The Microsoft Surface Pro Proves That The PC Is Back
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Now, this could just be me but I really doubt it - the upgraded specs and compatibility don't mean anything to me even as a power user if I'm not able to comfortably work with the device. I really think the blending of tablets and laptops is a bad idea. Maybe one day someone will come up with a hybrid that changes my mind but so far from what I see all of them look like a hodgepodge of touch interfaces plus a keyboard that's supposed to make the guy who's not so sure about the whole "tablet" thing feel at ease and, wrongly, think that if the tablet-like functionality doesn't work for him he (or she of course) could just slap that keyboard on and they'll be in familiar territory. But not with Windows 8.
I also question having a laptop with a touch interface to begin with. In order to do it right you've got to take into account the types of gestures people are naturally accustomed to plus the size of touch targets, etc. So if you do that then you basically end up with something like Metro which is really pretty but frustrating as hell if you want to use it as a regular PC. People want to use a tablet for "single purpose" apps (I'm kind of loosely using that term) and a PC is for more heavy duty operations where you may need multiple windows open at a time. I might need my Word processor out at the same time as my browser and my IM client and transfer text between all 3 as a very simple example. Try doing that with Windows 8. I have. It's horrible. I mean, I totally get why you'd want to incorporate tablet ideas into desktops and laptops but at the same time you can't just directly port the UI and interactions from a tablet to a PC. It's got to be more subtle. I hate to bring up Apple but I think OS X has done some good work in how their touchpad works. There are a lot of gestures that work very naturally on the touchpad that come from tablets but still make sense in the context of a laptop or a desktop with a trackpad.
But again, that might just be me and this all might just be a lot of stuff I just don't understand. But I've got a feeling it really isn't.
I think that maybe for as long as each form factor lends itself to certain kinds of activities there may not be someone who gets it right without literally combining both the laptop and tablet experience into one device. This means more like a two-in-one device than a hybrid. There is a difference. A two-in-one has the complete features of each device and they are completely separate from each other while a hybrid is trying to be all things to all people at the same time.
Or, maybe, just maybe, someone really will get it right and I'll eat my words.
Reason? What's the problem with "touch interfaces plus a keyboard"? Many thought the iPad was a bad idea, but its sales suggest the opposite. After all, an iPad is a "touch interface with a smaller keyboard on the screen", right?
"you've got to take into account the types of gestures people are naturally accustomed to plus the size of touch targets" Were people accustomed to the iPod touch interface when they first used it? No, it was completely new and different at the time of its introduction but younger generations picked it up really quickly because it was intuitive. I still find older generations struggling to use the iPod/iPhone/iPad.
You're making too many assumptions with this post. Go out, give the Microsoft Surface Pro a try, an unbiased try, and then report on your findings. It's much more credible that way.
To your second point, I don't think I'm making too many assumptions. The laptop with a touch screen isn't a new idea, we've had them for a few years now. If you've got a laptop that responds to touch you need a Metro-like interface for it, which like I said, is cool for a tablet but when you get down to business you end up just going for the mouse and keyboard and the touch screen ends up as a gimmick until you're back in I'm-carrying-this-thing-around-one-handed-and-doing-a-quick-thing-here-and-there mode.
Yeah, I haven't used the Surface pro, you're right. And if I had used it I would then be a credible source but I'm not trying to be credible here. I'm not a journalist. I'm a guy on HN like a lot of others who's sharing my thoughts, experiences and opinions. I'm not claiming to be an expert and you can see I use a lot of "I think"'s and "in my experience"'s in what I say. Everyone's mileage may vary but unless I'm making totally off the wall unfounded crazy suggestions or until I decide I'm going to write a report I expect people to cite I think I have just as much right to what I say as a lot of others here who haven't used it but have an opinion. Now, I have used the RT and a bunch of Windows8 laptops and desktops. So it's not like I've been living in a bubble and have no clue about what these devices look, feel, or work like.
I hate it. HATE it. the touch screen on a laptop is out of place without any way to disable the touch when I want, it overlays the touch technology on the screen which is visible to me in the sun - as well as the screen medium makes the screen more dim than I would like. Especially in the sun/brightly lit areas.
It really needs to be done right in order to make a great experience. Thus far I haven't seen one.
One of the frustrating things about a touch-screen laptop is that I have a very curious toddler. She likes to touch what daddy is touching, so she will come and grab the screen to bend it down so she can see what I am doing and in doing so clicks on things, scrolls and closes windows.
I never use the touch screen on this machine for anything and so it is simply an annoyance.
I just would like the ability to disable the touch functionality when I want.
In other words, I love that my ipad doesn't try to make life more busy than it needs to be. It's as close as I can get to unplugging when I need it most.
