So I got to play with a ‘surface’ yesterday

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Honestly it’s not that bad, the UI is surprisingly snappy.  The thing has a quad core processor, 2GB of ram..  the bundled keyboard… sucks. badly.  I don’t even know why they even made it.

Surprisingly, there is adobe flash on the platform.  Getting to the command prompt was pretty trivial, although I didn’t have any pure unsigned .net exe’s on me to test..  I forgot to check if the runtime included csc.exe …

The price is just too high for the platform to be compelling to be honest, it would have been a contender around the time the iPad launched, but true to MS’s nature they always let others lead before they enter the market.

Maybe after Christmas sales, or the lack of, there will be some motivation on Microsoft’s part to price it more competitively.

Also DOSBox would be a nice to have for Windows RT … but if it is all walled garden crap who knows if that’ll happen easily…

3 thoughts on “So I got to play with a ‘surface’ yesterday”

  1. I’ve heard rumors that the Surface RT sales numbers have been incredibly low. The 32GB model, for example, has sold less than 50,000 units online and half that in the the stores. Microsoft didn’t think they’d sell – so they only manufactured a small amounts – and this is why they “sold out”. The 64GB version has only sold about 100,000 units total. A friend who is an MS employee at one store (name withheld to save his job) mentioned that the return rate is very high – about 20% (1 in 5 sales come back). This would coincide with Ballmer refusing to state any sales numbers

    http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w8itprogeneral/thread/81d35f49-328d-42a9-bf4e-6701a6a2208e

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    I guess we’ll see…..

      • I imagine since we haven’t heard any ‘1 million downloads in 10 days’ type stuff, poorly??

        I wasn’t too thrilled with the betas & release candidates so I haven’t even bothered with the production release. the single page apps feels more like Windows 1.0 and why on earth would such a giant leap backwards be seen as anything good?

        I’m assuming between the omission of ‘download another browser’, and finding out why Apple still has OS X & iOS, MS was going to be the first down the rabbit hole with a one size fits all, except that Windows 8 fits neither. I don’t even think their Direct X ‘dirty tricks’ of new features for the latest OS only will be compelling enough.

        There has been two things that drive personal computing, and that is porn & video games. With steam appearing on Linux it may actually change things. Esp if Valve releases some kind of ‘steam box’ appliance. Things could actually change, or maybe even hurt the Xbox which either cost 8 or 30 billion to get where it is today.. I don’t think it has ever been profitable overall has it?

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