Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Offers $650 To MacBook Users Who Switch To A Surface Tablet (techcrunch.com)
After Wednesday's announcement of their new Surface Studio tablet, Microsoft launched a campaign to entice MacBook users to try Surface tablets. An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes TechCrunch:
Essentially, the company is offering MacBook owners $650 toward a Surface Pro or Surface Book, if they trade in their Apple laptop. Sure, it's all promotion, but it's the sort of gag that affords the company opportunity to showcase its perceived advantages over Cupertino as the company looks to appeal more and more toward creatives -- a category long dominated by Apple.
The offer is only valid through November 7th, according to Microsoft's official rules, and the deal does not extend to iPads.
The offer is only valid through November 7th, according to Microsoft's official rules, and the deal does not extend to iPads.
Seems like I can trade in old mbp's I no longer use, resell the surface pro on ebay and get the cash for a new mbp.
Only problem: I don't think I could move the surface pro's profitably (or perhaps at all).
Microsoft sell the Mac for $1500, gives the user a cheap chinese tablet in return. Profit!
Yep that does make things more interesting.
Ive been using the XKCD substitutions crome extension today. I added a filter that fixes any use of Cupertino because who ever needs to say Cupertino anyway?
So it now correctly says "Sure, it's all promotion, but it's the sort of gag that affords the company opportunity to showcase its perceived advantages over Co-operation as the company looks to appeal more and more toward creatives -- a category long dominated by Apple."
See what NFL coaches n players think of the new surface. Many many videos of them cursing the piece of junk n tossing it across the field.
Reeks of desperation.
Microsoft is desperate both to get their hands on some decent PCs, and also to get rid of Surfaces...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Compared to the new MacBook Pro the Surface tablet is probably faster too :-D
Sadly they both have the same dual core cpu but the MS one is 1/3 the price. FYI I own a surface pro 3 and Ubuntu runs great on it! No you did not misread that if anyone wants to run it on a thin and light form factor I recommend it. I still have Windows 10 as well for my Netfix apps which are are handy on a plane.
http://saveie6.com/
Er, so MS managed to show off probably the best tool for creatives/artists at a fairly good price - totally bespoke design.
Apple? Another laptop, almost identical in performance and features to the one from 3 years ago, but more expensive, with a retina touchpad instead of a touch screen. Plus they kind of overlooked the fact a lot of people like to plug their phone into their laptops to leech power for charging. So there's a dongle for that.
Yeah, that "happened" I guess...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
They're offering up to $650. My not-very-old Retina Macbook Pro is only worth $475, and I do not a $899 Surface Pro to be trading "up".
You know it's bad when you have to try and coax people into using your product.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I might do this if I could install Linux on it.
Since my MacBook became old and sluggish, I've been using a Chromebook and love the touch screen. Now that Apple has revealed it's long overdue (and underwhelming) MacBook updates, I'm looking for an alternative but I just won't ever use Windows... ever.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
>trade in ancient MacBook which still runs fine
>Sell the newly acquired Surface
>Buy the new MacBook Pro
>???
>profit
Is what is Microsoft going to give me for switching from a MacBook Pro to A Dell Latitude E7470 running Windows?
Just browsed the MS website.
This thing leaves Timmy Cook and Super Genius Jony Ive and Apple Inc. in the toilet.
Well it is now all obvious that Cook-Ive-Apple's game plan is to toilet the iMac, MacMinni MacPro and MBAirs and MBPs and iPods and iTunes. That leaves the iPad, iPhone and A-TV and A-Watch as their hardware products.
It is sad and I am sure there were a lot of people saddened when Apple Computer ditched the Apple ][, the product that lent it's name to the company, back in the day.
Maybe in a year Apple Inc. with re-name itself to FoN-LLC. Hay, remember the Sprint FON call anywhere From anywhere card (mine is in storage).
Ha ha
We've probably reached a lull in new hardware features and speed. Maybe the companies could work on their software for a while. Eg, make it faster (less bloated), more modular/integratable, add modes ("grandma", "average", "pompous").
One of the biggest beefs the teams have with the current system is that the tablets and the wireless network are the property of the NFL and the NFL sets them up and distributes them before each game. So Bill Belichick (one of the most vocal critics) doesn't have his own tablet setup the way he likes it... he gets some random tablet before each game. It's done this way so that teams can't put non-sanctioned materials on them (e.g. the Patriots recording other teams play calling) but it seems the NFL/Microsoft teams that set them up do a rather piss poor job many times... especially with the wireless network which seems to be to blame for most of the outages.
What really pisses the teams off is most of them have very competent and well paid IT staffs who aren't allowed to touch them at all. So Belichick can't flag down someone he knows and trusts to fix it, he has to deal with different people of varying levels of competence every week. I understand the effort to try to prevent cheating but this is just an idiotic setup. Coaches need to be able to flip through the play book very quickly. The play clock is generally 40 seconds but can be 25 for those not familiar with American football and it's a 5 yard penalty if you don't get the play off in time. If I was getting timeout errors or slowly loading pages I'd be pissed too.
