More FUD about the disk space issue... yes - there is a large recovery partition and yes - you can delete it to free up space. Any yes - perhaps MS would have been better off if they included a USB drive for recovery purposes (although I imagine trying to walk the average user through "booting from USB" to restore their partition would be a support nightmare).
This is just like the "omg - the desktop is gone and all we are left with is Metro!". Um yes... unless you "show desktop" and move on with your life...
And the "purpose of the surface pro"? How about "a tablet for those who need to be productive in a windows environment"?
>although I imagine trying to walk the average user through "booting from USB"
How is that any worse than the current status quo of every Windows product ever sold? I'd say it would be harder to walk mom through deleting the restore files when she calls and says her tablet won't hold all her movies and music.
Let's just face it, MS made a very stupid decision. I could see this happening during the Vista era, but SSDs have been mainstream for YEARS now. Windows should have a smaller footprint and holy hell, should not have a 12-18gb cab file to restore from on limited storage.
Enthusiasts spend way too much time making Windows SSD friendly. We need to delete superseded update from winsxs, shrink the default massive page file, delete the hibernate file on machines that don't need it, manually stop superfetch/defrag even though windows is supposed to do this on its own, etc.
>And the "purpose of the surface pro"?
In the age of affordable ultrabooks, who knows. Essentially you're buying an ultrabook without a keyboard and with a super tiny screen.
That said, I love the RT product and if the RT tablet was $299 it would sell like hotcakes. Especially if the 'desktop mode' didn't exist. MS should never have bothered with the Pro line and instead should have made a proper android and ios competitor.
> MS should never have bothered with the Pro line and instead should have made a proper android and ios competitor.
What for?
MS competitive advantage is backwards compatibility with an EXTREMELY HUGE catalog of Windows apps. Nothing more. Anything else doesn't matter.
A 'proper RT tablet' would throw away that competitive advantage and sell as well as the Windows Phone 7.
In fact, the mere existence of an 'RT runtime Store' practically throws away that competitive advantage. Specially now that Steam is expanding from selling games to sell some Windows applications.
What is the right way to me: sell Windows (7 is good enough) computers, with good hardware (competitive with Apple laptops) and with a Full Windows App Store. Not RT Store, Full Windows API applications Store.
I should be able to buy Office, Autocad, Adobe Acrobat, etc from there. Now that would have been huge. The first week would have been a financial success for WinRar, Sublime Text, Ditto, and lots of other programs people use everyday.
The screen isn't "super-tiny". It's 10.6". Compared to an 11" ultrabook, you're not loosing a lot of screen space (especially when you consider the 11" ultrabook probably has a much lower resolution than the Surface Pro). If you're comparing against 13" or larger ultrabooks, then sure, the Surface Pro's screen is small (though still higher resolution than most 13" ultrabooks), but then that's a different conversation, and one that people already have every time they choose between an 11" and a 13" ultrabook.
The popular ultrabooks and all of the ones I've seen in real life are 13". My comparison is between 10.6 and 13, which is a pretty big difference. Regardless, I can see how this is arguable.
Definitely, if you want a 13" screen, the Surface is a poor substitute. But by the same token, if you want a 15" screen, a 13" Ultrabook is a poor substitute. It's a tradeoff between portability and screen size. If you're willing to go down to the low-end of screen size for sake of portability, the Surface Pro looks very competitive with 11" ultrabooks. If you're not willing to go to that screen size, then the Surface Pro isn't really an option.
We are buying two PROs the minute they come out. They have expandable memory slots and the beauty of having a nice tablet and a full blown laptop is great. My wife can't wait for it to come out.
When the best way to defend your new OS is to say "You can do this and pretend it's just like the old one!" you're probably in for a hard time.
The surface pro seems to be a weird use case. It's going to come in at a price point where you could get a mid range Windows 7 laptop and an ipad mini or Nexus 7 for the same price and the combination of these 2 devices is probably more useful.
It's not in defence of the OS - it's a rebuttal to the people who ignore all the other benefits of upgrading to a newer OS and cite the (often repeated) notion that the desktop as we know it is gone for good.
I think most gmail overhauls have been significantly less major than Windows->Metro. The complaints against Metro don't seem to be so much that people haven't warmed to it yet so much as that it doesn't gel with the way they want to work on a desktop/laptop computer at all.
