[citation][nom]belardo[/nom]I've done some tradeshows with out ipad-1, and it was a life-saver compared to using any of our ThinkPads. Easier to show clients and other business people information / presentation. And yes... when YOU ARE on your feet for 7~9 hours... every pound is noticeable. So 6 hours on a low-lit screen is supposed to impress anyone? I don't get the kick-stand complaint thing either... but hey, you can't expect much from an idiot, eh?So for many peoples needs.... the Slate devices are (1) expensive at $800~1200 (2) heavy (3) hotter (4) short battery life (5) Noisier... hell, people from the PC world have been bitching about the high price of the iPad at $500... WTF?! But $1000 is cool?!Perhaps in 2-3 years, tablets DO replace the Desktop as the main computer... who knows? But for the typical human being... a basic tablet with iOS and Android does everything thing need.... email/ facebook and porn.[/citation]
Everything has a use. Tablets in general are oversized cell phones that can't make phone calls. They are slow and generally not much more useful than the phones they are designed around (save for the added screen size). They are so close to useful that I just find them really frustrating to use. All of my friends have iPads, and you know what happens with them? They are used for 1-2 months, then they hit a wall where it simply does not do enough to replace the use of other machines, so they end up just using the more capable machines (desktop/laptop) rather than switching between devices all the time. Then a new iPad or iOS version comes out, so they buy it hoping it will be better... only to find it does the same stuff faster, but does nothing to replace their existing devices, so it ultimately sits around again. I am not saying that tablets are entirely useless; They are great for movies on the go, or displaying presentations in a coffee shop (why don't laptops have such nice screens!!!), or for a little kid's first computer, but when it comes to doing heavier work where you need to multitask and run older programs along side newer ones, then you simply need heftier hardware and a beefier OS to get everything to work together.
As to your points:
1) Yes, they are expensive, but not expensive for what you are getting (more on that later)
2) They are not too heavy. These are to replace laptops/ultrabooks, not to compete with existing tablets. For the market they are aiming for they are actually quite light weight.
3) Hotter and Hot are two different things. Yes, they run warm, but 'hot' would be stretching things a bit. Running skype or GPS on my cell phone gets hotter than these. It is warm... but not hot, and certainly not 'too hot'
4) For battery life, again, this is not to compete with other tablets, this competes with laptops. 6 hours of use is plenty fine for what it is. I would love to see it hit 10 hours on the Haswell version later this year, but at 6 hours of up time I would not give it a 2nd thought. Most laptops and netbooks that I have used have gotten 2-5 hours of use, so 6 hours is hardly a problem.
5) Noise is a little bit of a valid concern, but what are you going to do? It is a laptop without the space of a laptop, it is going to make some heat, which needs to get out somehow. But even then it is still quieter than most laptops that it would replace, so it is not a major concern... but to have it silent would be better. Again, Haswell may bring power down to where passive cooling may begin to be possible.
6) And lastly, for price? There is a reason people complain about a $500 iPad; The iPad only has some $250 worth of parts in it. I understand business, and needing to have some markup on a product, but more than 100% markup? That is insane! And when you get to the iPads with more storage space then you are looking at a near 200% markup, which is absolutely incredulous. But the ignorant masses think it is somehow OK, so it sells just fine.
The SurfaceRT is also far too expensive for what it is. RT costs more to build than an iPad (mostly due to volume), but we are still only talking about something that should be a $3-400 product, and considering that MS gets a cut of every program sold on the platform they should be selling it at cost to quickly build their user base. But they cant do that because it would undercut all of their partners who are already mad at them for taking away business.
Then you look at the Surface Pro, which has (and this is an admittedly blind guess) ~$700-800 of hardware inside, which is selling for $1000. That is a much more understandable ~40% markup. Still expensive... but not super expensive for what it is. I would love to see a much cheaper (and passively cooled) $5-600 Atom version running full win8 as I would never pay $1000 for something that can easily walk away, but considering what you are getting I think it is selling for a pretty good price point.
As for the win8 interface: Grow up. Sure, it is not perfect and there is quite a bit of room to grow, but it is hardly awful. If you like the desktop then there are desktop programs for everything, so you can live in desktop all day long and never see the start screen. In fact, if you set your computer to sleep rather than shutting down, then you NEVER have to see metro as it will immediately go to wherever you were last before you hit the sleep button, just pin your programs to the task bar and it is not a problem. As for metro itself, it is admittedly not for everyone, but it is not terrible either. I remember when win95 came out with he start menu... that was a much harder transition, ant it took until win7 for them to get it right. The win8 start screen is at least more along the lines of the win98 start menu, and now with he windows Blue initiative I think we will see it evolve and become useful much sooner than the start menu ever did. Personally I upgraded to win8 for reasons other than metro, and hardly use that part of it, but when I do have to use it I have generally had a pleasant experience... the downfall of the start menu for me is that there are simply no native apps that replace the desktop versions (other than the windows games). If they evolve Xbox to a service rather than a hardware platform with the next Xbox, and they offer real xbox games for the PC then this would entirely change things for me.
As for the future of the desktop, I don't think it will be doomed in 2-3 years, but absolutely within the next 10. And even then the desktop does not simply 'go away' completely. The desktop will slowly transition to a personal cloud device which will provide bulk/shared storage and extra CPU and GPU compute power to smaller devices on the network. These smaller portable devices will then be your front end for your computer, security, HVAC and other systems in your home. And if you need keys and mice, or a monitor/TV then you can have that as well with simple wireless connections. So down the road you will have 1 desktop/server for your typical house (PC gamers and hardware junkies excluded of course), and then 1 portable device per person.
The really interesting thing though is that I think that ultimately you end up with cell phones and desktops, with the occasional tablet. I think that laptops as a general form factor will die out, and I think that tablets will largely be replaced by phones except for individuals who need that larger screen or some more portable horsepower than a phone will be able to deliver in the future. So I think that tablets ultimately become more of a business or industrial piece of equipment, while handheld pocket-sized devices end up ruling the day.
For my own experience, I finally picked up my first smart phone in December and it has completely replaced all of my portable devices, and (other than my netbook and laptop) it is actually better than all of my other portable devices. I know this would not work for everyone (especially on today's hardware), but I have a good desktop at home and in the office, so my phone is just fine for my portable needs, and future phones are only going to get better.
The problem with a tablet (for me at least) is that I need my phone anyways, so a tablet becomes redundant. I think that manufacturers believed people would want a tablet AND a phone, and the reality is that most people want one or the other, or at least one phone per person and then the tablet becomes more of a shared device.
At any rate, if I was a portable professional, and it came to a choose between an ARM based tablet, an x86 tablet, and a traditional notebook/ultrabook I would choose the x86 tablet any day of the week. It is smaller and lighter than a laptop without sacrificing much performance while costing about the same, but it is more useful than an ARM tablet. As it stands I don't need/want one of any brand, but if I did then the Surface Pro would be right up there as a top choice.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram