
Microsoft pulls in $1.35B in revenue for Surface line - jfuhrman
http://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-pulls-impressive-135-billion-revenue-surface-line
======
ArnoldP
They certainly did something right, though I'm not quite sure what it was. A
few years back, you couldn't step in front of an undergrad class here (Canada)
without being subject to a wall of glowing bitten apples staring at you, now
at least a quarter I'd estimate are those surface tablets.

Who knew people would take a chance on laptop that doesn't work when on your
lap.

~~~
pjc50
My wife has an SP3. Not only does it work fine on a lap, but it has a very
nice stylus. It runs Adobe Indesign just fine. It runs Steam just fine, along
with many slightly older games. The builtin speakers are good, as is the
keyboard cover. It's quite portable and has a battery life of several hours
when running Word + browser.

The Surface RT on the other hand remains kind of pointless.

~~~
gtk40
Well, seeing as Windows RT is not receiving updates and the Surface 3 runs
full Windows, isn't the "Surface RT" essentially dead?

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gill984
My sister has an SP3 and likes it a lot. She's a student in college and I feel
like this is a good niche for the hardware. The main draw to the Surface for
her was the pen because of how well it worked compared to other options. She
downloads pdf or ppt presentations and can annotate and take notes in class.

Is there any other hardware that can do this just as well? I think maybe the
ipad pro but I have never used one.

~~~
jallmann
My sister does the exact same thing with the Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga. She bought
a separate stylus for it, but the combination has worked well for her.

------
mythz

        iPad: 7.1B - doomed category
        Surface Pro/Books: 1.35B - super impressive, categories of the future!

~~~
vilmosi
Isn't this what people said about the original iPhone?

~~~
poopsintub
It's a bit subjective since one company had huge market share out of the gate
and invented the category, while the other keeps releasing 'new' products,
years later. So yes, there's growth for now. For Wall Street, growth is pretty
much key.

~~~
vilmosi
Why is it that when MS makes a "new" product and category, you put it in
quotations, yet when Apple does it, you don't?

Your approach to these companies is hypocritical at best.

At least MS is trying to invent a new category these days.

>>> had huge market share out of the gate

That's just wrong.

~~~
coldtea
> _Why is it that when MS makes a "new" product and category, you put it in
> quotations, yet when Apple does it, you don't?_

Because one dominates and defines the market, as can be seen by any before and
after, and the other is just putting out some products few people care about.

~~~
ntakasaki
So is the iPad Pro a "new" product or a new product?

~~~
coldtea
iPad pro is a "new" product. The original iPad was a new product.

------
arrty88
I used a surface pro 3 for a couple weeks before ultimately returning it.
Windows as a dev platform couldn't cut it for me, and the ubuntu VM in
Virtualbox did not survive multiple sleep cycles one puts the surface through
during normal use.

The thing i did love about the surface is that the processor is not sitting on
my lap, where as the macbook air/pro burns my legs all day long.

I would love for apple to make a version of the macbook that puts the
processor behind the screen.

~~~
Eric_WVGG
hey I’m not trying to troll you or anything, sincere question: Exactly how do
you work? On a sofa? Airplanes?

(irony zone, shortly after posting this, I realized that I’m typing from a
lounge chair with my laptop squarely on my legs… but this is an unusual
circumstance for me)

------
samfisher83
They kind of did the same thing with the xbox. Sunk a ton of money into.
Instead of just pure revenue growth it is important to look at margins. The
overall profitability of the product.

------
coldtea
> _Microsoft pulls in an impressive $1.35B in revenue for Surface line_

Really? Impressive for whom? 1.3B is less than what Apple made with the iWatch
-- and that's after decades of MS losing money and trying to go somewhere with
their table OS and then tablet offerings.

~~~
calciphus
Wait, where did you get Apple Watch numbers? Apple hasn't released those.

~~~
coldtea
" _Though Apple won 't share specific sales figures for its new Apple Watch,
disclosures made by the company this week reveal that the wearable device
reached more than $1.69 billion in sales by the end of September_"

[http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/10/29/apple-watch-
sales-...](http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/10/29/apple-watch-sales-
topped-17-billion-in-five-months)

~~~
amlgsmsn
So that's 6 months of sales versus 3 months for the Surface, so not directly
comparable.

------
eachro
But how much profit did that generate? I don't see any mention of profit in
the article.

~~~
us0r
Since when does anyone on HN care about actual profits?

------
wstrange
My wife switched to a SP3 from a macbook, because it looked like a very
compelling device.

It lost all bluetooth and wifi - 4 months out of warranty (hardware issue).
From googling - this was not a completely uncommon occurrence.

Yes - we should have gotten the extended warranty, but this was an expensive
device, and we expected quality hardware that would last.

