Microsoft Announces Intel Atom-Based Surface 3 With Windows 8.1 for $499

[Renzatic]

As an example, Pentium CPUs are still out there and being updated but are not powerful enough to sustain a good experience with Windows and going down to low-power CPUs on a full Windows 8.1 will most likely end up not performing the way that consumers are hoping.

I've got a nearly 8 year old AMD Opteron DDR1 machine (that's soon to be retired) running Win8 without any problem whatsoever. I can run Office, Modo, Photoshop, and a browser with multiple tabs open on it without any lag or hiccups whatsoever. It shows its age sometimes in weird ways, but it's hardly a chunkity, slow experience. By this point, that little Atom is probably faster than my once high end, cutting edge PC.

Some people greatly overestimate the requirements needed for a smooth experience.

 

[Black Magic]

So what you're suggesting is that Microsoft should just drop support for Windows, create a new OS and piss business owners off? Lose a majority of their customers.

If you haven't looked at Microsoft news lately, Microsoft is not really focusing on Windows as they are the cloud. They want to be your default word processor wherever you may ago.

Nope. I think Windows is good for the enterprise. I think in the consumer space, they need something better than what they offer now with a strong focus. Me personally, I would created a new consumer OS built for this decade and not with a foundation designed 2 decades ago. You have to keep up with the times.

You can put syrup on poop but that doesn't make it pancakes!

 

[Renzatic]

You may not feel the need to buy Antivirus software but that doesn't mean you don't have a virus.

You know how hard it is to get a virus these days? You have to really go out of your way to get one...

 

[SockRolid]

Microsoft on Tuesday announced the Surface 3 tablet with Windows 8.1, available in May for a starting price of $499.

Nice to have hobbies.
Isn't it, Satya?

 

[Serban]

Common 2 gb ram is not future proof
And after installing Windows 10 and Office you will have left like 10 Gb free storage

iPad Air 2 with 2 gb ram is more future proof than this

 

[Liquorpuki]

Lol, AWESOME arguement!
Sooooooo.... there are some products that you feel are overpriced. Ummmm, how would that possibly relate to the product I mentioned being overpriced?

Lol, this is SO desperately disparate from the topic, it is akin to you telling me my car is overpriced & me responding: "oh yeah, well... caviar is expensive!"
True or not.... it has NOTHING to do with what we are talking about.

You really wanna believe the BOM of a Surface = that of a Chromebook, go ahead I don't care

I do not agree. How does OEM compete with Microsoft when they are marketing it like crazy. Most OEM are happier to sell chromebook if they can. No need to pay the Microsoft Tax. Basically people buy windows because office runs better on it. The true monopoly is office.

Chromebooks are a smaller market and a budget market. What OEM's gain by not having to license, they lose in margins and market penetration.

Also, the history of W8 = MS gave the OEM's free reign for half a year. OEM's ignored hardware guidelines and did stuff like put out $300 W8 laptops without touchscreens. End result is W8 tanked hard. MS ended up going into hardware to salvage W8 and created the Surface line to show what they felt the OEM's should have created. Now its an actual brand. All their Surface hardware has been priced high enough to give OEM's space to compete on price. That Atom Surface 3 is $500. OEM's could put out an equivalent product at $100 less and still pull a profit.

 

[theheadguy]

Let me admit my bias up front: I despise Microsoft. I literally passed up the chance to walk across the street and hear Bill Gates speak.

1 month after I spent $1000 on my surface pro for work. It's a much better machine, but $499 is a great basic deal. But when all is said and done, I hate windows.

So any actual good reason for the despise and hate? I mean, aside from the Zune and Windows 98?

 

[Black Magic]

not sure if this comment was sarcastic, ironic or just ignorant.

I did laugh.

This isnt' windows 95 anymore

I realize that MS has automated defrags for their OS in recent versions. Do us all a favor though and run defrag c: /A and post it here. Thanks!

 

[Time Less]

Price seems pretty reasonable but I wonder how it will perform with that atom chip. The base model with 2gb of ram sounds painful.

