> Microsoft is planning to release a dongle that will plug into the new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop devices and provide USB-C support. It’s like any dongle you’d expect, and it simply slots into the Surface connector port on the device. “If you want to charge a device with a Type-C charger, you can. If you want to put data back and forth with a Type-C peripheral, you can,” says Panay.
> “If you love Type-C, it means you love dongles,” jokes Panay. “We’re giving a dongle to people who love dongles.”
And of course I would prefer to have a magnetic charging connector over USB-C all day. Makes even more sense if your USB-C is from this very same connector.
I don't fault Microsoft for doing this, the USB-C connector is so far from being off the ground in the market, there's no reason to support it on major devices yet. Most new technologies are going wireless, you move data wirelessly, you charge wirelessly. The need for USB connectors is dying, the old USB connector is nice to have on the Surface out of sheer convenience with some legacy devices, but I only use it maybe 2 times a year.
What would you even plug into it? It's not like USB-C accessories are readily stocked everywhere, I'm still carrying around dongles all day for my TouchBar MBP.
If the laptop shipped with USB-C people would be whinging they need dongles, literally can't win.
Not really, if they replaced either mini-DP or the surface charging port.
I have a 4k monitor with a USB hub and it connects via USB-C. So I can just plug in one cable for power, video, keyboard and mouse. On the surface that means three cables coming out of both sides of the thing, and one of the cables going to a USB hub since there is only one USB port. But I guess you could use the dongle, assuming it supports HDMI output.
That monitor is 2 years old now, I bought it with my 2015 macbook.
I think you are vastly underestimating how fast trends in the market come out.
USB-A was two years ago.
We're currently in the "having tons of dongles" state. In a year, it'll be 50% USB-C 50% other stuff. In 3 years, it'll be 100% USB-C, with high probability given the current market trends. Even Apple is adopting the USB-C standard. That speaks volumes to the coming trends, and how fast they're coming.
USB-C is already shipping on cheap desktops, a lot of smartphones, and many laptops. In two years Apple won't ship any computers with USB-A. USB-C has arrived:
Sure, but most of my USB-A stuff will still be fine in 2 years, and much of it in 5. I won't have acquired enough USB-C things in 2 years to care much about it.
Everyone buying a newly released Mac this year will only have USB-C. People buying svelte Windows PCs will be getting only USB-C. Next year's Surface will be only USB-C.
I'm guessing that many of the almost 400 million Android phones that ship this year will have USB-C. Chromebooks? They're going USB-C.
You're just telling us that you'll be happy with legacy. That's fine with me. Not everyone has to plan for the future. It's coming with or without you.
Those are host devices. My wife's and my external CD/DVD burner, USB DAC, Arduino, external hard drives, iPhone 7 Plus, two iPads, half-dozen flash USB drives, various controllers, external keyboards and mice, wireless non-Bluetooth mouse adapters, laser printer, et c., et c will mostly still be working just fine in 2 years, and all connect over USB-A. I'm guessing I'll only have one or two USB-C things by then unless I decide to drop a ton of money replacing lots of perfectly-good equipment.
[EDIT] I'd add: yeah, we have some USB-C Android phones at work. Most of them have... USB-A on the other end of the cable that came with them (there's one exception).
Why are you telling me what people have in 2017? No one is saying that USB-C is the standard now. Although in thin laptops it will be the standard this year. I'll be using my "legacy" USB stuff until it dies too.
The point is that market is starting to adopt USB-C, and everyone should be ready for the transition. I want a future port on my new computers, which will have a 5-10 year lifespan. USB-A would be nice too, but if I can only have one type, I'll take the future port.
> What connector do you think you'll need in two years, five years, 10 years?
And my answers were USB-A, both, and USB-C (but probably also whatever replaces it), respectively.
Your response to my answer was to tell me that lots of host devices are shipping with USB-C, which has no effect whatsoever on my answer (which I expect is typical, even of people on HN). I thought you must not understand that a bunch of host devices supporting USB-C barely has any effect on what I'll be plugging into my computers for the next few years, since you responded that way, so I gave an (incomplete) list of my USB-A devices which will almost all still be working in 2 years, and most of them in 5, and also, incidentally, a complete list of my USB-C devices (none).
