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Microsoft Forced to Slash Surface RT Prices Despite Vigorous Anti-iPad Ad Campaign
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So when the iPhone 5 S comes out in a few months and outsells the Galaxy S4 you'll be stating that same, that it's not fair to compare them?
Those of you gloating over this news and hoping the Surface would fail, do you realize that competition is a good thing for the market?
This is the reason why I think we're gonna see RT being phased out here soon. With Haswell bringing excellent battery life to the x86 scene, RT is just about redundant. There's no reason to provide a long lasting, all day ARM chip option for over $500 when your high end devices can last roughly as long on a charge and do considerably more.
This I can agree with. While I think a good 98% of the Windows 8 bashing around here is nothing more than bandwagoning and fanboy trumpeting, the dual UI view doesn't work as well as it should. The Metro side of things doesn't have enough powerful apps to justify paring it with an expensive x86 chip, and the desktop UI is too crowded and small for touch. It doesn't succeed in offering the best of any one thing, but rather does a merely good enough job with two.
To me the inplementation is horrible. If you start on metro the first thing you do tales you to desktop. You stay there unless you manually go back to metro where you are whisked to the desktop the next thing you do. I might have enjoyed all of the zipping around in the 70's, but now it's just tiring.
As far as stability, etc. it's not bad at all and learning metro takes a few minutes only. Metro IS what's driving most away though..
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I would take a pro in the 500.00 range.
Oh yes Jaguar. I am embarrassed I forgot.
Otherwise, Tegra 3 is ancient now. Fire sale it.
Could you elaborate or explain in what way the iPad has improved or been influenced by other tablets?
Apple has an impressive first mover advantage in the tablet segment, and while other manufacturers only seem to be able to offer me-too products that do not hurt the iPad in any way, I hardly think that you can call this real competition. What the market needs and what would push Apple to really improve the iPad would be if anyone else would introduce a truly disruptive new tablet product.
Sorry, don't mean to sound pedantic, but we hear this competition argument all the time, but no-one seems to know what it really means in this context...
Agreed (apart from the "good enough" bit, there are alternatives that will - and already are - eat Microsoft's lunch on this one).
The killer app for Surface Pro (or whatever Windows based tablet) is to be able to sell you a tablet INSTEAD of a laptop.
As it is, we are considering the Lenovo I mentioned above (the Helix, i remember the name now: http://shopap.lenovo.com/au/en/tablets/thinkpad/thinkpad-helix/ ) because it is a good enough laptop and similar price to the HP Elitebooks we are buying that we could simply buy them instead and the user ends up with a tablet they can use for sketching on and other tablet-y things (e.g., OneNote combined with wireless projector = good for meetings - would be even better if it works with multiple users on the same shared notebook - haven't tested that yet). The hardware/concept is great, but the OS is just garbage.
I.e., we wouldn't pay any more in terms of computer resources per user, but they get a tablet "for free" both in terms of $ and the number of devices they are carrying around. The battery life is excellent for a laptop as well due to having a big battery in both the base and the screen.
It's just not a great tablet due to the OS... but it's "free" for a business user if you can live with Windows 8 on the desktop side of things.
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What you're saying really isn't true - Microsoft is a very diverse company. If you think Gaming and Music aren't something MS employees do you must be living in a bubble.
I don't see Win8 on the desktop as being all that bad myself, but then again, I rarely ever use actual Metro apps. I mostly use the start screen to organize all the apps I don't want to pin to my taskbar and do searches. For that, it works great.
It's when you start using those Metro apps that Win8 gets weird. You have two sets of applications that you interact with in entirely different ways nestled inside the same OS. That's just...yeah...it's not good UI design. Like if someone fires up Metro Mail and wants to get back to their desktop, they'll find that hitting the windows key toggles you between the start screen and the last used metro app (which the desktop is now considered to be as of Windows 8). What you have to do instead is hit the win key, then hit the desktop tile. It's such a huge change to a long since well established idea, it's no wonder people are confused.
See, I like the idea of what MS is doing with Windows 8, and I can understand it's a necessary transitional product between the old ways and new, but they could've designed things to handle a little better than what we've got.