 

[Black Magic]

You know how hard it is to get a virus these days? You have to really go out of your way to get one...

Torrents.....

 

[DotCom2]

Let's wait and see how Apple reacts to this.
iPad Pro???

 

[bobr1952]

Not a fan of Microsoft or Windows, but this looks like a decent product.

 

[Liquorpuki]

Please feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

------

I think you missed the point Liquorpuki made when he mentioned the OEM's get to sell essentially the same hardware for less; typically in the $300 range. If MS were looking to hurt the OEM's they could have intro'd the S3 at $299 instead of $499. That give's the OEM's room to breathe. Surfaces are reference machines for OEM's as well.

You're right. This is exactly what I was getting at.

 

[cfedu]

Well that's equally as insane as hating or loving Samsung or Apple or whoever. they genuinely don't give a monkeys about you.

Why waste your energy in hating a company that make and pushes technology forward even if you don't want to buy that particular brand / tech. I don't like Windows, but I love the xBox. I don't like Samsung phone interfaces but love their chips in my iPhone or the chips in my Fridge Freezer.

The worse part is that Apple is becoming worse than MS in certain ways.

 

[Serban]

it's clear that an iPad Pro is coming in October

 

[Renzatic]

Torrents.....

Yeah, and how many people torrent? What percentage of the average Mom 'n Pop demographic that the iPad is apparently perfect for because it's so simple are gonna hop on Pirate Bay and download a pirated copy of Office?

That's hardly what I'd call a driveby, random infection.

 

[Daalseth]

Touch screen is just another input device so that's not an issue with Linux. The bigger question is will MS allow you to boot other operating systems.

As long as I can nuke and pave....
I DO NOT like Win8.anything.

 

[crsh1976]

Price seems pretty reasonable but I wonder how it will perform with that atom chip. The base model with 2gb of ram sounds painful.

Win 8.x and 10 run well-enough on 2 GB as long as you don't launch 5+ apps and have 10 tabs open in your browser in a low-end computing context; 2 GB of RAM works now, but it's not great by any stretch and it's certainly not future-proof.

That said, nothing is future-proof nowadays.

 

[Serban]

Win 8.x and 10 run well-enough on 2 GB as long as you don't launch 5+ apps and have 10 tabs open in your browser in a low-end computing context; 2 GB of RAM works now, but it's not great by any stretch and it's certainly not future-proof.

That said, nothing is future-proof nowadays.

A MAC PRO with 8 or 12 core and 64 RAM is future proof, even a top iMac spec or 15 MBP are future proof
future proof i mean 5 years

 

[TheHateMachine]

We are gradually shifting out our HP laptops + iPad combo all over our hospital for Surface Pro 3s. People are really impressed with the devices and are just chucking their HP and iPads to the curb. All the executives want them and surprisingly physicians (Who are all heavy Apple users) want them instead of ipads/macbooks. We are running Atom based mini PCs from HP with our image and they handle everything just fine. This will be nice as we can give our physicians Surface 3s for cheaper instead of giving them SP3s which typically go to admin and IT staff.

 

[lowendlinux]

A MAC PRO with 8 or 12 core and 64 RAM is future proof

Not really the graphics cards are already obsolete.

 

[gmanist1000]

2gb of RAM running a full desktop OS. No thanks.

I was excited until I saw that

 

[LordVic]

I realize that MS has automated defrags for their OS in recent versions. Do us all a favor though and run defrag c: /A and post it here. Thanks!

actually, you're just proving your own ignorance on this subject.

Firstly: Fragmentation of a hard drive is not a function of the operating system. it is a function of the File system type. A fat32 system will be more fragmented than a NTFS system. Fragmentation is a by-product of the File systems way of handling free space and continuous file system usage.

with FAT32 and NTFS, fragmentation occurs because the filesystem doesn't check if it's the best place to put data, it just starts dumping it in the first available spot, then skips over used space, and continues on. It operates on the "save first, then we'll clean up later" mentality. EXT and HFS+ operate differently and first scan for the best place for that data before writing it.

there are pros and cons to either approach (HFS and EXT take slightly more time to write to do this)

Windows Provides the defrag tool as a counter to this. Microsoft however have previously attempted to switch Fielsystem types (during Vista development they were creating a new one, but public backlash stopped them)

HFS+ does also run the problem of having to use more space on disk and performs it's de fragmentation on the fly.