USB-A is hands-down the more useful port to me for the next few years. USB-C is a nice bonus for future-proofing but has zero immediate utility, and will still have little or none in 2 years. Just answering the question.
> so I gave an (incomplete) list of my USB-A devices which will almost all still be working in 2 years, and most of them in 5
If I'm not mistaken, save from the flash drives and non-bluetooth dongles, all of those can be converted with a simple cable switch. Wired KB+mice may unfortunately be cabled into the device but it's still practical enough to just keep an adapter on the end or there's some soldering for a cable swap to be done. Unless you plan to change all of your gear at once, you're in for such a transition anyway, one way or the other.
I have to agree with melling here, such a pricey device that I'd plan to keep for at least 5 years should have the new port.
No, the question is "why is it important that the Surface, or other laptop, ship with a USB-C port today. Asking 2, 5, and 10 was to illustrate that over most of the life of the Surface, USB-C will be preferred.
But what things other than flash drives (Who even uses those anymore) have ports built in? I have a USB-C -> USB 3.0 mini-b cable that I use for my external hard drives that cost me about $5.
seriously... what do people even use usb-a for besides charging things? compatibility was crap, transition to 3.0 was crap and even the highest end computers offered limited ports - opting to keep a few 2.0s given that support for 3.0 on the device side was even weaker, big, asymetric, fragile, ...
lets just let it die and move to cables that won't need a dongle and aren't thicker than almost everything in a laptop from this generation
I'm pretty sure I didn't retire the last of my ps/2, serial, and parallel port equipment until about 2010. Gameport and AT probably went out around '05-'07—until then USB saw very little use and if I'd had to pick all-USB or no-USB, I'd have chosen the latter. My ~3-4yr old unremarkable desktop motherboard still has several legacy ports. I've made no special effort to resist USB, I just haven't retired equipment if it's still useful.
USB came out it 1996. Peripherals stick around a long time.
A bit misleading. Apple was the first major manufacturer to adopt USB in 1998. It took a good 5 years before PC's started adopting them. The move to USB-C is happening much faster.
Serial and parallel devices died off pretty quickly though the ports lived on for various reasons. PS/2 keyboard and mice endured a good while longer.
I've only seen the joystick port appear on sound cards, which themselves are pretty much dead, and the AT connector was all but extinct by the mid 1990s.
New motherboards seem to fall into two camps: Legacy ports of all flavours, or ridiculous numbers of USB 3.0 ports. I saw one recently with 12 USB3.0 connectors on the back.
Doesn't mean those people were wrong at the time. I was still using a serial port until 2012, still using a PS/2 keyboard until 2014. So I was right not to buy a USB-only PC in 2010, even though I've now switched to one.
I picked up a 2-pack of USB-A/USB-C adaptors on Amazon for $10. I keep them in my bag, it hasn't been a problem. If you're plugging in more than two things at a time then you'd probably benefit from a hub anyway.
I still want to be able to transfer data to/from my phone (S7) and my camera. I still want to use my headset. These things are going to last for several years; as such I'm not buying a laptop without USB-A any time soon.
I tried a bluetooth headset but it had enough extra latency to throw me off (I play rhythm games sometimes). In theory my wifi's fast enough for copying data to/from my phone, but I don't think it offers an easy way to do that (and my camera doesn't have wifi at all).
i think we're pretty much done with USB-A given any form factor besides desktop(-replacement?) these days. I'd rather not sacrifice the space for the next 3+ years when its basically relegated to phone charging duties - and barely that given this generation of battery life.
Plus that kickstand always looked so inconvenient to me. On normal laptop I can adjust screen angle however I want. The kickstand also require a bigger surface to put it down properly. On normal laptop I am fine as long as the bottom half can fit on the table (or any flat surface), here there is need for much more space, seems very inconvenient especially when working in tight spaces like server room, car, or small coffee table.
So buy a f*cking laptop! I'm only half-kidding - but criticizing an integral part of a product, when there are multiple alternatives with exact the feature your desire is ... silly.
