How is the Surface disappointing? Explain please. Surface has by far the better hardware, and Windows 8 has a FAR better UI and UX than iOS. How is the Surface worse than the iPad? It's way ahead.
I owned a surface and I own an iPad Pro now. They aren’t even comparable in usability, Apple is great at refining features and making them work even if Microsoft is better at getting them out earlier. It’s like comparing the iPhone to WinCE.
I will have to side with Microsoft here, everything said is in-fact true. The Surface from a technical perspective trumps the iPad, it's effectively a true computer (USB ports, storage options) inside of a tablet form. In all honesty, it was never Apple that was focused, it was Steve Jobs. When Jobs was at the helm, he did things differently to everyone else and it was this different approach that got Apple to where it is now. The legacy that Steve Jobs created is being carried on, albeit rather loosely. It's obvious Apple are losing their way very slowly, we can't forget that the iPad and iPhone were both masterminded by Jobs and Johnny. I mean seriously, the iPad Air? It has nothing to gloat about except being lighter, but was the iPad ever that heavy to warrant being lighter? It already weighed less than some books can way.
Microsoft don't get enough credit, they've done a lot of things wrong, but I think the Surface is a solid device that doesn't get enough attention. The price point was definitely wrong, if you want to rival Apple you have to undercut them in the market. Most people don't buy Apple devices because of technical specs, they buy them because of the large library of applications, the hype around owning an Apple device and the look and feel. When is the last time you heard someone saying they were going to buy an iPad because of the kind of CPU it has?
The iPad and Surface Pro 2 are both fantastic devices that can achieve the same things. The software is different, but on a hardware level they are both highly capable devices with seemingly limitless potential. Apple has the better OS for the moment and the better design, but Microsoft has the better hardware. For those that have used both iWork and Microsoft Office, it's obvious that Microsoft wins hands down. You never see anything other than Microsoft office being used in the enterprise and I doubt you ever will in this lifetime.
If you want to win accolades and praise, making fun of the competition in this way makes you look like a jealous douche, both Apple and Microsoft come across as childish to me. Once upon a time Apple in terms of their public presence and marketing never really mentioned the competition but based on remarks that Tim Cook made, it's obvious their strategy is to no longer take the high ground and let the consumer make their choice, they're playing hard-ball with Microsoft and Samsung now.
Ha, said much more eloquently than I would. I think it is odd that people are automatically dismissing it simply because it is not an iPad. I guess that is how the hive mind works now-a-days. I like the Surface because it is a genuinely unique OS. And, in many ways it is better than Apple's offering. The gestures are better, it surfaces information better, and it works much better as a productivity device. When has better become not good enough?
Astonishingly successful? IPads out sell surface by 6 to 1 in revenue and 10 to 1 in units. And unlike surface, people actually use them primarily as tablets. Surface's success is almost entirely as a laptop with a secondary and relatively little used tablet mode. That's hardly been threatening to the iPad.
Microsofts vision of that convergence, of how to provide desktop class features in a tablet, is literally to put the WIMP desktop into a tablet. That's a completely different and fundamentally incompatible vision of how to make an advanced tablet UI to what we see in iOS 11, which is a complete and utter refutation of Microsoft's approach.
What's so great about Surface besides its design and build material? I don't mean to knock on those. I think they are great, but that doesn't equal that the product overall is great. Windows RT is performing very poorly on an high-end ARM chip (don't want to imagine how it would perform on an older dual core ARM chip, or god forbid a single core one) compared to the true mobile operating systems like Android and iOS, and its app store is virtually non-existent. Office on it is also an exercise in frustration.
The price is also too high for what it offers. Even if the build of materials is exactly the same as the iPad 4 (I think it's lower), that doesn't mean it should cost exactly the same as an iPad 4. Because it offers lower value than an iPad (think ecosystem, brand, etc). I also don't think it's acceptable for a $500+ product to have such a low resolution anymore. And don't tell me it has an "extra 16 GB". It doesn't. It only has 17 free GB of storage.
How exactly they cared about surface? It was a premium toy that was never perfected for pros (these huge displays they discontinued) or e-waste (all 4gb go models). It cost twice for any minimal reasonable hardware configuration. It had insanely impractical weird IO (minidp from 10s in 20s) and fabric palm rest.
It was targeted to push in enterprises where their sales noses are so deep they sometimes don’t even need to bribe CEOs to push their sales initiatives. Even corp drones refused to use it and returned to HP. Who even need this stand contraption for work? Who need touch on Windows? May be people just buy macbook AND ipad for the same price?
