Microsoft Surface RT price announced | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Surface RT price announced

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57 pointsvignesh_vs_in87 comments

Pricing like an iPad, fewer apps than Android tablets, and no way to run legacy Windows applications. It's hard to see what the selling point is here.

$100 cheaper than an iPad.

iPad 2 can be bought from $399, and the $499+ iPads have a Retina display, this is only 1366x768.

$100 more expensive than an iPad 2.

New things cost more than old things.

Its more equivalent to an Ipad 2 than the Ipad 3 since it doesn't have a retina like screen. The Surface pro has the screen where pixels aren't visible.

I do wonder if the surface will be more reliable than a xbox 360. I'm on my second one and it just broke again. Microsoft isn't know for reliable devices and as a business, i can't have tablets die on my employees. With apple, i haven't had any issues with three year old ipad that is used daily.

> I do wonder if the surface will be more reliable than a xbox 360. I'm on my second one and it just broke again. Microsoft isn't know for reliable devices and as a business, i can't have tablets die on my employees. With apple, i haven't had any issues with three year old ipad that is used daily.

Well if we're trading anecdotes, I went through 3 Macbook Pros in 3 years. Two screens broke and one trackpad stopped working. One of the headphone jacks also broke. Apparently the issues I hit were fairly common, at least on the generations I had. This doesn't mean Apple makes bad hardware. It means that their hardware isn't perfect (no one's is), and that I got unlucky.

My wife has a Dell laptop that's years old and has no problems except that the battery needs replacing. Anecdotes don't count for much.

Disclosure: Microsoft employee

$100 cheaper than an iPad with equivalent storage, but if customers compare the base model of each, they're the same. Not to mention that Apple's website offers the previous model for $100 less.

We'll have to wait and see if a big part of that storage is not used by the Windows OS, which is much larger than iOS, unless they don't count that storage, but they might.

Also, it still has a regular resolution. I would expect at least a 1080p resolution at that price. The 9" Kindle Fire has one, and it sells for $300. That's $200 difference,and the Surface still doesn't have that high of a resolution.

It runs Office.

iPad and Android will get Office in spring, too, and it will probably cost $30 at most, otherwise no one will get it, and moving them to these 2 platforms would have been a pointless exercise.

But I still fail to see how this is a major selling point on a tablet. I'm sure Quick Office and Apple's office suite provide more than enough functionality for most people, and an experience that isn't too cumbersome.

But what bothers me most about it when people mention this is that they seem to think that because it has Office, it just washes away all the app advantage that the iPad or even Android have on tablets. And that's nowhere near being true. The Surface does have a lower value because of lack of apps, and that should be reflected in the price. There's little reason in getting a $500 Windows RT tablet over a $250 Nexus 7 (half the price, same performance).

I think you underestimate the dominance of MS Office, and the ability to use it as a selling point.

On tablet? No. Office requires high precision input devices (i.e. keyboard and mouse), which are precisely the devices that tablets do not have.

Tablets are consumption devices; for productivity, you will still want laptop or desktop - without Metro.

> Office requires high precision input devices (i.e. keyboard and mouse), which are precisely the devices that tablets do not have.

Touch cover or type cover, perhaps. I haven't used either of these yet, but I believe this is one of the niches they are intended to fill.

Transformer Prime owner here. It has a detachable keyboard, that while quite nice (it is a battery too, so no balancing problems!) is still a far cry from a keyboard on a proper laptop. (Btw., keyboard on Thinkpad X230 rocks, despite being chicklet).

I'm working daily with Excel. If someone in IT would have the crazy idea to buy us tablets (even Surface) for that work, we would beat them with it. That's why I see the "Office on RT" as hyped nonsense.

It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking no one will buy X if it's not as good at Y as Z. (Here X, Y, Z = tablet, document editing, laptop.) A laptop will undoubtedly be better for document editing than a Windows RT tablet. But then, a full-blown desktop is better for document editing than a laptop yet desktop purchases are still plummeting.

People won't buy a Windows RT tablet because it's the best at document editing. That might buy it because it's good enough at document editing, more portable than a laptop, and fun to play casual games on, though. (Of course it might meet an entirely different checklist for many.)

I don't think anyone is expecting the Surface to replace your work computer. There are a lot of people torn between getting a tablet or a laptop, though, and for a sizable chunk of those people, Office RT + Touch/Type Cover might be a real selling feature.

