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Comment by kbumsik | Hacker News Reader

It reminds me how the first Surface Pro looked like.

It was incomplete and useless device so it didn't go well. However, Microsoft didn't give up. After three iterations Microsoft finally made Surface Pro 3, which was the first useful Windows tablet with a cleverly designed keyboard and a great 3:2 ratio screen. The surface line finally took off and third-parties began to make "surface-like" products since then.

Microsoft is not like Apple. They don't make perfect products at the beginning, but they eventually nailed it after some iterations (I know they still have software issues though.) So I will wait and see what Microsoft will make in the next generations.

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Apple doesn’t make perfect products in the beginning either.

iPhone - no 3g, no GPS, no third party apps, couldn’t shoot video, and no flash for cameras. My feature phone had all of this at the time. Between 2G and AT&Ts network it was a hard pass for me. Not to mention the 4GB of memory. I did end up getting two iPod Touches before the iPhone 4.

iPad - it wasn’t apparent until the next year, but the original iPad was sorely crippled by having only 256MB of RAM compared to the iPhone 4 that came out three months later with 512MB of RAM. The iPhone ran iOS 4-7. The iPad could only run iOS 5.

Apple Watch - slow, no GPS and apps were terrible with the first version of WatchOS. They were only a little better with watchOS 2. The third generation were the first good ones.

Not sure I agree with the first two, as those products were so revolutionary, it's hard to ding them for some features they missed (Especially since they eventually got many of those features via software updates). Not saying they were perfect by any means, but it was a damn fine first attempt.

First gen Watch was trash and I completely regret that purchase, furthermore, I can't believe Apple even released it in that state. It was literally unusable for me, with some taps taking multiple seconds (!!!) to respond. It was unbearable.

Windows Mobile phones had everything bar capacitive screens years before the iPhone, and tablets were a thing for years, as well. So please, stop with the "revolutionary" nonsense.

Everything about Windows Phones (CE Based) were horrible, including the browser and the interface. Tablets before the iPad were bulky and the interface wasn’t exactly touch friendly.

Nothing but the resistive screens seemed bad to me at the time. Very useable, useful devices. iWhatever was evolutionary, not revolutionary.

I had plenty of experience with Windows CE based devices - I programmed them for four years writing field service implementations. Did you try using Office or IE on Windows mobile devices compared to either iWork,Google Docs, or later Office for iOS?

Office Mobile and even IE were fine, though I used Opera. This was pre iPhone, and I even had 3G with tethering on the HTC Tytn. Stuff was way ahead of its time, and worked great at the time. There were no alternatives!

I will never call any Apple stuff revolutionary, it's just not. It's an improvement over existing things.

> Microsoft is not like Apple. They don't make perfect products at the beginning

Oh man, try to remember how the first iPhone was. It was the most useless thing in the world. It didn’t have app store!

The lesson is to iterate, iterate and iterate

Is that sarcasm, because I had the first iphone and being able to use a browser anywhere was the killer feature, and it was amazing.

Is that sarcasm, because I had cheap Symbian 40 phone with Opera mobile way before iPhone was announced. Browser that i used everywhere. And this Symbian phones were majority of the market. Also Windows mobile phones that only geeks were using at the time also had browser and also way before iPhone.

The Opera browser at the time for mobile weren’t full browsers. They rendered on a server and had limitations.

No, that was Opera Mini. Opera Mobile was a full browser using Presto, and ran on a bunch of platforms including Symbian, Windows Mobile and Maemo.

The web at that time didn't need full browsers to be enjoyable. Most websites were like what Hacker News is right now: just simple HTML, little to no JavaScript, and easy on bandwidth.

By 2005, Flash was ubiquitous and one of the knocks against the iPhone in 2007 was that it couldn’t run Flash. Plug ins were ubiquitous and bloated MySpace pages and Geocities was a thing.

Home broadband adoption was already 40% (https://www.pewinternet.org/2006/05/28/home-broadband-adopti...)

No, that was Opera Mini J2ME. Symbian's Opera mobile was based on Presto and rendered and executed JS on the device. It could optionally compress images and JS with Opera Turbo.

Did you forget large touchscreen, no physical buttons and no need for stylus?

Of course other phones had browsers, they were just pain to use and iPhone was revolutionary device compared to even most feature rich flagship device. It’s an opinion you may disagree with, but you’re in minority.

I don't argue that iPhone was revolutionary although I think it was way less revolutionary than average consumer thinks. I argue with very specific claim. OP have claimed that "being able to use a browser anywhere was the killer feature" and it is just not true because most of the market could do it. All symbian, blackberry and Windows Mobile phones could do it.