They cancelled RT hardware without any delay while windows 10 mobile can run fine. What they did with surface phone? Right, dropped android support like a cheap chinese factory. Do you want to fix your out of warranty 3 yo surface? No sane technician will take it, even if you told him how MS is in (love) with right to repair. Surface is a joke. Well may be .NET developers can use it because how easy it is to develop LOBs with new .NET tools and how productive you feel all the time working with new cool features of C#.
Surfaces, to be fair, aren't really direct competitors with iPads. iPads run a mobile OS, surface run Windows. You're using Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator on a Surface, not iOS apps.
It's the UI. It is designed from the ground up for touch. People who like iPadOS do not like Windows Surface tablets for that exact reason. A desktop UI that's been shoehorned into a tablet is not as good as a purpose-built touch UI.
I thought I was clear, but re-reading it I agree I wasn't.
What I meant was that I found little use for a tablet until I got the Surface. It still doesn't play a major role in my day to day activities but I'm using it daily and Windows 8.1 on the Surface is a wonderful experience.
If any other company was behind it I honestly think it would be more successful, but because it's Microsoft there is this natural hate. Just reading your comment, "Surface is a joke compared to the iPad" seems to indicate a lot of disdain for a product that I doubt you've even held in your hand. Am I wrong?
Even as a pretty big Windows fan, and someone who would personally choose a surface pro over an iPad, I find it impossible to recommend Windows tablets to people considering an iPad. The apps and user experience just isn't there when it comes to doing the sort of things people do on an iPad.
I don't see the financial incentive to develop for Windows RT and the Surface. The iPad is too dominant. Android tablets are munching on the periphery. I just don't see the market acceptance of the Surface. It is not "better" than the iPad. It is a different vision and direction. But why would millions of users follow that vision when iOS and Android offer a compelling enough platform already?
I gave my iPad to my kids and "upgraded" to a Surface Pro 3 a while ago and I regret it every morning when I sit down with my breakfast to read hacker news.
It's not a good tablet, and it's not a good laptop. It attempts to sit in the middle which is not what I want.
I was expecting the tablet interface to be a lot more finished, but there are a lot of rough edges and missing features.
I'll be going back to iPad on the next cycle.
As a long time OSX user as well, I was surprised to see how unpolished Windows 10 Desktop is as well.
So the target market is people who want a really slow more expensive tablet with a horrible interface for touch?
Microsoft’s own products run better on the low end iPad than the low end Surface. On top of that, the interface is better for touch.
And Microsoft sells less Surfaces than Apple sells Macs, let alone iPads. This isn’t really saying much about the Windows being backwards compatible for ever (what started this thread) was a great strategy.
Apple fundamentally doesn't believe in a hybrid laptop/tablet "productivity" machine (for good reason, debatably). The iPad Pro is an attempt to bring iOS into the realm of productivity, rather than merging the experiences of iOS and Mac OS X.
My take on this is that the Microsoft's strategy for the Surface wasn't necessarily to sell a ton of Surface tablets and take out the iPad. I think it was to illustrate what Windows 8 brings to the table in terms of a hybrid tablet experience. This is similar to how Google had lackluster sales of their Nexus phone but it was a reference model of what you could do with Android. The Surface opens up some eyes to the idea of the "convertible laptop", which I think ultimately is how Windows 8 starts to make more sense. On any other configuration it's a clunky experience. Windows 8 is a poor tablet experience and a lame desktop, but as a convertible laptop it's actually quite enjoyable (in my opinion).
Microsoft's Surface isn't a tablet in the iPad sense of a device for casual content consumption; it seems intended to enable content creation and more formal business use. Comparing the two the way you are isn't very enlightening.
The complaint is that average users are not going to know or understand the difference between "real windows" and "ipad windows". It's also kind of pointless for a salesperson to attempt explaining this to the average user. The surface competes directly with the ipad. It contains an arm chip and probably can't run your old existing windows software.
It might be worth revisiting the Windows 8 interface. It was maligned at the time but it’sa very fluent, intuitive interface now that people are used to iPads. The multitasking is exactly the same as iPad now, only difference being you pull down to close apps instead of up.
I pulled out my original Surface RT yesterday and was surprised to find it has aged incredibly well - perhaps better in 2020 than it was in 2012, because it was well ahead of its time.
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