My experience with Numbers on the iPad is pretty awful. Even at the price I kind of felt cheated. It might not be possible to do a good office suite on a touch centric device but I'm not sure anyone has really tried up to this point. The number of people needing such a thing is still relatively small (but obviously growing).

Adding a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse should make a tablet-based office suite quite useful.

Adding a keyboard and a mouse to an iPad will make this non portable (at least for me). If you really need a keyboard and a small device I think buying a Mac Book Air 11' is a much better choice.

Also the iPad doesn't know what a mouse is, so that's a non-starter.

Disclosure: Microsoft employee, not that it seems relevant

Yes, but then you have basically ARM laptop, just with more standalone parts and with worse usability as a real laptop.

I agree with you, real office support (there are ~compatible apps on both iPad and Android) seems a very weak selling point on a tablet. I personally don't care for it: my tablet is a "potato couch" or information consumption device. For the occasional office document viewing the existing apps are plenty enough. If I need to do serious work, I'll grab my laptop.

And the many convertible products announced also leave me cold. I used to think such convertible devices would be the next big thing, but no more after looking at it. For me a convertible is either too big for a tablet, or too small for a laptop. Plus the balancing is usually wrong in laptop mode (too much weight in the screen/tablet). In the end it looks like a seaplane: neither a good boat nor a good plane. But just like a seaplane some people will have a use for it ;)

On my side, there are now cheap and light tablets. For roughly the same price I'd rather have a cheap tablet (Nexus 7 is plenty enough for me for example) and a cheap but ok laptop. I can put both in a bag, and it's still lighter than my previous laptop. Then I can have the best device for my current usage. Sync is not a problem, there are plenty of options to deal with this, and for what I use the tablet for it really doesn't need to have the same OS as the laptop (different usage, different apps. And actually not many on the tablet).

But it's a big world, and maybe I'm not mainstream. We'll see when the hype settles and the actual sales number start to fall.

Comes with the best authoring product free. Micro SD USB Stand

They could have released this with an Atom processor at the same price. Windows RT is such a huge gamble for Microsoft. It will either sell enough copies to push developers to Metro or turn a lot of people off to Windows 8 before the "Pro" tablets even come out.

The Surface Pro may be coming out 3 months later but there will be full fledged Windows 8 devices from other companies in November.

Isn't this supposed to be expensive, to be in the place where 90% of other Windows RT tablet manufacturers will look UP to, but cut down on little details to keep the price low and another 10% of them to take it as a lowest feature set and build up from it for the PURE LUXURY segment above?

(I know, this is not a strategy to sell a lot of products, but it's a good strategy for building a thriving and healthy ecosystem around the product, and Microsoft seems to get this more and more, same as they seem to get open-source on the Azure and to open up in other ways... they finally realized that they are A DINOSAUR (more in the size meaning than in the backwardsness) and they need around them an ecosystem rich enough to support dinosaurs too, in order to survive!)

It's an interesting theory, but Google's experience with Android tablets suggests that it needs a flagship device at a popular price to take off. And in the luxury sector, that price leaves little room below Apple, whose tablets are perceived as the gold standard.

Also, perusing recent announcements, OEMs don't seem to have much interest in going for lower prices. I guess the cheaper tablets will come post-launch, but they'll be on the defensive against Android tablets.

I think Google aimed for the "below iPad" segment from the beginning and tend to think this was a smart move for them as they achieved fast growth.

...but Ms seems to be directly targeting the iPad segment, because pricewise this is not the "luxury segment" anymore, it's the segment of the users that actually want to do WORK, not just consume entertainment, on these devices and Ms wants them because they will spend more on all the productivity tools they need and they will be able to buy from Ms.

i think that’s the point most people are missing. while i personally would have liked to see it priced a bit lower (starting at $400 - $450 would have felt about right to me), i can totally see why they didn’t and i think those arguing for a lower price are being too short-sighted. this isn’t just the launch of a single device, it’s also effectively a launch of a new platform, and the success of the latter is far more important..

as they said from day one (and as i'm sure they were repeatedly emphasizing to their hardware partners over the past few months), they aren’t going to undercut OEMs on price. which makes total sense. they’re not Apple; it’s going to take more than one device to grow the platform and they’re playing to where they always play in the market: offering Windows on as wide a variety of devices and form-factors as possible (now also including some built in-house). undercutting other offerings may have boosted Surface sales in the near-term, but overtime it would have probably crippled broader adoption of Windows RT by alienating the OEMs that are critical in pushing it.

the general argument for a cheap(er) Surface RT is that it’s needed to help grow the Windows Store. while i think it would help to some extent, most of that comes in just the fact that it’s out there, as a flagship device, representing the platform in the market. i think their approach of relying on the large (soon-to-be) Windows 8 install base to incentivize developers is a far sounder strategy for building it out.. even at a lower price point, a few million additional Surface RT units (maybe) aren’t going to have as large of an impact on demand for Windows Store Apps as the hundreds of millions of devices that will eventually be running Windows 8; what it would have done though is likely alienate the OEMs that would otherwise be pushing those sales, and eventually Windows RT sales down the road.

Superior industrial design and user experience.

Over the years, I've seen a lot of people say that Microsoft should adopt Apple's business model: abandon backwards compatibility, compete on the high-end rather than price and focus on industrial design and user experience.

They've done just that. Let's see if it sells.

I can't argue with that. But the pricing isn't surprising. Apple doesn't make that much money on the iPad, and they have an incredibly efficient supply chain.

At the same quality level, it's hard for anyone to undercut apple on price on iPad, unless you do a 0-margin product (google, amazon).

In contrast, iPhone has lots of margin, so it's relatively easy for other players.

> Apple doesn't make that much money on the iPad

Hmmm... I might be wrong, but I thought they have HUGE margins. You know, like 40%? Keep in mind that the most popular iPad, 32GB 4G is $729. The $499 model is not the most popular one (at least according to the analysts).

Do you have a source for that ?

For some reason I find that hard to believe: that the most expensive iPad is the most popular one as opposed to to the 16 GB WIFI only version.

I can't find the article now (stupid Google shows just ads and links to Amazon or Apple when I search for something like "iPad most popular model"), but here's one that claims 64GB 3G Model was the most popular iPad 2 model on launch: http://gigaom.com/apple/most-popular-ipad-2-model-is-also-th...

Arguably, early adopters are different than "late"-adopters, but still... The "analysis" that I remember was for iPad 3, and it was a few months after the launch.

Not sure what your definition of "that much money" is :-)

The margins are estimated to be ~37% - ~50% depending on the model. http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/News/Pages/New-iPad-32-GB-4...

Those estimated margins aren't as high as iPhone (http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/News/Pages/iPhone5-Carries-...) but are still pretty damn good :-)

Somewhere definitely north of 30%, 40% for high end devices. Keep in mind apple has its own retail distribution, so there is no middle cut (they offer very little to resellers like best buy). Apple has room to cut prices if they want, I don't think anyone else does though.

It's hard to run a hardware business at less than 35% gross margins. There are a lot of extra costs besides the bill of materials and assembly.

37% for apple might only be 25% for any other competitor, because apples supply chain is so streamlined and locked down. So it's hard to compete with the base iPad on price.

At 50%, you are right, there could be room to undercut, but that's only the high-end iPad (eg 64gb) which isn't where the volume is.

iPhone margins are much better, and thus leave more room for others to undercut or offer feature parity.

$110 for the soft keyboard cover, $120 for the hard keyboard cover. They think $10 difference is big enough for giving customers confusion of choice.

It's still the same company that released 6 editions of Vista.

> They think $10 difference is big enough for giving customers confusion of choice.

Who says they're trying to confuse anyone? The touch cover is the primary offering, which is why it's in all the ads. The type cover is a secondary offering, intended for people who want a more traditional keyboard and are willing to tolerate the extra thickness. The $10 difference presumably covers the difference in manufacturing costs.

I guess you'd be happier for some reason if they didn't offer the type cover?

Disclosure: Microsoft employee

So with a price similar to the iPad it's obvious MS doesn't want to compete on price but rather on features. Well good luck on that.

Well, they may be the only party able to do that. While Google and its herd of OEMs play catch up, MS is actually trying to think different...

you assume Android isn't trying to compete on features as well. Guess what, it is, and competing in various form factors and price.

No offense, but unless this device blows the doors off in reviews (in battery life and usability) this thing is DOA. The Pro version might have better luck with the enterprise, but no reasonable person is going to buy an RT tablet that can't run desktop apps and lacks the ecosystem that Apple has.

Excuse me, but I believe it's actually the android ecosystem that produces many different products and the user really has a lot to choose from.

One example: http://youtu.be/AxE_Im20UZM

Another example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX9KG369evA#t=10m34s

Yet another: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wf_PqPi2tw

Now, I'm not saying that those examples are better than products from iOS or WinRT ecosystem, but you can hardly say that there's no innovation.

Well, these are nice experiments. Remind me of the good old Nokia...