It's a throw-away marketing headline not some super-technical classification. One-click away is a comparison grid of Surface products which includes ... a laptop.
This looks like a laptop to me! Having read your comment I imagine I have to reassess. But in my head while watching the video I was evaluating it to replace by old MacBook Pro.
It is a laptop, or at least a laptop replacement. Try the kickstand setup and see whether it's good enough for what you want to do or not. Criticising the kickstand is absolutely reasonable, but do so based on experience rather than speculation.
As some others have said, the kickstand can actually be more convenient in tight spaces (especially flights.) Most of the time, it's perfectly lap-able (typing this from a chair by my pool.)
Additionally, it has the great feature of elevating the heat source off the ground. This comes up any time I want to sit it on, for example, my couch. With my old laptop, the fan exhaust was largely getting smothered in upholstery, but with my surface pro it's sitting 6 inches above the table/couch/surface.
You can barely use it in your lap if your legs are crossed, and the keyboard can't be used if you're holding the device in mid-air. Other than that, my complaints are all about heat dispersion/generation, not the form factor.
My wife inherited my 1st generation Surface Pro after her beater HP laptop died two years ago, out of all the things I expected her to complain about the kickstand was never an issue (the touch cover pissed her off to no end though, so I bought a type cover instead).
I can see some people not digging the kickstand, but I'd say give it a try before dismissing it.
I own a SP, and I actually like the form factor, which I find much more flexible than it looks. I didn't find any condition where I can't use it.
I don't have experience on a car, but I routinely use it on my lap in the public transport, on airplanes, and on "small coffe tables", as long as I accept "90% of comfort".
Of course, the SP is a hybrid, so if the laptop form factor is a requirement (or "100% comfort"), then no hybrid is an appropriate choice (except the Surface book, which is arguably overpriced).
Regardless, it's definitely wrong to state that it needs more space; it actually needs less than a laptop, as it only needs three contact points - the kickstand, the screen bottom, and the top/lower side of the keyboard.
Honestly this is the number one reason i quit using my SP. I know a lot of people here love them, but it was just too obnoxious to use on my legs, soft surfaces, and lots of other places.
I will agree it was awesome on plane tray tables, but that was about the only "oh cool! obvious advantage!" location.
i found myself wanting a normal laptop that could hold itself up repeatedly, and kept switching back to my macbook pro
Yes I'm saying it's not enough. It's the same RAM that was available 4 years ago on Macbook Pro (and still not available any higher on MBP either).
It's common to run several types of server in production, these all need to be run on localhost for development purposes. Also virtual environments so server architecture can easily be scripted.
16GB works for me, but is far from ideal. I was hoping MS would one-up Apple here, but not yet.
Counter-example: I worked in ML research at one of the largest companies in the field (in the billions of predictions per day) and 16GB was more than enough to do anything I would ever do on a laptop/tablet/etc..
Furthermore, I found that solutions which couldn't be successfully worked on with <16GB RAM were basically architecturally unsound. Not being able to scale the workload on demand or control peak demand. Extra RAM just hid poor developers from their non-scalable solutions - or just increased their downtime till they got an OUT OF MEM error. The issues were only exacerbated at scale - failing even with 128+ GB in RAM.
Basically, when the difference between a dev sample and a prod sample is 3+ orders of magnitude, your ability to scale the process up/down, fail gracefully, even battery life, etc. are far more important than having large swathes of memory to fail on. Especially on the go.
If you do deal with production (big) data, you're ssh'ed in to some always-on, process-maintained hardware if only for the sake of latency and interruptions. And you better have the toolset to do it. How much memory does a terminal take?
For graphics, I understand - but then you're definitely not working on a surface pro or on the go at all really.
I'm not crunching big data in development or doing much with graphics (other than occasional faffing on some image editor). What I'm running is a lot of local servers. Each server has overhead even if you are only storing one byte of data.
ie I'm running Rails, MySQL, Elastic, Redis, Nginx, Memcached, and in some cases, multiple instances (dev, test, and multiple shards)
And then the usual OS requirements - Vim, 250 browser tabs, Slack, Hangouts, etc.
