Surface 3 - New direction, higher prices and crappy i3

[gertsy]

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/05/20/microsoft-corporation-launches-thermonuclear-war-o.aspx

Regardless of the noise. RT makes sense in regard to a runtime OS on alternative (to Intel) processors.  Albeit ARM only at this stage.
It's a case of damned if you do or don't for M$.
If all it achieves is get Intel out of its rut and into more competitive thinking about heat and power then that's something. The advances in Intel "i" CPU tech from Surface Pro to Surface Pro 3 are quite marked. It's the threat of market disruption that drives advancements for incumbents.
IMO having an i7(8 core) in a tablet is ludicrous. i5(4 core) is nigh on overkill. An i3(2 core) makes sense.  I am guessing people questioning the speed of an i3, haven't used a recent one or have other problems on their machine.  In general tablet type usage "browsing, consuming content, social, email" on a PC there is little speed difference between processors of the same release. Once you start doing productive multitasking stuff there is a obvious difference.

Sent this on an Android Kindle Fire 2 core. And it is markedly less snappy than my Wife's Surface RT or my daughter's hand-me-down iPad 2 for that matter.

Don't hear much bagging of the Kindle Fire here.

As to the article, they don't even know the difference between PC sales and laptop. How a Surface would compete against a PC I don't know. Nor do they understand the concept of market disruption. Fool is appropriate.

Without prejudice and in good humour; If I were Microsoft I wouldn't be looking the Amiga.org Forum for marketing/product advice.

[Duce]

Same was said about Google when they started selling the Nexus devices.
Their defense was then "we wanted to show our Android partners what we considered the baseline Android handset experience".

It did work out quite well for them, all things considered - and has bettered the Android handset market experience.  Most Android handset makers have trimmed down their "Cruft" factor considerably, with the exception of Samsung.  Motorola, HTC, Sony and even LG have an experience that isn't *TOO* far off the vanilla Android experience lately.  Samsung is still an unmitigated trainwreck of dopey skins and useless add-ons on top of Android, though.  The new Motorola phones, you'd be hard pressed to spot much difference between Android on them and the plain jane vanilla experience, and they have won many fans with this.
A vast majority of people that bitch about Android being buggy and slow rightfully do so because all they have ever used is the crapware Samsung type TouchWiz UI garbage.

It worked well for Google and didn't harm the competition.  Many people, and I am one of them - love the vanilla Android experience on the Nexus devices, I just never got into them too much because I always required a card slot for additional storage.  I love my old Google Play edition HTC One, and I despised the plain HTC version with their UI.

MS is doing the same thinking with the Surface line, trying to pass it off as a "baseline standard" as to what a Windows tablet *should* be.  Quite frankly, up to the Surface 3, I think they have failed at it miserably and I agree that they have done nothing more than creating friction with their long time hardware partners, but I'm sure they will learn this soon the hard way.

The Surface 3 is a far better device, but it's not going to take over the world.  Most people find something like an iPad a far better option usage case wise, since a good chunk of people buy tablets as consumption devices solely.  There's a market for the full Windows experience on a tablet, but it's a small and very specific market - the enterprise market, really.

[gertsy]

Well, time will tell Duce!
It's called Market disruption and it's considered a win/win even if you fail.
Whoops nearly called you dice. Just getting used to this Kindle Fire auto-correct.

[Duce]

How do you like the Fire, anyways?

Got one of the original Kindle's for reading and just love the thing, but haven't had much hands on with the newer ones yet.

[gertsy]

I've always liked the original Kindle with the Ink display. Especially the new version.
The fire is a bit of an enigma. It's a 7 inch display at a usable resolution +720 but acts a a mobile device online. So YouTube for instance plays low red by default.
I put a 720p blu ray movie on it however ad it looked sharp and played beautifully.
The carousel GUI is okay but sometimes sluggish the same as browsing in Silk(not so silk)
 PDFs look generally crap. Which could be a conversion issue.
Email, photos Music are great.

So not for all?