In the meantime, the mainstream Android tablets (Fire, Nexus, Galaxy Tabs) are actually "me too" devices, lagging visibly behind the iPad.

Disclosure: I'm a happy Android user, both phone and tablet.

There is an extra competition factor: App Store. I don't think anybody can compete with Apple in some sectors like games and interactive books. I haven't seen anything similar to the iPad offerings even in the Android store.

It's $100 cheaper.

As multiple people have pointed out above -- no retina display. It isn't cheaper than iPad 2, which seems to have roughly a similar screen.

Also given Microsoft's track record with hardware. Xbox360 has a reported 50%+ failure rate with their units.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_problems

Really hoped that it will be priced lower than that. Now it's very uncertain if this will be a hit with the Windows Store Apps so few and developers still not convinced about the platform as well.

It's still $100 cheaper than the 32GB iPad but storage is useless if you don't have Apps to fill it.

Its also $100 more expensive than an iPad 2 (or the same price if you assume 16 GB = $100). The resolution of the Surface is similar to the iPad 2 (if you care about that), but I'm not sure if the screen is somehow otherwise better (e.g., IPS?).

That's a nice note on the dev perspective. If they were smart, they'd have something similar to Google I/O and give tons away to potential developers.

They already did that for Windows Phone, nearly every mobile dev i know got a free Nokia Lumia or similar at certain conferences (Droidcon Berlin was an odd choice tho).

It didn't seem to have helped that much.

I think it did help. They have 100K+ apps in the Windows Phone Store.

Even with PC sales on the decline, there are still going to be tens of millions of people with a Windows 8 computer and the "Store" tile staring them in the face every time they turn it on.

"... Apps to fill it" I guess some video games could be large, but wouldn't most people with tablets fill most of their storage with audio and video files rather than apps?

Interesting that there's no mention of Office in the screenshot. I had assumed that at that price the inclusion of it would be the differentiator over the iPad since the Surface RT app ecosystem is minimal right now.

Personally, I'd have a very hard time recommending this as a purchase. I'm much more bullish on Surface Pro as its legacy support can mitigate any Win8 App Store holes.

Right at the bottom: "Pre-loaded with Windows RT, Microsoft Office 2013 RT...". I'm not sure it will be enough to set it apart from the competition, though.

Wow, it doesn't have 3G standard! If it came with 3G I think this pricing would be acceptable. As it is, good luck MS!

Indeed, Meh.

No 3G or 4G. I'd spend the extra $30 for the entry level iPad2 instead of the entry level RT tablet. And I don't even like Apple...

As early adopter of WP7, i'll make that mistake again. Those devices always looks great on commercials and (biased) reviews, but when you start using them on daily basis you notice that they're missing some important features (like buggy notifications on WP7).

Also, metro apps often crashes on my desktop Win8 rtm, and not third party-ones ....

Terrible strategy by Microsoft. Don't they realize they are behind in the race? MS Phone still has no devs...The iPad is viewed as "cooler". Average users won't see the tech differences between the iPad and Surface. At the same price they'll pick the iPad because it's "cooler" and the Joneses have it too.

I really like the look of this. I don't mind Windows and if I didn't have an iPad - which I only use for consuming content and browsing the web - I would probably consider getting one. Maybe when Apple stops supporting iPad2 eh?

The problem for me is the price. With Apple you know you are paying a premium for what is a luxury item.

Microsoft's brand to me isn't luxury. Its functional or economical. Its like the XBOX. Its a nice system but its middle of range in terms of cost, design and specs. Maybe this is the start of Microsoft re-branding? The trouble is I still have memories of cheap laptops taking a minute+ to boot up running windows. I associate these horrible machines with the Microsoft brand. This is why I find it hard to see myself paying what is essentially an Apple price for a Microsoft product.

If the iPad is a luxury item why have other companies not beaten it in price/performance? The Surface doesn't have a retina display, for example. Yes, Apple make a profit on their hardware, which is apparently not the case for Nexus tablet or Surface (rumor has it), but their devices are pretty competitive in price for equivalent quality. They just ignore the low-end market in the non-iPod category.

> Its like the XBOX. Its a nice system but its middle of range in terms of cost, design and specs.

Out of curiosity, what do you mean when you say the Xbox is middle of the road in terms of specs? I believe the original Xbox was far more powerful than the PS2 and GameCube, and ditto for the Xbox 360 vs PS3 and (obviously) Wii. I guess cost of the XBox 360 was middle of the road, but only because the PS3 was so crazy expensive at launch (I bought one as a Blu-Ray player well after launch and it was still crazy expensive).

