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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.)"
I like this plan.
Bye Bye, Microsoft.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
So you get software no one likes in hardware no one would pay for. That sounds like a recipe for success.
If you really want to use Windows, you need to pay up for the privilege. I think it's too cheap; they should start these Windows tablets at $2000. I'm sure millions of people will be lining up to buy these things.
(Hopefully Steve is reading this.)
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.
This all pencils out. Everyone wants Microsoft Windows on a tablet. They're already lining up for it. It's Windows -- the same interface, the same applications, compatibility with all the Microsoft back end processes, and all documents of any type made by Microsoft products will open on it. Regular security releases and bug fixes will keep it in great shape, and Internet Explorer is a joy to use. For all that, of course people will be willing to pay a premium price for the product. This isn't arrogance, it's due recognition of our own excellence. We've owned the desktop for decades; this obviously means we have a superior product.
Additionally, charging a higher price creates a mindset of a premium product. Charging a price competitive with those made-in-China boxes running not-Windows will make us seem as useless as them. People are willing to pay for excellence.
(Please mod this funny so I don't lose all faith in humanity...)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
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.
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.
(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