Surface with Windows 8 Pro – Pricing

You put a lot of effort to get it backwards.

  > it's a tablet, without the regular complexities
  > of 'tablet mode'

No, it is a table with added complexities of desktop mode.

  > It runs the same stuff as your desktop, acts, smells, barks and looks just like your desktop

Except your desktop expects you to interact with keyboard and pointer device not with you touch. And there it all fails apart.

  > if you want to use it like a crippled toy in the style of an iPad

The words you were looking for are "use it optimised for touch, as iPad".

  > Microsoft were the first to seriously meld the desktop and tablet experience

And were seriously unsuccessful at it.

  > Waiting with bated breath to see if Apple wholesale copies the Microsoft approach,
  > toy-apps-as-start-button works wonderfully.

What's the logic behind that? Microsoft "seriously meld the desktop and tablet experience" and it fails. Apple launches iPad with "crippled toy style" and it is wildly successful. No somehow Apple should copy Microsoft's approach which failed?

If that price included a full version of Office I would definitely get it myself.

As priced, it's a no-brainer for the executive set who like to be seen with their iPads but get real work done on 5 pound, AD-joined, IT provisioned Dells. They already have volume licensed Office, and IT teams are going to make this a standard option for road-warriors and execs.

I think the Hacker News set doesn't understand what it's like to work at a non-tech Fortune 500 company. Microsoft's goal isn't to replace the iPad on teenagers' Christmas lists, it's to protect the highly lucrative corporate market from further iPad (and eventually Mac) penetration. On that measure, the Surface Pro is going to crush it.

>because Ballmer is trying to enter the market that he publicly mocked in 2007 (iPhone) and 2010 (iPad).

I'm tired of these kinds of statements. The golden rule is that companies' employee publicly have to put down their competitors' new strategies. Imagine if Balmer said the iPad is great it's going to kill us, or if Jobs said 7" tablets are good but we'll make only in two years, so wait for us to make it. Or even Andy Rubin saying that Android UI is laggy compared to iOS, fix coming in 18 months. All of them(except maybe Jobs) would be summarily fired or atleast will be forced to recant their statements immediately on threat of being fired. It's almost part of their job to publicly mock their competitors, or their shareholders will dump the stock.

The more puzzling thing to me is, why do so many people actually think that these people say what they really believe and really believe what they say?

Try using a Surface - it really is nothing like the old tablets of yesteryears.

Convertible laptops were 5lb monstrosities that were nearly impossible to hand hold, emitted tremendous amounts of heat, had incredibly poor battery life, and infamous reliability issues that came from a mechanically complex transformation mechanism. They also used resistive touch screens that were easy to damage, required frequent recalibration when heavily used, and were difficult to use with fingers (making the devices almost exclusively stylus-based devices).

So no, the modern incarnation of the tablet (in the way that iPad has defined it) is nothing like the tablet of old. In fact, if you look at the new convertible tablets coming out of OEMs, they've come pretty far too: capacitive screens, solid construction, hugely reduced weight, unbelievably lower heat output, and battery life that actually matters. We're also seeing novel new ways of building convertibles (e.g., separating keyboard from screen entirely) that make the devices far more realistic for handheld use.

The big secret to tablets that Apple realized, and other companies are slowly picking up on is the importance of the screen. Old convertible laptops used the absolute worst screens that had limited viewing angles, demonstrated ugly moire and discoloration on taps/presses, along with a slew of heat output and power consumption problems. Compare with the calibrated, accurate, brilliant IPS panels that now inhabit tablets (both Surface and iPad have IPS panels), they are worlds apart. When you're putting together a mobile device that is going to be oriented this way and that in someone's hands, a shitty LCD panel really doesn't cut it.

And the problem with Asus and their "half price" touchscreen laptops is all in the screen.

>Asus has touchscreen laptops for less than half of the price

Are they full HD resolution? Do they have an active digitizer? Core i5 ?