Microsoft Surface pricing revealed

This seems like a very, very snazzy piece of hardware. If I had the money (grad student), I'd buy one. But for anyone with any kind of financial limitations, I can't see this really making a splash in the market. I mean, if you want basically a tablet but will be using it most often at a desk and need a keyboard, get a chromebook for half the price. If you will rarely need a keyboard, get a Nexus 7 for a third the price and get a bluetooth keyboard and case or under a hundred bucks. If you want a bigger screen, get the Kindle with a keyboard. Want more functionality? Root it.

Cool to have a true high-end competitor to the iPad. But when you consider that the market for non-Apple tablets is mostly people who don't consider the extra value of high-end product worth it, this will basically just be splitting the lots-of-disposable-income market with Apple. Which is cool I guess, but they might be a bit late to the scene for that.

edit: Full disclosure: sent from my Nexus 7.
 
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DocHolliday said:
Solid CPU, nice screen rez and IPS panel, SSD drive. All for a grand. Hmmmmm.


EDIT: OH and herpes.
Click to expand...

I plan to use this mostly as a tablet, but also for lightroom 4 / photoshop, movie watching, email, writing, etc. You have a lenovo keyboard/build quality in hybrid form.. fucking love it.

Pretty much spot on. i5, (1.7 gah) but it's ivy bridge so it has good power management. Still, Haswell will absolutely shine when that comes out in these ultrabook type form factors.

HD 4000, VLC and flash will all be gpu enabled so the hd 4000 will playback 1080p mkv no problem.

13.3 inch, 1600x900 IPS panel. Fuck yes. 1080p would have been nice but 1600x900 is good enough and it's IPS.

Good battery life, 8 hours.

128 ssd, good enough for what I'll be using it for. I have a 500gb external for pictures/movies if need be.

micro sd slot / full hdmi port, it'll easily grab my pictures and also connect to my desktop monitor.

USB 3.0 port, good stuff.
USB 2.0 port, good stuff.

Windows 8 64 bit.

this is $999 on best buy preorder. or you can get surface RT for ~650 including the touch cover... to me this is a no brainer. and also the way they priced the surface, there is no way the surface pro is going to come in at 999.
 
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TimTheEnchanter said:
This seems like a very, very snazzy piece of hardware. If I had the money (grad student), I'd buy one. But for anyone with any kind of financial limitations, I can't see this really making a splash in the market. I mean, if you want basically a tablet but will be using it most often at a desk and need a keyboard, get a chromebook for half the price. If you will rarely need a keyboard, get a Nexus 7 for a third the price and get a bluetooth keyboard and case or under a hundred bucks. If you want a bigger screen, get the Kindle with a keyboard. Want more functionality? Root it.

Cool to have a true high-end competitor to the iPad. But when you consider that the market for non-Apple tablets is mostly people who don't consider the extra value of high-end product worth it, this will basically just be splitting the lots-of-disposable-income market with Apple. Which is cool I guess, but they might be a bit late to the scene for that.

edit: Full disclosure: sent from my Nexus 7.
Click to expand...

I think it's very hard to seriously compare a full blown OS on x86 architecture to semi-full OS on ARM processors.

The issue is this, the closest os to a desktop experience on a tablet is probably windows RT. However, I won't be able to watch VLC because no one is going to port vlc under msoft app rules. I want the joy and ability to use touch based apps on my pc, which is what the ideapad offers, with metro UI and styles, but also still have the ability to launch lightroom 4 exe on desktop and manipulate photos.

Maybe RT will change the game since it's so easy to compile an ARM executable with your x86 project, however, with x86 you're going to get the best of both worlds.
 
Diablo Escobar said:
it's just ... imo you don't use a tablet at a table, that defeats the purpose of the tablet. i guess sometimes i bring my ipad over to a table to keep reading something while i eat, but in that case i probably want portrait orientation, not landscape. Microsoft has obviously put an immense amount of thought into this thing and I applaud them moving away from shovelware crap into trying to build high quality designed products, but this keyboard business seems like a fundamental flaw. The tablet is useful on your couch, on the go, in a car, on the subway, at the beach, etc.... none of these are places where that keyboard cover adds a lot. It's awesome that it is a keyboard cover and you can carry it all the time, but it's so central to their marketing that I fear they're going to create dissatisfied customers of the people they do manage to convince
Click to expand...

I think for a younger crowd, college age kids maybe, you're missing the potential value a keyboard brings to the table. I already know a bunch of college kids that tried using their ipads exclusively for school and it really didn't work out that well, but the point was that it was something they were interested in doing. This could potentially make that possible.

It could also blow dicks, but I guess we'll see. :)
 
Ender said:
I plan to use this mostly as a tablet, but also for lightroom 4 / photoshop, movie watching, email, writing, etc. You have a lenovo keyboard/build quality in hybrid form.. fucking love it.

Pretty much spot on. i5, (1.7 gah) but it's ivy bridge so it has good power management. Still, Haswell will absolutely shine when that comes out in these ultrabook type form factors.

HD 4000, VLC and flash will all be gpu enabled so the hd 4000 will playback 1080p mkv no problem.

13.3 inch, 1600x900 IPS panel. Fuck yes. 1080p would have been nice but 1600x900 is good enough and it's IPS.

Good battery life, 8 hours.

128 ssd, good enough for what I'll be using it for. I have a 500gb external for pictures/movies if need be.

micro sd slot / full hdmi port, it'll easily grab my pictures and also connect to my desktop monitor.

USB 3.0 port, good stuff.
USB 2.0 port, good stuff.

Windows 8 64 bit.

this is $999 on best buy preorder. or you can get surface RT for ~650 including the touch cover... to me this is a no brainer. and also the way they priced the surface, there is no way the surface pro is going to come in at 999.
Click to expand...
too big... it isnt much of a tablet.
 
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