I'm sure there are all manner of optimisations and assumptions that could cut things down, but I'd rather the big manufacturers upgrade their RAM capacity every few years so I can focus on a dev environment that's a good approximation for prod.
Dev-Prod parity is probably the best reason to want the extra power, but then you're just limiting your software to the lowest common denominator between mobile computing and a server farm. At the end of the day, if you want to take advantage of the big guns, you will have to sacrifice mobility or parity and spend some good time on devOps. And even an extra 16GB won't get you around that.
Also, 250 tabs? dayum. I don't know how anyone could effectively use that many tabs. I don't think thats what browsers/laptops are designed for. My mind memory of just the tabs would be saturated long before the laptop's.
I frequently have that many tabs open because I use them as lighter one-shot bookmarks (although see onetab). Basically things that I need/want to refer back to once or twice but don't want to bookmark. So they tend to stack up until I go through them and close out the stuff I'm no longer interested in. Really I think FF/etc should probably just garbage collect most of them if they haven't been active for a few days.
> For graphics, I understand - but then you're definitely not working on a surface pro or on the go at all really.
I do work in graphics/rendering, I work on laptops often and plan to get a surface pro, 16 GBs is the most painful part of working on a laptop for sure. It is the primary reason I spend most of my day on the 128GB ram desktop whenever I'm close. But even 32GB would go a long way for me.
I'm using 13GB right now just doing some normal web/backend dev. 4GB to a Linux VM running VScode and some servers. Then add Outlook/VS/Firefox/Chrome and a bunch of other utilities and I'm there. I've only got about 40 open tabs total (few docs, few Azure, few GCP, several reading), across all browsers so I'm not going nuts on that side.
Yea... I never said you couldn't saturate the memory, just that if it saturates 16 GB easily, its a shitty architecture. you're running a 4GB VM to run an IDE inside it... and "40 tabs"? That could be anything between a couple MB and X GB depending on the content. Not really a measure of anything. Just think about how much more efficient Chrome/Google is being than you're 4GB+ VSCode (text editor) set up.
To go over 16GB right now on Intel mobile chips you need to sacrifice battery life (going from LPDDR3 to plain ol' DDR3 or 4). This will be resolved with Cannon Lake/Coffee Lake, but until then don't expect to see many ultra-thin form factor computers with >16GB.
I have a lenovo t460p which has 32 gb of this supposedly power hungry RAM and it can make it through a workday on a charge just fine. From what I can tell, the power needs of non-LP RAM are overstated.
AFAIK, the reason ultrabooks have LPDDR3 is because it is very low profile when soldered. If thin is your thing, you want LPDDR3. My t460p has a smaller footprint than a MBP, but it is as thick as a whole stack of them.
That has a 72Wh battery; the Surface Pro 4 has a 40Wh battery, and this is presumably similar. So it's a pretty big difference.
The difference between LPDDR3 and DDR3 isn't dramatic in actual operation; LPDDR3 uses about 70% of the power of DDR3.
It becomes a bigger deal when the machine is in standby, however; LPDDR3 uses 10% the power of DDR3. This would be a big deal for Apple, which also insists on using LPDDR3, and has historically sold machines with standby times measured in weeks or months. Not sure if people have particular expectations of standby times from Surface Pros, but if they're used like tablets you'd want it to be decent. Keeping the memory powered is nearly the only power used when a computer's in standby, so 10x the power usage would be a huge deal.
I have had several windows laptops with lpddr3, and the standby battery life was never that great. Windows just isn't good at managing battery in standby. I think only apple can bring up the power argument for choosing lpddr3 because it only makes a real difference in their case.
Never really used a modern Windows laptop; I remember the whole power management situation being a complete nightmare in 2001 or so, but would have assumed it'd been sorted out by now...
RAM is lung capacity for a device, as well as longevity.
Longer device life and usefulness comes come from additional ram than a beefier processor.
Apple mentioned somewhere the 32 GB laptop jump involves dealing with a battery usage hit. While 32 GB arrives, a few vendors like Lenovo seem to have the 32 GB offering available in laptops, but not their Surface Pro clone.
