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Surface Pro / Surface Book?

Tom Klaber

By Tom Klaber
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Tom Klaber

Tom Klaber

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On 8/12/2016 at 5:33 AM, gester said:

ios, some time?

VW on iOS? You are nuts.  I have lost total faith in Apple.  They have turned their backs on true power users.  They almost entirely consumer oriented now.  They have not refreshed their Mac Book pro line in 4 years - and as it is they barely equip them with the min recommended specifications.  I know we are going to get a refresh tomorrow -  but still.  Ipad and Ipad Pros are never going to have the power to run real programs - instead - get thinner and priority software and cloud access.  

I would not want VW engineers to waste a single day on trying to port VW over to iOS.

 

 

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Tom Klaber

Tom Klaber

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I am sure the new laptop will be fine, but even so - it is unforgivable not to upgrade your Pro line in 4 years.  My guess is that they will have incorporated a Polaris AMD GPU, but only one model will have it - just like today.  The Apple fans will buy it and make due, but there is no value argument for the apple side - it has to be for pure love the brand or hate for the other guys...(Sorta like the elections over here).  

 

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Jim Smith

Jim Smith

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Perhaps users of CAD and related software are too small a market but I have often thought that Apple has missed the boat on this and other professional graphic markets and it drives me nuts. 

But it's not just Apple, I'm surprised that no firm has really taken this up as a thing and come up with a machine that is super powerful and works like, well, and electronic version of my old drafting board. The functionality of VW plus the ability to mark stuff up & sketch stuff would be a game changer. I know the latest iPad markets some of this functionality but, as has been said... iOS. It is really too small & is really just a toy. Mr Jobs was many things but what he forgot in his desire to have people draw with their fingers; people have been drawing with sticks since the neolithic.

 

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
PVA - Admin

PVA - Admin

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Apple's hardware situation is bad. Really bad. It's one thing to be a company who makes no bones about charging more for superior overall material choice and build quality as well as attention to aesthetics, but quite another to charge $3,000 USD for something that could be trounced spec for spec by a machine priced below 1k in 2016. 

Us specifically spending time making an actual drafting software package separately from the main product solely for iOS is probably not something we would consider. To be honest from what I have seen with streaming control of virtual machines, it would make more sense to build a small app that just linked you to an instance of Vectorworks being run on a server farm somewhere and just tweak some of the interface elements for touch or stylus input. But that is just me thinking aloud, I haven't heard specific plans.

Apple's lack of entries into the professional hardware market are also becoming problematic. I believe as of this quarter there are only maybe 5 specific models in the entire Mac range that I would recommend someone use for Vectorworks. The rest all have Intel cards which are fine for web apps and 4k video decoding but not for acceptably smooth navigation in 3D as is so needed in VW. Combine that with the more and more common capable workstation/gaming laptops that we see with names like Blade and Specter that have flashy finishes, but also very capable guts that handle CAD applications properly and you get serious competition. I have had more users who were staunchly Mac switch to Windows because of their limited hardware choices this year than probably any other since the OS X 10.3 days. They wanted the best rendering times, so they went after 24-core CPUs from Dell rather than wait for Apple to decide we needed that yet.

They could fix it, they really could. I hope they do, I prefer to work in a world where competition breeds better tools all the time. It's just better.

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zoomer

zoomer

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19 hours ago, zoomer said:

I think that will happen sooner as we all think.

If Apple dumps the Mac Pro completely, the iMac finally in some years,
tablets develop in that same pace, we have to work on an iPad Pro soon. 
Maybe 27".

Maybe 3' by 6',
and we can finally add our Mayline again and draw with Apple Pencil 2.0.

Keynote Ouch,

I correct myself, it will be the iWatch Plus that we will have to work on our 3D CAD ...

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Art V

Art V

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20 hours ago, Jim Smith said:

Perhaps users of CAD and related software are too small a marke

This may be the case for Apple, but overall it is not as HP and DELL have been serving CAD users with dedicated workstations for quite a while and now others are bringing out workstation quality laptops (e.g. MSI and barebones custom built to order outfits) as well.

For CAD users on the Mac the only option seems to be the highest end iMacs that may do for now. I used to have Macs but the price/performance difference has become too large to ignore.

People used to say PC's are cheaper way back too, but they forgot that back then that Apple had to be compared to quality PC's like the IBM machines, the HP Vectra line (bomb proof quality) etc. and then the price difference was not that big anymore. Sadly for Apple this is no longer the case (with the exception of high end nVidia Quadro cards being used in the computer). Windows has become stable enough that if you need really high-end performance you're at the moment probably better of with a custom built Windows machine than with an Apple machine and not just from a price perspective.

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zoomer

zoomer

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2 hours of my life I will never get back.
(Good that I did other things beside it)

 

So back to Surface Books.
(For Apple Dummies)

What is the current position ?
The OS is nearly the same than the desktop OS ?
Or at least compatible and run the same Software ?
It has the hardware power to do all office related things and even 2D CAD ?
 

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Art V

Art V

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7 minutes ago, zoomer said:

So back to Surface Books.
(For Apple Dummies)

What is the current position ?
The OS is nearly the same than the desktop OS ?
Or at least compatible and run the same Software ?

As of Windows 10 yes it is from an OS perspective, but it needs to have Windows 10 and not Windows RT though I don't think the latter is used anymore for Surface books. Windows RT is a cut-down/dumbed-down version of the regular Windows and does not run PC software.

7 minutes ago, zoomer said:

It has the hardware power to do all office related things and even 2D CAD ?

Yes it does, and reasonably well too according to some people. When it comes to really power-user kind of stuff such as complex 3D models or very large/compex files it may not work as well enough as a good desktop/laptop would.

The biggest issue may be storage space on the Surface pro as all is in RAM though there might be models now with SSD's for storage, if not then you will have to rely on external SSD disks as harddisks use too much power and then connectivity options come into play as well.

Edited by Art V
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Tom Klaber

Tom Klaber

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7 minutes ago, Art V said:

The biggest issue may be storage space on the Surface pro as all is in RAM though there might be models now with SSD's for storage, if not then you will have to rely on external SSD disks as harddisks use too much power and then connectivity options come into play as well.

 
 

OR after the 2017 release - rely on cloud storage.

Edited by Tom Klaber
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Art V

Art V

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1 minute ago, Tom Klaber said:

OR after the 2017 release - rely on cloud storage.

Good luck with that if you have to use a 10+ GB aerial background image in your project :)
Though your ISP or mobile internet provider might be happy to have you as a client for what they can charge you for data transfer. O.o

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zoomer

zoomer

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Thanks a lot.
So not many years until a surface is an adequate desktop replacement for most people.
CPU and GPU Power increase per of iOS devices has also reached or exceeded what we were
used with PC's around 2005.

It is nice to see that those devices will satisfy 95% of people in the world,
just that we 3D workstation geeks get lost.
My hope is the VR trend, for games and everything else beside Architecture,
(As I heard that especially Architecture is no market because all Architects are, or behave, cheap)
that we Architects will still get some progress in 3D.
Although I still prefer still doing images, Architectural Visualization happening in real time VR only
in the future would be ok for me.

 

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