From a usability perspective, it is a device that is in-between. It is not a
stellar tablet nor a stellar laptop.

~~~
Seventhson74
Funny, my wife and I had a 2014 Macbook Pro with retina display and the
backlight on the screen went out. We also have a SurfacePro 3 and have had no
issues whatsoever. We brought the Macbook to the apple-store (with extended
warranty) and they initially tried to tell me that screens were not covered
(as they are almost always broken due to accidental damage). I had to come
back with a flashlight and show them that you can still see the image, it's
just the back light went out and you cant really break just the back light. I
was really starting to move away from Apple anyway but this really sealed the
deal for me. However, I know that my experience is anecdotal, and it's plural
is not data so take my experience for what it's worth.....

------
jonnycowboy
I think this is impressive but it will see even larger growth when businesses
start adopting them in lieu of the standard Dell laptops.

------
orbitingpluto
One thing I want to know from Surface Book owners is whether the keyboard can
be configured for smoother productivity.

Naviagational (Home/PgUp/PgDown/End) and volume keys are on by default meaning
that you have to press the Fn-Alt-Function Key if you want to use Alt-
Function. The problem with that is that an independent Fn press will lock out
the function key, toggling the behaviour so that Function Keys are now the
default.

I would like it if LAlt-FunctionKey was different behaviour from RAlt-
FunctionKey. LAlt-F4 would close a program while RAlt-Function Key would
change the volume. The requirement to use the Fn Key and the fact that the Fn
can be locked (and easily and accidentally unlocked/locked again) is a serious
usability issue.

Actually I'd prefer a full real keyboard... nevertheless the Surface Book and
the SP4 keyboards are massive improvements.

Moreover, does anyone know if the undocking button next to the Delete key can
be locked out, say, requiring a key combination instead?

------
sjm-lbm
This is impressive in general, but particularly so in light of where they came
from: [http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-900-million-
surface-...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-900-million-surface-rt-
write-down-how-did-this-happen/)

------
ChuckMcM
I wasn't really surprised by this, I've got a Surface Book (ordered after the
announcement) and so far have been very pleased with the hardware, and hoping
the software can catch up. For me, to replace a paper book and paper notebook
you have to have a great reading experience and a great drawing experience.
For me, the Surface Pro 4 has both of those.

That said, I'll probably end up getting the tablet version to augment the
Surface Book unless they can fix detach. Way too often I try to detach and it
won't because something is unable to release, and when I'm in "clipboard" mode
there are _no_ ports on the clipboard. I can get around that partially by
using the dock which has ports but I'd really like a USB-C port and a micro-SD
card slot on the display half.

~~~
nextos
It's really excellent harware. But sadly it's not very usable in Linux yet
[1]. I'd love to use a fanless Surface with a tiling window manager as my
daily driver.

But it comes nowhere close to my MBA 2012 (used by Linus for sometime) in
terms of Linux compatibility. Almost perfect with a stock kernel except for
really minor problems (no battery ACPI ticks when it discharges).

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/surfacelinux](https://www.reddit.com/r/surfacelinux)

~~~
ChuckMcM
Linux support is, as you say, non-existent. That might be better with the new
Dell Skylake laptops. That said, I've never found a pen-aware Linux sketching
program that had any utility and I don't have the time to write one.

~~~
pwnna
Sketching or note taking? Xournal is a pretty good note taking software and
I've been using it for several years at this point.

~~~
nextos
Yep, xournal was the one I had in mind.

For the remaining stuff I'm completely keyboard-driven. Yet I prefer Surfaces
to regular laptops. This is for ergonomic reasons.

I find it easy to place them split from the keyboard, which makes a great mini
desktop. Also I can hold them as a tablet if I'm reading or surfing casually.

------
frik
" _Microsoft and Nokia have sold a total of 110 million Windows Phones
compared to 4.5 billion iOS and Android phones in the same period. IDC
recently reported that 400 million phones were sold in the recent quarter,
meaning just 1.1 percent of them were Lumia Windows Phones. Microsoft does not
have any compelling Lumia handsets, and the Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL were
both disappointing flagship devices with unfinished Windows 10 Mobile
software._ "

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10993847](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10993847)

------
makecheck
A general accounting question...do all companies count revenue the same way
for scenarios like:

\- Product is purchased by store.

\- Customer actually buys product.

\- Customer returns product.

\- Unsold product is returned by store.

In other words, I don't know how to compare this to anything else because I
don't know if it's counting units that didn't reach real customers, or if the
announcement would be a lot different two weeks from now after some people
return their Christmas presents?

~~~
craigvn
They all count differently depend on the news they are trying to sell.

------
ommunist
even if they'll give Surfaces for free, and pay people to use it, I am afraid,
more and more people will use Android and iOS. It is simply too late for MS to
"own the desktop". IN december I 've seen first time in my GA account that
hits from Android users prevailed over MS OS, iOS being on the 3rd place.

UPD: since its mostly dull corporate websites, I think I am correct.

------
bitmapbrother
>Microsoft pulls in an impressive $1.35B in revenue for Surface line

Why don't they publish the profit they made on their Surface line of products?
This is a lot like the revenue they reported for Azure. Until we know what
they actually made these numbers are of very little value.

------
MaysonL
Impressive indeed! Over 19% of Apple's iPad revenue.

~~~
hyperliner
It's more comparable to at least a MacBook Air laptop.

~~~
poopsintub
They spec'd the Surface Book to match up with a MacBook Pro, but I honestly
don't think the quality is there.

------
theklub
I got a surface book for work, its pretty sweet.

------
cm2012
If I ever get a tablet, it will be a surface. Simply because so much of the
work I do resides in spreadsheets, and Surface is optimized for excel and
productivity.

~~~
fsloth
IMO, tablets are consuming devices. And as a tablet, my Surface Pro 4 is not
very good - it is a bit too heavy and has a too short battery life.

As a portable laptop with a pen and screen with an excellent sRGB colorspace
support - and with a nice keyboard - it's awesome.

