I am not disappointed that microsoft is charging how much they are for their surface pro tablets and surface books. Yes it is outrageously expensive for what you get, but they are for the most part the best windows tablets out there, and people are willing to pay those prices for the best. Furthermore microsoft goal is three fold
1) Not lose money on the surface line
2) Make the oems, happy and not trying to win market share for the sake of winning market share, the goal is to make the oems make better tablets and prevent people from going to apple. Thus they set a really good experience on the high end and hope the oems adopt many of those features based of the public demanding those features or else they go buy surface
3) Hope this little features trickle down and microsoft retains being the OS of choice for high end devices and not lose marketshare to apple on the high end, and android/chrome on the low end. In other words make windows less sucky, and less race to the bottom which has occurred since the netbook revolution.
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What I am angry about are these things
1) They did not make any core m models in smaller form factors that are passively cooled. For example they could have updated the surface 3 non pro lines and say these are the surface 4s with both atom and core m options
2) Still only 1 usb port, and no usb c. Why can't we have 2 ports, for example remove the mini displayport port and replace it with a usb c. Hell you can put more than 1 port on there.
3) They destroyed price points and did not use some of the skus that intel has that just makes sense. For example
In the surface pro 3 line we had this sku
Intel Core i3 4020y. 1.5 ghz+hyperthreading, 20 GPU Eus, 11.5w tdp, but it had a lower real world tdp due to it being the model that could be passively cooled if you used sdp settings and not the desired 11.5w non throttling 100% 24/7 normal workload tasks.
It was $799 with the pen, 4gb of ram, 64gb storage.
Well guess what Intel has released a similar sky m processor
Intel 6th Gen Pentium 4405y. 1.5 ghz+hyperthreading (yes a pentium with hyperthreading). 24 GPU Eus, 6 watt tdp with a 4.5 watt tdp down.
So why do we have a model that starts at $899 and not any lower price models to bridge the gap between $500 cherrytrail 2gbs, and $600 cherrytrail 4gbs both of which do not include the pin?
I honestly do not know why they did not use a sku that is literally a drop in replacement for them. Price this sku at $799 or $750 and you are giving the customer more options and it is a direct replacement for what you used to offer at that price of $799. In other words you killed a product in a specific price point.
And if it was competing with the higher end models too much, then just put it in a surface 3 case that is that 10.8" screen.
Is it so much that I want a good skylake tablet that is passively cooled and does not have to get even larger. Why are you trying to make the surfaces into laptop clones. Tablets have purposes too especially when they have windows, kickstands, and active digitizers.
I am so glad that they are making a surface book but I just do not understand microsoft sometimes. I understand not making the oems angry but these are obvious simple things to implement