I think the point they're trying to make is that the sort of person who wants 32 or 64 GB of RAM in their laptop (and I'm definitely in that group) also wants a fast processor and a decent graphics card. The number of people who need 32+ GB of RAM and are happy with a slow processor is probably quite small. The sort of work I'd use my Surface Pro for doesn't need more than 8GB of RAM and the sort of work I need 32+GB of RAM for I wouldn't do on a Surface Pro.
But, depending on your workload, fast enough may well be... laptop i5/i7 are pretty fast, again depending on workload... if I'm trying to simulate a tech stack, with modest data loaded, I'm the only user, so it's plenty fast, but memory can become constrained pretty quickly...
Windows overhead, Visual Studio, Linux VMs, multiple docker containers, local dynamodb, sql database, queues, etc. If you're developing locally against a workflow with a few VMs in the mix, 16gb can be an incredible constraint. I'm not trying to simulate hundreds of users, just one across a stack.
But that is probably not the usecase most people who will buy a Surface Pro for. It's a very portable device and 32GB would consume more power and probably be only bought by a very small amount of users.
Not sure... "PRO" should probably be a label for "PRO" versions of something, and 16GB should probably be a minimum in that case. Lots of people doing heavy image work or video may be better served by more than that as well. Which is well within that segment.
Thats a matter of definition. Surface Pro originally was to distinguish against the Surface RT, where it made sense. Same goes for iPad Pro which is clearly not meant in the same way you are suggesting, Macbook Pro is the same. The PRO label is meant to distinguish them against their own lower tier products.
Imo the demand for 32GB RAM Laptops is pretty limited right now, which is why you usually find that in workstation laptops only.
I don't know any 13" Ultrabook with 32GB to be honest.
The issue for that is kind of like the "faster horses" vs cars. In this case, however the touchbar was a half-baked interface in trade for the lack of full touch.
I think that the users who DO have that usecase (like the OP) are clamoring for a machine that is more portable. The same debate raged when the MBP was released; people want a powerful, sleek and portable workhorse that they can use for longer than 2 hours, and no one is delivering right now.
Maybe because its not easy todo with current technology ? Size, heat and power consumption all have to be balanced carefully, so you can not just stuff an i7 quad core with 32GB RAM in a tiny package and expect it to be great. Compromises have to be made. I think it's incredible what kind of processing power we can have in small packages today and it will of course move forward, but for some people it's never quick enough i guess.
How much more heat/power would 32gb vs 16b use/generate... okay, so I get 12.5 hours instead of 13... As long as it's more than 8.5 hours battery life under modest load. The RAM is very far from a big consumer of electricity in a laptop.. the screen and cpu are MUCH more of an issue there, likewise in terms of heat.
People who needs lots of RAM usually willing to pay extra for i7 and other expensive parts, and hardware manufacturers know and exploit that.
Fortunately, there’re some ultrabooks on the market with user-upgradeable RAM. This article says Intel CPUs supports 16GB DDR3L modules since Broadwell, i.e. you should be able to install 32GB yourself:
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/16-gb-so-dimm-ram-module...
Sure, but even if the surface pro came with 32gb of RAM (all other specs identical), would you consider trading your XPS 15 for a surface pro? We're really talking about two different market segments here.
Neither the Surface Pro i7 nor the XPS13 (not talking about the 1 in 2 XPS13) are fanless. Its the same class as the Macbook Pro 13 but Kaby Lake as opposed to Skylake allows for a fanless i5 Surface Pro.
The space of people needing >16gb are typically looking at more fully-fledged workstations, is maybe the idea here? Not that an upgrade option wouldn't be good, it just seems a bit at odds with the surface's goals
It absolutely isn't. I'm a C++ programmer working in games industry, my work machine has 64GB and all our work-issued laptops are 32GB(which is not enough to actually start local servers of our game, so doing any mobile work is quite limiting).
why does this apply here: because I can easily imagine artists using this to modify some assets and trying to run the game to see what they look like, but with 16GB of ram they won't even load the editor, much less the actual server+client combo.
I know you don't mean this to sound hubristic, and I hope you consider the same of me as I'm not trying to be insulting.
