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Comment by julianpye | Hacker News Reader

It is not compatible to Surface RT tablets. I don't understand how Microsoft is willing to burn its early adopters so much. Surely it is not a technical matter or a matter of resources? If anything, Microsoft should do everything to keep all of them happy. Regarding the hardware itself - if you have ever tried out a Native Instruments Maschine, which this is kind of modeled on, you know that the haptics of the pad keys are key. This won't work well with the type of switch of the touchcover.

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I don't understand why Microsoft even calls the two tablets the same, when they couldn't be any different from the software, hardware and price perspectives.

The only explanation I can come up with is that they're trying to confuse the consume and think that one is just as good as the other (you can do the same things with both), and this title "Surface Music Kit", even though it's just for the Surface Pro device, proves my point.

You are confused. It's compatible with non-pro "Surface 2" (second generation Windows RT based device). It's incompatible with "Surface RT".

Even the confusion seems to prove the point that Ms are confusing their customers.

My company just ordered some of the original Surface Pros on discount.

The labelling on the boxes had us doing a double take, because we thought we received the ARM units by mistake.

Surface Pro boxes just say Surface on them, so you actually have to look at the additional text to see that the OS is Windows 8 Pro or that the SSD is larger than the RT before you realize you go the right unit.

How is this any different than Apple only supporting nth Gen iDevices?

Generally when Apple stops supporting some generation of devices it's 100% because of a hardware reason. Sometimes that hardware reason is processor bound (siri, and yes I know people have used siri on jailbroken 4's but the performance is adversly effected) and sometimes something else ( iBeacon and other Bluetooth LE technologies ).

I generally don't like to give MS the benefit of the doubt, but in this case I know a lot of work went into the keyboard cover between the 1st gen (both pro and RT) and 2nd gen surface units. Is it possible that the connector has changed?

Yes, Microsoft's keyboard connector changed between the Surface RT and Surface Pro to add additional pins for power.

This is why Microsoft's latest Power Cover also doesn't work on the Surface RT but works on the rest.

It is possible the Music Cover takes advantage of the additional pins.

How is that at all like this? Apple doesn't drop support for their devices after a year, plain and simple, and that's what Microsoft has done here. If there's a genuine "hardware limitation" that prevented them from giving support to their early adapters, then it's absurdly shocking to me that they didn't have the foresight to know that they might want to create covers like this in the future and add support for them preemptively.

They still support Surface RT. It's simply that they introduced effectively a new HW port on the new devices, which they haven't retrofitted on old devices. Apple has done the exact same thing on gen X to gen X+1 in the past. Everyone has.

The iPhone 4S and below are completely unusable with iOS 7. Even switching between two apps will require one or the other being evicted/reloaded into memory. That phone is only from ~2011 mind you, and it's clearly become a third-class citizen in its own ecosystem.

Also, it's not as though Apple didn't introduce Siri with the 4S and exclude the 4 from that feature.

The iPhone 4 was released June 2010 and I know people who use iOS 7 with it.

Sure, it has hiccups but the point was more about Apple not abandoning the users than about how well older products run the new stuff.

>The iPhone 4S and below are completely unusable with iOS 7. Even switching between two apps will require one or the other being evicted/reloaded into memor

I'm running iOS 7 in a iPhone 4 (not even 4S), as do millions of others, and what you are saying is BS.

I can even upload a video if you don't believe me.

I had a 4S with iOS 7 for several months and what you're saying is complete BS. I can upload a video if you don't believe me.

Try non-hostility as an initial response in the future.

>I had a 4S with iOS 7 for several months and what you're saying is complete BS. I can upload a video if you don't believe me.

You do understand that "had a 4S with iOS 7 for several months" and "totally unusable" are contradictory, right?

I'll have the video, please.

>Try non-hostility as an initial response in the future.

Well, sorry, I guess.

You could also try not generalising from your outlier example.

Unbelievable levels of narcissistic nitpicking here, I don't even care to have any more conversation with someone possessed of your level of pedantry. I began shooting a video but decided that you can fuck yourself instead, as there's no convincing someone who can be this anal. Probably you'd bitch about the portrait orientation with which I shot it.

How do you know you're not the one generalizing from N=1? Why wouldn't I expect that all iPhones have roughly identical performance charcteristics, as one of the highlights of the Apple business model is strict hardware control. Equivalent hardware, ergo equivalent performance on that hardware.

Clearly you have been confused by a small amount of hyperbole which, according to votes, many people have had zero problem understanding so far. I imagine life for you being an expanse of loneliness punctuated by moments of extreme confusion. More so than for most, I suppose, just so you can better understand what I'm saying about you.

Microsoft still support the Surface RT in exactly the same way that Apple support their year-old devices - they're still providing software updates for them, but some newer features aren't available. On iOS stuff like Siri and the new motion tracking features wasn't available without upgrading from hardware only introduced a year or so earlier.

It's different in that Apple's "n" is quite higher and has a very good technological reason (a 4 year old machine or older is quite a difference to a 1 or 2 year old machine).

As I said in a separate comment below, I believe there is an actual hardware limitation here. According to two of the MSFT team's reddit AMA, the peripheral connector hardware did change (a few power pins were added).

Did they seriously not have the foresight or product planning to know that they might want to create covers like this in the future? That's such a weak excuse. It's not like the Surface RT came out four years ago, it was the end of last year.

They should've done everything they could to prevent themselves from leaving their early adopters behind, although I'm not surprised in the slightest that they did so. They did it to Windows Phone 7 users in the transition to Windows Phone 8, and they're doing it again now.

Saying that everything people do needs to be backward-compatible is what leads to having to support IE 6.

I'm sure you had the foresight a year ago to know that they'd want to attach different covers in the future, why didn't you tell them?

I mean come on, I'm not expecting 12 years of backwards compatibility, I'm just saying that maybe one of their hardware engineers might have said: "Gee, is it possible that we might develop a new cover next year that needs power, for a backlight or something? We're under a time crunch now, so we probably won't have time to take advantage of it yet, but maybe we could add a couple pins for power to future proof it?"

It's absurd to consider that an impossible foresight to make.

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