Technology Ramblings

With Microsoft's recent announcement of the Surface Studio All-in-One desktop, they now have a direct competitor to the Apple iMac. So which one would you buy ?    Like with the MacBook Pro vs Surface Book comparison I did in a previous post - let's let at both from a hardware, software and ecosystem standpoint... First the hardware.    Like with the MBP / SB comparison - we'll compare the top end models. The new Surface Studio supports 6th Gen Intel Core i7 CPU and can support up to 32Gb RAM.  The iMac also supports 6th gen Core i7 CPU and 32GB of RAM. The Surface Studio uses 28" Pixel Sense Monitor with 4500 x 3000 resolution with DCI-P3 color support and 10 Point Touch and Pen Support.  GPU is via Nvidia GeForce GTX 980M with 4Gb of RAM.    The iMac uses a 27" Retina Monitor with 5120 x 2800 resolution with no Touch or Pen Support and uses an AMD Radeon R9 M395X GPU with 4Gb of RAM Surface Studio has 2TB Hybrid drive and iMac has 3T...

Over the last two days both Apple and Microsoft announced refreshes to their laptop lines. So now we have two bright shiny and very expensive top end laptops to compare..  Let's look at then from a a hardware, software and ecosystem standpoint. First the hardware.  We'll compare the top end offerings from each.. Both the new MacBook Pro (MBP) and Surface Book are based on the 6th generation Intel Core CPUs know as SkyLake and support up to 16GB of RAM. Both come with PCI SSD with Apple supporting all the way to a 2TB model while the Surface Book stops at 1TB. The Surface Book comes with a 13.5" 3000 x 2000 (267 PPI) screen with 10 Point Touch and Pen Support.  The screen is driven by an Nvidia GTX 965M GPU with 2GB RAM and is detachable and can used as a tablet or flips 180 degrees. The MacBook Pro 15.4"  2880 x 1800 (220 PPI) screen with no touch or pen support.  The screen is driven by an AMD Radeon Pro 455 with 2GB of RAM. Optionally you...

Today Apple announced the new line-up of MacBook Pro (MBP) laptops.  The line has been relatively static for several years since the introduction of the Retina editions and sales have slowed.. The new line-up is thinner and lighter than the previous models and are based on Intel's 6th generation Skylake CPU.  There are two sizes - 13" and 15".  They also come with 4 x Thunderbolt 3 ports - so no more traditional USB. 13" models come with 8GB of RAM, Intel Iris GPU, 256 or 512GB of PCI SSD storage along with a 2560×1600 resolution screen.  Pricing ranges from $1,499 to $1,999 15" models come with 16GB of RAM, AMD Radeon Pro GPU, 256 or 512GB PCI SSD along with 2880×1800 resolution screen. Pricing ranges from $2,399 to $2,799. The big features for this refresh are Touch ID and the Touch Bar.  Apple has added the T1 chipset from the iPhone to support touch ID identification to the MBP and the new Touch Bar has effectively replaced the Function Key row ...

IDC released their preliminary Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker report for Q3 2016. And here is where we stand... Worldwide Smartphone sales remain relatively flat with a 1% year over year growth rate.  362.9M units were sold in Q3 of 2016 vs 359.3M in 2015.  This was in spite of the massive recall involving the Samsung Galaxy Note 7. Looking at the top 5 vendors... Samsung is still #1 worldwide even with a 13.5% decline in unit sales - 72.5M in 2016 vs 83.8M in 2015.  Worldwide market share is 20%.   Sales of Galaxy S7/S7 Edge and the mid range J series made up for some but not all of the Note 7 issues. Apple is #2.  As I reported in an earlier post Apple sold 45.5M units - a 5.3% drop from the 48M sold in 2015 and maintains a 12.5% market share. The big gains continue to come from the big 3 Chinese players, Huawei, Oppo and vivo. Huawei saw unit sales grow 23% to 33.6M units while Oppo and vivo saw triple digit growths of 121.6% (25.3M unit...

Yesterday, MS held their Fall Hardware Event in NYC.  During the event one big theme rang through and that was a focus on "creators" and many of the new announcements reflected that theme.. First, MS announced that the Windows 10 Redstone 2 branch will now be officially called the Creators Update when it releases in March/April of 2017. Next MS placed a focus on 3D with several new announcements starting with a revival of one of Windows oldest included apps - Paint.  The new Paint 3D is completely new app with the capability to work with included and captured 3D images and insert existing 2D content.   There will also be new mobile apps that will allow you to capture 3D images.  MS demo'd walking around a model castle capturing the 3D image into Paint 3D and then working with the content.   Paint 3D will also support direct 3D printing. Continuing on the 3D theme MS announced new VR headsets coming from major OEM partners Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus and Acer. ...

