Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

We demo'd a surface at work, and these were my takeaways:

1) The UI is incredibly confusing. It, again, feels like it's just a windows machine with some goofy /thing/ bolted to the top of it. It reminds me of windows media center.

2) At least the one we got was really heavy. Heavier than a macbook air, which is a "real" computer.

3) We all-too-frequently seemed to get dumped back into a standard windows desktop with a startbutton and everything...which would be great, if it functioned that way. All I wanted to do was create a PPTP connection on the thing, but absolutely couldn't figure out how to make that happen.

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I am fairly far from an apple fan, but the reason that the iPad has been so successful is that apple designed it from the beginning to be a new device with new UI paradigms.

Android did the same.

Microsoft, at least from the experience I got with surface, absolutely did not, which is sad, because they're easily poised to be able to dominate tablets.

The "holy shit" dream scenario that I have, and I think it's shared by a lot of tablet users, is a tablet as a detachable auxiliary monitor that I can dock applications into.

If I drag, for example, a browser window over to my surface monitor, that surface monitor should be able to get picked up and go with me, and then I should be able to dock that back into my desktop and go back to working there.

A couple of notes to your points ...

2.) There are two Surface models, one is the Surface RT (which this article is talking about) and the other is the yet to be released Surface Pro.

The Surface RT is slightly heaving than the latest generate iPad.

The Surface Pro is supposed to be 2 lbs., which is lighter than the smallest Macbook Air and with the exception of form factor, it is every bit a real computer as is the Macbook Air.

3.) There is no start button in Windows 8 or Windows RT, so I don't know what device you were demo'ing.

I appreciate your reasoned post about the Surface: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5146663 A couple clarifications to highlight how the jury is still out on this device and its long-term impact on the market.

> 2.) The Surface RT is slightly heaving than the latest generate iPad... The Surface Pro is supposed to be 2 lbs.,

I had the Surface RT (with touch keyboard) in one hand and my MacBook Air in the other hand. The MacBook Air felt lighter. I did the same thing with a Surface Pro I wasn't supposed to see on a different occasion; the MacBook Air still felt lighter. It could be the Surface Pro I saw was a hardware prototype.

Weight doesn't seem like the Surface's major advantage.

> 3) There is no start button in Windows 8 or Windows RT

You're right that there isn't a start menu in desktop mode (unless someone installs the popular apps that put it back). However, there is a hardware start button on the surface RT I saw... and I did hit it quite often when holding it in landscape. Somehow my hand just wanted to hold the device in the middle from below (perhaps because it's easier to balance? Torsion is heavy?) and got tired much quicker when holding on one side.

The weight of the Surface RT and Surface are lighter than the Macbook Air 11 inch by .88 pounds and .38 pounds respectively. The Surface was engineered to equally distribute the weight so that it even feels lighter than it actually is.

How heavy is the pro keyboard attachment? More than .38 lbs?

About that. A Surface Pro with the Type Cover should be both thinner and lighter than the smallest MacBook Air. Exactly how many hundredths of a pound lighter isn't yet known since no review units were sent out and the Surface Pro website says "under 2 pounds" for the device.

You're right! There is no start button, this is my mistake.

The desktop looks like this: http://oyster.ignimgs.com/wordpress/stg.ign.com/2012/11/Surf...

MS can only dominate tablets by upsetting their enterprise segments.

Microsoft's personal computing empire is built not directly on Windows and Office, but on the million little customizations and plugins that people build on top of them. That's where their lock-in comes from these days.

If they can't put that platform on the new hot computing hardware, their advantage is gone. New people buying a hypothetical "touch first" MS tablet would not only be free to choose other applications than Office, but their enterprises would be forced to rewrite their MS-locked solutions. Thus making it easier and easier for IT groups to push alternate desktop and server platforms.

If Outlook is reduced to just-another-mail client, and the workflow/management 'applications' built on top of it have to be serviced elsewhere, you might as well let employees choose mac or linux machines. And you may not even be able to justify Exchange itself after a few years of that.

Hmm..that's weird. Surface RT is 1.5lbs and Surface Pro (yet to release) is 2 lbs[0]. Both versions (11, 13 inch) of Macbook Air are more than 2lbs[1].

[0] http://www.microsoft.com/Surface/en-US/surface-with-windows-... [1] http://www.apple.com/macbookair/specs.html

EDIT: Those are without the keyboard. Depending on the keyboard, I can see how Surface might have been slightly heavier.

My speculation is that MSFT couldn't get all of the desktopy things to the non-desktopy world, and had to compromise by leaving things (like setting up a pptp connection) to the old control panel. My guess is that by the next release we'll see the desktop deprecated on RT devices.

No, the desktop is needed to run Microsoft Office.

According to http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft_press/archive/2012/10/29/f... on p.36, ipc between apps is blocked for Win 8 Store apps. If this is required by an application, you have to run it in the desktop. Deprecating the desktop won't be simple if such ipc is integral to how the applications function.

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