The British are coming! The British are coming! And they're buying Surface fondleslabs In a small corner of the IT industry, Microsoft is toasting a success of sorts: its relatively unloved Surface tablet is gaining customers and has unseated Google's Nexus slabs in the popularity stakes in the UK. Shipments of all fondleslabs into retailers and distributors in Blighty swelled 20.4 per cent, year on year, to 2. …
Wow... What happened to Acer? I've always thought that Acer has knocked out perfectly good (in fact, i'd go as far as to say very good) hardware at reasonable prices. Always been pleased with Acer laptops etc. Is it just that laptops are no longer the must-have, and they haven't managed to penetrate into the fondle-slab market?
Errm, that was ASUS that made the Nexus7....
I stopped reading when it mentioned shipments... We all know how keen Microsoft can get sometimes to stuff the channel well beyond tipping point.
I know about 20-30 people with Nexus slabs, not a single actual or potential surface owner, so this really stinks of flawed data somewhere...
Small number statistics from people you know will tend to be skewed by people's tendency to buy something that someone else they know has. So once you've got a couple of people in your social circle with a nexus its likely there will be more.
In my case (aside from the usual iPads amongst the iPhone owners) I see a disproportionate number of assorted Kindle Fires and Nooks. I do know one Surface owner, but he's not someone all the owners of the others know - so no influence there.
> I stopped reading when it mentioned shipments.
When MS took a $900million writedown on its stock of Surface last year it was said that this was at $150 per unit. So they had 6 million units left over that weren't selling. At the time they were not selling these through distributors, now they are. It may be that this growth in _shipments_ is a mix of original and generation 2 Surface into distributors at knock-down prices in order to get headlines.
Much like the unrepeated 'WP beats Apple in 25 countries' was _shipments_, mostly to places that Apple didn't ship to, and when Apple was 'between products' with a new one due.
Everyone but Google and Apple are heavily discounting tablets. Nexus devices are being discounted but without Google support they aren't 'heavily discounted', must have some effect on sales. The discounting is so deep right now it's a miracle anyone can leave a shop without a new tablet ;)
Still not convinced actual customers are buying Surface yet, needs to go much cheaper. Todays £49 Lumia 520 price is a more realistic level of discount. I think they'll bury Surface excess stock in the desert rather than go that cheap.
I agree with the firesale sentiment for RT. But "pro" tablets are, as you say, full Windows devices and that is NOT A BAD THING. Some people's needs extend beyond hammering out 2 line responses to emails or watching videos. e.g. I develop software for a living and it would be rather nice to be take a tablet (and keyboard) and fire up Eclipse for that purpose. Another person might need to review a long document and print it to some random printer.
That's where a Windows based tablet would be useful although Microsoft's tablets are expensive examples. There are cheaper devices, even of similar spec.
Unfortunately, Sony's slab comes with free theft of my personal data courtesy of Google.
I'd be able to understand if Google were actually paying *us* a slice of the pie every time they sold our data on, but they're not. They're taking something I've created without recompense. (Android itself is just a loss-leader for them. Compared to everything else they do, the cost of maintaining and updating Android is a rounding error in their annual budget.)
Google's a parasitical business model of the worst kind. For all the invective aimed at the likes of Apple and Microsoft, at least the product they're selling isn't *me*.
Privacy is a precious thing: once you've lost it, it's damned hard to get it back.
"Microsoft flogged 71,540 units in the quarter.... Some 58 per cent of these units were of the ARM-powered RT version"
So they sold 30,047 Surface 1 and 2 tablets in 3 months, compared to Apples 742,000 and Samsungs 653,000.
"Google struggled to gain traction, with sales dropping nearly 80 per cent to a little over 42,000 units"
So the old Nexus actually sold better than the Surface RT, and the Surface Pro, when the numbers for both aren't bundled together.
It's probably a comment on the wonderful use of statistics. The RT and Pro are very different pieces of kit with an over-arching label of Surface and as such there is less justification to roll them in together than models differentiated predominantly by size. Of course...down at the basement level of market share you will use anything you can to make yourself look more significant.
"In a small corner of the IT industry, Microsoft is toasting a success of sorts: its relatively unloved Surface tablet is gaining customers and has unseated Google's Nexus slabs in the popularity stakes in the UK."