Example would be games consoles and the amazon kindle, in fact plenty of people will have 2 games consoles to play different kinds of games (e.g wii and xbox).
I think the main draw of hybrid devices is where buying individual devices is unaffordable to most people (e.g cars) whereas the price is computing devices seems to be coming down.
Dedicated devices have other advantages too, for example if your kids are bored you can hand them your tablet or let them play xbox while leaving your laptop free to work on.
it might also be nice to have a hybrid device if carrying two devices is cumbersome. However in the event that you will be carrying a laptop, you probably have it in a bag find that a small tablet will fit comfortably in there also.
With a Surface RT you get no legacy app support, and it's slow. You get support for Atom ones, but they are still too slow for most legacy apps. And they are not very cheap either. At a time that even an iPad, the market leader in tablets, costs $330, these things are going for $600+ with a keyboard. They stand no chance.
As for Surface Pro, you get the speed of an ultrabook (more than a tablet, but less than a regular laptop, or a PC), but 4h of battery life, so not useful as a tablet, while only having a relatively tiny tablet screen, compared to a laptop, so I don't think you can be that productive on it. It's also too thick and heavy for a tablet.
I now think the future really is having a good, no compromises tablet, that should be very affordable, especially in the future. And a good, no compromises laptop with a large screen, that you can use for work, and you don't have to change every year, or even every 2 years.
What are those TC guys smoking? Could it be delicious PR funded paid placement?
I can therefore only conclude that they're quite terrible?
"From a laptop perspective, Surface Pro falls down too. The traditional laptop has a stiff hinge to hold the screen at an angle of your choosing. It is hard to understate the importance of this hinge. I use laptops not just because they're small and I want something that won't take lots of space in my home, but because I actually need portable computing. I go to conferences, I stay in hotels, I ride trains, and take planes. My laptop's hinge means I can comfortably use my laptop with coffee tables, dining tables, the little desks you get in hotel rooms, and wherever else I happen to be.
The hinge also means I can comfortably use the laptop even without a desk at all, on my lap. As long as the laptop's center of gravity is over my knees, it will be solid and stable, which means I can keep it a comfortable distance away from me so my arms aren't all scrunched up just typing on the thing. In practice, this means I have the hinge hanging in free space.
The Surface kickstand offers me none of that. It puts the screen at the right angle when my desk is a particular height, but at any other height it's the wrong angle. And worse, when using it on my lap, unless the kickstand is supported the screen flops uselessly. The result? In practice, the Surface RT and Surface Pro have a bigger footprint on my lap even than my old 15-inch MacBook Pro. And if I move a little, whomp, the screen drops off the back of my knees and folds out of sight. The Surface Pro is smaller and more svelte than my MacBook Pro, yet it's far more demanding of space."
If I wanted a laptop, I'd by an Air. If I wanted a tablet, I'd by a Nexus 10 or an iPad. Why would I want a laptop without a real keyboard/trackpad, and why would I want a tablet that's 2 pounds with 3-5 hours of battery life? You can say "best of both worlds" but I think it's more consolidation for the sake of consolidation resulting in a user experience that's compromised for every use-case.
From the article: "The type cover and inputs are flawed. The touchpad on the type cover is woefully small and the connection between the keyboard and the device is often wonky, disconnecting at odd intervals."
This, in my opinion, puts a nail in the whole "but, but, it's an ultrabook!" shtick some people have been trotting out.
The PC is not back, and the falling PC sales during this year will prove it.
In many ways this was pretty close to the move that Microsoft needed to make now, but it's not right enough and not good enough and not executed well enough either. In the timespan between the announcement and release Apple will have gone through an entire ipad rev. cycle. You can't fight against an OODA loop that is multiples faster than yours with half-measures and mediocrity. The company is already on the betting table whether you like it or not, you need to play to win or go home.
What Android, iOS, and OS X have demonstrated is that a lot of people can meet their computing needs without Windows. Microsoft's approach seems doomed to hold on to a huge but ever-shrinking slice of that pie.
Offering something dramatically different might (from my flawed understanding) demand removing some of the older elements of Windows that allow backward compatibility, but prevent deeper changes to how Windows works.
I'd love to see them put out a new-from-the-ground-up OS as a free beta, and get enough things right to generate a lot of buzz around it. They could release it with some limited emulation for Windows, just to ease the transition, the way Apple did with OS X. Of course, they don't have to do this, and anyone considering their new OS would be just as free to consider any OS at that point, but that seems to be happening anyway with mobile devices.
To sum up my rambling, they're an interesting company with a lot of smart people who seem to be shackled to old technology. If they don't move on, much of the world will move on without them, and that would be a shame.