>Did you forget large touchscreen, no physical buttons and no need for stylus?

iPhones did have physical home button and O2 XDA II from 2003 has the same touchscreens size as original iPhone. Also you are forgetting that first capacitive touchscreens were awful. Qwerty keyboard or resistive touchscreen were just nicer to use. And you didn't have to use stylus. Most people who I know used stylus in few very specific applications and they just use finger for most tasks but to be fair you had to be very precise.

I disagree that it was useless. The first iPhone had a small but very polished set of features.

The first iPhone was fantastic compared to every other phone that existed when it was released. If it was useless, so was every other phone.

There is a potential difference though: with the Surface, Microsoft only needed to iterate on the hardware, which it could do by itself. My concern with Windows 10X is that it requires buy-in from developers to reach its full potential, and that has been lacking. To be blunt, UWP attracted basically no developer attention (which is a shame, it was a pretty good development environment). Unless they figure out how to turn that situation around, the Surface Duo might be a fantastic Office machine but nothing else.

Minor correction:

The Duo is the Android phone.

The Windows X tablet is called the Neo.

> UWP attracted basically no developer attention (which is a shame, it was a pretty good development environment).

This is not a shame, this is the logical consequence of all to lies told to the Windows Phone community, which could have bootstrapped UWP but was totally demotivated when UWP was released.

But the main reason is the stupid decision to make UWP available only on Windows 10, at a time where Win7 had the highest marketshare. Microsoft should focus on making WPF multi-platform if it wants developer to be excited again to develop native software on Windows.

There is hardly any energy behind consumer PC development at all outside of games.

> at all outside of games

And you know, all the software stacks across multiple disciplines required to actually make games and movies and TV shows and music.

That’s a profitable niche, but not a huge niche. Would you really go and talk to investors about your great startup that makes desktop software in 2019?

It’s a great market for Microsoft, Adobe, Avid, etc but not for any new entrants.

Yes, it made no sense to adopt UWP when Windows 7 was still so prevalent. I'm still supporting it at least until next year, possibly beyond then.

You also have to wonder at their commitment, WPF wasn't that old when they started dicking about with Metro. WPF didn't even feel finished. Why invest huge amounts of time and effort in a platform you don't think they have a long term commitment to.

A lot of users spend their entire life in Office and various MS online apps. This would be worth having just for PowerPoint alone. It would let you keep slides open while presenting and have other apps open privately.

This! They also iterated quite fast:

Surface Pro 1 - February 2013

Surface Pro 2 - October 2013 (that's not a typo)

Surface Pro 3 - June 2014

> Microsoft is not like Apple. They don't make perfect products at the beginning

For example, perfect butterfly keyboards.

3 months in and the touch bar stopped working, it just doesn't light up. It's a work laptop so it is going for a replacement, backing up my data as I type this.

Also, some keys double type :( Perfect my ass.

PS: I know you are being sarcastic

They perfectly emulate the fragility of real butterflies.

The amount of bellyaching about the MacBook keyboard is the exception that proves the rule.

The current AppleTV remote is garbage too, Apple Watch Series 0, how many rule proving exceptions do they get? Shall we segue into iOS 13...

The first version of nearly every Apple product has had major issues. With Apple you're always better off waiting for v2.

Hockey Puck mouse.

Heck my Mac-mini overheats and throttles itself not by reducing the CPU clock but apparently by having a system process just take ownership of the CPU and NO-OP things until the system cools down, bringing everything including the UI down to a crawl.

An absolutely horrible user experience.

The famous display snow that happened for years when plugging external monitors into Macbooks.

Actually, it reminds me of that pre-iPad Microsoft project that they killed off to focus on Windows 8. It was almost production ready too; had dual screens and there was a neat video of how the stylus interacted with it. I can't remember what it was called though and can't seem to find it searching DDG/Google.

The Microsoft Courier! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Courier

Video of it in action - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmIgNfp-MdI

Cancelled Microsoft Courier might be what you have in mind. See:

https://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+courrier+tablet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmIgNfp-MdI

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Courier

"After three iterations Microsoft finally made Surface Pro 3"

I think Microsoft does this a lot. They persist and usually succeeds. Most of the time.

> They don't make perfect products at the beginning, but they eventually nailed it after some iterations

This is not limited to hardware: early versions of SQL Server were far from perfect, but they kept improving on it. Makes some kind of sense if you have deep pockets and your product targets a very lucrative market.

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