I really don't get why the network can't be left in place. The NFL just keeps the admin passwords for the routers and such and locks down the network, setting it up before every game just seems like asking for trouble, especially since no two stadiums are alike.
Used MacBooks sell for $350 to $1300, i.e. some MacBooks are worth a lot more than the $650 they are offering. I wonder if they'll take my ex-wife's broken Mac Book...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
> it's the sort of gag that affords the company opportunity to showcase its perceived advantages over Cupertino
To me it's the exact opposite of being perceived as better, it's "people who have tried Mac don't want to use our products, we have to PAY them to use ours." Part of Apple's marketing of iOS devices is that they are unapologeticly more expensive, they are positioned as "premium" products. Microsoft is going the exact opposite way.
Many years ago when I launched my first hosting company I didn't want to deal with "bad" customers, people who don't pay, send spam, attract DMCA notices, etc. I wanted to offer a professional service for professional webmasters, so I made it invitation-only. You could host with us only if we knew you or you had good references from people we know. As it turned out, NO potential customer EVER turned down an invitation to host their site with us; the exclusivity turned out to be a great marketing bit. It wasn't false exclusivity, BTW, since we weren't spending 80% of our time dealing with BS from a few PITA customers, we were able to provide excellent service. Anyway this thing from Microsoft is the opposite. "Nobody who has tried Mac wants our product, we have to pay people to take it" is what I see.
Somebody might get the impression that they can trade their very old and/or broken Mac and get $650 worth in MS bucks. They would be horribly mistaken. The old Macs fetch $75. And less if they are broken.
To get $650, you have to trade in a used Mac that is worth about $1,000 on the market.
What is not to like?
"first they ignore you. then they laugh at you. then they fight you. then you win."
So it looks like MS has finally made it to stage 3.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Can I turn in my Powerbook 165C? I think it has System 7 on it.
What a scam. Convince your customers to pay more so they won't appear to be one of the unwashed masses out in public. Then claim they will have a superior experience. While slowly removing features from subsequent generations of the product, and increasing the price.
"You are fortunate that we are willing to take your money." Suckers.
I suggest we have a friendly competition to show who can show the most eloquent disrespect of Microsoft's idea. I like your "... its perceived advantages over Co-operation..." However, here is my entry in the competition: Quote from the story linked by Slashdot: "...it's the sort of gag..." (2016-10-29, 13:14 PDT)
Definition: gag: choke or retch. Synonyms: retch, heave, dry-heave.
So, the Microsoft Surface Tablet is a "gag" of a tablet? Was the writer of that article unconsciously showing his disrespect?
Microsoft Windows 10 is a "gag" of an operating system? From a Network World article: Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made. Quote: "Buried in the service agreement is permission to poke through everything on your PC." Windows 10 is now "Gag OS"?
I had been using an old Macbook as my primary system for my day job, however I was forced by my employer to upgrade. The newest version of MacOS X supported on it was still so old that the anti-virus software that my employer uses was no longer being updated for it. All of the upgrade choices ran our corporate-build of Windows 10, so I ended up with a shiny new Windows 10 laptop.
I figured that it wouldn't be a big deal. Most of my work involves VPN'ing into a corporate network and ssh'ing into Unix-y/Linux systems where my real work is done. But, after a couple of months of this, I am ready to buy a cheap, used (but new enough for anti-virus upgrades) MacBook to do my work on.
There are just too many stupid bugs in Windows (when switching between displays and display modes, the desktop manager resizes windows to the smallest width and height even after switching to a larger display until restarted) and really annoying inconsistencies between applications (is consistent cut-and-paste behavior really so hard to implement?). And, then there is the battery life. The laptop nominally has a 10-hour battery, but, using it the same way that I was using the 9-year-old MacBook with a 5-year-old battery, I am getting less time between needing to recharge than I did with the MacBook (2.5 hours max). There may be ways to get the new Windows laptop to work as well as the old Macbook did, but shouldn't it just work well out of the box?
Checked the Microsoft page but P-P-P-Powerbook is missing. I have all original accessories except for charger.
Not a deal. All the laptops listed are worth more than $680.00 I was checking to see if my old 2008 macbook pro with the intermittent nvidia issue was accepted. Nope. Most of the laptops listed are still worth over $1200.00 If you really want to "switch teams" then you are better off selling your laptop on Amazon.
I'll take the $650, return the Windows OS license for a $50 refund and pay $699 to use Linux on it.
Result: $1 profit and a big smile on my face!
Maybe, the NFL is interested, especially New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick .
At least now there is an upgrade path to a machine with an escape key.
Let's trade a nice $2500 laptop for a $600 paperweight. Even 5 year old MBPs have higher resale value and have way better performance than their product and they're not even offering that much for it.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
These things are almost detail-for-detail copies of the MacBook, iMac, and iPad lines. Only, they look a bit clunkier.
And the best part of all is that they are manufactured by Lenovo. You know, IBM's former laptop brand, sold to a Chinese conglomerate. . . and Lenovo products are notorious for coming with spyware and malware pre-installed.
OK, here is the best part, actually. You must send in your charger along with the functioning Mac laptop. Those things cost $65 to $85 all by themselves! Add in that that $650 is only a discount coupon to the purchase of Microsoft's clone of the MacBook Pro you are ditching. And of course, you only get the full $650 discount on a really recent Mac laptop. An older one. . . Well, you would get more on ebay for it than this 'trade-in value' that Microsoft is offering.
Last, there are many restrictions. The display must have no dead pixels. None. No scratches. Must boot up. No property ID tags. The list of restrictions goes on and on.
This is just PR, and a bad deal for someone looking to sell/trade an extra laptop they have sitting around. (I have 6.) You will get more cash money by selling your old laptop on ebay than by taking up Microsoft on this "deal" – and all the back-doors you'd expect from Lenovo and Microsoft.
In sum, the offer is insulting. If I trade in my fully-loaded Mac to get a Microsoft (Lenovo) clone of that Mac that has the same specs of what I am trading in (1 TB, 16 GB RAM, etc.), then the price is at least $3300! That is more than I paid for my Mac with similar specs. . . a couple of years ago! Why does this myth of Macs being expensive persist? Sure, you can buy a cheap computer, or a cheap car. Neither is the same as a well-designed and reliably manufactured laptop or car. You can buy a Camry or a BMW. You can buy a Dell or a Mac. I digress. . .
In any case, a Mac can dual-boot to run OS X, Windows, or Linux. Just partition your drive and go. I run Windows, when required, from a sleek Micro-SD card that does not stick out. I use Fusion, enabling use of Windows and OS X simultaneously, thanks to my two dual cores. And it's sand-boxed, so no Windows sploits can breach my main system (OS X).
It works seamlessly. I switch between Windows and OS X in a programming class that I teach: I use the environment that a given student is using on their laptop. The API is running on both OS's, as well as Firefox on both, and some others on the OS X side. It is so dead-easy to switch between them on the fly, during lab-sessions of a class.
No one will take this "offer" from Microsoft. You would get less than you gave away. And be stuck in Windows-only. Ick.
Ever noticed that these "creatives" mostly seem to be copying apple?
I think what we need is for these people to stop doing that and try to be innovative and think new forms, shapes and concepts. Then maybe they wouldn't call the 7'th generation of slight improvements of a product for a breakthrough and a revolutionary design.
So what?
No it isn't. Try reading a bit of criminal law. Fraud and theft are not the same things - it is why they have different lettters, forming different words. Lol.
... I launched my first hosting company I didn't want to deal with "bad" customers, people who don't pay, send spam, attract DMCA notices, etc. I wanted to offer a professional service for professional webmasters, so I made it invitation-only. You could host with us only if we knew you or you had good references from people we know. As it turned out, NO potential customer EVER turned down an invitation to host their site with us; the exclusivity turned out to be a great marketing bit. It wasn't false exclusivity, BTW, since we weren't spending 80% of our time dealing with BS from a few PITA customers, we were able to provide excellent service.
Thank you for the advice!
I don't want my own web startup to turn into the 'next' Mega-Upload or whatever, but to be a service that caters to a specific market. This is the way to do it. I can cater to my specific 'type' of clientele, and not worry about leechers who would pay, but then inundate me with DMCA take-downs.
Great advice!
I've been running web-centric business since the mid-1990s, so I've have opportunities to make plenty of mistakes, and do a few things right. I'd be glad to share my lessons-learned if you want to chat some time, tell me about what you're doing.
http://www.howtogeek.com/24996...
Incentives, hard sales, even Hawaii Five-O spots... still can't sell the POS.
Here's a thought, dump the really bad OS and make something real instead of trying to bolt onto a really bad foundation. Great stuff on top of crap is still crap.
Your really big chance was back in the late 1990s when you were being sued. Should have sold the OS to IBM for say a billion, then upgraded the OS to Linux. It's a win win win. You guys get a really good OS under it, Linux users get office, IBM gets screwed again. What more could we ask for?
Oh, and you should have dumped monkey-boy years ago. Just google microsoft and monkey boy. No, it's not racist. Then google balmer and 1980s. You can see one of the original M$ commercials.
about just making you a verified boot linux image. Something with a corporate signed kernel and userspace using TPM and TXT (or equivalent) with that runtime auditing stuff on.
Most of the current Win10 hardware works pretty well with linux, outside some touchpads in 'modern' mode, a few glitchy EFI bioses, Nvidia dedicated gpus, and the odd wifi adapters. And Unity does a passable job pretending to be OSX, WindowMaker if you liked NeXTStep, and E17 if you need something fast, simplistic and vaguely windows-y in normal interface.
If the submitter / editor thinks the Surface Studio is a tablet, I want to see their workout regimen.
$650 is only for recent high spec models.