Today at the Microsoft Fall Hardware event we got introduced to the Surface Studio All-in-One (AIO) device previously code named Cardinal. In a post back about a month ago called "Will the Cardinal Fly" - I speculated like many about what this device may be, what kind of models would be available along with some opinions on whether this new device would really move the needle on Surface Sales.. Being the owner of a touch based AIO, to be honest I was a bit skeptical about what MS was going to announce and how it may change the game in the space. While I had always felt the value in AIO was the reduced footprint vs a traditional PC, I had never seen a lot of value in the touch interface.  And even as new models came forward with larger screens and tilt flat capabilities, to be honest I rarely used it.   With the Surface Studio, MS has really redefined the platform. First let's discuss the basics.  The Surface Studio utilizes a base + tilt screen layout, with t...

Today Apple release their FY Q4 financial results.    Here is the good, the bad and the ugly... The Good... Apple sold slightly more iPhones than Wall Street analysts had expected 45.5M vs 44.8M.   Personally I believe the strong US sales of the iPhone 7 was driven by of all things, the color choices. Services revenue grew 24% to 6.3B from 5.0B in 2015. The Bad..... While Apple sold more than analysts expected - it was still a 5% units sales drop (45.5M vs 48.0M in 2015) and a 13% revenue drop 28.1B vs 32.2B  in 2015. This means the Average Selling Price (ASP) for the iPhone is dropping - $618.72 in 2016 vs $670.37 in 2015.    Mac, iPad, Watch and TV sales also fell.   Mac sales fell 14% to 4.8M, iPad sales fell 6% and the "Other" group of TV and Watch fell 22%.    Overall Apple saw it's annual revenue drop for the first time since 2001 - from 233.7B in 2015 to 215.6B in 2016.   The Ugly..... The sales loss in China c...

Tuesday Oct 25, MS released Windows 10 Redstone 2 Branch build 14955.  This build was for both PCs and Mobile. Following the challenges of the previous release 14951 around distribution and updating, the good news is 14955 downloaded and installed correctly on all my PC and Mobile devices.  So no pain there. The build itself did contain new versions of the Mail & Calendar apps which added some small features: You can now open email messages in a new window.  You can now use Quick Actions directly from new email notifications.  Get someone’s attention with @mentions. Type the @ symbol anywhere in the body of your email and start typing to pick the person you want to address.  But the primary focus was fixes.   Some 7 for Mobile and 16 for PC that were documented in the announcement.   While not all the fixes applied to my devices, many quelled a lot of the noise that came back through the Feedback Hub after 14951.    14...

On Oct 19th, AdDuplex published their Windows Device Statistics report for Oct 2016. It reflects a pretty sad state of Windows Mobile.   Here are some of the low lights. Worldwide - none of the newest Windows Mobile devices crack the top 10 in terms of percentage in use.   In fact the top two devices are the 2 year old Lumia 535 and the 3 year old 520 which make up nearly 25% of all Windows Phones.   The top 10 (67.3% of all Windows Phones) is made up entirely of entry and mid models, like the 435, 520, 530, 535, 640, etc.   All of these were initially WP 8/8.1 devices.   While not on the market that long the new HP Elite X3 ranks 36th.  Not very encouraging for HP and with all the software and firmware glitches that have been reported, I fear it is a lame duck device.  Even cutting the price of the 950/950XL by 40% hasn't really changed things. Additionally the percentage of Windows 10 phones has barely moved and is at 13.7%. And of that num...

On Oct 19, MS released Windows 10 Redstone 2 branch build 14951 to Insiders for both PC and Mobile. On the PC side - The build continues the expansion of Ink capabilities via new features like Ink support for both Photos and Camera that allow markup of images and a Protractor and Stencils. Additionally the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) was updated to support the 16.04 Ubuntu (Xenial) release and the ability to launch Windows apps from WSL was also included. Finally there were about a dozen or so published fixes. The build installed with no issues on all my test PCs. Mobile was a very different story however and ended up causing quite a bit of pain. It started with getting the update itself.  When I first ran Phone Update, the new build displayed, but showed a weird message that stated that I needed to plug in or click on download.  With either method, the download started by never progressed beyond 0% - even though WiFi was showing a lot of traffic. Initially...

