Microsoft Surface priced up for Blighty Advanced orders for Microsoft's Surface tablet are now being taken in the UK. Prices starting at £399. That'll get you a 32GB version of the ARM-based slate without the touch-to-type keyboard-equipped Touch Cover, which comes bundled for an additional £80. Buy the cover on its own and you'll pay £100. Alternatively, those …
Why is it so dear? Apple is notorius for ramping up prices, but they are selling a well established luxury product. MS are launching what is ment to be a device to show of the capabilities of windows 8 rt. By selling it at the price of an ipad they are making the decision easy for conusmers; go for the well known industry leader, or try somthing new. Most consumers go for the easy option, which in this case means apple.
But yeah, i havnt pre ordered one, cant see the point, i should be able to pick one up for £200 on the shelf next to the touchpad and the playbook.
The entry level iPad is £399 for a 16Gb version.
The entry level Surface is £399 for a 32Gb version.
Surely "dear" is relative is it not? If you've decided the iPad (in any form factor) is too expensive, then you need to go and get yourself a Nexus tablet, because the Surface was never going to come in at those prices.
As you say "dear is relative". Its dear when you look at what they are trying to do. HP and Rim tried this approach and they failed spectacularly, why does MS think they can do better? We on the reg forums arent truly the target demographic for tablets, the average joe on the street is. So when they have the option of an ipad or a surface, what makes MS think they will go for the surface? Its untested, untried, and effectivly the same price as the ipad. So they might as well get the ipad. Joe know exactly what he is getting, and he has the extra cache of buying into a luxery brand. The surface is too dear.
"Its untested, untried, and effectivly the same price as the ipad. So they might as well get the ipad. "
For someone making an argument that the Surface will fail even if the cognoscenti like it, because it's not what the "person on the street likes", you show a weak grasp of how "the person on the street" thinks. They don't analyze past performance much or consider the company's history. They walk into a shop and play with it or watch a video or play with a friend's and say: "that's cool. I want that one."
The ones who analyze in excrutiating details, are us
Simples!
One word - Office.
The Surface has been touted as coming with a near-feature complete version of MS Office. This is a big selling point for many and easily worth a few quid extra.
Whilst I own Apple kit in the form of Macs, for my tablet and phone fix, I'm Android. However, I've pre-ordered the Surface based purely on the fact that it comes with a proper Office suite. I've used pretty much all of the Android Office suites, and tried the iPad equivalents too, and none of them is capable of replacing MS Office for my requirements.
Surface and Windows RT may just change all that, and I'm prepared to take a punt on it.
The entry level iPad is the iPad 2 16GB, which comes in at £329.
The New iPad starts at £399, but it has a Retina screen with a resolution of 2048 x 1536 compared to the Surface's rather measly 1366 x 768. As such, I think people are justified in thinking that the Surface is expensive for what it is.
We pay about $15 on this side of the pond for a 16GB memory card. Sure, it's nice to have it built-in, but that's not a terribly huge win for Microsoft.
As others have mentioned, Apple is established as THE luxury brand in this market. Most other companies who've gone head-to-head with Apple on price have lost... who wants a Fiat for the price of a Mercedes?
ASUS is another to look at. But look at the specs -- Microsoft isn't selling a top-of-the-line device here, but a mass market device. They're using a lower resolution screen, versus the TF700's 1920x1200. The Surface is based on the T30 Tegra 3, rather than the faster T33 in the TF700... and DDR2 memory, supposedly. The TF700 uses DDR3-1600 DRAM. Sure, the iPad 3 is only based on DDR2, but they have a dual-channel memory controller, versus the Tegra's single channel. Yes, the Surface RT comes with twice the RAM, at 2GB. But it's not like any version of Windows to be easy on RAM. The Surface sports dual 1Mpixel cameras, versus 2/8Mpixel for the TF700... the old iPad had lower rez cameras, too, but the new one's photo-quality.
So Microsoft's less competitive here than I expected.
Hopefully that's typical of the bloat of WinRT applications.
I just checked my Transformer tablet here... I have 53GB free out of 64GB internally, 48GB free out of 64GB on the SD card (music, mostly). But that's also with a couple dozen books and 182 apps installed. That includes Firefox, Chrome, Emacs, g++, Terminal, Adobe Reader, and two office productivity packages. And yeah, some games.
Part of the deal, I suspect, is that Android (and iOS) devices have a fairly big chunk of NAND flash, which holds much of the operating system proper. Microsoft seems to be building these PC style, where the NAND flash is just a BIOS loader, and they get all of the OS from NOR flash (your flash drive). So the Windows device's 32GB really is 32GB, the Android device's 32GB might actually be more like 36-40GB.
"Simple, it does a lot more. It's a tablet with a full blown OS."
It's not a "full blown OS", by which I assume you mean a desktop OS. It's metro plus a skeleton desktop to support MS Office. I assume that the desktop only exists at all as a kludge because Microsoft couldn't port the MS Office suite over in time.
Not sure there's any actual desktop... Office runs on this as a Metro application. Yes, it's still using Win32 (the usual Windows API) not stuck with WinRT only. But that's a trick only Microsoft can do.. no one else gets to use Win32 on Windows RT.
And as far as Windows RT being a "full blown desktop OS"... new to mobile, are we? They all run designed-for-mobile middleware/app frameworks, Windows RT included... Microsoft's tablet/phone OS is the WinRT API over top of the Windows NT kernel. Apple's got the usual Darwin OS (BSD UNIX, Mach kernel) on iOS, and in fact, a good bit of the OS itself comes from MacOS. Android is running over top of Linux, not just for desktops, but the choice of most server, data warehouse, and supercomputers.
What makes the OS are the applications. RIght now, you can do all kinds of desktop things on Linux... I have g++ and Emacs on my ASUS tablet, for example. And two different office suites. WinRT will have MS-Office, and that's about it... nothing else is going to be an easy port, since it's exactly like moving your application to a whole new operating system. One reason the early Windows 7 Phone and Windows 8 Metro apps are written in HTML, CSS and Javascript... but that's no way to write desktop-class stuff.
Oh no it's not.... It does much less than a £139 Nexus7....
Seems you sir, are one of many that Microsoft have confused into purchasing by their Windows 8 ./ Windows 8 RT naming scheme,.
This is the one that doesn't have any apps and can't run Windows software,
#EPICFAIL.
Well MS don't have the bulk purchase discount Apple do. But maybe they want to compete on features at the high end, not be another cheapo product - they want people to not simply buy because it's cheaper than iPad. That's a reasonable angle to take, IF it works.
@JDX
That's exactly what Ballmer said. Almost exactly those words. However MS took the same approach with Windows Phone 7 pricing it to be similar to the iPhone and we know how successful that was.
On the other hand, Microsoft is a wholesaler not a retailer. So maybe it's leaving room for one of the other tablet makers to enter the market and in the meantime just gathering the low hanging fruit.
But Microsoft *is* a wholesaler not a retailer. It doesn't really know how to treat regular end users. Geeks like me, sure. For example, I don't get the iPad (or tablets in general) but friend loves hers because Apple offer a care package which means she can go to the store, ask questions, have apps installed - you know, touchy feely stuff. It will be a shock if that's what Microsoft offer.
Me too, just pre-ordered the 64GB one with the touch cover, and a 64GB microSDXC card to pop into the card slot. Looking forward to all that touchy-feely goodness and full integration with my Windows Phone. Will be upgrading my desktop and laptop to W8 too, they both have touchscreens :)
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