Microsoft Surface RT Pricing Starts At $499

pelo said:
The courting hasn't worked. In fact, the WP8 SDK hasn't even been released to developers with the OS and its devices supposed to come out in 2 weeks. Courting developers? No...
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Not sure what the WP8 SDK has to do with Windows 8/RT, two different things. The WP8 just got done and Microsoft has been keeping a tight lid on things. That's going to change when WP8 is released.

pelo said:
Secondly, Microsoft have only ordered 3-5 million devices and expect to sell only that many for the remainder of the year. I'm not sure where you're getting 200million Win8/RT devices from. Where are you getting this enthusiasm from? The retail channels have already stated they expect very slow sales and PC sales are slipping, down over 8% from last year at this time.

http://www.ibtimes.com/worldwide-pc...unch-lenovo-sees-growth-others-decline-844509
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All Windows 8/RT devices be it a desktop, laptop, tablet, RT device, touch or not can run Metro apps. And PC sales always dip just before a new version of Windows is released, indeed that's the point that the link you provided makes. The PC market is about 350 million units, 200 million of those machines running Windows 8 shouldn't be a problem.


pelo said:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9231900/Poor_pre_launch_showing_plagues_Windows_8

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/windows-8-a-bad-bet/61455
http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-windows-8-sales-expectations-low-says-topeka-2012-10
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Sure, but the vast majority of Windows sales come with new hardware so I don't know how the early adopter number impacts that.

pelo said:
I understand you're the biggest win8 fanboy on these forums, but that's no reason to live in an alternate reality. 200million devices over the next calendar year? You must be crazy. Even the most hopeful expectations wouldn't reach half of that figure.
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200 million Windows 8/RT devices combined by the end of next year, nothing fanboyish about that, sorry.
 
pelo said:
T

Secondly, Microsoft have only ordered 3-5 million devices and expect to sell only that many for the remainder of the year. I'm not sure where you're getting 200million Win8/RT devices from. Where are you getting this enthusiasm from? The retail channels have already stated they expect very slow sales and PC sales are slipping, down over 8% from last year at this time.
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I don't think 200 million devices is enthusiasm, actually, he was being very conservative.

According to the press, there were around 320 million PCs sold last year (no tablets considered) - of these, 16 million were Macs. So, rounding, we had 300 million Windows PCs sold in 2011. If sales are down 8%, they will still sell around 275 million Windows 8 PCs. This alone already is a huge amount of devices that will attract a lot of devs. If you count in tablets, MS manages to sell all their 3 million devices (and I'm taking the lower valueyou said were estimated) this quarter and keep the same pace the rest of the year, they'll have sold 12 million surfaces. Add that the OEMs may sell as much as twice this number (6 million/quarter, which is around 2% of the sales of PCs) and you have 36 million Windows tablets sold in one year. All together, over 300 million devices in the market, for devs to target.
 
So you believe they've been courting developers by ignoring them? That's what's happening on WP8. I quite literally mean ignoring them, because that's exactly what's happening.

The Win8/Metro SDK has been available for a year and still has a horrendous selection of applications. Microsoft haven't done much to cure this ailment, and it still has a very petty selection of applications. The RT version suffers even more from this because it's limited exclusively to what's in the Windows store. The x86 versions benefit from having desktop applications available, but unless you're buying a ULV version (why not buy an Ultrabook or laptop at that money?), you're going to be using an x86 Atom/Hondo with typical netbook-like performance.

Secondly, that's down 8% and also down from expected sales figures. The retail channel also doesn't sound very confident either.

The issue with your 200million figure (among being far too high) is that it's 200 million where, exactly? The Win8 ecosystem is fragmented and includes WP8, winRT and Win8 x86, all of them with separate applications, which, btw, are absolutely pitiful atm.
 
pelo said:
The issue with your 200million figure (among being far too high) is that it's 200 million where, exactly? The Win8 ecosystem is fragmented and includes WP8, winRT and Win8 x86, all of them with separate applications, which, btw, are absolutely pitiful atm.
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Win8 ecosystem is not fragmented. Metro applications will run in Win8 and WinRT (native ones may need to be recompiled, but that's it). As for WP8, I'm not sure, but I think they may work there with a recompile as well, considering they use the same set of APIs available for all of them (or are created using html5 and js).
 
