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Leak Hints Windows 8 Tablets May Be Dearer Than Makes Sense
MrSeb writes "If, like me, you thought Microsoft would price Windows RT competitively, you were wrong: A leaked slide from Asus says that its Vivo Tab RT, due to be released alongside Windows RT at the end of October, will start at $600. Unbelievably, this is $100 more than the iPad 3, and a full $200 more than the iPad 2 or Galaxy Tab 2 10.1. For $600, you would expect some sensational hardware specs — but alas, that's sadly not the case. The Vivo Tab RT has a low-res 10.1-inch 1366×768 IPS display, quad-core Tegra 3 SoC, 2GB of RAM, NFC, 8-megapixel camera and that's about it. Like its Androidesque cousin, the Transformer, the Vivo Tab RT can be plugged into a keyboard/battery dock — but it'll cost you another $200 for the pleasure. (Curiously, the Transformer's docking station only costs $150 — go figure.)"
RT is what Microsoft is calling the ARM version of the OS. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_RT. Windows Runtime ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Runtime ) is the Run Time. Confused yet? :)
K Man
British English! Dearer = more expensive.
This article is horrible. It lists prices for the ASUS tablet and then concludes that Windows RT (the Operating System) is overpriced. The only relevant piece of information in this article is the fact that manufacturers have said that "in June multiple OEMs said that Microsoft was charging between $80 and $95 for a Windows RT license". Using the overall price of the tablet and then concluding that the cost of Windows RT is the reason is horrible, horrible logic. Go to the primary source and figure out how the price of Windows RT ($80-$95) differs from the price of Android.
Second, you may have noticed that "Sebatian Anthony" is the author of the article (he probably gets paid by ExtremeTech according to the number of pageviews he gets). You may have also noticed that the submitter for this article is "MrSeb" and if you follow the link it leads back to Sebastian Anthony. Yup, the article's author is the same person who submitted it to Slashdot so that he could make money. This wouldn't be so bad if the article wasn't so horribly written. Just take a look at the comments in the article (mostly negative about Sebastian's leaps of logic) and compare them to the comments on Slashdot (mostly positive, probably because Slashdot loves bad press about Microsoft). Stop getting this shitty article-writer paid.
On a side note, I happen to remember seeing Sebastian Anthony on the old (now gone) "Download Squad". He was a huge advocate of piracy and used all kinds of crappy logic to justify piracy. I'm glad to see his lack of intelligent reasoning extends to his other articles as well.