Surface Pro: Hefty Tablet Is a Laptop Lightweight | Hacker News Reader

Surface Pro: Hefty Tablet Is a Laptop Lightweight

online.wsj.com

42 pointsevo_938 comments

Seems like a pretty balanced look at the Surface. They do talk about the 'available storage' a bit but I wish they were even more clear about it, something like "a 128G iPad has Xgb for users, the 128G Surface Pro has Ygb for users." My thought is that calling it out helps make it a customer visible difference that can be marketed against.

Waiting to see what the market makes of it.

iOS takes up less than 4 GB out of the box.

comparing iOS to Surface pro is just a example of what is wrong with the article and some of the comments here.

compare osx to the surface pro. Oh wait. OSX doesn't run on anything less than a Macbook Air which weighs 2.8 lbs. It also ships with 80gb and 128gb disk of which I do not know what is available to users. the 80gb air sells at $999 and the 128gb at $1099. And the air doesn't function as a tablet, does not have a touchscreen display etc etc.

Seriously poor reporting here. Compare apples to apples and then buyers can make informed decisions.

I agree that this (MB Air vs Surface Pro) is the larger story, and its not being well covered, but I lay some of that at Microsoft's door rather than the press. Generally there will be a 'press kit' with the demo device which highlights things that the manufacturer thinks are important.

I've not seen Microsoft's press kit for the Surface Pro. It has been my experience though that when I have seen the press kit the story written at least mentions all the high points, if only to disagree or dismiss them.

This is indeed a very serious problem for Microsoft.

Because they are positioning this device as a laptop and a tablet.

To not want comparisons with the iPad completely misunderstands what people are expecting from a tablet.

Microsoft was very vocal about the iPad being an expensive and useless netbook. And that people don't really want a tablet experience, they want a fully fledged OS.

Time will tell.

The QNX kernel fits in L1 cache...

But it's rather unlikely that the entire Blackberry operating environment using it does, which is what is really being compared here.

Oh I'm sorry. I thought the ideas was to make irrelevant statements about the size of software components.

That doesn't mean it has 124GB available for users.

Minus some filesystem bookkeeping information and os , what else takes up the space?

The difference here is pretty obvious to me. The Surface can stand alone, recover and reset itself, etc. The iPad, should something go wrong, is a useless brick without Apple's helpful malware called iTunes available on another PC.

There are lots of obvious differences. Both companies have compromised on the ideal of a light device that runs nearly forever ona single charge, has a high resolution screen, a powerful processor, plenty of memory, all the apps you need, &c.

Each company has made different compromises. The question is, to whom are those choices/differences meaningful?

Being able to use a Surface without access to a Mac or PC is meaningful to people who are buying a primary PC that happens to have a detachable screen. Being able to store all of your music or movies on it is meaningful to those who are buying a post-PC device.

I don't know why you call iTunes "MalWare," but it sounds to me like you'd compute on an Abacus before you'd use an Apple device.

I've purchased 4 Macs in the last 4.5 years.

Two Macbook Pros and two Macbook Airs. I'm both clumsy and impatient and a huge fan of them. I'd only consider something like the Thinkpad Carbon with a better screen over my Macbooks. That having been said, iTunes could greet me with a cup of coffee and sex in the morning and I would still scoff.

My comments weren't meant to say anything about iPad or Surface. Personally, I think that Surface is a great start and I think people are being really short-sighted about it. Obviously the iPad is a different use case as you point out and isn't going anywhere, I think that's good as consumers define what they want/expect.

Chances of a user messing up an iPad OS install are much slimmer than with a Win 8 device.

The old 1 GB = 1000MB instead of 1024MB marketing trick reduces usable space to ~119GB even before you start subtracting the OS space.

It's not a trick. Giga = 10^9 for 100% of everything except memory. Bandwidth, Disk Space are measured in SI units.

Memory too. There's a difference between GiB (power of 2) and GB (power of 10).

Fair point, I agree that the proper terminology, it should be GiB to be explicit. I was just trying to point out, that the only time you should ever consider GB might mean 2^30 is with memory (and it usually does with memory). You should always assume that GB means 10^9 in all other scenarios. Bandwidth, Disk Space - GB always means 10^9.