Wshmaster0 said:
Also what huge user base do you speak of?
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Umm... the 1.3 billion PC users out there that are potential customers for Microsoft and the other developers. :rolleyes: As was mentioned, this new store is something developers are going to want to jump on quickly and open up to another potentially large market. As consumers shift away from traditional desktop PCs to mobile devices the percent of people Win 8/RT directly targets is just going to get larger.

However, metro IS available on desktop PCs and believe it or not, it has its purpose there too. I find myself using the IE browser frequently since it's totally sandboxed from the rest of the system, as well as many casual games and other apps that I discover (it's fun to go digging around in there and see what cool apps I can find, there's more than I thought there'd be at this point). Netflix just released their app so I'd use Metro for that so I don't have to worry about installing Silverlight. I like the PDF reader so I don't have to use Adobe, and the list goes on. Win 8 isn't JUST for touch devices. Most of these apps work just as well from my desktop as they would from a touch device.
 
pelo said:
The Win8/Metro SDK has been available for a year and still has a horrendous selection of applications. Microsoft haven't done much to cure this ailment, and it still has a very petty selection of applications.
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Hmmm, no the Windows 8 just went RTM 2 months ago along with Visual Studio 2012. Code that was written with the Windows 8 DP and VS 2012 DP largely doesn't work with the RTM code base.


pelo said:
The issue with your 200million figure (among being far too high) is that it's 200 million where, exactly? The Win8 ecosystem is fragmented and includes WP8, winRT and Win8 x86, all of them with separate applications, which, btw, are absolutely pitiful atm.
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You're just being obstinate. 200 million devices running Windows 8/RT is perfectly reasonable and I have no idea why you keep brining Windows Phone 8 into the conversation.
 
slh28 said:
Yup agree with you totally. For example look at the Blackberry Playbook, launched at a ridiculous price and I recently picked one up a brand new 64GB one for a quarter of its original price. Had RIM undercut Apple by say 25% to begin with it might not have been such a flop.
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If memory serves correctly, I believe the Kindle Fire and RIM Playbook had the same ODM and are nearly identical hardware wise. Given that Amazon sold out of the Fire and there are various Playbooks still floating around, a reasonable conclusion can be drawn that marketing and software play a huge role in a particular device's success.
 
I was really hoping for $500 with the touch cover and the choice of which color I actually get. Rather than $500 + $120 if I want a color other than Black. I would have pre-ordered it already had it hit my price point = (
 
sviola said:
Win8 ecosystem is not fragmented. Metro applications will run in Win8 and WinRT (native ones may need to be recompiled, but that's it). As for WP8, I'm not sure, but I think they may work there with a recompile as well, considering they use the same set of APIs available for all of them (or are created using html5 and js).
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For which ISA?

If you think developers are going to recompile, you've got to be kidding yourself. How long has it been since we've had AVX and where are the applications for it? That only takes recompiling as well, yet outside of video transcoding applications and synthetic benchmarks, the ISA is nowhere to be found.

And you're most certainly going to have to be jumping through hoops when recompiling. It's very rarely a straight forward ordeal, particularly when dealing with very different architectures and ISAs. Java could help, but it still requires hand-tuning and optimization.
 
pelo said:
For which ISA?

If you think developers are going to recompile, you've got to be kidding yourself. How long has it been since we've had AVX and where are the applications for it? That only takes recompiling as well, yet outside of video transcoding applications and synthetic benchmarks, the ISA is nowhere to be found.

And you're most certainly going to have to be jumping through hoops when recompiling. It's very rarely a straight forward ordeal, particularly when dealing with very different architectures and ISAs. Java could help, but it still requires hand-tuning and optimization.
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What are you talking about? You don't have to recompile anything to get a Windows 7 compatible program to work on Windows 8. Windows RT apps are deployment level compatible between Windows 8 and Windows RT, one code base, one deployment that works on both.
 
jcollett said:
If memory serves correctly, I believe the Kindle Fire and RIM Playbook had the same ODM and are nearly identical hardware wise. Given that Amazon sold out of the Fire and there are various Playbooks still floating around, a reasonable conclusion can be drawn that marketing and software play a huge role in a particular device's success.
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You also have to factor in that Amazon was perfectly willing to lose money making and selling the Fire because they're able to get it back a hundred fold over content sales. Amazon is a content provider first and foremost. Blackberry would not have been able to match the Fire's price.
 
pelo said:
For which ISA?

