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by vrinsd 817 days ago
Sadly, this is more of MSFT's "we can do what Apple does too!".

For a "business" oriented portable why is it so limited on ports? No wired Ethernet? As many others have pointed out, why are the 3D graphics so hobbled? People use laptops for CAD, visualizations and these days GPUs perform offload of a lot of other functions.

I saw someone "crap" on Dell and Lenovo but honestly I think most of the Lattitude laptops have really good build quality, decent availbility of parts and good longevity.

Lenovo X1 Carbons are far from perfect but they're pretty solid machines and still offer wired Ethernet (albiet via a breakout dongle) and a decent amount of ports. Linux works pretty decently here too.

I never understood what the value add of MSFT's Surface family was/is, supposedly a "first party" portable with Windows with the same quality and engineering as an Apple product but if you look at HOW they go about it they seem to keep missing the point. If you go to Wikipedia and punch in 'Surface' you'll see some crazy big table of devices they've churned out, all with varying degrees of issues.

I have a Surface Pro 2 which runs Debian Linux quite well (like another poster pointed out) so that's cool but it's has a lot of oddities that wouldn't be acceptable had the machine not been free.

Lenovo made an X1 Tablet family that's fanless and is honestly pretty compelling if you need a fanless, "tablet-like" PC that runs Windows. I use mine as a car diagnostics computer and the car software needs Windows.

If I were writing the specs for a "business computer" it'd include being fanless, excellent battery life, plethora of ports incl. legacy USB-A, light-weight and durable. I doubt any Surface will meet that.

Apple MBPs and Apple Airs BTW do NOT meet these criteria either, lack of ports, chunkier / heavier on the MBP line, can't do dual-displays on the Air, macOS really needing 16GB but Apple charging a crazy tax for 16GB+ of RAM, etc.