Comment by pinaceae | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pinaceae | Hacker News Reader

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you did all of that on a Surface RT? Impressive, because Excel and Powerpoint are unusably slow on RT.

Source: We've developed a business app for Win 8, development was co-sponsered by MS and Intel. We have a very succesful iPad app in our vertical, it allowed large swaths of our customer base to switch to iPads for their fieldforce.

MS themselves acknowledged that if you want to handle "large Excel" files, the RT is the wrong device.

The Surface Pro 2 finally has the performance.

I understand your enthusiasm, switching from a 2005 MB Pro to any device in 2013 is mindblowing. Just hold back with a little bit too much hyperbole, the RT was an underspecced consumer device, Office support on it was an afterthought and a paniced scramble for the dev team (as documented here on HN a while ago).

Yes, I was able to do all that on the RT. I never planned on using it as my main machine, but I had no choice. Using an ARM powered device to handle an entire workload is not ideal. You are right it was not the fastest or best spec'd machine. When the time came instead of buying another RT, I purchased a Pro.

because Excel and Powerpoint are unusably slow on RT.

I guess if you're using pivot tables or vlookups on massive datasets you might have a point. But I use Excel every day on my Surface RT and it performs very well.

My wife had her computer blink out for a couple weeks and while the problem was getting fixed she hooked up her ~10 year old netbook she bought back then for ~$300 to a monitor/kb/mouse and after windows updated the ancient XP and office installs, was back to work pretty quick. It was absolutely fine for office work and basic web surfing, full screen videos were a little rough but they worked...she even got some dev work done on it.

Tbh, if the video performance was a little faster and it had an extra GB of RAM, she'd be perfectly fine with it as her day to day...and it fits okay in one of her larger purses.

It's absolutely amazing how overpowered our machines are these days, there's almost no sense to it.

What is a large Excel file here? hundreds of Megs? For most files that I encounter, my old Surface RT works great.

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