On Oct 11, Gartner released their PC sales analysis for Q3 of 2016.   Worldwide - some 68.9M PCs were sold - a 5.7% decline from the the 73M sold in Q3 of 2013. Worldwide - top 6 vendor rankings remain unchanged with Lenovo, HP, Dell, Asus, Apple and Acer in that order.  While HP, Dell and Asus had modest gains of 2.3 - 2.6% - Lenovo had a drop of about the same size @ 2.3%.   The big losers here again was Apple and Acer who saw unit sales drop 13.4 and 14.1% respectively. For the US the picture was slightly better.  The drop in total US sales was effectively a rounding error @ 0.3% - 16.1M units vs 16.2 in 2015.  The top 5 here are the same players in a slightly different order with HP, Dell, Lenovo, Apple and Asus as the top five.  While HP and Dell sales were pretty flat, Lenovo saw a 15.3% gain in Q3 while Apple saw a 10.7% decline in sales.   There continues to be consolidation in the industry as the "others" category of vendors ...

On Thursday, Oct 13, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware announced a new partnership, whereby AWS would provide native support for a customers existing VMware workloads to run an AWS and be managed by native VMware tools like vSphere and the vRealize Suite.   This a huge game changer for the already dominate AWS in the Public Cloud space.  Here's why While AWS has the leading market share and offerings in the Public Cloud, everything from the hypervisor they use (Xen) to Storage (EBS/S3) and VM definitions (AMI) while based on open standards were unique to AWS.   At the same time, corporate IT was building their Private Clouds on VMware, which gave then the market share lead in that space. As customers look to move more and more workloads to the cloud, the challenge was two fold  First, Corp IT staffs know VMware - so ESX, vSphere and Cloud Management Tools.  They think about vMotion, vStorage Motion, SRM, etc, etc.  Any while there is an AWS Plu...

On Oct 13, MS released Winodws 10 Redstone 2 branch build 14946.  This was for both PC and Mobile. This install both downloaded and installed on all my test devices (PC, Laptop, Tablet and Phone) correctly - albeit somewhat slowly.  Especially with my phone.  The post install store updates to apps to an exceeding long time and at one point every major app would fail to launch. From Mail/Calendar People, Camera, etc - you name it it would fail at launch.  I was thinking that I may have to do a reset to gain back control, however after about 30 minutes the apps began to respond.  I waiting about an hour and then rebooted the phone and all apps began working. Although MS called out that the upgrade may fail on mobile devices with multiple speech packs installed, my Lumia 735 did install okay.    From a feature/capability perspective, the focus on this build was improved touchpad settings and gesture control as well as improved WiFi control. Ther...

On Friday Oct 7, MS released Windows 10 Redstone 2 branch build 14942 to Fast Ring Insiders.  This was a PC only build. The update installed cleanly on PC, Laptop and Tablet. While there were a handful of fixes, a new Photos app and Update icon and teh ability to hide the app list on start, there was one big change that to me was long overdue in Windows. That change involved how MS represented running services in Task Manager. For years, MS lumped together many of the Windows Services that are managed in Windows Management Console into a very ubiquitous service called SvcHost with little ability to monitor or kill those individual services via Task Manager.   You would just see a list of svchost.exe processes running with little to no idea what service that process was actually running. For machines with 3.5GB of RAM or higher that has all changed.  Starting with 14942 there are individual listings of each service and so now you have the ability to see how many ...

Microsoft held it's Ignite Conference this year in Atlanta the last week of September. Typically MS uses conferences like Ignite and Build to review current offerings as well as discuss upcoming capabilities. While there was some exciting stuff around Xamarin and Azure, the Windows 10 announcements in my opinion were pretty weak. So here they are... The first was increased capabilities around Ink, so easier access from a pen click, improved handwriting recognition in sticky notes and then integration with Cortana and OneNote.   So the demo that was shown used 4 sticky notes with varying content from Flight numbers to $MSFT.   By clicking on them - the notes were changed from handwritten to the flight info and a calendar entry, or to a stock quote for Microsoft.    While pretty cool, the question to me becomes how many of the 400M Windows 10 machines out there actually have pen support ?  And secondly would this new capability be a catalyst to purchase ...