At risk of sounding like one of the knee-jerk "because it's Microsoft" brigade, and unlike the Windows Phones that said brigade seem to be incapable of seeing, I have only ever seen two Surfaces in the wild. And one of those belonged to a mate who was given it by his workplace for appraisal purposes.
But I do see Android tabs every morning on the tube into work... so where the hack has this data come from?
It's funny with all this stuff - even with Xboxes, I know far more people with whatever non-XBox play stations than people with XBoxes (but, yes they do exist).
I know one person who owned a Zune (when still working at Microsoft 8^)
A know three people with a Windows Mobile: 2 got it from the employer, and as they are using it for email and calls only, they have not even noticed it sucks - one really bought it for himself. Well, the first time he called me we had to switch to the fixed phones (true. really really true. I laughed my ass of for the rest of the day... "Was that your Windows mobile? What was going on?"- " Err I don't know, but now, after a reboot, it works normal again")
I haven't seen anyone with a Surface yet. I know someone who knows someone who has a Surface, and he says it looks cool.
So where are all these people buying MS devices like mad? Just afraid to show the devices in public because they are so uncool?
/Zane
Surfaces aren't for consuming video on the train/tube/bus, they are basically replacement laptops for convenience or for folks that have a desktop still perhaps and want portability but still a proper computer.
Since the keyboard cover is slim and usable and since it displays a web page for an email without switching away from the email and since it has a 'real' windows mode it is much more useful than other tablets.
Having proper office for free and a USB for a mouse and/or real keyboard and, very importantly, multiple logins for different people, including children, with family safety, all straight out-of-the-box and no fiddling around I am surprised more people don't realise the benefits.
Pricewise, the RT Surface 1 was a bargain and my boss at the office spent time looking at it, compared the weight favourably to his iPad, since he had to have a case of course. He very much wished his iPad had Office but the expense prevented it. He also thought the two-app display for metro was much, much better than constantly flicking between apps, especially emails with links.
And, while doing so, another guy at the office said "I have got one of those too". He liked his as well.
So, that's where they are, considerably fewer than the others, as the figures suggest, they are not cheap after all. But, they exist, they are enjoyed and they are favoured over iPads I think.
I think people will buy anything they think is the proper thing to buy, Samsung rely on this in their massive ad campaigns. Some of us, however, look at what we actually need and buy the device best suited.
I never owned a tablet and don't really, really need one, because I have a laptop. I just now, even more rarely have to unplug the laptop to take it somewhere.
Surfaces aren't for consuming video on the train/tube/bus, they are basically replacement laptops for convenience or for folks that have a desktop still perhaps and want portability but still a proper computer.
Pricewise, the RT Surface 1 was a bargain and my boss at the office spent time looking at it, compared the weight favourably to his iPad, since he had to have a case of course. He very much wished his iPad had Office but the expense prevented it. He also thought the two-app display for metro was much, much better than constantly flicking between apps, especially emails with links.
Did you not point out to your boss that he shouldn't compare Surface to the iPad, because the Surface is basically a replacement laptop for connivence like a Macbook Air, which runs office and can have more than one app on the screen?
I don't really see, why you think that a Surface should not be compared to an iPad?
They have approximately the same form factor and if you compare a Surface Pro to an iPad cost in same way-too-much range.
It is true that the Surface Pro (in all 3 incarnations) is a laptop in tablet format and as such will win KO victory in a comparison with an iPad when comparing using it for actual work. So your point being?
The Surface RT (only tried version 2) is great as a tablet, works great for watching video (using a phone for internet connection) and other casual stuff that an iPad also is good at. Easy to carry and has a full Office included for free (no more "almost" being able to read the attachments to emails). Still a bit funny having both a Desktop and the Start-menu, but when I use Win8 on my Laptop I almost never touch the Start-menu, but on the Surface RT I only use the Start-menu, except for very specialized file handling where the File Explorer still is better.
An Olympic sprinter can do the 100m in sub ten seconds. I could probably make it in 30 seconds (even stopping for a few gasps of bottled oxygen at half way) and come third so long as nobody else with any level of fitness entered.
Relative to MS coming third in the tablet race, I'd be doing comparatively well.
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