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Microsoft Forced to Slash Surface RT Prices Despite Vigorous Anti-iPad Ad Campaign

Renzatic said:
Well...uh...I never really liked Aero glass all that much. With Windows 8, I can actually read my title bars now. :p

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.
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Yeah, i've seen/played with the "improvements". Another big one is a massive revision to powershell. Which is a shame, because that is something I would like - the Win8/server 2012 version has so many more features.

I'm pretty "meh" regarding Aero as well, but the point is desktop vs desktop - you could always turn aero off on 7 if you dislike it...

There are also regressions to go with those improvements:
- search is broken. in 7 i can click start and type (for example): "kind:=email from:jeff date:last week" and get a list of emails from jeff within the last week. Windows 8 breaks this.
- i can't (for example) have a document open, and click start to enter a command line to run without the document disappearing
- I can't run the Windows 7/2008R2 RSAT (admin tools) on Windows 8. The 8/2012 tools can't administer Win7/2008R2. The Win7/2008R2 tools can't administer server 2012. I'll need two machines (or at least a VM during any transition. lol).



edit:
I agree with the rest of your post entirely.


One other annoying thing I've found with the Win8 tablets as well is the form factor. 16x9 just feels excessively long in portrait mode, and very squished in landscape mode. But then i have that issue with all 16x9 screens. I'd much prefer a similar aspect to the ipad - but that's a hardware design decision, not a Win8 problem.
 
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Meanwhile...

Best Buy is accepting iPad trade-ins so they can sell their iPad 4.

Apparently the demand has been disappointingly low.
 
cmwade77 said:
They are still too expensive. What Microsoft needed to do was come out at $99 for about 6 months to a year. Yes, they would take a major loss in the short term, but hear me out.

You sell initially at a loss to get a lot of market share, because in today's world that is where it counts. Once they had established the marketshare, then they could sell at normal prices that they can make a profit off of.

This is assuming that people actually liked Windows tablets (clearly they don't).
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That's backwards. Once you get the price down, whether you're making money or not, that's the price. If you want a $99 tablet, then when they put the price up to 300, nobody would pay that. Nobody. Unless it was made of mother of pearl.
 
Anyone know how these prices translate in the UK? Purely out of interest...I don't think I'd ever buy one.
 
Why RT?

I find Windows RT incredibly confusing. Can someone explain what does advantage is there to RT? Perhaps with these price cuts now there is lower cost, but there are full Windows tablets out there that cost about the same. I bet the new Surface RT will be the only new RT device released this fall.
 
reden said:
Have you physically seen one of these things? They're big and heavy. The only way they sell these are through retailers like Best Buy, where they shove them down ignorant consumers who are looking for the next "hottest" product.
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Exactly! :) now the decline start...
 
junctionscu said:
I find Windows RT incredibly confusing. Can someone explain what does advantage is there to RT? Perhaps with these price cuts now there is lower cost, but there are full Windows tablets out there that cost about the same. I bet the new Surface RT will be the only new RT device released this fall.
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In theory far better battery life, lighter, etc.

In reality, i've been attempting to get an RT unit to evaluate for the past 9 months, and havent been successful. I've never seen one in the wild...
 
throAU said:
- search is broken. in 7 i can click start and type (for example): "kind:=email from:jeff date:last week" and get a list of emails from jeff within the last week. Windows 8 breaks this.
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It's not broken exactly, it just has to be done from a specific place. Rather stupidly (and I hope they fix this with 8.1), start search is meant for more simplified queries, like for finding specific files, folders, and apps. Searching from Explorer allows for more granular control. Like if you want to find a document that has a specific line of text in it, or an email from a specific person on a specific date, you do that from there.

Yeah, I dunno why they think setting it up like this was a good idea. MS seems to be all about partitioning the power users from the regular ones. Metro being something else entirely the desktop is just the most obvious example of this, and it's ending up making things more confusing than it needs to be.

One other annoying thing I've found with the Win8 tablets as well is the form factor. 16x9 just feels excessively long in portrait mode, and very squished in landscape mode. But then i have that issue with all 16x9 screens. I'd much prefer a similar aspect to the ipad - but that's a hardware design decision, not a Win8 problem.
Click to expand...