Can you rephrase that in a way that makes me care?
Propping up poor products just for the sake of them being there, purely as a tickbox to wave the presence of competition is not only nonsense, it's anti-competition. The whole purpose of competition is that your product lives or fails based on how well it does compared to others on the market - others make you be better, and put pressure on your prices to stay down. Obviously competition appears to have succeeded here. HP's little failure was exactly a strongest-of-the-fittest situation. This appears to be the same thing. Weak product, weak reception, bye-bye bad idea. But apparently you would prefer it to remain in the fighting ring, regardless of how good or bad it is, regardless of how well or poorly it was received, regardless of how well or poorly it sells. Competition is as much about weeding out the crap as bringing in the new ideas.
The fact that they've dropped the prices exactly says that competition is working. Seriously - is this not what competition is supposed to be? Is this not good news for consumers?
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I actually liked Bill Gates too due to his charitible nature and I respect the guy for his business acumen, if only Ballmer had 10% of his brains then MS wouldn't be in this mess.
On the other hand stop moaning about something that happened, five, six years ago and I don't get if you vehemently hate a company so much and hate their princilples as you do with Apple why oh why do you keep coming here on an Apple-centric website, you must have so much pent up energy
Microsoft is at a 5 year high for their stock. Balmer was CEO during all 5 of those years.
Google today exceeded their all time stock price high for the history of the company.
Can you say the same for Apple? Apple is down about $270 from their all time high.
I don't hate Apple. I do disagree with their business practices and personally feel like they are milking their users for everything they can while they can. That's not a bad thing if you are a company. Apple is in business to make the most profit it can. They did that well IMO with very bad business practices that has always put the customer to go to the press or have a class action lawsuit until they act on bad press.
At WWDC Apple previewed a rip off pastel new version of iOS and a MacPro that is supposed to please their pro market that isn't upgradeable.
If you follow tech you'd be asking for more at a more affordable price.
If Apple doesn't introduce anything more than they showed at WWDC it's going to be more than a long summer with nothing from Apple. It's going to be a landslide for their stock.
Tim Cook and Jony Ive both have an agenda.
Tim Cook is looking for maximum profit with giving as little as possible.
Jony Ive is and always has been form over function.
I don't believe that's a good combination when they have Android to deal with on the mobile side and Microsoft to deal with (from OS and Office) on the PC side.
It's just the same thing that happened with the Mac. This time it will take longer before Apple has to borrow a Million to stay afloat thanks to the boatload of money they have in Ireland.
I don't really mind windows that much. It's just an OS like anything else, you can customize it to do what you want for the most part. I like OS X because I use it WAY more, and I know it inside and out. I don't think Windows is as nice, but it's not terrible or anything.
I suspect most Windows 8 users are the same.
I have yet to find a Metro app that does anything I actually NEED. Everything I actually NEED is in the desktop.
Which begs the question: why would I want Windows 8?
Yes, there are minor performance improvements (my win7 work laptop - an elitebook 8570p - actually boots faster than the Lenovo Helix above - and the Win7 box is not SSD). Supposedly there are security improvements.
But they're simply not enough to justify a round of application compatibility testing/upgrades (I know for a fact already that we have apps in use that will not work in in IE10 at all - that work in IE9), IT resources spent on doing the actual upgrade, etc. Even if the software was FREE (which it sort of is for us, given we are on an enterprise licensing agreement - we pay for a client desktop license which means same cost per year whether we run XP, Vista, 7 or 8).
In my view the only real compelling reason I'd want Windows 8 is for the touch UI, for a tablet, which depends on there being Metro based apps available to do what I need to do. Desktop mode on the tablet won't cut it.
The fact that Microsoft STILL doesn't have a metro version of Office out is a massive, massive screw up on their part. This should have been ready to go on Windows 8 release day - they may have seen actual business uptake of the Surface devices if it was.
We're "Microsoft One" and we do one thing: Windows, Office, and Exchange.
Plus maybe Xbox too.
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The phrase "damning with faint praise" leaps immediately to mind here.
Plus maybe Xbox too.
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The phrase "damning with faint praise" leaps immediately to mind here.