But I work in the same company as Gambiting, on the same game I think. And yes, loading a map that is the size of San Andreas in GTA5 (with more props) is expensive on memory.
You can't "load a region" in the editor, not because there is a design constraint but because you need to generate navigation meshes, collision systems, render objects etc before you "stream" them in, not to mention that "streaming" is a hack that is build for consoles and weak PCs and has to be optimised for to work reliably, you'd spend more time chasing bugs in your streaming than actual bugs you were working with.
So, you load the whole map, you generate your navigation mesh and run your collision detection, and then you can do mapwide things like "find breaks in the world" and other stuff.
In this case, yes, 64G is helpful, because a developers time, especially a tools programmers time who deals in very low level C++/ASM optimisations for AAA games' time is worth more than a studio full of 64G ram modules.
I am curious if you do this mapwide thing very often to debug game bugs. Cuz we all know the usual game renderer does a lot of culling optimizations like z buffer, occlusion. Maybe another approach is not doing this in realtime but rather generate frame by frame to do post-render analysis?
The main map of the game is almost 30GB on its own and is a result of work of hundreds of people - suggesting that limiting ourselves to 4GB on work machines would be "beneficial" is silly.
Who in hell does run a game server on a laptop, and outside office?
by the way the integrated graphics are real shit in this laptop, better go get a MSI or something. This PC's are clearly not for high end work, it's just Macbook Pro kind of "pro".
PD: I think if you're running the whole map on the RAM you're doing something wrong.
I think people are missing a point here. The game itself runs perfectly fine on a 7 year old CPU and 8GB of ram(it might run on 4GB but I haven't tested this personally). - I'd say the actual game client is optimized extremely well.
Is it really shocking that dev machines have a lot of ram?
If someone works in full frame photography or edits 4K video, do you tell them to try working on machines with 4GB of ram to see what they come up with, and how it's going to be "beneficial"?
Why would it be any different for games? When a level designer loads the entire map into editor, it's the same as loading a 4K video into Adobe Premiere - it's going to eat up your ram, and you need to have loads of it.
>>Who in hell does run a game server on a laptop, and outside office?
At E3, the answer is - literally everyone. We send one guy with a fully encrypted beefy laptop that runs all servers during the show, and he has to keep an eye on it 100% of the time. You're not going to fly a desktop over the Atlantic just for a games conference.
I suppose that would work, but a one-time big laptop purchase that is then owned by the studio is easier to justify than buying a machine abroad(not to mention you can test that the laptop works several times before going, a brand new desktop might/might not work and people usually arrive a day or two before a conference so it's not like there's loads of time to debug problems before the big show).
What he wrote was extremely arrogant. Unless he tried to be funny. I am tired of people who tell you that you are doing it all wrong after a quick look.
I work on a pretty complex system myself and every few months somebody comes in,takes a quick look and tells us we just need to use framework X and all will be easy. Guess what, we are not totally stupid and have looked at it already. And it wouldn't solve the actual problem which is that it's just a very complex thing we are doing.
First understand what people are doing before telling them they are wrong.
What's so taboo about creating things under the constraints of machines that everyday people own? The best engineers are always the most resourceful and focused.
> What's so taboo about creating things under the constraints of machines that everyday people own?
Because it's impractical, unnecessary and wasteful. There are a number of processes that by their nature require global knowledge. These are not the sorts of processes that need to be done in the client (many of them in fact are done up front precisely so that a client will not need to do them), but they are the sorts of processes that a developer will need to do if they are to be able to make a change and see its effect. Also, there are good reasons to generate assets at a higher resolution than needed in the final artifact.
Just like if you're rendering a 3d animated film you might need a more powerful machine than those who are only watching it, or if you're training a neural net, you need a more powerful system than if you're merely running it.
TEST things under the constraints of machines that people own. Multiple people have given multiple reasons why there are better ways to do things. I read another recently talking about being able to capture all the game state for debugging, too.
Maybe their stuff is extremely complex and is already optimized? Before you make such a suggestion you should be very sure that you understand the situation.
