I think people miss the point of WinRT. Look at Apple. If you were to buy a Mac Book, you could run some great software and even develop on it, right? What about the iPad? Can the iPad run the same great software? Can you develop on an iPad? No. They are two different devices with different abilities. Nobody will argue that point.
People seem to forget that the SurfaceRT is Microsoft’s “iPad” It was never meant to be a PC/Laptop replacement. A GREAT thing about the WinRT, is you can build applications (Called Windows Store Apps) and they will run on Any Windows 8 device. You also have a common look and feel between WinRT devices and Windows 8 devices.
Sadly, people see the SurfaceRT device and think, “This damn device will not run the same software I want to run on my PC.”
The failure, here, is that Microsoft may have been ahead of themselves when it came to the “Tablet.” It also did not help that the Surface Pro (Running Windows 8) is billed as the RT’s big brother. People just don’t realize the difference. Microsoft also does not do a perfect job at informing the people on what RT is really supposed to be.
All that being said. Hell, just get an RT to have an inexpensive tablet that COMES with Office
If I could get them for $10, I might rip the keyboard off of it and use it in another project somewhere. Other than that, UEFI pretty close to bricks the thing. MS would have sold quite a few more of these if people could add their own OS, but that didn’t match the business model, I guess. I like to think that maybe this is an under-appreciated factor in the failure. Closed sucks.
Unfortunately, barring a so-far-undiscovered vulnerability, all ‘Surface RT’ devices are of pretty limited use to anybody who doesn’t want to run Windows RT(and, unless Microsoft is atypically benevolent, Windows RT’s future is likely to be grim, since it’s install base is pretty tiny compared to Win8 on x86).
The bootloader, it is locked. There is a ‘jailbreak’ for running non-Metro applications, if built for ARM, on the mostly-complete win32 environment within Windows RT, so there is that; but other OSes are out.
For $300 or so… I actually might be interested in a Surface RT. At that price it’s competing with tablets, and the limitations of Win8 RT aren’t as egregious.
That review made it look tempting, but even then it sounded like it took a few tweaks to get everything working well. If a tablet manufacturer really wants to hook the artist market they’ll need something that’s ready to go right out of the box.
On the plus side, you can prevent quite a lot of paperwork from blowing away by placing one of these on top of it. No worries about battery life , either.
Just the existence of the Pro ruined the idea of the RT. Who wants the hobbled version of something, even if it’s cheaper? I think it was a very dumb idea on MS’s part and it confused the market–good riddance if it dies. Too many people didn’t understand it was not a Windows substitute.
Now–the Surface Pro. That is a whole different story. A little high priced, but the most functional and productive tablet out there by a long shot. And when the haswell models come out and battery life improves, nothing else will come close. Probably.
Never going to buy a Surface RT, but a Haswell powered Surface Pro with more storage (512GB?) and the type keyboard thrown in for the current price might replace my old MBP if Lenovo doesn’t start selling a Yoga 11S with a decent res screen first (or Nokia make something nice). I liked the look of the Helix but it’s too expensive and has the wrong processor in it.
I like TIFKAM, I like the Surface Pro hardware (had a play with one in the local MS store), 8.1 sounds promising and I like my Lumia 920, which I hope would integrate well.
If I buy a hybrid, it’s going to be a laptop replacement, not a bargain basement tablet. My HP TouchPad just gathers dust most of the time. Even cheap and running Cyanogenmod it was a false economy.
I have two Surface RTs and I initially liked them a lot. However:
The Tegra 3 hardware is really woefully underpowered for a full OS.
Not being able to run x86 apps is not necessarily that big a deal, certainly not as big as people make it out to be – oh noes, I can’t run Garden Landscape Designer 1998 – but it does limit flexibility over time.
They really really really should have made the keyboard cover standard and thrown it in at the same price.
On the plus side
IE10 is frigging great (I swear) in fullscreen tablet mode and IE11 in Win 8.1 update, which is a free update, is even better.
Battery life is awesome, nearly iPad level.
You can drop in a 64GB SD card easy and make it into an outstanding media playback device, which is basically impossible on iPad or Nexus 10.
Imagine a tablet with a keyboard, so you could actually type some damn paragraphs! Yay!
However, I’d like the RT a lot more as a general purpose email and web device if it was about 2x faster than it is now. It is just too damn slow in the era of iPad 4 and Surface Pro for me to use.
If I remember correctly, part of the issue he had was that Photoshop didn’t support the pen’s pressure sensitivity correctly at first. People have also had issues with the text size on the classic desktop, but that’s just Windows 8 and high DPI displays interacting poorly.
I was sort of baffled by the choice of Tegra 3(there are rumors that it’s a variant on the usual SoC; but it’s not a terribly punchy part). I wonder if Nvidia was the party best able to deliver a WDDM driver?
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: if Microsoft had come out with the Courier in 2009 like they had teased, I would have one of those, not the two generations of iPads I have now.
