“We’re sure that more high-density Windows laptops are on the way, but the Kirabook is the first to make it to market. The laptop raises some natural questions: Does a computer that is both thinner and lighter than the Pixel and the Pros skimp on battery life to achieve these feats? Is the Kirabook good enough to justify its jaw-dropping $1,599.99 starting price? Most importantly, can Windows support high-density displays as well as OS X, Chrome OS, iOS, Android, and others can?” Great laptop, great screen, decent battery life – but Windows’ scaling is a terrible mess. Metro is fine, but the proper desktop is a disaster.
Desktop scaling is getting better with Windows 8.1, but it will never be perfect on the Desktop.
There are a ton of UI toolkits, drawing APIs, and legacy platforms which don’t respect UI scaling settings at all. There’s no much Microsoft can do about Adobe disregarding OS settings.
The fact that it works on the Metro side of things is only because Microsoft locks you down to either HTML5/JS or XAML which does respect scaling settings.
The short term solution is the Windows 8.1 enhancements, long term though Microsoft needs to move more of Windows over to Metro.
That has to be the most obvious piece of flame bate I’ve seen posted here in a while. Congrats there Mr. Nelson, you win the Captain Obvious Troll award for the month.
OSNews has had like four or five red meat Windows articles filled with clickbait garbage plastered all over the News and Page 2 for the past few days.
Its sad that me inconveniencing the merry band of Metro haters with facts is enough to win me an award, but I hardly think I take the cake for flame bait.
Windows and ms applications scale with DPI, too many third party applications dont. For example Autodesk Sketchbook will scale on the desktop, but Adobe applications are hardcoded not to scale with DPI on windows.
Its not automatic iirc, unless you explicitly support it in your manifest you get DWM DPI virtual scaling, rather than true DPI scaling.
More ties into it, generally the more nity gritty GDI you do the worse off you’ll be.
….Just wondering what GDI means..??
cheers
For instance, Microsoft could not render text on a non-compliant program before scaling, and instead do it after scaling. (Slower, because it has to be rendered twice – once for the program to know where the text is, and again for the real rendering, but…)
Then, raster-scale the rest.
How much longer are we going to see those awful stickers on all windows laptops? Who the hell cares about “core i7 inside” or the damn “energy star”? Why are they intentionally ruining the appearance of the product?
If they absolutely have to have them, why not spraypaint the damn logos on the bottom of the laptop?
Edited 2013-05-15 14:37 UTC
At least you can peel them off without them making a mess. First thing I do when I get a new machine
Not always, the ones on my old dell m1530 took some coercing and left a generally unpleasant leftover glue. Good thing the surface was aluminum – if it was plastic there would be lots of nasty scratches.
I usually cover the scratches with nice Centos/Fedora/whatever stickers. 🙂
The fact that PC manufacturers like to use the same shell for a wide range of configurations doesn’t help. Shoppers can only tell them apart from the stickers. For example, I saw six different HP Envy dv6’s on display at a local HP counter last week: one with AMD A6, one with AMD A8, three with Intel Core i7, and one with Intel Core i5. They all looked very much alike, apart from the array of stickers on the palmrest. In a sense, those stickers are part of the visual differentiators.
I could see the logic behind this but OTOH every shop i’ve been to always had a little information card with the specs next to the laptop anyway.
The stickers are probably more about promotion of brands than specs?…
Actually AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel subsidize most of those stickers. Sometimes they seem to use super glue on those things, which ends up ruining the surface when attempting to remove them.
Whoever was the marketing “genius” who came up with that idea should be forced to remove sticky residue from anything he owns for the rest of his or her life…
Ahh. Money. I should have guessed it was more then some brain dead marketing and “tradition”.
Still one of my major gripe with current laptop.
I’m guessing I would have to buy one of these non-reflective screen ( and try to stick it)
Yeah, matte screens are very hard to find these days. Only reliable way to avoid glossy screens is to get a BTO from a shop like XoticPC, Power Notebooks, AvaDirect or Puget Systems.
Here’s another reviewer who’s unable to keep his bias in check: the 13″ Retina MacBook Pro with a 256GB SSD is $1,699.99 but I dare you to find a single review complaining about the “jaw-dropping asking price”.
Okay, the review itself is not as negative as the introduction makes it sound, but even the “good points” as presented in a way that is is not entirely positive. For instance:
– Large, fast SSD is a standard feature, as is 8GB of RAM (though the latter is non-upgradeable)
completely ignores the fact that 8 GB of RAM in the 13″ Retina MacBook Pro aren’t expandable either. And don’t get met started about:
– Lots of fan noise under load
– High starting price and no touch in the cheapest SKU
because MacBooks Pros under load are notoriously whisper quiet and, of course, brimming with touch functionality, aren’t they? 😉
Now, don’t get me wrong: my point is that some reviewers try very hard to find faults with most products without an Apple logo on it, not that (given the same price range) the 13″ Retina MacBook Pro isn’t more desirable to some people.
RT.
Edited 2013-05-16 13:10 UTC
I’m typing this on a netbook, pretty much the only netbook (assuming chromebooks don’t count) currently produced. I get that you might want to pay $500 more for a more advanced computer in the same basic size and weight but once you pass the 1000 dollar mark you lose me. I would need way more oomph to be able to buy that.