For example, iPhone completely changed my life overnight, mostly due to its navigation features and ability to look up phone numbers.
I think Surface will only be dominant if it solves a problem for people. So, which problem does it solve, and why is it useful for people?
I figure that in a few years I'll be able to do all of that on a smaller 8" form factor - even better.
At some point you start hitting some physical limits of the human body. At 7" or 8" you can't have a full-size physical keyboard and there are only so many lines of code you can fit onto the screen, and so forth.
Personally (and I do mean this is personal preference and not the One Right Solution For Everybody) carrying around a 3-5lb notebook isn't a big deal because I'm already going to be carrying pen, paper, a few medications, and a charger or two. Even if my main computing device weighed zero pounds I'd still be carrying a small bag.
Surface is a tablet which can also run Photoshop, AutoCAD, MATLAB, Visual Studio, Flash, and whatever other weird legacy apps are kicking around. It can multitask. It has a proper digitizer. It has a kickstand and a very innovative cover. Yes it's not a laptop. No it doesn't have the Android store. That doesn't mean it's useless.
(P.S. just noticed my hacker news account is 1337 days old today. wheee.)
Adobe and Autodesk all have multiple apps on iOS. How many Metro apps have they released? That's the metric that counts when we're talking about tablets.
All the software you're talking about only really works in desktop/laptop mode with a mouse. As long as that is true, MS will be an also-ran in the tablet space.
They don't really compare well, iOS versions lack a lot of important features in comparison with the windows ones.
>" How many Metro apps have they released? "
I believe the point is they don't need to, they desktop software runs just fine.
>"All the software you're talking about only really works in desktop/laptop mode with a mouse"
Not really, all those apps actually benefits from the use of a stylus (actually artist prefer that more than using a mouse) and that's something that you can't really do with an iPad (I own an Ipad2 and I had really tried hard to do anything productive on it without luck)
Art problems, apparently. Gabe of Penny Arcade seemed pretty positive about the Surface Pro:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/2014/01/22/so-many-games1
"I made the switch back to an iphone recently after having a Windows phone for about a year. I really liked the OS but I had nothing but trouble with the hardware. I went through three different handsets and all of them ended up failing on me. Eventually I gave up and just bought an iPhone 5c. I have to say that after a year on the Windows phone I had forgotten what the Apple app store looks like. I think I had managed to convince myself that the Windows app store was pretty solid. Jesus Christ was I wrong."
This tells us what, exactly, about the Surface Pro?
That even someone directly targeted by Surface "professional-stylus-user" demographic, and who was willing to try Windows Phone, now has one foot in another ecosystem that also offers a quite popular tablet? Surface (and PC Gaming) wasn't enough to keep him on Windows Phone, but maybe iPhone will be enough to pull him to iPad (even if it's not as good for some tasks, but better for others e.g. gaming) if the two competing attempts at lock-in clash (and they will, because lock-in is lock-out if you're on the wrong side of it).
True, but keep in mind only refers to games in that article, which is hands down the stronger point of the app store. I don't play games any more and I hardly miss anything from iOS that doesn't exist in the Windows Phone Store.
I'm not disputing that the iPhone changed smartphones forever, but looking up numbers was something existing smartphones had apps for, long before the iPhone.