Yup. I agree. When I first saw the iPad, I was sorely disappointed it wasn't a 16:9 screen. But now that I have one that I play around with daily, it really is the most comfortable size and shape for a large tablet.

Though I think 16:10 would be the happy medium between the two. It gives you more screen space for apps that need a lot of space, yet isn't so long it's unwieldy to hold for extended amounts of time.
 
Soon, they can slash even more!

In Europe, it became known, what a helpful tool Microsoft is for NSA.
 
Iconoclysm said:
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.
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The people doing Windows and Tablets are not the same people doing their Games and Music (huh?). Your point is moot. Microsoft doesn't coordinate its various branches all that well.
 
Renzatic said:
It's not broken exactly, it just has to be done from a specific place.
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Maybe I wasn't clear enough.

The level of granularity i can get with windows 8 search is NOT the same.

e.g., i can do something like

kind:=email from:jeff date:7/5/2010

(or date:thursday or whatever - its not uncommon to chat with a colleague and ask "when did you send me that again?" and then go hunting for it)

I remember testing several months ago and being most annoyed as I use that sort of query a lot, and doing it in outlook is extremely slow (Windows 7 search from the start menu is almost instant)


Furthermore...

Windows 8 search in metro doesn't actually look inside outlook messages.


edit:
I remember testing in the explorer search and being annoyed for some reason. I forget the result. At the end of the day, having 2 different indexes to search for anything is supremely retarded and a waste of my time. If i want to search for something I want to search everywhere in one place.
 
macs4nw said:
There's the issue of essentially one OS (Windows 8), running two device categories; both the desktops and tablets hamstrung by the limitations in that OS, imposed by that other device category. By definition, it can't possibly be optimized for multiple device categories.
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Honestly I think Microsoft knew this all too well. And I also think their real intention was to transition away from the traditional Windows interface, similar to what they did with DOS in the nineties.* In this way they could use "legacy software" to supplement the intitially limited library of native programs.

*Notice how they tried to reduce the desktop to an "app", just like they reduced the command prompt to a window.

The trouble is there are a lot more computer users now then there were back then, and it's not quite as easy to add a touchscreen as it was a mouse.
 
throAU said:
I remember testing in the explorer search and being annoyed for some reason. I forget the result. At the end of the day, having 2 different indexes to search for anything is supremely retarded and a waste of my time. If i want to search for something I want to search everywhere in one place.
Click to expand...

I was about to reply, then saw this.

Yup. You're right. What you want can still be done, but the way it's set up is about slapassical dumb. All searches should be done from one place like it was in Win7. Win 8.1 looks to be fixing this issue though, and if it does, I'll actually prefer it to the old Start menu style since it gives you all the control from it, and also gives you more room to browse about. The latter bit is the one good thing 8 does over 7.

Anyway, the way Win8 does things doesn't bother me much because I rarely ever get that specific. 99% of the time, I use search for quick access to documents and files I already know the names of, but I can see why it'd annoy the hell out of people who do.
 
cclloyd said:
I saw one at the MS store in the mall. It didn't have a wall. Literally the whole store is just there, so does that count?
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I dunno why "seeing something out in the wild" is such an important metric for popularity. I mean I've only ever seen 3 iPads and a handful of iPhones outside of my house. In fact, I've seen far more Android devices in use than iDevices.

Does that mean they're failures? That people prefer Android because I see them more often? Or is it a flawed metric to judge things by?
 
Renzatic said:
Win 8.1 looks to be fixing this issue though, and if it does, I'll actually prefer it to the old Start menu style since it gives you all the control from it, and also gives you more room to browse about. The latter bit is the one good thing 8 does over 7.
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Well, yes and no.

Those queries i typed above also work from the explorer search bar, and you can make the results window full screen if you want.

You can also set the window to display list, details, preview tiles, sort by date, size, type, etc.

Don't think you can customize that in the metro search?
 
A cheaper Surface won't make any difference. It's a poor product. MS is in for a huge downfall. The XBONE is not going to be very successful either.
 
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