I believe his point is that memory manufacturers advertised 1GB of RAM which is actually 1GiB. So for advertised memory, 1GB = 1024MB.

Walt is an iPuppet. A balanced review from him is a big deal.

He was pretty enthusiastic about the Surface RT.

I've always seen his reactions to Apple products as being dispassionate and bored. He doesn't seem easily impressed by anything, and yet he's always accused of being a rabid Apple fanboy.

When Steve Jobs referred to him as a "good friend" and blew a lid internally when Mossberg wasn't "writing good things" about MobileMe, you can see where the perception comes from.

Perhaps unfairly. It showed a willingness to be critical regardless of relationships. I've never understood why instances like this are considered exceptions proving a rule.

It seems to me like the battery life is the killer here. A highly portable device just needs long battery life. Mobility == no access to power, the two just go together. It seems to me that MS would have been better to release the RT stand alone and wait for the next generation of Intel chips (working closely with Intel, if necessary) to dramatically decrease power and get the fans out of this thing. If it had no fans and got 2x battery life it would be a pretty awesome device.

Earlier reviews today with discussion that were flagged off the front page.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5175190

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5176564

I came on to post this exact same thing. Clearly there was abuse of flagging going on. I would hope that a moderator will look at it and see who was needlessly flagging posts.

I wouldn't hold my breath. This has been happening for a very long time.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4849814

The thing is I couldn't care less about the surface-pro, or Apple or Google products specifically. To me these are interesting tech stories that I want to know more about and when people with vested interests (ab)use flagging to kill an otherwise valid story, that annoys me and I think, detracts from what it means to be part of the HN News Community.

No, they weren't flagged off the page. The first one slowly faded to the bottom of the page, and the second got few upvotes.

The second one was on the 3rd page with 30 points posted 2 hours ago which doesn't happen without flagging.

http://i.imgur.com/ADMcanz.png

Copy pasting from my earlier reply to you about the first one:

Then why was it sitting below another article that was posted around the same time but had only nearly half the points? 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.

http://i.imgur.com/Yg5kXJb.png

I believe that a lot of factors go into determining the rank, including domain, poster, and probably more. So it's hard to compare 2 submissions.

That said, if flagging pulls the submission down, which I believe it does, then it's an obvious avenue for abuse for people with an agenda.

Neither of them sold. I wonder what's next for Microsoft, they did make some computer cos mad and still didn't hit a homerun

The point of the Surface "exercise" for Microsoft is not really to make a profit.

They're trying to "lead the herd" in creating a feasible merge of the "desktop" paradigm and the "mobile" paradigm, keeping Windows in the center. This is extremely important to Microsoft, since they have no foothold in the mobile market, and that's where the entire consumer market is headed. We can expect the merge of the desktop paradigm and mobile paradigm (i.e. keeping both battery-life, light weight and performance) to happen at some point in the future anyway, but meanwhile, Android and iOS/OS X are growing at a rapid pace, all at the cost of Windows marketshare. If mainstream users move to these OSs, the merge will happen with Android and iOS as center, and Microsoft will have a real rocky road ahead.

Trust me, Microsoft is willing to throw tons of money at this problem.

Unfortunately it's a repeat of the Windows Mobile/CE debacle, the enthusiast crowd that makes your product acceptable to the general computing public is treated with apathy bordering on hostility. They shipped a Windows NT-based system that cannot run win32 applications due to a marketing decision and expected it to be sung with high praises. Compare this with Google Chromebook, while Google is focusing on users using it with the ChromeOS (and no local storage), they are not stopping anyone from using it how they choose. One of the positive outcomes of the earlier experience was XDA, and it's members are at it again: http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=1288

>Neither of them sold

It's not even available yet...

I stand corrected, but I have my doubts. Maybe they should have given the design to HP, Dell, Acer or to everyone.

Manufacturers are already making Windows 8 tablets.

Who would've then proceeded to ship it with crapware pre-installed. No, thanks.

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