The high risk behind the Surface PRO

TabletPC have been in the market close to 10 years and it has been extremely popular with just a small portion of the market. I have been using them and I love them but when Apple released the iPad showed the world why TabletPC never gained in popularity. TabletPC were heavy, they were most of the time slow and the battery life on them never passed the 4 hours barrier. The iPad in another hand were not heavy, software run fast and the battery life was more than 10 hours.

Now, let's check the Surface PRO, it's not that heavy, but UMPC were not and they were not a lot more popular than TabletPCs, we do not have any elements to judge the speed of it but we can say that it uses an i5 processor which have not impressed me personally at all, you will find applications like iTunes taking a long time to load and do anything. And the battery life is between 4 to 5 hours. Sorry, but nothing classifies closer than this to a TabletPC. The Surface PRO is a TabletPC.

Now, the question that I have in my mind this whole time is, what the heck is making MS believe that they will be able to retake the old concept and make it popular this time?

Why being a TabletPC fan I selected the RT over the PRO? Because of the processor, the RT performance and the battery life.

The ARM processor runs virtually cool, there is not any need for a fan or extra heat dissipation. I wonder how this issue was resolved in the Surface PRO but I can tell you one thing, the Surface PRO will never run cooler than the RT. That's for sure. And if a fan was needed then there will be some noise. We can speculate about how optimized is the OS in the Surface PRO to make it faster but again, there is not any way to make it faster than what you see in the RT version which has been cleaned all that's possible removing most of the drivers and other things that never will be used in the RT. In the PRO version so far they said to have included Windows 8 PRO. The same thing they said about the differences between Office RT and Office Full version to be included also in the PRO. So definitely I do not expect to see a better performance in the PRO version. A Battery Life of 4 to 5 hours is virtually half of a working day. Tell your employer that you are going be working half of your working day. Get it? That means that you will be forced to carry a charger, or an extra batteries or load the Surface PRO with an extended battery if that's possible in the PRO version. Any of this solutions means an extra thing to carry and an extra weight.

So why PRO? Just to be able to run any Windows Application? The amount of applications for RT is growing daily and soon you will find replacement for those Windows programs that you are currently using and missing. For the rest a very simple approach. Keep a PC in your home always running and use it as application server. When you need to run iTunes, for example, you connect via Remote Desktop and run it there. I have been using this method with my iPad for more than a year and now with my Surface RT and it works very well.

So what's the selling point of Surface PRO? At least for me none. So if MS did not convinced me who will be convinced?

Apple has shifted the market showing users other ways that work better for the majority of the users. Sticking to old concepts will not in anyway help Microsoft to compete against Apple.