If you think developers are going to recompile, you've got to be kidding yourself. How long has it been since we've had AVX and where are the applications for it? That only takes recompiling as well, yet outside of video transcoding applications and synthetic benchmarks, the ISA is nowhere to be found.

And you're most certainly going to have to be jumping through hoops when recompiling. It's very rarely a straight forward ordeal, particularly when dealing with very different architectures and ISAs. Java could help, but it still requires hand-tuning and optimization.
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AVX requires only recompilation? No change of code whatsoever?

As for WinRT, the same code, without any changes run in Win 8 and Win RT. Here is a chart showing the developing paradigm in Windows 8 (courtesy of zdnet and Doug Sevenarch). Note that the green part is the Metro paradigm and blue is old desktop.

dougsevenarchdiagram.png
 
The major selling point of this device was the awesome keyboard cover.... now they want to charge 599 for the BASE OPTION that includes the critical keyboard cover piece.... Windows RT doesn't run x86 applications... and the app store for RT is most likely essentially empty at this point... the Nexus 7 @ 199 would do me fine for a $400 price difference.

That said, I would gladly pay 1200 for Surface Pro... as it is a fully featured laptop, Ivy Bridge, USB 3.0, Intel HD 4000... in fact I've preordered a ATIV Smart PC Pro tablet...
 
VIC-20 said:
2) Give more breathing room for companies like Acer, that actually sells countless millions of units do to the lowest pricing, to ruin the image and reputation of new product.

Good plan. Because consumers aren't going to buy the cheapest Win 8 tablet and think "This is junk. I should have bought Microsoft's own Premium Signature Tablet." as opposed to "Wow. Windows sucks, I should have got an iPad."
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acer is insignificant when it comes to tablets. They don't sell many, and they're not exactly cheap either.
 
bcrisp82 said:
What are your qualifications again? I want to know what your logic is behind this statement.

Better hardware, better platform, and it is a premium device.

If you want a cheaper WinRT tablet get an Acer or some other garbage.

You get what you pay for.
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Complete BS. The device is just overpriced, no way around it.

Tawnos said:
:rolleyes: At 299-399 you'd all be complaining that it wasn't 199-299. Looking for a reason to complain :rolleyes:
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Nope, $300 - $400 WITH the keyboard cover is the price it should have been if they were serious about actually selling many of the damn things.

wonderfield said:
I like this. Surrounding paragraphs in rolleyes is a beautiful way to signal that everything between those rolleyes should simply be ignored.
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Indeed.

Greggy_D said:
Too. Fucking. Expensive.

Make it $400-$500 with the keyboard and I'll buy.
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I agree with your top statement, but I still say the device should have been $300 - $400 with the cover in order to sell well. It's really too bad as I was REALLY interested in getting one of these, but no way at that price point. My prediction is that in 6 months or so when these sell like crap, they'll start discounting them to where they should have been, but by then it'll likely be too late. I'm just hoping to get a Pro version for a reasonable price (say $600 to $750). Of course, I'm not holding my breath... ;)
 
If it has a high resolution screen like the iPad and great battery life, it may be worth that much.

But it doesn't on either front. Too expensive.
 
This makes me glad about the desktop I just bought for $460 with a nice big screen and plenty of performance which lets me actually get work done so I can get out of the house/office sooner ;)
 
Once again, Microshit is trying to act like Apple.
However, Apple sells premium products, Microsoft on the other hand does not, at least not in the hardware department.

They never have.
MS trying to sell these at those horrid prices is going to do more damage to them than any comment I could come up with about them. lulz :rolleyes:
 
Staples said:
But it doesn't on either front. Too expensive.
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I agree.