[SysAdmin]

Former Windows 8 developer and MS employee said it's time to kill the Surface off.

http://stratechery.com/2014/time-kill-surface/

http://twit.tv/show/this-week-in-tech/459

[SysAdmin]

If Surface sucks what is MS doing right? This looks cool and very interesting.

http://www.valuewalk.com/2014/05/microsoft-corporation-brings-real-time-translator-to-skype/

[Duce]

The Skype thing looks great, if it works well.  But I'm 110% sure all the video demos are just canned, B roll film of it working nearly perfectly with the fails edited out.  It's too glaring to miss the fact there's a man of Indian persuasion speaking English to a woman speaking German and BY LAWD, it's working flawlessly, translated on the fly.  I do not wish to seem racial here, but the various accents of people REALLY throw recognition software.  I've got a Scottish friend that owns an iPhone and when he uses Siri, he might as well be speaking Klingon to it.  The video of the demo just seems too "put on".  If it works as shown, it'll be revolutionary - but I'm willing to wager Google gets their product far better in a far shorter amount of time than anyone else.  Google now (and the related speech recognition and translation services they have) is vastly superior than anything else by a wide margin.

Honestly, it reminds me of a youtube clip that was recently released by a broadband provider in the US.  

The video showed a bunch of "hardcore gamers" trying this FANTASTIC LAG FREE GAMING EXPERIENCE at some mock convention and these guys were just raving about it.  1 minute after the clip was released to the public, it was duly pointed out the game said HARDCORE GAMERS were trying does not even come in an online/multiplayer form, lol.  There's not much truth in advertising.

Kinect is, quite frankly - the sh!ts.  I have a hard time swallowing that MS have made Skype that much better, and it all is coming from the same company.  IMHO (Skype), it's 100% less stable and 1000% more bloated than it was just a few years ago.  I'm forced to use Skype on a daily basis and I just despise it.

[psxphill]

Former Windows 8 developer

It doesn't appear they are a developer.
 
"Back when I was a category manager for the Windows 8 app store"
 
I'd be interested in when he left, he asserts that Windows 8 is broken and needs fixing when it's 18 months old and has had two updates since (and is now called 8.1).

[Duce]

The guy that wrote the article has pretty fairly been accused of overstating his importance while he was at MS, and has also been accused of writing solely for "clickbait" factor - which I tend to agree on the latter.

[SysAdmin]

This reminds me of the old Windows Vista days when it was almost universally hated but had a few defenders. MS solved the Vista problem by killing it and replacing with something better. I never bought or used Vista and I'll never buy or use Win8.

[persia]

Have you tried the "spring update" of 8.1?  It fixes most of the problems.  App Store apps now appear in the task bar, there are arrows to guide you and you can close/minimise App store apps with a trackpad/mouse.

[Duce]

8.1 update 1 is a vast improvement, but I can see why people dislike it still.

Outside of the slightly "flatter" appearance, you couldn't really tell this W8 PC from the W7 one beside it.  All the Legoland Metro crap can be tucked away and never seen again quite easily, and W8 is far faster than 7.

[psxphill]

This reminds me of the old Windows Vista days when it was almost universally hated but had a few defenders. MS solved the Vista problem by killing it and replacing with something better. I never bought or used Vista and I'll never buy or use Win8.

People are always told to hate new Microsoft operating systems. For Windows 95 it was because it replaced Program Manager with the Start Menu. If you're the type of person that takes notice of what other people say then you'll always have problems upgrading.
 
What seems to happen is that people accept changes in the version after they are introduced. So Window 95 was bad, Windows 98 was ok then Millenium was bad. Windows XP was good, Vista was bad, Windows 7 was good, Windows 8 was bad.
 
I don't know if this is because of finally becoming familiar with it, or because it sounds better if one time you hate something and the next you write about how "you know you all hated the last version, but you'll love this one".
 
I used Vista, it had many improvements over XP. It was for example the first supported 64 bit release (XP 64 was pretty much a barely supported pre-release of Vista). If you hate change and don't need any of the new features then you'll never want to upgrade.
 
I find it funny that in response to being forced from XP some people have been trying to switch to Linux, which doesn't solve the problem of change and introduced an even bigger learning curve. However this is glossed over because someone told them it was great.
 
I expect people will be told to love Windows 9, including metro apps & the start screen. At that point they will become more popular.

[persia]

Microsoft hasn't used the word "metro" in a couple years, and then only as a code name, never officially.  The new apps are Windows Store Apps.

[Duce]

And every person in the MS related Press areas still refers to it as "Metro" behind closed doors.  Some call it Windows Store Apps, some say "Modern UI".  Call it what you like.  I call the brick a brack "formerly known as Metro" simply "Legoland Design School".  

Even the most fervent MS press folks like MJ Foley, Ed Bott, and our own illustrious ex Amigan, Paul Thurrott use the Metro term in passing still.  You can gild a turd, but I can still smell the stink  But let's not get into semantics, it's just a name.

It (Metro) indeed was full, blazing official term at one time, but they hit a lawsuit snag on it.