As a regular Apple user (iphone/ipad/macbook air are my main tools), in my eyes Gruber is jumping the shark here. He comments on the structure of the event, his own feelings watching it. He comments on what information that has not yet been released. He clearly wants to move focus away from the hardware itself. Perhaps because it is just a little too awesome to come from MS?
It appears to be really good, but MS doesn't really have anything yet. You can't buy it, you can't pre-order and it appears that no journalist had any hands-on time with the keyboard. All we have are promises and anyone can do that.
I disagree wholeheartedly. Vision is also hard. Making and communicating a promise that gets people excited, is really really tough. There are thousands of product videos published every month trying to make promises people care about. Living up to the promises is also a great challenge. But to me, vision is not as easy as you describe it.
Really there is very little worth mentioning beside the keyboard covers. And Microsoft does not allow anyone to touch the keyboard covers. Whose fault is that?
It is not record setting thin, or impossibly light, it has worse screen than the retina iPad, battery life is not mentioned at all, neither is th price,the look is quite minimalist and good, but not new or stunningly interesting ... pray tell, what's so awesome about the hardware? The glorious kickstand?
The fact that with the Pro Version I can run whatever software on it I want. We are salivating over these at an enterprise level as it solves several major problems for us (if they work as advertised).
It means that rather than buying sales types an Air/Ultrabook along with supporting their iPad/Android we can buy them the surface pro and hand them a Windows Phone and have easy integration.
But that's software isn't it? The Surface Pro hardware is just an Intel Tablet (albeit the slickest one), with the real keyboard cover, this is thicker than a MBA 11", roughly the same weight, unknown battery life and price.
Hold the 11" MBA in your hand, pretend it is a tablet, see how that works out ergonomically.
Yeah, it is software. Software that I can manage just like the rest of our software and not have to worry about buying two devices, or convincing the user that I should be able to wipe the device that they bought, or trying to convince them that they shouldn't put sensitive data on a device that I have no way of controlling.
If they need to walk around holding a tablet in clipboard mode all day, then the ARM version would be the platform. Yes, the apps they run would have to be Metro apps, but Metro apps are worlds easier to write (and get deployed) than an iOS app. And I can still re-use that same code on the Pro version if need be.
To my eye, the Surface is what Apple would have made if they ever paid any real attention to enterprise users.
Apple absolutely does not care about "Enterprise" if Enterprise means only IT people and middle managers who buys the same Wintel stuff year after year after year.
I'm pretty sure Apple does some of the things just to spit you guys, personally. Like requiring iTunes until just recently.
From what I've read on Daring Fireball, Gruber thinks highly of Metro's design and he seems to at least infer that the design is as good as iOS or even better.
