Yep, macbook air. They completely screwed up the marketing on this product. Bewildering how they could make such a huge blunder.
Ugh, this might be my gf’s bday present if the Win10 full upgrade isn’t too much, but God that price is gonna hurt.
Yeah, I agree. Positioning this as a Chromebook killer was a big miss. It’s very much a Macbook Air killer.
To quote again, wait, where? Not seeing it on the MS website. I wanna play with a configurator.
It’s $50 to update it to Win 10 Pro. That nugget just dropped.
Fifty bucks isn’t unreasonable, but selling a laptop for a thousand dollars with a castrated OS in the first place is just insane.
So it’s not on the Microsoft store yet, but lets eyeball the price.
Surface Laptop
$999 - Core i5, 4GB RAM, 128GB storage
+$100 - to 8GB RAM
+$100 - to 256GB storage
$50 - to real Win10
Total: $1250
Surface Pro 4
$1200 - Core i5, 8GB RAM, 256GB Storage
$130 - keyboard
Total: $1330
Macbook
$1299 - Core i5, 8GB RAM, 256GB storage
Total: $1299
Asus UX305UA
$780 - Core i5, 8GB RAM, 256GB storage
Total: $780
When you look at the pricing, marketing as a limited education-only laptop really is just stupid crazy. You can buy a macbook for the same price. It’s a whopping 60% more expensive than a really nice Asus ultrabook.
Yo, there’s something still unannounced about he surface laptop that will pique your interest in this thread. Hold tight.
Dude, you want to know the sure-fire secret on how to keep people in suspense?
(I’ll tell you later).
It does look like an interesting product. It’s just the marketing and Windows S make no sense at this pricepoint.
Okay, so the Windows 10 upgrade is free until 12/31/2017. That’s interesting.
How long do we have to hold on for?
I wouldn’t hold my breath, that’s all I’m sayin’
Which one? The one to upgrade to Win10?
Or for schools to upgrade to Win 10 S?
So they just had this huge presentation where they talked about Windows S and how it was great how crippled it was, and how it has this cool new wallpaper, and the hardware they introduced at the same event specifically to showcase Windows S… it won’t even run Windows S. But that’s in 8 point font after an asterix somewhere, so they don’t mention it at the presentation.
How can a multi-billion dollar company screw up marketing this badly?
That’s all I was referring to above:
- Prefer to run non-Store apps? Easily switch to Windows 10 Pro for free until Dec 31, 2017.
Stusser: You might find it hard to believe, but this was an event specifically focused on education, especially K12 education where students usually don’t own their own devices, and Windows 10 S is exactly what schools and teachers have been asking Microsoft for, forever. Something locked down, that can’t be screwed up by students, that’s faster because of no bloat, yet can be centrally managed just as well as Enterprise/Education SKUs have always allowed.
The Surface Laptop - much like every other Surface device - is the high-end aspirational device that everyone wants, targeting education, that is meant to inspire other device manufacturers. That still means Windows 10 S.
But, if you simply want an awesome laptop and don’t care about the Education stuff (again: the entire purpose of this event), then you can upgrade to the normal version of Windows 10 for free.
I mean, apart from the vast reams of software that they expect to be able to use that won’t work because it lacks an MS Store variant.
There’s a difference between controllable and crippled. Schools that have sunk hundreds or thousands into software packages that don’t and are unlikely to ever work on Windows 10S aren’t likely to find it as pleasant as you seem to think they will.
Don’t get me wrong, it will be great for certain education use-cases. I’m just not sure that they in any way comprise the majority of schools’ needs.
This thing is way to expensive for most educational markets except for ones that live in really rich places. This will do nothing to touch the encroachment of Chromebooks.
I really have no idea who would buy this thing. Anybody who has $1000 to blow on a laptop certainly wants more than a crippled OS like Win10 S. There are several quality high end 3rd party laptops that aren’t crippled like these will be unless you of course want to pay another fee to MS…DOA…
Just stick 10 Pro on the damn thing to begin with Microsoft. Stop this idiotic attempt to push your UWP apps and Windows Store on people when they have already shown they don’t care.
Bullshit. Microsoft sells millions of Surface Pros. They aren’t “aspirational devices meant to inspire OEMs”, they’re commercially successful mass-market products.
If MS wants the Surface Laptop to sell, it should be marketed appropriately. Not with a crippled OS that somehow means it targets education, even though the guy specifically spoke about kids going to college, not high school.
I assume that Microsoft has little interest in being the main vendor of Windows S Labtops, and is similar to how Google sold $1,299 chrome books. It was designed as an aspirational device that could be undercut by it’s partners. It’s easy to see Asus, Acer and others selling much cheaper versions of the Windows S computers for schools, while the high end surface goes out to executives, because they can’t be trusted with a full version of windows.
You can see examples of it already. Microsoft doesn’t have to sell many surface tablets to win. It’s partners are making high end devices that people wants.
In addition, I’m sure that the cost of Windows S will also be cheaper to vendors than a full version of Windows 10, which will further help reduce the price of competitors labtops.