Getting rid of this legacy would be Microsoft's poison pill. Unfortunately for them Windows is being disrupted by OS X and Linux for power-users on one hand and Android / iOS for normal users on the other hand. They are in the classic innovators dilemma.
Or just slowly die, filing lawsuits to retard the industry and drag out your lifeblood a few more years.
Instead they've chosen to handicap the most successful product they've ever had. I couldn't say I'm sorry as I haven't been a Windows user for years.
They need to either outdo Apple, beat them to the punch, or play on a different field. For example, Microsoft is perfectly positioned to make the tablet as a business device a reality. IT departments would salivate over the ability to control apps and deployments and so forth the way a carrier can. Imagine if MS build a set of tools that allowed companies to make internal intranet "app stores", for example. Imagine if they made all of their office tools work well on a tablet. Imagine if they made a tablet that could easily snap into a base station and suddenly work as a monitor attached to a kb/mouse/wired internet and then be easily removed for taking to a meeting or home. And it also could have built-in 3G connectivity and smart VPN support so it would always stay effectively connected to the company network. Is that the kind of device that a lot of people would buy? Is that the sort of thing that could build an entire business that Apple would have trouble reaching for some time?
I could come up with dozens more examples. But instead of making a strong move they took a running start then stopped to tie their shoelaces and forgot what they were doing. Good specs and fancy googaws are only of limited value in the moment, and they only sell devices if you've already got mindshare. Apple could announce that it's next iPhone was dephlogistonated and it would sell devices, but that's because of all the hard, uphill brand grinding work that Apple has done in years past, MS isn't in that same space.
There are some truly cool things about the Surface Pro (such as the multi-touch + stylus input), but this is not a time for experimentation.
Apple is making in profit about 3/4 of Microsoft's revenue. Microsoft certainly still has a lot of resources still at its disposal, and it will still continue to earn billions in revenue for years (maybe decades), but the time is fast approaching of their last remaining chance to stay relevant and stay in the game before it passes them by.
How does Windows 8 take up 41GB? Is it purely the OS? Bloatware?
please, Apple, please
Hackers won't want to buy the Surface. It's got a touch screen. What do they want with a touch screen? They want a full powered, no proprietary Linux installation; a Mac OS X Unix with a lot of freedoms and some great proprietary software; or, if they love ASP or Visual Basic, maybe Windows. But not Windows developed for a touch screen tablet. Actual Windows, on a computer screen.
And users who think critically probably won't want the Surface because, after the glitzy touch screen and processor speed holds no more euphoria, they realize that they're not holding Windows Vista or Windows 7. They're holding Windows 8, which is not really a full operating system on a tablet. Microsoft advertises it this way, but in fact, Windows 8 looks better on a tablet than it does on a laptop. So really, Microsoft just switched the discrepancy such that it could claim the tablet had a "full operating system" - a full operating system would be a hackable Windows 7 implementation, and all the processing demands that would carry with it.
Windows 8 doesn't seem to be progress to me. It seems to be part of the trend to slowly fuse tablets and laptops into this strange combination that will universalize every computing need.
And that's crap. That's something like saying an iPad can replace your laptop (it just can't, most of the time).
People are confusing trending with progress. It's not progress to try to universalize your devices. You can't forget that hardware still has software needs. What's the point of calling it a tablet if you're just going to make it a less powerful laptop? Microsoft gets away with this because of terminology. Let's change tablet with "less powerful laptop":
If I have the choice of a less powerful laptop with a touch screen, and a laptop with a superior processor, more hard drive space, more RAM and a larger screen, I'm going to buy the second, especially if it's proportionately priced to its advantaged.
This is a dumb trend, don't buy into it.
EDIT: I venture a theory that Microsoft is trying to defeat Apple's iPad with the Surface by redefining tablet (no, literally, not in a marketing campaign kind of way). A tablet is useful under certain circumstances, the same way a computer is. It's SUPPOSED to be streamlined. So if you completely un-streamline a tablet, what do you have? A computer that is bloated and less powerful. It manages to be less able to satisfy the demands of either.
A tablet is specialization. So when the specialization is removed, it's no longer worth it.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5175190
If that one got flagged off the front page then this one stands no chance. No point in wasting time writing up comments. Save your breath for the extremely negative posts, those will stay on the front page for days.
http://i.imgur.com/uFPTSqR.png
Edit: Even now, it ranks lower than another article with the exact same points posted a full four hours before it.
Or maybe people who might be interested have already left HN in disgust over a bunch of fanboys and zealots flagged stories that don't fit their worldview, just like it happened to this article too as predicted which is sitting on the 3rd page now although it should be on the front page.