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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.)"
Perhaps Microsoft has decided they need to make money instead of doing loss leaders.
To make money, you have to sell product.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Some MBA did up a presentation where they could make an absurd profit on each unit and then success will happen at only 10% of iPad sales.
In order to switch from an iPad to a Windows unit it would have to be so much better, so way much better, way way better. So unless it unfolds into a private jet that then flies me to my private island that comes with it I will predict that they will jig the stats on sales (force people to warehouse them and then prebook the sales) and in the end it will be Zune 2.
Right now there are two ways to sell a tablet to consumers, sell them an iPad or sell them something that looks exactly like an iPad for way less. The only possible third way would be something way better; thus MS will have had to vastly improve upon technologies that are near the leading edge of what is possible. So better than retina? Better battery life without making it an inch thick? Thinner/lighter electronics? Vastly better GUI? Vastly better Processor? Better Apps?
If MS were really lucky and had the best engineers on the planet and could get their first effort perfect I could see slight improvements on all of the above but not enough to touch Apple's marketing or enough to justify a monster price.
My prediction is that MS is going to make this all enterprisey. It will tie into office and other MS crap in a horribly incestuous way. They will provide white papers to the CTO types saying how this can improve data security and fine grain control over the user experience. What they are forgetting here is that one of the reasons for Apple's ability to break into the Enterprise market is that they don't cater to the enterprise market's OCD about ruining the user experience. I am sure that this is what killed the BlackBerry; those phones are actually pretty good. But RIM gave the telcos and sys admins too much say over what could be turned off on the phones. Many a corporate user had a complete dud of a phone after all the good bits were turned off in the name of security and productivity. Apple looks at this and just asks "Why would we allow you to ruin our phones?" Over the last few years the better companies have had a policy of BYOD that is a real winner among the employees who are the reason the company exists and a real pain among old school admins.
So basically crappy companies are going to buy a handful of these new tablets and their employees are going to put them into the microwave hoping that if they ruin enough of them they will get an iPad; or at least not have to suffer the Metro UI.
"Dearer"? You mean more expensive?
No sig today...
So you get software no one likes in hardware no one would pay for. That sounds like a recipe for success.
The hardware isn't THAT bad. It's just not particularly great. People would probably pay for the hardware if it had a more reasonable price point.. I'm thinking around $300. You can't fix windows RT without replacing it, though.
I'm not sure how MS expects to compete here. Every competitor in this field charges $0 for the OS. MS is selling ONLY an OS. I guess they expect hardware manufacturers to eat the cost? It would be a little intriguing if RT and Windows 8 were binary level compatible, but they're not - they just look similar.
MS never had to be price oriented, they held a monopoly on consumer and enterprise desktops, and had a pretty good market share of servers. To the point where competitors effectively had to be free to compete, not because of technical superiority but because of how the market was stacked against them.
The trouble for MS is it doesn't have that lead in the mobile space. Its now forced, whether it acknowledges it or not to compete on:
Cost and UI matter to regular consumers, Cost and Technical Merit (maybe including a bit of UI as it relates to funcationality rather than prettiness/bragging rights) matter to techies.
MS's problem is the first group aren't going to be impressed with Notro compared to Apple or Android, especially if the devices are going to cost significantly more. The second group remember enough about MS's business practices from the 90's and 00's as to be warey of accepting them.
There is another possibility, maybe it's not the MS license knocking up the price, ASUS might not be expecting big sales from these devices and so are hoping to cover R&D costs with a smaller number of sales by bumping up the unit price?
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
I don't know, I paid $40 for DOS 6 when games were $50, I'd say that's cheap, especially since it came with DoubleSpace. Most people aren't Microsoft's customers, they're Asus and Dell and HP customers. I doubt that more than $10 went to MS when you bought a computer. Enterprise customers are their customers, not you. Now, Office seems expensive unless you put it next to Photoshop are worse, SAS.
You're confusing them with Apple. Apple computers are way more expensive than Windows computers, but Apples are percieved to be higher quality. I just don't see how MS can sell a tablet at a higher price than an iPad and expect anyone to buy them. Folks buy Apple to be kewl and show off how much money they have, you can't say that about MS.
Look how the Zune flopped, and it wasn't as expensive as an iPod. There's no way anyone is going to be willing to pay more for a Windows computer than an Apple computer.
Meanwhile, when I get a tablet it will be a cheap Android. Apples cost too much and Windows has too few features compared to kubuntu.
Free Martian Whores!
(a good IPS panel with a capacitive sensor isn't cheap, not that 1366x768 is 'good')
This is what pisses me off these days: on a 10" device made for looking at kittens on the internet, a 1366x768 IPS screen is considered "bad". But on my 12" notebook, where I actually need a good display for e.g. Photoshop or Lightroom while on the go, a 1366x768 IPS screen would be an *upgrade*. The display situation on laptops is seriously FUBAR...
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done