Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Is Giving Students a Free Xbox One With Surface Pro 4 Purchases (theverge.com)
Microsoft on Wednesday announced a sweet deal for any student on the fence on purchasing the Surface Pro 4. The company has said that it will be taking $300 off when students purchase a Surface Pro 4 and Xbox One. In a statement to The Verge, Terry Myerson, head of Windows and devices at Microsoft said, "So basically a free Xbox One with the purchase of a Surface Pro 4." The deal is only running at Microsoft's retail stores in the United States. The deal goes live today and will last until August 14.
$899 isn't too expensive...
Core m3, 4 GB RAM, 128 GB SSD
Well, you could step up to the i5 version, 8 GB of RAM, and a 256 GB SSD. Incremental upgrades in each category, can't be that much...
$1299
Wait, only the i7 has the good (good for Intel) GPU and the i5 has the GPU that barely handles flash video? I guess I'd need to go to the i7, what's another $100-$150, right?
$1599
If I'm spending that much I'll need to sell my desktop, monitor, etc. and use it as my main PC. Need to max out the storage. Wait, why is 256 GB the largest option? Let's at least bump the RAM up to the 16 GB my 5.5 year old PC had the day it was built...
$1799
Oh, now the larger storage options are available. With 1 TB it costs...
$2699
Well, at least the bleeding is over. Oh wait, the keyboard is sold separately?
$2798
Oh look! A money-saving bundle!
$2798 with a free stylus and neoprene sleeve. And I guess now a free Xbone?
WHAT A DEAL!
The i5 barely handles flash video.
And yet you're still wrong despite how "bad" it's performance is you can play flash media and content just fine on GPU bound systems as we have for the many years withing browsers and plugins which never supported hardware acceleration in the first place.
. I'm running a newer i5 and it struggles to render 1080p flash video
I on the other hand am running an ancient i5 with the HD Graphics chipset and have no problem playing a 4k Youtube clip in chrome, both standard Chrome, and with the Disable HTML5 extension which reverts everything to Flash, and the UAC prompts come up without issue. My girlfriend has exactly the machine you're complaining about (i5 SP4) and it's even faster than mine, certainly not slower. As mentioned above the shitty games performance is due to thermal throttling. The i7 doesn't fix that. It has shitty game performance none the less.
Fix your computer instead of blaming everything on the hardware. Even in the low end models running normal Windows workloads is a very smooth experience on the Surface Pro machines providing you don't max out the RAM or force your CPU to thermally throttle.