Don’t Call The New Microsoft Surface RT A Tablet, This Is A PC
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I want one of these Surface tablets, they look nice and I really do like the appearance of Windows 8. Give it time, the surface will be cracked and you'll see people running variants of Linux on these things before you know it and then I'll be more inclined to buy.
People have ported useful Linux tools to Android, but so far, it's not nearly as comprehensive as having a full-on Linux package management system. So I gues my question is whether there more Linuxy versions of Linux -- distros that run XWindows apps, and where you can pull full-blown versions of things like Octave, Emacs, gcc, and so on out of a package library -- with touchscreen support in the same class as Android?
I was genuinely surprised how the jailbroken iOS userland gives you a really good debian-like experience, whereas with Android you often get just busybox and the rest is more up to you like LFS.
Canonical has also been pushing Ubuntu onto the space. They have Ubuntu for Android[1] where you keep using Android on phones/tablets but then are able to tether them to a screen/keyboard and have a full Ubuntu running out of the same device and accessing the same data. They've also just demo'd Ubuntu as a real tablet OS on a Nexus 7[2].
[1] http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/android [2] http://www.mobilemag.com/2012/10/23/ubuntu-running-on-nexus-...
Could not find anything newer and do not have spare table to install it. But work is definitely done.
It's what has given Apple their "radical" feel.
MS has a lot of money. Good margins compared to PC manufacturers. They can afford to be a little bold. Here instead of offering two different keyboards (or no keyboard) and letting consumers choose, figure out which one works better. Make the perfect keyboard for a touch device. Most consumers have never had one of these devices before. Their guess at whether or not
Apple told us the best option was no keyboard. Android me-tooed. If Microsoft have a better answer, I'd like to see them champion it with confidence. Commit to the design. Letting the market decide is great and given a choice between intelligent design only and evolution only, I'd go with evolution. But, I'd rather have both. Since MS is leaving its world of software to create a machine that demonstrates its new OS parading, I'd like to see them treading confidently.
just do it Microsoft.
No need to be overly (and wrongly) pedantic.
Yeah I'd love a desktop replacement that cannot and will never run any legacy Win32 apps. Sounds awesome.
Out of curiosity, what legacy Win32 apps are you actually looking to use? I'm generally a Windows user, but not really for the legacy apps.
Every single App you currently use on Windows is a "legacy app" for Windows RT. They'll all have to be written from scratch.
I'm not going to get a Surface, but to be clear every singe app that I currently use on Windows is definitely going to be available at launch on Windows RT, assuming you count Chrome and IE10 as interchangeable (which non-experts do) or if a version of Chrome launches (like the version on iOS). It's going to launch with a browser, a chat client, a media player, and a random set of games. There is nothing else that I run on Win7.
Anything intended to be used on a touchscreen device needs to be written from scratch. Any application intended to be used by a mouse used on a touchscreen is an absolutely awful experience (I used a WinXP laptop with a touchscreen display about 6 years ago, totally fine laptop but the touch screen is useless because the usability in apps is not there). You can't expect to just run Lightroom on a touchscreen and expect it to work well.
I had never heard of Lightroom before, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like it is targeted at professional photographers or hobbyist photographers who have $1000+ camera equipment. I dual boot Ubuntu for development, and I recognize that is esoteric hobbyist usage, and I don't expect Windows to start supporting all the tools I want for development out of the box. I can't imagine who really thinks that level of usage should be supported by a low end consumer device.
Don't move the goalposts: you "what legacy Win32 apps are you actually looking to use?" I responded with some common ones. Let's go simpler then: dropbox is a "legacy" app that you cannot install.
The conversation was in the context of desktop operating systems, you yourself said it: "Is it not true that Linux and Mac OSX are viable for new desktops"
You can debate for hours if linux is "viable" for desktops (Year of the desktop! 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002...) but that just confuses the conversation further. It's impossible to argue that WinRT is.
Doesn't make a compelling argument does it.
Presumably the point is that if it's a PC replacement then customers are primed to spend more on it than if it's "just" a tablet. Tablets can replace PCs for sure but not because they provide all the functionality and performance, no instead it's because - like you it seems - people don't use all the capacity of their PCs. However, MS wouldn't want to suggest that any tablet might be a PC replacement for their customers, only this one ... blah, blah.
tl;dr it's just a marketing angle
My statement is in response to the claim 'Surface is not a PC because it won't have Photoshop on it'; I do not think that is a compelling argument. My statement isn't trying to go all the way to say that WinRT is a Desktop replacement, it's merely that single argument shouldn't lead you to the conclusion that it isn't.
That WinRT itself won't have Photoshop on it is probably already false if the platform succeeds at all (there is already a reduced version of Adobe Photoshop for iPad, Adobe would make a less-reduced version for RT if the demand is there and the hardware supports it). Even assuming it is, lack of Adobe Photoshop doesn't automatically make something not a viable desktop replacement for 99.9% of people.
It looks like they are pushing Surface as something to be used with a keyboard (at least more so that iPad). That seems like a reasonable thing to call out in marketing as why this device might be able to replace the desktop for some users when an iPad fell short.
Any new version of anything is going to leave out some percentage of the users unless it is a strict superset of the old functionality. Apple Maps are totally useless to anyone who only used Google Maps for public transit. It's totally ridiculous to make the claim that Apple Maps isn't a viable replacement for Google Maps based solely on the fact that for a specific fairly small set of users it isn't a viable option; Apple Maps is still a viable replacement for the vast majority of users.
Well given that every Win32 app is a legacy app as far as Surface RT is concerned, I would say "all of them".
Oh, and you can too run legacy Win32 apps on OSX and Linux, Wine and Virtualbox being two prime examples of how.
Of course, Chromebooks start at half the price of the base Surface RT.
And just like Surface RT, they wont be seen as a desktop replacement any time soon.
I had previously heard rumours of sales of only 50000 units worldwide (Cannot source atm)
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/few-buy-chromebooks...
I took the primary point of calling a PC to be that it is too large to be called a tablet. The article goes to great length to point out that the keyboard is pretty much necessary, the full size usb port is necessary and that the whole package is as big as a laptop.
How would you define PC and PC app?
Isn't this the exact same line MS used to use against linux? It can't run win32 apps and is therefore useless?
How things change...
You can really see how techcrunch rushed this one out the door as quickly as possible without doing much error checking. None of the images work when you click on them, there's spelling mistakes/typos everywhere and some weird expressions that don't seem to make sense at all.
Maybe I'm oldschool, but IMO a Personal Computer is end-user programmable on the device itself. RT comes with no devtools and doesn't cut it.
Reading all the reviews this evening it looks like they are going for 'your corporate road warrior' type. Clearly the iPad is making inroads there, and office on the road? Check. Powerpoint to HDMI output? Check. Exchange email? Check. Given their market share in that space it seems like the right place to start.