuntu box, and my work laptop is a mac, so using a windows machine as a daily driver is going to be a different experience for me, I'm looking forward to setting up the development environment on it.
Do I like my new machine? Well the answer to that has to be yes. Really it's a remarkable piece of engineering, there are a few things which I need to get used to, the keyboard has a bit more travel then the macbook one, and also I hate the way the cursor keys are set up. Also the track pad isn't bad, but isn't the polished experience you get from a MacBook.
Obviously it's early days, but I'm looking forward to seeing how my work-flow changes using it, back when I was making games, Visual Studio was a remarkable IDE and I'm looking forward to using it again, also .NET from 3.5 onwards (both C# and F#) are very cool languages, so we'll see what happens.
The windows store is an interesting place, you get the feeling that it wants to be an apple store so badly, but doesn't quite pull it off. The whole experience was good, but rough around the edges in many areas.
After I was convinced to get the laptop, which I grudgingly admit didn't take much to convince me. The buying experience was definitely a mixed one, While we had a great attendant and they had the surface book we wanted in stock. But the whole process was a bit rough, we asked to get the receipt emailed to us, however that never actually happened. Also they offered the VIP service, which comprised them installing all the latest firmware and OS patches, it also comes with the added incentive of a $50 gift card, so what the heck, we went for it. We were told it'll ideally take an hour or 2, maximum of 3, and they will call us when it would be done. Unfortunately that phone call didn't come and by 5 o'clock we decided just to go back to pick it up.
So now I'm sitting here typing on my new brand shiny windows laptop. I've had mixed feelings about a windows, as my main workstation is a ubuntu box, and my work laptop is a mac, so using a windows machine as a daily driver is going to be a different experience for me, I'm looking forward to setting up the development environment on it.
Do I like my new machine? Well the answer to that has to be yes. Really it's a remarkable piece of engineering, there are a few things which I need to get used to, the keyboard has a bit more travel then the macbook one, and also I hate the way the cursor keys are set up. Also the track pad isn't bad, but isn't the polished experience you get from a MacBook.
Obviously it's early days, but I'm looking forward to seeing how my work-flow changes using it, back when I was making games, Visual Studio was a remarkable IDE and I'm looking forward to using it again, also .NET from 3.5 onwards (both C# and F#) are very cool languages, so we'll see what happens.
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