I wish they'd been more clear about that, almost all the promotional materials show the new Surface with the Type Cover (keyboard) and pen. It feels deceptive.
I was more interested when I thought $400 would get me a complete Windows tablet/ultrabook. At $650-700, it's nice but not nearly as compelling.
It feels like airline convenience fees jacking up your ticket $100
Besides, when upgrading most people sell their old device so it just shifts the problem one step back to the person buying your old Surface.
And regardless, if you upgrade a normal amount of time for a laptop/tablet, even in a corporate environment, you will need a new keyboard every time.
Gen 1 shit never works with Gen 2 shit.
And some pens are $40 though not everyone needs the pen.
Others only want the keyboard, not the pen. Having only one variant and "take it or leave it, we know what's good for you" is a strategy. Allowing customizing is too.
*If I want a keyboard I have desktop PC with a full-sized keyboard, a big monitor and everything else I need
> On a more practical note, Kinect represents the $100 difference in price between Xbox One and PlayStation 4 this holiday. It's of course Microsoft's prerogative to go "all-in" on Kinect, but we'd sure prefer to choose at retail.
[0] https://www.engadget.com/2013/11/20/microsoft-xbox-one-revie...
I'm not disagreeing with your comment, I agree that if they advertised the bundled price and then calling out the opportunity to buy it without a keyboard as a lower price option would be a better way to market it, but is the unit 3 pieces? (pen/keyboard/display) 2 pieces (display/pen)? or one piece? (display).
I have both the Surface Pro and the iPad pro and find that both can be operated without the keyboard although windows applications often assume the keyboard is there. And while you can use your finger on the Surface display the stylus is much more accurate.
Bottom line seems to be that Microsoft and Apple are going head to head with these things and Microsoft didn't have a 10" version. I was disappointed in the lack of LTE availability at release.
No, they are both deceptive.
Apart from that: For my very own usage patterns, no Windows machine is in the same market as an iPad. I see that they pitch it this way, but I don't know anyone who perceives those two products as comparable for daily usage.
Allow me to introduce you to me :-) I presumably have different usage patterns that you do.
I've got both an iPad Pro 10.5 and a Surface Pro and keyboards and styli for both of them. With the exception of software that is available for one and not the other, they are pretty much interchangeable as a daily driver with two caveats.
1) If I am using my Surface on the road I have to tether it through my phone for internet connectivity.
2) If I am using the iPad have to SSH into a Linux machine to get a Linux userland prompt.
I use Dropbox on both of them to access shared files.
The big differentiator for me, is that on Surface when I plug in the dock connector it lights up my dual 2K monitor/keyboard/mouse setup and it is just like being on a desktop machine. Not something I can do with the iPad.
The other aspect that probably makes my setup unique is that I'm not developing code for either the iPad or the Surface, just using them as essentially terminals to get to the systems where I am writing the code.
How is web browsing on the iPad Pro compared to the Surface Pro?
On my iPad 3 I found browsing frustrating because of the way Safari handled memory. I got very tired of starting to write a comment on HN or Reddit, opening more tabs to research while working on the comment, and having Safari decide that to save memory it should discard my comment tab's content and reload it from the net when I switched back...thereby also losing what I had typed so far.
Has iPad Pro improved this?
I switched to Surface Pro 4, figuring that because it is running a desktop OS and desktop browsers, it either would handle this better out of the box or I could fiddle with virtual memory settings to make it work. It did indeed handle it fine out of the box.
On the other hand I still regard the iPad as a fantastic device made for browsing, reading, media consumption an dlight work. The fact that it’s light, small and so portable enables you to always have it ready and nearby on the couch, out in the garden, at the coffee table. It’s a feature that’s hard to explain. Unless I’m doing real work, my iMac hardly gets any use these days.
The surface might handle these tasks just as fine, but I guess you’d give up at least some convenience due to the fact that, at least to me, the surface seems like a ultrabook first, tablet second.
FWIW, I haven't used it since I bought a 6th-gen iPad with LTE. It suits that role better for me.