I like the idea of windows 8, just not the execution. If MS' future is Metro, they should have went the iOS route with dedicated devices -- windows phone 8 and windows tablet metro that run the same apps -- and eventually added classic desktop as an app when x86 emulation was good enough on arm.

There should had been a clear distinction between the two environments. As it stands now, metro is billed as the only start menu on x86 devices, but the full os on RT devices. This is confusing and offers no compelling reason to buy the RT version.

I see Apple releasing OSX as an iOS app in the near (>=5 years) future. The reason that will work for them is because iOS is a standalone brand that people understand.

Just my 2¢, I'm not a windows user.

You do realize that Microsoft is going to release exactly that in a little under ten days.

The "desktop" is a tile on the Start Screen.

Well, the "desktop" in RT is completely different than the desktop in x86. What I said was that Metro and Windows 8 should be separate products until the x86 desktop can be emulated as an app inside of Metro.

As it stands now, your RT "desktop" apps will not run in the x86 desktop and vice versa. Those two desktops are only similar in look and feel. I do think that the Metro apps will run on both x86 and RT, not too sure about this though.

This is so fucking confusing. We have two versions of Windows 8: x86 and RT, both with two separate environments: desktop and metro. If an app can run on metro in both rt and x86, the consumer is faced with a 1/3 chance that a given app will work on their Windows 8 machine.

> metro is billed as the only start menu on x86 devices

Metro (Windows 8 style) is not billed as "only the start menu" (assuming that's what you meant) on x86. You're hearing that from hanging around HN, not from Microsoft. Windows 8 fully supports Windows 8-style apps on x86, and it's expected that you can and will install some of those apps. However, Windows 8 on x86 also fully supports all the desktop applications you use on Windows 7/Vista/XP. So if you want, you can indeed avoid all the Windows 8 applications on x86 and stick to the traditional desktop, in which case you'll only see the new style on the start screen and perhaps in various settings screens. But that's not the expected experience on x86.

For those who don't like TC, $499, $599, or $699. According to the mistakenly launched product page.

The only way I'd get an RT tablet is if all of the XP (yes, I'm still using it!) programs I use came out with an RT version. That's very unlikely. Is there still a controversy over Firefox having an RT version, btw?

I'll wait for the full 8 Surface -- but if the rumored $899-$999 pricing for that is true, I might wait and wait and wait for prices to drop.

Not the price point many people were hoping for.

So now I have to do a "proof of concept" that I can use it for business - I'm going to download Win8 and test apps before I ever buy the tablet.

If you read Hacker News, this product isn't aimed at you, sorry...

So who is it aimed at? Why would my mom or college-attending cousin get this over say, a Transformer or iPad?

Windows apps? Not available for RT option. Cover? $100 more.

What need does this product fill for it's users that it shines at?

My parents bought an ipad and then paid $100+ for a keyboard case, they use their ipad like a laptop - even though that's not really the intention of the ipad whereas it is with Surface

The new TV ad is here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mSckyoAMHg

The Surface RT does some things better than the iPad. For example, it has a MicroSD slot and a full USB port. The side-by-side multitasking view is pretty nice to put a chat or Twitter client while browsing/working etc. The built in snap out stand is also pretty cool.

I guess the main problem is that there are pretty much only two comparisons:

1. How does it compare to an iPad? Available apps is a major factor here.

2. How does it compare to a regular Windows laptop? Windows RT not running normal Windows applications is the problem here.

For most people, at least. Maybe those problems are moot, but as long as no one really has such a device we can all just guess.

Comes with office and has internet, which covers the use cases for a very large number of people.

Many people probably don't really think about what they actually need but instead about what they might need. So a large app(lication)? ecosystem probably plays a large role in that, even though many of them only ever use a browser and install two games.

What an... odd commercial. Emphasizes a lot on the "snap on" of the keyboard.

It made me feel uncomfortable but I'm not sure why.

Agreed. Wouldn't it be better to show off all the awesome stuff you can do with it? The only think they really show is that you can swipe in the Metro display.

And it does some things worse. Notably, a significantly worse display.

Oooh. Who on earth will like this ad?

Late 20-something out of work dancers?

The crazy people who are proclaiming this as an iPad killer before it has even gone on sale

I liked it, as a piece of art.

It was ineffective as a sales device — it didn't make me want to actually purchase one of these tablets, or share the ad via Twitter or whatever — but I thought the music and choreography were well done.

Still no information on battery life.

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