However, the defragmentation discussion becomes moot when factoring in SSD and flashbased storage devices

----------

Torrents.....

Torrents are no safer / insecure than any other file download method.

it is also non specific to what OS you are on, as trojans / worms can be found for most systems. Windows tends to get the brunt of it due to sheer volume of windows products that are out there (something like 90% of the world is on windows)

Like any system, regardless if windows, OSx or Linux, you should always be cognitive of the source of your download and ensure that you are not installing something that you cannot verify the source of.

 

[diamond.g]

Intel Atom is better than M cpu?
so this will be more performant than the new macbook?

Eh, multicore performance is about the same, but that is due to Atom having more (real) cores.

Had an afterthought I thought I'd share....

It seems MS is doing some interesting things here from a business standpoint, I think they are really taking a gamble here.

My guess is this is a lost leader machine. In other words, I'm guessing MS is still stuck on the idea that they are a software company and plan on making their money on the OS and MS Office subscription fees in the long run when people's free period runs up on their current software.

However, the flaw to that thinking is, if you start out this this Surface, can you imagine how slow it would be in two years trying to run Windows 10.X?

I would think most people who jump on this within a year are looking to replace it because it's too slow and having a full OS on a underpowered tablet really offers little to someone who really just wants a tablet for simple tasks like email and games.

The result... MS sells something and makes little money up front hoping for more revenue from a loyal customers... but instead will give the customer a bad experience and cause them to look at alternatives quickly.

It will be interesting to see how this all works out in the long-run.

Performance with newer versions of windows hasn't gone down since Vista. The main issue with commodity PC's is skimping on HDD/SSD. Older versions of eMMC are atrociously slow compared to standard SSD (and lets not get started on M.2 SATA)

Windows 10 will run slow on this config...so
I think the main selling point will be the 599$ with 128 SSD and 4 Gb RAM
with 100$ you double the storage and ram
Anyone knows after windows 8.1 or windows 10 is install on the 64 Gb storage version, you are left with how much free space?

IIRC ~20-24GB should be available.

It only took about 5 years but Atom today is a different story entirely. Not to mention most venders dropping 1.8/2.5" hard drives a like a rock and moving to eMMC if not going full blown mSATA SSD.

After getting your first SSD you realize it was the HARD DRIVE all along.

This!

I've got a nearly 8 year old AMD Opteron DDR1 machine (that's soon to be retired) running Win8 without any problem whatsoever. I can run Office, Modo, Photoshop, and a browser with multiple tabs open on it without any lag or hiccups whatsoever. It shows its age sometimes in weird ways, but it's hardly a chunkity, slow experience. By this point, that little Atom is probably faster than my once high end, cutting edge PC.

Some people greatly overestimate the requirements needed for a smooth experience.

I realize that MS has automated defrags for their OS in recent versions. Do us all a favor though and run defrag c: /A and post it here. Thanks!

Shouldn't have to defrag solid state storage anyways (if I am not mistaken Windows 8.1 won't let you).

 

[thejadedmonkey]

But if you look at it from their end, the Surface hasn't sold well at all.

If you look at MS's financial report, the Surface line is a "billion dollar industry" for Microsoft, meaning it pulls in $1,000,000,000 a year. There's a chance you might want to reevaluate your position

The Atom is not a powerful enough processor for desktop Windows and desktop applications. One again, Microsoft is missing the memo on the mobile device revolution, which will end up being good news for Apple, et al.

The CPU they're using in it is more powerful than the one in the rMB. #justsayin If you want the technical details, it's slower at single core usage, but the quad core supposedly outperform the Core M used in the rMB on anything that uses > 2 processors, by a slight margin.