Surface 3 - New direction, higher prices and crappy i3

[Andre.Siegel]

The Surface tablet continues to struggle and the idea to take down the iPad failed so with Surface Pro 3 the plan has changed.

Source?

The new Tablet now has a higher price ($799 vs $499) and is aimed at corporate
customers.

As someone else pointed out, the new tablet is a successor to the Surface Pro 2 and Surface Pro, which have always been aimed at professionals and power users. The new Surface Pro 3 is in fact less expensive than both of its predecessors.

It also includes a crappy i3 processor instead of the i5 that the Surface Pro 2 had.

At the lower price, it also features a 12 inch display instead of a comparatively tiny 10 inch display. Apple's smallest laptop has a 11.6" display for a reason. Anything smaller is simply not usable for serious work with common desktop applications (for most people, anyway).

You can get a i5 or i7 but the prices goes way up.

The cheapest i5 version costs as much as the entry level Macbook Air 13. (The Surface Pro 3 has a slightly smaller, but much, much better display. It also features twice as much as memory at this price. The Macbook Air's 4 GB look fairly dated in 2014.)

For people who do not mind the Metro user interface, which does not include me, the Surface Pro 3 is valid alternative to a Macbook Air or similar Windows-based Ultrabooks.

Looks like the regular Surface RT tablets will be discontinued thus Surface will now start at $799 instead of $499.

Again, source? This sounds more like wishful thinking than anything else. The iPad mini outsold the full-size iPad in 2013. On amazon.com, the best-selling Android tablets are all 7 inch models. Clearly, there is a huge demand for lower-cost, smaller, highly portable tablets in the 7 to 8 inch range.

The only way to compete in this space in terms of price and user experience would be to release a new Surface RT tablet, which is exactly what many media outlets were expecting to see at Microsoft's recent press event. The assumption that Microsoft will just leave this huge market niche to Android and iOS is not plausible.

[Andre.Siegel]

@Andre.Siegel

Surface RT caused MS to take a 900 million dollar write down ouch! Surface RT has always sold very poorly and did not have many apps available. A Surface Mini was developed but then the decision was made to no longer try to complete with low cost iPad's and Android tablets. Thus Surface RT will be cancelled shortly, collect them for door stops while you can.

Again, this is pure speculation on your part. Microsoft also wrote-off 1 billion USD on the Xbox 360 in 2007. Yet, Microsoft did not stop selling the Xbox 360. They even launched a successor a few months ago. Arguably, Microsoft's general purpose computing devices (i.e. Surface and Surface Pro) are more important to their core business than Xbox has ever been, and will ever be.

[Andre.Siegel]

The RT Surface tablets should have never, ever come out.  Just a giant mistake on MS's part.  Says "Windows" on the damned thing and you cannot run any traditional Windows (x86) software on them.  One of the most dead in the water products I've ever seen.

From a branding perspective, it was clearly a huge disaster that could have and should have been avoided. Long before the products became available for sale, I predicted that there would be immense consumer confusion surrounding the ARM and x86 versions of Windows.

Two 10 inch tablets. They share the same user interface, but one is compatible with old applications and one is not. No wonder this caused all kinds of problems...

That being said, if consumers can choose between a 12 inch Pro model and a 7 inch RT model, that is an entirely different situation because these highly distinctive form factors are perfectly able to convey a different set of features and use cases on their own.

Realistically, most people would not expect to use a desktop application on a 7 or 8 inch tablet because it is rather obvious that the usability would be absolutely horrible. Consumers also do not get confused by the fact that they cannot run standard desktop applications on their Windows Phone devices either, afterall.

So, with regard to the Surface devices, the Windows branding itself was not necessarily the key problem. The RT and Pro form factors have simply not been distinctive enough in the past.