I'm not really afraid, uncertain, or doubtful of the disk space issue. I just think it's straight-up misleading and represents Microsoft's gross misunderstanding of what makes the mobile model successful.
They give you hardware that is capable of storing the advertised amount of data - they advertise it the same as any other vendor (nobody advertises "usable diskspace" unless there is a 59GB iPad out there).
When do you think hardware vendors should start specifying available disk space as part of their SKU? When it's less than 10%? 20%? Should this value include pre-installed applications?
That is pure Ignorance to what the user wants. And we dicussed that on this site already. It seems to be fairly obvious to most that there is a big difference between having more than the half unusable and having a tiny bit used.
Defending Microsoft in that brainwashed-looking way serves neither you nor them.
I actually thick the Surface Pro, or something like it, will be the future of home computing. It is exactly what everyone with an iPad, including myself, wishes the iPad would actually do. It is a tablet form factor with a the guts of a true computer and support for multiple peripherals. Dock it wherever and have a real computer system or take it on the go like any other tablet.
I think it's wrong that this level of product integration is what everyone wants; i.e. functioning as a tablet and as a laptop. One of Microsoft's most powerful profit generators was software integration (both in Office and Windows).
But integrated products (ones that do BOTH X and Y) are necessarily inferior at being the best X or the best Y. A designer must make trade offs in order to make the integration work. In the realm of software, the trade offs can be quite small, and so the integrated whole is quite good. But in a hardware device, integration imposes critical constraints that make integration across functions quite painful; limited screen size, battery life, memory and storage, etc. Perhaps the most insidious is overall UI complexity. Making a device for keyboard and mouse is quite different than making a device with a great touch experience. Having both (and even adding legacy Windows UI) is very challenging.
Microsoft should not have released a "turd" if they could not achieve a great experience within the design constraints. I think most people believe this first attempt has serious flaws and compromises.
Because Apple has shown the world what a great experience a tablet can provide, I think users are unwilling to compromise just so they can occasionally connect a keyboard and mouse to it, or run legacy applications. I'd rather carry two devices than use one (inferior) product.
I agree that the Surface is not the final realization of the ideal home computing device but it is a decent step towards it. Eventually the device will be a phone with the computing power of a laptop that you can dock and have a full environment ready for you. Clearly we are not there yet but this is a towards that reality.
I just want an ipad with a file system and the ability to move data easily in and out. The lack of easy workflow destroys the iPad as a serious device for me.
No but they wish it could run every website on the internet without issue, be a decent word processor when needed, and actually be a true laptop replacement.
I actually own a Surface RT and I like it. I get the feeling that a lot of people try out Windows 8 or the Surface RT for a few minutes and pan it as crap. There's definitely a learning curve associated with it but the payout is that it's got advanced gestures that allow you to do more without a keyboard.
One thing that could be impacting sales is that you have to go to a Microsoft Store (brick-and-mortar) or online there to purchase it. There is no try-before-you-buy experience unless you're lucky to live close to one of those stores.
As for the storage space what I've noticed is that I need just enough space locally to have certain files available to me. So local storage for me is basically a cache where I keep most of my documents in the cloud.
> it's got advanced gestures that allow you to do more without a keyboard.
I really like the edge swiping. I miss it on other devices where menus and such are wasting my screen space all the time.
One thing I don't like is the "swipe from left to change apps". There's a setting to adjust that, though, so the left swipe pulls up the app switcher instead.
Coming from WebOS I love swipe gestures and am more sad more OS's don't utilize them.
I didn't know about that setting. Thanks, I'll have to check that out!
One other thing that I do like is the ability to show more than one app on the screen at the same time as appropriate. So you can see your music app in the left 25% of the screen while you type up a document or surf the web. Really underrated.
> How many times do I have to say it: The Microsoft Surface is a turd.
This should have been the article's title, just so readers know what the author plans to say. Not to argue for or against the position, just for maximum candor.
Comparing sales between a phone you find in every shopping mall and could buy without knowing the differentiators, and a new class of device? That doesn't sound like an unbiased argument.
My take on this is that the Microsoft's strategy for the Surface wasn't necessarily to sell a ton of Surface tablets and take out the iPad. I think it was to illustrate what Windows 8 brings to the table in terms of a hybrid tablet experience. This is similar to how Google had lackluster sales of their Nexus phone but it was a reference model of what you could do with Android. The Surface opens up some eyes to the idea of the "convertible laptop", which I think ultimately is how Windows 8 starts to make more sense. On any other configuration it's a clunky experience. Windows 8 is a poor tablet experience and a lame desktop, but as a convertible laptop it's actually quite enjoyable (in my opinion).
I think Windows RT is an amazing tablet experience. As others have mentioned some of its UI conventions are different and require learning. Overall, its a very well made and pleasant to use device that does what I need it to do.
Though I should note that I've loved them Metro UI since I saw it on the Windows phone.
The strange thing is, in his self citing comment about it been a turd, it becomes apparent he hasn't touched one.
This is the issue MS have, not some cries of false advertising of free space. No one is buying them, no one is seeing them. A guy I work with commented that he's not seen one despite it been months after the RT launch. He quite liked it, just not the price tag.
This would seem to be correct but doesn't take into account different hardware specs.
For a start, the larger the disk, the more is used for formatting and is lost due to the difference in how manufacturers specify sizes, so you can't just add/subtract storage amounts, you need to scale.
Also, different combinations of processor, cellular modem, etc, will require different parts of the operating system, and Apple differentiates between these in the distributions it provides. It's not a massive difference, but it is something.
Finally, on Mac OS, the operating system reserves some space for a memory dump if the device loses power so that it can resume where it left off. This means if you have 8GB of RAM, you will always have 8GB of disk space reserved (search for sleepimage). I don't know for sure, but iOS may do something similar.
The amount also varies by the version of iOS installed, and if delta updates have been applied (they take up a lot more room, though I'm not sure why).
Yeah, when I see these comparisons about "percentage" of free space, I find them pretty ridiculous, because they compare the iPhone or the iPad at 16 GB, and say it's like 80%, and then the Surface at 64 GB.
If you're going to compare it like that then compare it with the 64 GB iPad, and then you get the free space to be almost 3x larger than on the 64 GB Surface (95% vs ~35%).
>I say interesting because I'm not sure if it's better than Windows 7--it's bizarre, for example, that they turned the useful Aero snap into a toy, but I digress
What? Aero snap on W8's desktop works in the same way as in W7.
True, although they do have the advantage of being somewhat more niche in that they aren't developing an entire platform from the ground up with all the costs that entails.
For example if MS loses enough ground with Windows in the consumer / small business space and begin to cede the enterprise desktop too does it make sense for them to continue development of Windows as a pure server platform?
Or will we start to see ports of stuff like Exchange,Active Directory,VS,SQL Server to other platforms?
I think they will focus on higher level (and therefore value) enterprise applications - SharePoint, Dynamics ERPs (particularly AX) and Dynamics CRM.
It also wouldn't surprise me if they decided to take all product consulting in-house and become much more of a consulting company with products as a useful sideline - a bit like IBM.
>Or will we start to see ports of stuff like Exchange,Active Directory,VS,SQL Server to other platforms?
Maybe. Some of that stuff doesn't make sense to port. For example, the value proposition of Visual Studio to Microsoft is not that it makes them particularly a lot of money, it's that it encourages its users to produce software that only runs on Microsoft's platforms. Obviously nobody is going to run Visual Studio on Linux if it can't produce Linux binaries, but it doesn't make any sense from Microsoft's perspective to allow that, so likely Visual Studio will never run on any other platforms.
And really the rest of it kind of suffers the same issues. Is Active Directory still worth it when the client devices are non-Windows? Probably not, unless they make enough integration modifications to the client OS that it would amount to producing their own Linux distribution. (That'll be the day.)
I guess I could see the case for selling Exchange Server for RHEL if they produced a Gnome, KDE or Android version of Outlook to go along with it. Even that seems like an ecosystem thing though: People install Exchange because they already have Windows and Outlook and Active Directory and Exchange relies heavily on all of them. If the starting point is Android or iOS and gmail, does that still happen?
This is just like the "omg - the desktop is gone and all we are left with is Metro!". Um yes... unless you "show desktop" and move on with your life...
And the "purpose of the surface pro"? How about "a tablet for those who need to be productive in a windows environment"?