It reminds me of the story "The programming antihero" from an old Gamasutra article[1]
"He knew from experience that it was always impossible to cut content down to memory budgets, and that many projects had come close to failing because of it. So now, as a regular practice, he always put aside a nice block of memory to free up when it's really needed."
Being able to use the same device travelling and at your desk is really useful. Even if it were a case of only opening the actual editor at your desk and just working on emails/design docs/what-have-you while travelling, it makes for a much nicer workflow than switching devices.
Well then this isn't the laptop for you. Me neither, but I'm sure e.g. web devs would be fine. Can't make a machine for everyone. Look at the form factor, obviously it's not trying to be a behemoth gaming laptop.
if you need to work on assets that won't work well with 16GB of RAM then the Surface Pro is probably not the right choice..
It competes with an iPad Pro etc which don't even offer a full desktop. The surface runs a full Windows with Photoshop and Unity Game Engine if you want, and with the i7 and 16GB would run that pretty well.
We do. But if you take an alpha build of the game to E3 or an external presentation you need to run everything locally, and usually beefy alienwares or custom-built laptops are used for this.
It vastly depends on your work flow. If you are like me and just using editor, browser, small LEMP stack, git, gulp, ssh and some other small tools then you are fine and 16GB is plenty but when you start doing virtualisation, docker instances, data crunching, in memory dbs etc. then suddenly 16GB doesn't look like much.
Yes, but this "laptops" are set to use cpu in burst mode. So if you run servers like docker and VMs etc (like I do on my SP4) you often hit the burst limit and the cpu throttle's right back down.
I've taken to using an external usb fan to get extra speed.
If you run servers then SP4 is not for you. Choose proper tool for your job. SP contrary to its name is not pro at all, it just looks professional but if you want to do serious work you need serious horse power.
Obviously not running prod servers on it. But for on the go development, what's wrong with using some of that 16gb to start some docker containers to work?
Yeah and slow down every time connection is a bit slower or you want to search something across whole project. Very often I am doing search trough all files directly in Sublime and I can do that because I am restricted only by throughput of my SSD and CPU.
If you're searching across a whole project, the server is footing the brunt of that. it's only sending back the results. That's not usually a lot of data, so your connection would have to be in the kilobits to be that big of a burden.
This is simply not true. If you search using external application, all the work is done locally, not server site. During the search Sublime have to open EVERY file, search for word and then close it. That's a lot of data going back and forward. Of course search can be done using server tools like grep, then the search will look just as you said, server will do all the work and then return result. There are two problems with that approach, first this is not as nice user experience as it is in Sublime, second: server (usually VPS) is in most cases slower than my dev machine, because not everybody works with multi cpu behemoths.
Either ssh into a real server, or use (or ssh into) that clunky behemoth gaming desktop I have sitting under a desk, which I sadly use way more for work than for gaming.
Have fun every time your unreliable coffee shop wifi breaks down. It quickly gets far more convenient to just connect the power cord and do everything locally.
I'd say that HDMI would be make the machine a lot more versatile than USB-C (or MiniDP, for that matter). Showing a few photos on a TV, using your client's projector for an unplanned demo, using an absent coworker's screen - I can't remember how often I've envied MacBook Pro Retina users for that port. It's magic.
TVs and projects are not going to switch from HDMI to USB-C either, so waiting won't solve that problem.
Will RAM capacity remain a true valid complaint until the end of time? How much power on one device do we really need in the age of cloud computing and multi-device ownership?
Developers use more memory because it's available.
Most developers seem to assume their program is the only program running on the system.
This is why my girlfriend can't have multiple browsers open. For a "demanding" workoad (IE; IntelliJ IDE, browser, mail client) windows can easily consume 15/16G already.
Personally I use a stripped down linux machine but I'm regularly over 8G, where's the future-proof option?
The way we use our machine matters along with the continual upkeep and fine tuning of our tools. It is our responsibility to not put the foot down on the gas completely all the time. The real world constraints on this machine do not seem unreasonable for me and my type of work (software, web) at this time.
Fortunately, in my arena of software we distribute work off of the computer and our programs are more piecemeal. Very few software engineers need a large amount of resources locally.