Balmer said itunes would fail, Balmer said iPhone would fail, Balmer said iPad would fail. Balmer told us that microsoft windows tablets would stir up the market.
You can always count on Balmer for knowing what he's talking about.
You can always count on Balmer for knowing what he's talking about.
The prices already came down to under $NZ600; I was really impressed, such a good product for that price point, and so much more useful than an iPad, which I to this day do not understand the use case for beyond iOS games on a bigger screen.
It is a shame they launched Surface before Haswell and needed something with decent battery life - the RT's is amazing, but not having the distinction would have been nicer. Now I just have to wait to see what looks like a good Windows 8 tablet or at least touch laptop - man I wish Apple would put touch on the rMBP!!
It is a shame they launched Surface before Haswell and needed something with decent battery life - the RT's is amazing, but not having the distinction would have been nicer. Now I just have to wait to see what looks like a good Windows 8 tablet or at least touch laptop - man I wish Apple would put touch on the rMBP!!
I can't at some of the biased troll fan boys on here.
They're lowering the prices because they're about to announce the next generation of Surface. I had the iPad, and tried out the Surface RT and it's so much better at getting things done. I love my iPhone, but to knock off everything Microsoft does just makes you look like an ignorant fan boy.
They're lowering the prices because they're about to announce the next generation of Surface. I had the iPad, and tried out the Surface RT and it's so much better at getting things done. I love my iPhone, but to knock off everything Microsoft does just makes you look like an ignorant fan boy.
Well...uh...I never really liked Aero glass all that much. With Windows 8, I can actually read my title bars now.
But on a semi serious note, there are some improvements made to the desktop that makes Windows 8 somewhat worth the upgrade. The new file copy dialog and task manager are great. Plus the win+x menu is a killer way to access all the commonly used underpinnings of the OS from one convenient place. There are enough improvements there to consider keeping it around instead of slapping 7 on if you get a new computer.
But these aren't HUGE upgrades overall. They're nice, sure, but not worth spending $200 on. If MS didn't have that $50 early adopter deal back when 8 first came out, I probably wouldn't have made the jump myself.
And jumping off from that, I don't consider it a hugely necessary business upgrade unless you're using it as a Hyper-V server to host a bunch of Windows 7 VMs. I mean hell, there's really nothing in 8 to justify upgrade all your office PCs to it. Nice desktop features aside, it doesn't do the basics any better than 7 does, which in that environment, is more what you're concerned about. Stability always trumps flash and features when smooth operation is concerned. Not unless the flash and features are so good you MUST have them, which Win8 doesn't offer.
Yeah, MS might have a good idea going on behind the scenes, but they're not doing much to capitalize on it, or tempt people to bring their apps over to the new APIs.
You want people using WinRT? Make it just as capable as Win32, then design your own damn apps around it. It's a huge failing on their part that Office doesn't have a fully functional, elegantly designed Metro equivalent. If they did, it would've gained more developer attention, and MS would have a better foundation for nixing the desktop entirely for tablets.
And even worse, the actual WinRT apps aren't as good as their Metro inspired web apps. Just look at Live Mail and Skydrive in your web browser. It's got that flat, smooth MS style going on, yet doesn't make any usability sacrifices. You can navigate them just as easily with your finger as you can with a mouse. It's great design. Now compare them to the Skydrive and Mail apps that come standard with 8/RT.
...yeah. Nowhere near as good. They almost seem like betas in comparison.
So why aren't they as good? It's like MS has a ton of great ideas, but they're not evenly applied. And even worse, they're not applied to the places they most need to be. It's obvious they want people using WinRT, but hell, if you're not gonna take the effort to do it yourself, why should your developers?
It's kinda sad seeing a company with so much talent and good ideas fail to capitalize on them. They're not gonna beat Apple at what's now their own game by halfassing everything.
haha. I didn't mean it to be some kind of back handed insult although it doesn't sort of come out that way. Most of the time we're not interacting with the OS anyway, we're using some other application. But we do need the OS to behave normally otherwise.
Indeed. I wonder how many people bought the RT thinking you can just install any app you want instead of relying on the market place with f*all content.