Microsoft Slashes Prices On Surface

McGruber writes "Thursday, The Verge broke the news that Microsoft was slashing the price of its tablets — the price of the 32-gig Surface RT plummeted by 42%! Staples, TigerDirect and many other retailers are already selling the tablets at the lowered prices. I wonder what Microsoft will do for customers who purchased a tablet right before the price drop?"

Comments

Price Adjustment

[Oysterville]

I doubt that Microsoft will do much of anything for those early adopters, but check with your place of purchase. Frequently they have a price guarantee that will cover price adjustments both at that store and with competitors.

Re:Price Adjustment

[hairyfeet]

Meh if you were dumb enough to buy one early? Sorry but you kinda deserved the wallet ding for failing to pay attention. Pretty much all of the media had already panned the thing, they were selling it for MORE than an iPad, the Surface had giant FAIL written all over it almost from the start so anybody with any common sense should have figured they'd either have to take a hell of a price drop or end up with a warehouse full of shit they couldn't sell. Folks forget that computer chips have a shelf life, if you don't move the units its soon badly outdated compared to what is on the market and nobody will buy it.

Honestly I wouldn't even buy it at the current price, the tegra 3 was never that great a chip to start with and thanks to bad design on the part of MSFT the Surface can't even take advantage of the fifth core on the tegra 3 so the battery life will be worse than Android on it. Maybe if it hits below $145 it might be worth playing with, but considering we are talking about a company with a history of abandoning products that don't become hits (Zune, Sidekick,Kin,WinPhone 7) do you REALLY want to take the chance?

Mark my words by xmas these things will either be on woot! at $100 or less like the Touchpad or they'll end up in a landfill somewhere, Anything to do with WinRT seems to be destined to fail, hence why nearly all the OEMs canceled their WinRT offerings.

Re:Price Adjustment

[AmiMoJo]

Surface was never meant to compete with the iPad. It's more like a laptop/tablet hybrid. The iPad is about mini-apps, mostly viewing data and playing simple games. There are exceptions but look at it this way: Surface comes with a keyboard and stand designed into the form factor, the iPad is a purely hand-held touch operated device.

Microsoft's target market is people who want to work on Windows creating documents or writing longish emails but also want a tablet form factor they can easily carry with them or use hand-held for viewing. Of course being Microsoft they completely failed to communicate this and further confused things by having two different platforms with the introduction of RT.

The point is that it should really be compared to netbooks or Chromebooks, in which case it was still massively overpriced but an interesting twist on the idea.

Re:Linux?

[supersat]

No. The bootloader is locked down, and since there are code signing requirements for apps, you can't even run a VM.

Bad math

[Dan East]

the price of the 32-gig Surface RT plummeted by 42%

That's wrong - the price has been reduced by 30%. The new price of the 32 gig Surface is $349. The original price was $499 (the price of all models is being reduced by $150). You divide the discount by the original price, not the new reduced price, to find the percentage reduction. 150/499=30% (150/349 is indeed 42%, but that is meaningless in this case)

Re:Is it possible to run Linux on these?

[phantomfive]

After the price cut, it still costs $349 for the cheapest model. Might as well get a ipad mini, or Galaxy Tab if you want Linux.

Re:They are in such demand

[supersat]

The only content you can create on the Surface are Office docs. And only personal content -- use of the included Office software for any organization (including non-profits) requires a separate, full Office license.

Sad thing is

[obarthelemy]

Even at that price, I'd probably not buy a Surface-RT if my current Android broke. And looking around me, I find nobody I'd recommend it to: you have to
- need Office
- but no other Windows App because those don't run on RT (bneither does AD, Outlook... none of the "pro" stuff)
- and no other serious App in general, because Win8-RT is still missing a *good* apps for the basics (RSS, dlna, multi-format video player, etc etc)
- no games except a handful
- not want 7", nor any weird stuff (phone with your 3G...)
- be able to make do with a quite retarded OS. I've just finished setting up a "metro" Win8 desktop for the 'rents; Metro is a compendium of UI miscues, functionality holes, and bugs. Live tiles are semi-nice, until you realize there's about 8 of them, of which 4 are useless. Not even a *clock* for chrissake.
- be able to cope not only with random featuritis (hey, let's make IE metro-like when it's the default browser, and not Metro-like when it isn't), but also random de-featuritis (hey, now that people have gotten used to Facebook photos on their screensaver, let's cut that !)

Last time I had to deal with MS in mobile, they explained to me nicely that no, my (just bought) HTC HD2 coudln't synch with my (just bought) Windows computer, that it was normal, and that there were no plans to make the 2 sync. I dropped them right there, and they're staying dropped until they come up with something Real Good. Win8, Win8 RT, and the Surfaces certainly aren't it. Even the Nokia cameras aren't.

Re:Linux?

[sjames]

I have seen that done actually!

It seems that neither Ford nor Chevy go out of their way to make that any harder than it naturally is, unlike Microsoft.