The fact that it is running a Windows OS just flat out makes it not worth that cost.
Yes, increased "productivity" and "compatibility" blah blah blah.

Sorry, save that crap for your MS ad campaign.
This is all we need, more MS devices loaded with bloatware, malware, adware, viri, and other crapware.

No integrated memory or SSD is going to save a tablet from all of that.
 
Red Falcon said:
I agree.

The fact that it is running a Windows OS just flat out makes it not worth that cost.
Yes, increased "productivity" and "compatibility" blah blah blah.

Sorry, save that crap for your MS ad campaign.
This is all we need, more MS devices loaded with bloatware, malware, adware, viri, and other crapware.

No integrated memory or SSD is going to save a tablet from all of that.
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"Windows 8 - The AOL experience, reinvented"

Microsoft Marketing Manager,

Heatlesssun
 
nOrVow said:
"Windows 8 - The AOL experience, reinvented"

Microsoft Marketing Manager,

Heatlesssun
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All of the nonsense that Windows 8 haters spout around here its amazing how little the actually substance of anything that they say is talked about with any logic or reason. For instance, a Microsoft marketing manager would highlight deficiencies in the Modern UI with multiple monitors.
 
Flyboat said:
Good luck with that price, since market is already saturated with iPad and Andrio.
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This is a point that needs to be made more often. The tablet market to begin with is limited, niche, almost a specialty market that is of dubious duration. No doubt it is approaching saturation if not already saturated. (I won't be buying a tablet at any price, for instance--all of them are under-powered and under-featured, and designed as "throwaway devices" deliberately made difficult to upgrade internally. Of course, don't let me forget software--all of the tablets royally suck when it comes to software--at least in comparison with Windows laptops and desktops.) I wonder if people understand what market saturation is--it isn't apparent that they do.

There is no "new paradigm" here--doesn't exist. Instead, there's a "new delusion" of the kind that routinely infects a variety of markets in the form of fads. Whenever Apple becomes involved in something like this "delusion" is the price of admission--after the inflated sales price, of course...;)

On my wish list for disappearing in 2013? Obama and Apple. Now *that* would make for a happy new year...;)
 
Have you guys used it? Let me guess no.

How the hell the quality on this not premium? Anyone even touch the damn thing yet? Seriously so many people trying to bash this is amazing. You can't compare this to an ipad, the productivity of this tablet is night and day above ipad, I mean seriously, you get office rt preinstalled.

I think the resolution is more then enough given how windows 8 looks and it is tiles not a bunch of icons that need high pixel density to look clean. There will be cheaper options for people from other manufacturers, Microsoft probably did this for a reason to not piss off the hardware manufacturers. If they price this at 300, who the hell is possibly going to buy any other tablet?
 
So what makes this so great over an iPad 3? I mean other than it not being Apple. Why would I want to spend money on this with the App/Android store having tons more apps?

Wonder what MS is smoking these days.
 
$499 and up, and they ordered five million to be made.

What's that word again?

Disillusioned?
 
Will not consider WinRT at these prices. For media consumption and tablet gaming (yes, the future of gaming), just grab a Nexus 7. For real works, these toys will not cut it.

I have the Transformer Prime, and I regret my decision of buying it. It is not a bad tablet for Angry Birds and like. But when I use it for work (just opening word/ excel/ PDF files), its performance is disappointing.

5 million units? Expect to have clearance sale next X'mas...
 
I can't see a table being useful for actual work. Games/media consumption/web browsing ok but for work I need the dekstop or at least my work laptop. I like my kindle hd, wife likes her iPad - we like these things but there is no real reason to bother with the RT at present. Integration with Win 8/Win Phone/Win RT will not make a difference at first in terms of sales. I can't see anyone but a few folks like heatless have been waiting to go all WinX on everything. Everyone else has an iPad/Kindle/Nexus/Asus/Samsung tablet already.

I just do not see this device unseating the iPad in this generation. Possibly later on once 70+ percent of the installed PC base has Win8/9 on them (won't be for likely over 5 years) and people are refreshing their tablets maybe 3rd gen RT will take off.

If they want market penetration earlier than that I don't see it without making the device cheaper.
 
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