Seems like a pretty balanced look at the Surface. They do talk about the 'available storage' a bit but I wish they were even more clear about it, something like "a 128G iPad has Xgb for users, the 128G Surface Pro has Ygb for users." My thought is that calling it out helps make it a customer visible difference that can be marketed against.
comparing iOS to Surface pro is just a example of what is wrong with the article and some of the comments here.
compare osx to the surface pro. Oh wait. OSX doesn't run on anything less than a Macbook Air which weighs 2.8 lbs. It also ships with 80gb and 128gb disk of which I do not know what is available to users. the 80gb air sells at $999 and the 128gb at $1099. And the air doesn't function as a tablet, does not have a touchscreen display etc etc.
Seriously poor reporting here. Compare apples to apples and then buyers can make informed decisions.
I agree that this (MB Air vs Surface Pro) is the larger story, and its not being well covered, but I lay some of that at Microsoft's door rather than the press. Generally there will be a 'press kit' with the demo device which highlights things that the manufacturer thinks are important.
I've not seen Microsoft's press kit for the Surface Pro. It has been my experience though that when I have seen the press kit the story written at least mentions all the high points, if only to disagree or dismiss them.
This is indeed a very serious problem for Microsoft.
Because they are positioning this device as a laptop and a tablet.
To not want comparisons with the iPad completely misunderstands what people are expecting from a tablet.
Microsoft was very vocal about the iPad being an expensive and useless netbook. And that people don't really want a tablet experience, they want a fully fledged OS.
The difference here is pretty obvious to me. The Surface can stand alone, recover and reset itself, etc. The iPad, should something go wrong, is a useless brick without Apple's helpful malware called iTunes available on another PC.
There are lots of obvious differences. Both companies have compromised on the ideal of a light device that runs nearly forever ona single charge, has a high resolution screen, a powerful processor, plenty of memory, all the apps you need, &c.
Each company has made different compromises. The question is, to whom are those choices/differences meaningful?
Being able to use a Surface without access to a Mac or PC is meaningful to people who are buying a primary PC that happens to have a detachable screen. Being able to store all of your music or movies on it is meaningful to those who are buying a post-PC device.
I don't know why you call iTunes "MalWare," but it sounds to me like you'd compute on an Abacus before you'd use an Apple device.
Two Macbook Pros and two Macbook Airs. I'm both clumsy and impatient and a huge fan of them. I'd only consider something like the Thinkpad Carbon with a better screen over my Macbooks. That having been said, iTunes could greet me with a cup of coffee and sex in the morning and I would still scoff.
My comments weren't meant to say anything about iPad or Surface. Personally, I think that Surface is a great start and I think people are being really short-sighted about it. Obviously the iPad is a different use case as you point out and isn't going anywhere, I think that's good as consumers define what they want/expect.
Fair point, I agree that the proper terminology, it should be GiB to be explicit. I was just trying to point out, that the only time you should ever consider GB might mean 2^30 is with memory (and it usually does with memory). You should always assume that GB means 10^9 in all other scenarios. Bandwidth, Disk Space - GB always means 10^9.
I've always seen his reactions to Apple products as being dispassionate and bored. He doesn't seem easily impressed by anything, and yet he's always accused of being a rabid Apple fanboy.
When Steve Jobs referred to him as a "good friend" and blew a lid internally when Mossberg wasn't "writing good things" about MobileMe, you can see where the perception comes from.
Perhaps unfairly. It showed a willingness to be critical regardless of relationships. I've never understood why instances like this are considered exceptions proving a rule.
It seems to me like the battery life is the killer here. A highly portable device just needs long battery life. Mobility == no access to power, the two just go together. It seems to me that MS would have been better to release the RT stand alone and wait for the next generation of Intel chips (working closely with Intel, if necessary) to dramatically decrease power and get the fans out of this thing. If it had no fans and got 2x battery life it would be a pretty awesome device.
I came on to post this exact same thing. Clearly there was abuse of flagging going on. I would hope that a moderator will look at it and see who was needlessly flagging posts.
The thing is I couldn't care less about the surface-pro, or Apple or Google products specifically. To me these are interesting tech stories that I want to know more about and when people with vested interests (ab)use flagging to kill an otherwise valid story, that annoys me and I think, detracts from what it means to be part of the HN News Community.
The point of the Surface "exercise" for Microsoft is not really to make a profit.
They're trying to "lead the herd" in creating a feasible merge of the "desktop" paradigm and the "mobile" paradigm, keeping Windows in the center. This is extremely important to Microsoft, since they have no foothold in the mobile market, and that's where the entire consumer market is headed. We can expect the merge of the desktop paradigm and mobile paradigm (i.e. keeping both battery-life, light weight and performance) to happen at some point in the future anyway, but meanwhile, Android and iOS/OS X are growing at a rapid pace, all at the cost of Windows marketshare. If mainstream users move to these OSs, the merge will happen with Android and iOS as center, and Microsoft will have a real rocky road ahead.
Trust me, Microsoft is willing to throw tons of money at this problem.
Unfortunately it's a repeat of the Windows Mobile/CE debacle, the enthusiast crowd that makes your product acceptable to the general computing public is treated with apathy bordering on hostility.
They shipped a Windows NT-based system that cannot run win32 applications due to a marketing decision and expected it to be sung with high praises.
Compare this with Google Chromebook, while Google is focusing on users using it with the ChromeOS (and no local storage), they are not stopping anyone from using it how they choose.
One of the positive outcomes of the earlier experience was XDA, and it's members are at it again: http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=1288
Waiting to see what the market makes of it.