The second gen Surface RT uses the Tegra 4 SOC and is said by many to be MUCH faster and more responsive. Certainly as good as an iPad.
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Microsoft still losing money on Surface
- Thread starter Rogifan
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The second gen Surface RT uses the Tegra 4 SOC and is said by many to be MUCH faster and more responsive. Certainly as good as an iPad.
Perhaps but I really do question the wisdom of having an RT version. Its confusing to consumers who think they're getting windows (that they can run their existing apps on), its hampered by app selection (though improving) and it really doesn't serve a business purpose. I'd say improve the Surface Pro 2, cut the price, offer more incentives and I think MS would be better served.
Makes sense.....Having a unified OS experience across devices would definitely help MS with the surface. Being able to have the same apps on your WP8 phone and W8 tablet would be a nice customer experience.......
I don't think its any more confusing to customers, the same ones that would get an ipad and expect it to run photoshop or office, like they can on their mac.
The business purpose it serves is actual MS office, for me it was. May not seem like much to some, but not all of us need a device that can run Final Cut or Photoshop or other power hungry programs. All my databases run on dedicated machines. When I go out to a client site I can just open up One Note and take my notes and it syncs with the notes I can access from my work laptop. I can open documents in office and excel without having to worry about conversion and I can just plug the micro HDMI into a display device. I'm aware that there are limitations with it in the corporate environment as well.
MS needs to differentiate better and should have named it differently. I wish the SP2 would come down in price, but what competitor can you get with a full HD screen (that doesn't lag), a U series i5, not the Y that some devices use to get excellent battery life, micro SD, USB3...with up to 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage and 5-6 hours of battery life, and a range of manufacturer peripherals? It should come with a choice of their keyboards I think. BTW, the wifi card SUCKS on 2.4GHz in the SP2 when you have bluetooth on. Yes, 16:9 can be awkward, but I don't have little tiny Burger King commercial hands so landscape is no issue. Typing on the screen is not fun and I would not want to do it exclusively, it is definitely more comfortable on our ipad mini.
Just wait until Apple finally gets around to their x86 touchscreen device, should make this market real interesting and would be definite grounds for me to part ways with the SP2, parallels gives me all the Windows processing power I need.
I disagree because with the iPad, you have iOS which Apple has done a great job at communicating that this is NOT a desktop OS, and its name is quite different. It looks different, it behaves different and has completely different apps.
For MS, you have Windows and they really don't communicate all that well that the surface is running windows rt, it really only says that office is included. A typical consumer coming into a MS store will say wow, it includes office, "I'll get that" without realizing that its a completely different and hamstrung version of windows. MS kept the name same which exacerbates the issue.
There's no guarantee that they'll do that. They're selling gazillions of iPads why muddy the waters when you don't need too.
I realize I'm not the average consumer in terms of knowledge of electronics, but I'm not confused at all with Windows RT. I know what I'm getting, and even if I wish there were a bit more apps, I'm not going to be outraged and return it when I realize I can't download iTunes. Windows RT is just like iOS when it started out, and they both share part of their name with their desktop counterparts (Windows RT, Windows 8; iOS, OSX).
It's not a hard distinction for someone with a modicum of tech knowledge, but that's not the majority of consumers out there. My wife is a pretty good example, she doesn't know much about technology at all, but still enjoys her ipad and her macbook air with windows on it. In trying to consolidate these 2 for her I showed her some windows tablets. She really liked the surface RT when it came out because of the metal casing and flip stand. I had to explain to her that most of the windows programs she used would not work on RT. She knew what Windows was of course, but had no idea what RT was and what the distinction was. She has several innocuous programs she uses such as one for printing graphics, another for putting together photo albums, etc, all of which were windows legacy programs and had no app equivalent.
The thing is, if there was some positive trade off then maybe I would have went through the work of convincing her. If RT had better battery life, if it was thinner and lighter, if it was cheaper, but none of those things were true versus an atom tablet. RT did not offer her any significant advantages over an Atom tablet, in fact it didn't offer her any advantages at all.
If she didn't have my advice she would have purchased the RT unit, went home and would have spent hours trying to figure out why her beloved programs would not install.
The Surface is a really neat piece of tech, but is probably something most professionals wouldn't consider. Tablets are mostly used by consumers to check Facebook. If I had the choice of a laptop and a Surface, I'd still choose the laptop because then I can sit it on my knee and be able to work without a table.
What i hate about laptops is many of them burn your knee/leg after 30 mins of work.
All things being equal, I've been intrigued by the Surface. I think it can replace some/most of my laptop needs quite easily, but I'm not willing to spend 1,000 bucks on this.
I guess, I think they were hoping for more apps by now on the platform? But RT has a limited market. Also you are a bit right with the confusion, I mean their is one iOS, one Android, different versions of them but they all run the same apps essentially.
But with the Surface RT and Pro side by side and the tile desktop on show, apart from the device colour and thickness you can't really tell a difference.
I've been doing this since January of this year with a Pro 2 with great success, and at well over $1k. However, I'm starting my MBA this summer, so I really don't know how much I'm going to enjoy online classes on the 10.6" screen. My only other PC is an Ubuntu box I have setup as a home server & tinker machine. Sold my 2011 15"MBP last fall, been eyeballing a 13" rMBP or an Air, I'm one of those many people who cannot make up their mind on which one.
Same. Though, I do hope Microsoft continues to make the Surface. They are on to something, and on the edge of doing something really cool.
Despite what Apple says, tablet and PC will converge. Surface is just the beginning.
Good point, I upgraded my 13" MBP a couple of years ago to a 15" MBP precisely for the screen real estate. I needed a bigger screen to remote into my work's servers (text/images too tiny) and found Aperture and photoshop were hampered by the smaller display.
My point is that while I can see this being a possible replacement to a laptop, I wonder about the practicality of it being a replacement. It would probably be better suited to supplement a computer. Kind of how Apple was originally marketing the MBA back when it was first introduced.
I'm not so sure. I think there will always be a place for a device more oriented around consumption and one that's specific to productivity. To me Surface is much more like a laptop than a tablet. Just look at Microsoft marketing materials. Surface is hardly ever shown without the kickstand and keyboard and rarely in portrait orientation. To me, this is Surface:
