Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Microsoft Surface Pro geekbench=5700ish; iPad 4=1700ish
- Thread starter mouser45
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Exactly!
I have a surface RT and its already way more productive for me than my iPad in terms of replacing my laptop which I really only use when I need Visual Studio or some odd x86 app.
The surface pro can easily replace my laptop which I have docked to my 26inch monitor anyways. Its way more portable, has awesome pen support and can easily double as a couch tablet for consumption as much as a desk computer for work. Haters gonna hate.
What's the tradeoff? Having to deal with:
2lb weight.
More than twice as thick as the iPad.
Probably 1/3 the battery life of the iPad.
Depends on what you are looking for.
I honesting think it's going to be a niche market. $899 is price out of the mass under $500 tablet market and the pc laptop market.
2lb weight.
More than twice as thick as the iPad.
Probably 1/3 the battery life of the iPad.
Depends on what you are looking for.
I honesting think it's going to be a niche market. $899 is price out of the mass under $500 tablet market and the pc laptop market.
Exactly, it's in ultrabook territory, but with the advantage of having a tablet format and a wacom digitizer. I'm sure ultrabooks don't sell anywhere near as much as ipads so no the pro won't be a mass seller.
I'm curious if anyone has figures on what percentage ultrabooks make up of computers sold every year?
Time will tell if it works for this thing. Pronouncements by forum users like you and I won't assure its success or doom.
----------
If MS was smart, they'd have shipped it with Adobe Creative Suite, NOT Office, because those creative users who are all about CS and Wacom tablets might bite, despite the high price. I still don't see Enterprise biting.
Um I'm picking up one for myself and my staff, and I have a bunch of clients clamoring to pick these up as well. Enterprises regularly spend $1,200-1500 per employee on laptop configs so this is no hurt on the wallet.
Yep shipping it with expensive software that costs more than the device itslef would be a smart move ?
Come on Irishman its bad enough we've feck'd up everyone in the UK's beefburger's, Got Danny Healy Rae calling for Kerry folks to be exempt from drink driving because our roads are quieter, than to be making another Holy show of ourselves by saying something so moribund as they should bundle third party expensive software with their Surface Pro...Besides, those creatives either alreadys have an adobe CS suite or a adobe cloud account. A lot of software in this design brief / catagory comes in both PC/Mac variations. So other than OS differences, ince inside the application it doesnt make a difference if were running on mac or pc.
I'm picking up a surface pro and it will replace my MBA and small wacom tablet for portability which is underused anyway. With a surface I can run Corel Painter / Photoshop and Illustrator without the need to carry extra hardware, it can all be done on one device and it costs less than I paid for my MBA.
Wont replace my Mac Pro - Work station with my 24" Cintiq but I see it as a much more useful device for my needs than my MBA.
Battery life estimates for the surface pro were in the region of 4 hours.
It misses the point. It's a crappy laptop and a crappy tablet.
Surface RT will be more useful as a tablet. They should have put an ATOM in the Pro.
It misses the point. It's a crappy laptop and a crappy tablet.
Surface RT will be more useful as a tablet. They should have put an ATOM in the Pro.
By that line of reasoning the macbook Air is also a "crappy laptop". Dunno, I loved my macbook Air and the only reason I'm upgrading to the surface is to get a digitizer and the option for a tablet form factor.
I don't fully disagree with you, the Atom CPU's are very nice in the windows tablets. IMO MS should have made the Atom CPU tablets the lower range surface, and the ivy bridge the higher end Pro and the RT should never have seen the light of day. The Pro where it's priced and the purpose it serves is right on IMO, it's the RT that is the glaring screw up.
Last edited:
Yup.
But the MBA has a real keyboard and real keypad. It's not trying to be a tablet.
The Surface has a touchscreen and an active digitizer with a real keyboard and trackpad. Its a tablet and a notebook. It just doesnt have a hinge for them. Big deal if you use your device to type on your lap a lot, not a big deal if you dont. The MBA cant be a tablet (Unless you pay $2500)
People love to use the word compromise, but if it works for the user thats all that matters. Replace compromise with balance and it still makes sense.
A toaster oven isnt a pure toaster and it isnt a pure oven, but its still a great device.
Perspective from a digital artist.
Wacom Cintiq 12 €950
+
11" 64GB MBA €1100
= €2150
----
11" 64gb MBA €1100
+
Intuos 5 medium €450
= €1550
----
Modbook Pro
€2500
----
Microsoft Surface Pro €899
+
keyboard €100
= €1000
For some of us the surface represents a viable alternative. Disregard OS, once your in the application it looks and behaves the same as it does on a MAC.
Even the MBA despite claims of 5 hour battery life, realistically when running photoshop or painter 12 you only get 3.5-4 hours tops.
So yes it's niche, but I remember the MBA when it released and how much Vitriol and utter **** was written about it on these forums, and yet eventually it found it's niche and now represents the cheapest laptop you can get from Apple.
People need to stop being so ignorant all the time....
Wacom Cintiq 12 €950
+
11" 64GB MBA €1100
= €2150
----
11" 64gb MBA €1100
+
Intuos 5 medium €450
= €1550
----
Modbook Pro
€2500
----
Microsoft Surface Pro €899
+
keyboard €100
= €1000
For some of us the surface represents a viable alternative. Disregard OS, once your in the application it looks and behaves the same as it does on a MAC.
Even the MBA despite claims of 5 hour battery life, realistically when running photoshop or painter 12 you only get 3.5-4 hours tops.
So yes it's niche, but I remember the MBA when it released and how much Vitriol and utter **** was written about it on these forums, and yet eventually it found it's niche and now represents the cheapest laptop you can get from Apple.
People need to stop being so ignorant all the time....
Then instead of getting the surface keyboard get a Bluetooth keyboard, mouse, trackpad, etc in whichever size or form you want. There are much better keyboards out there then the one on a MBA.
People's minds are so closed, "if its not a laptop OR a tablet then its a compromise". As if there can not be an in between because they haven't heard of it....very strange...
Considering they've historically been miserable failures, it is a perfectly reasonable opinion to have. If you read the reviews of these old failures, they generally blame the compromising nature of the product for its failure.
When I see stuff like this, it certainly doesn't help the case for a laptop/tablet. It's almost comical! Is it a laptop, a tablet, or panini press? Why not all three?
Don't forget this isn't Microsoft's first time around the block either. They've tried to merge the formats in the past.
How many people even remember Microsoft "Tablet PC" today?
Of course it is possible that MS got it right this time. Surface Pro might succeed where they have failed before. After all, Apple's Newton was not a huge commercial success and look where they are now. All I'm saying is that it's not unreasonable to hold the opinion that merging laptops and tablets won't work because nobody's done it right yet.
I actually want one for software reasons. All the stuff I thought I'd be able to do on a tablet when I bought the iPad 1, I can't do because Apple turned iOS into a budget market. Software that runs on ARM is cheap crap because the companies that control app store distribution (Apple, Google, Amazon, etc) don't profit off the software market. So they commoditize it. Putting the x86 ecosystem on a tablet brings back quality software.
The Haswell/Skylake roadmap will eventually turn the debate from Core i5 running quality software for 4 hours vs an ARM running cheap crap all day to a choice between quality software and cheap crap.
And I don't think you have to be an artist to appreciate that Wacom. OneNote is a killer app that's gone under the radar. Students wanting to take notes in class for example, anyone who uses Evernote, could make use of it. When I bought the iPad one thing I wanted to do was use it to draw circuits and schematics at work. I tried everything from sketch apps (I learned using your finger sucks) to vector drawing apps like OmniFocus (which was a hassle). Well I can finally do it on this device
"The RT Is the glarging screw up"- I've heard this statement made quite a few times and I completely disagree.
If anything, the RT is the true 1:1 competitor to the iPad.
I really see little value in all the x86 apps when they were never meant to run on a tablet. I am not complaining about all the ancient softare that I cannot run on my iPad.
-The RT has the battery life.
- It has true multi-tasking ability with the snap feature to run 2 apps at one time
- It has the unqiue 16:9 aspect ratio.
- It is sized appropriately- as thin as the iPad and about the same weight
- It has the live tiles. Makes IOS look ancient
-The desktop interface is perfect for file management (something that is not possible on the ipad).
-It has expandable storage
-It has the best tablet/hybrid keyboard (iPad cannot compete here)
-It has MS OFFICE for free!
Stop with the crap about how the RT is the screwed up device. Those that have the RT and have used it would strongly disagree.
I on the other hand see less value in the Surface Pro. I would run out right now and get a Macbook Air before I would get the pro. On the other hand, I think the Surface RT is a great companion to my personal macbook/pc, etc.
*My 2 cents and this is from someone who has bought every version of the iPad released to date. I actuall now used both my Surface RT and my iPad mini (for reading)
While I also own the Surface RT, don't you think it would have been better off being an Atom device? There are benchmarks out there with Atom Windows 8 devices that have the same performance and the same battery life. I like my Surface RT but I would have been much happier with an Atom and full windows. At least then I would be able to bind it to AD and get GPOs enforced letting it replace my work laptop.
Thats exactly it. The RT would be fine IF Intel didnt have the Atom which matches it for power/battery pretty equally if not better. Makes me wonder why they went with ARM at all when there are benefits to going Atom such as running desktop apps. I would think there was at least some sort of analysis that went into the ARM decision.
If Intel didnt have the Atom, I would be behind RT all the way.
Reading some of the comments from the Reddit AMA yesterday, it sounds like Microsoft feels strongly that they need to have a tablet that competes in the appliance space, and while I think they have had some execution and marketing issues with the RT, I kind of agree with them. Many, perhaps the majority of people buying tablets are doing so because of that appliance-like reliability. Even in the reviews of the Surface Pro, it is admitted that this device doesn't do that - from ease of setup, to battery life, to even 'not being a device you'll want to quickly peek into to check email if you're used to doing so on an iPad' or something along those lines that I read in one of the reviews.
Secondly, from the original launch, there was discussion of Microsoft purposefully choosing the Tegra in order to diversify their silicon options, and to light a fire under Intel to build really good low power parts. Seems to be working if that was their intention.
No, the smartphone did not do the same thing. Which smartphone is in a slightly thicker/larger/heavier smartphone form factor but runs a full-featured desktop OS (i.e. Windows XP, 7, 8, Mac OS X, Linux)? That's right, NONE.
Smartphones were built from the ground up to be a different device in both form factor, instruction set/CPU architecture and operating system. The successful smartphones ALL use ARM RISC (reduced instruction set computing) versus x86 CISC (complex instruction set computing) of desktops and laptops. Form factor was also completely different from desktops and laptops. Not to mention primary input source (touch-based versus keyboard/mouse). Operating system? While iOS and Android both derive from UNIX/Linux kernel/core, everything else above that level was completely rebuilt for touch-based input. Smartphones did not try to merge two existing, completely different device categories.
Surface Pro? They are trying to merge two existing, completely different device categories. Tablets, which are ARM/RISC based devices with a slab form factor and mobile OS (iOS, Android, etc.) and laptops/desktops, which are x64/CISC based devices with a laptop/desktop form factor and full-featured OS (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux).
Surface Pro is a Frankenstein of post-PC computing (smartphones, tablets) and PC computing. It's trying to do EVERYTHING and sucking at EVERYTHING when individually compared to the best of that category. It's the jack of all trades and master of none.
In the PC category, it has a pretty terrible keyboard compared to what is available for conventional desktops/laptops. ThinkPad keyboard? MacBook keyboard? What about mechanical keyboard? They are all superior keyboards to the Surface Pro's touch cover or type cover. Mouse? That little Wedge thing was super uncomfortable and I have relatively small hands. Maybe a little kid half my age (I'm 19) may find it comfortable. But not people with adult-sized hands. Desktops/laptops also have better performance, especially desktops. The Surface Pro's CPU is a ULV part. Desktops/laptops all have better performing options available. Graphics? Desktops/laptops all have discrete GPUs if you want that. SSD/HD? 128GB top capacity is pretty small when you can have 768GB SSDs available as options or even larger ones. HD? SSD isn't for everyone. Some people need more storage capacity. Enough said. And for some people, 128GB SSD is too small as well. Battery life? It's battery lasts less than even mid-end ultrabooks that costs much less. So how is the Surface Pro any good in the PC category? It's basically a low-end ultrabook WITHOUT an acceptable keyboard/mouse and TERRIBLE battery life. Let's not forget it also makes major compromises for I/O ports that many ultrabooks that costs much less have.
In the tablet category, it is on the large/heavy/thick end of the spectrum. You have thin tablets like Sony Xperia Z, Apple iPad 4, Samsung Galaxy Note/Tab and others. The cameras on iPad 4 are much better than either of the POS ones found on the Surface Pro (or RT). The screen on iPad 4 and Nexus 10 all are better in almost every way (panel type, pixel density, etc.) than the Surface Pro. Sure it's got a Wacom pen, but so do Samsung's Galaxy Note tablets. The Galaxy Note also has 1024 levels of pressure, which beats the 512 on Surface Pro. Let's add in the fact that almost all of these tablets have better battery life than Surface Pro (or RT) except the Sony one since it hasn't been released yet (I think, I haven't really followed the news regarding it that much). It can't beat any of these Android/iOS tablets in any way (size, pen input, battery life, screen, etc.) except for the USB port it has which is a plus. So it's basically a POS tablet.
As you've probably noticed, I have yet to mention the software side of things. The Surface Pro can run any x86 application. That is a huge plus. But not many of them are optimized for touch input. You can bust out the pen but it's hardly ideal. You can bring your own keyboard/mouse since it's got Bluetooth (I'm assuming) and also a USB port for wireless receiver dongles (like Logitech nano receiver which works for multiple peripherals) but then again, you're trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. You can keep shoving but why not just get a round peg instead? On the tablet side of things, the Windows Store has a pretty anemic selection of apps. Most of them lack terribly in function and some in form. The Metro UI can't do many of the things the traditional UI can. It's also very inefficient in many/most scenarios. Apps on Android or iOS? Already very matured apps since they have existed for many years and developers have been continuously improving on them. Surface Pro (or RT) have a pretty terrible selection of apps as a whole. I did read about the Netflix app being really good and how it can resume a video feed faster while multitasking faster than iOS/Android Netflix app. But that is ONE app. There are 700K and counting apps on Android/iOS's respective app stores and for every one app that is better on Windows Store, there are 100X better ones on Android/iOS. Not to mention many major apps available for Android/iOS is not even available on Windows Store.
The best analogy to sum up my above argument is this:
Smartphone/tablets/post-PC devices are round peg in round hole.
PCs/desktops/laptops are square peg in square hole.
Surface Pro? round peg in square hole.
Surface RT? square peg in round hole.
You can keep shoving as hard as you can and eventually you will get the wrong-sized peg to fit in the wrong-sized hole BUT it's far easier to just match peg with said hole.
No, I think the Surface RT is exactly what it should be.
Firstly, wouldn't the price have gone up for an Atom?
Secondly, I do not want to use legacy apps. I bought a tablet to replace my full size iPad/other tablet. I did not buy a tablet to replace my MacBook. The only value the desktop mode provides me is the ability to manage everything on my surface...and that is all I want.
Remember, this product was designed for the mainstream audience... I want to pick it up and use it with my fingers as much as possible. The keyboard is a wonderful perk that I take advantage of when writing emails, in Office or when typing a post like this one.. otherwise, it's the perfect cover!
I really think the Surface RT sales should pick up, while the Pro will be more niche. I do hope that they both succeed in the long run.
----------
I just wanted to comment on the App portion of your email. I think the issue is quite overblown.
What you are also missing is the "Live Tile" aspect of the Windows 8 UI. The fact that I can have an infinite amount of small Apps that are live. Let me give you an example...
On my iPad, I have an App that lets me login and see how my favorite stocks are doing. I have to go into the app each time to check on them. On the Windows 8 UI, I have individual tiles for each of my key stocks and the tiles update whenever I look at my home screen. The value from my Surface apps is much greater than anything I have gotten from my iPad.
Secondly, I think most will find the apps they need. Let's take "News" as an example. Currently on the Surface, I see a NY Times, USA Today, WSJ, NPR, app. How many news Apps do you need? I understand that on my iPad I can find 50 other news apps, but it starts to become overkill eventually.
I've got my news app, my technology app, my cars apps, my sports app, my stock app, my travel app, my finance app.. etc.
With the Surface you may not have as many options, but the spectrum of apps is there... and they are much more insightful because they update on your home screen.
People are also not pointing to how great the built-in Bing apps are. The News app pulls from all the major news sources, as does the Sports app, Travel app, etc. They did a much better job than Apple with their core apps.
I'll provide some screenshots of what I am talking about a bit later...
Nobody's saying the Surface = a phone. We were talking about technological convergence, which the smartphone did and the Surface Pro is trying to do.
You seem unaware that the smartphone also merged completely different device categories - PDA, phone, camera, mp3 player, handheld game player, etc. Each of these implementations initially sucked compared to their dedicated counterparts. Heavier phone with a ridiculously short battery, noisy low MP camera with no image stab, etc. That didn't stop it from taking off.