The Emperor's New Clothes
The Surface Pro is really just a tablet… as much as Microsoft wants people to believe different. It’s like the story of The Emperor's New Clothes. The clothes are not there, but people (except for a child) have been convinced that it’s there.
The reality is that it is a multi-touch tablet, that runs a desktop operating system (Windows 8) instead of running a more appropriate multi-touch tablet operating system. The unfortunate thing for people who buy it is that they assume that all of the software that runs on the Surface Pro will be multi-touch too… just like on the iPad. What they find out is that since the Surface Pro runs Windows 8, which is a desktop operating system, the software applications that they will run on it are not multi-touch tablet apps! They are the same non-touch apps that require a keyboard and trackpad/mouse that they use with their desktop computers. So if they want to actually use the Surface Pro to run their 3rd party desktop apps like Autodesk, Dreamweaver, VideoStudio, QuickBooks, etc., then all of a sudden that $130 floppy keyboard “accessory” becomes a necessity.
All of the hundreds of thousands of apps that run on the iPad Air are multi-touch, and designed specifically for the iPad… and there is an equivalent (or better in some cases) iPad app for any Windows app that can be run on the Surface Pro.
So, considering that the Surface Pro is really a thick, heavy, expensive, multi-touch tablet that has very few multi-touch applications to run on it (mostly just the apps that Microsoft supplies with the tablet) there is no comparison between it and the iPad Air.
And to call the Surface Pro with the floppy keyboard attached to it a “notebook”, would mean that we would need to start calling the iPad Air with an attached keyboard a “notebook” too, for the same reasons!
The big difference is that there is a much wider choice of much better keyboards, for less money, with the iPad.
When you think about it, both the MacBook Air and the iPad Air are thin, light, and powerful mobile personal computers. In fact the iPad Air is used by almost all of the Fortune 500 companies… and now with IBM’s partnership with Apple, the iPad’s presence in business will grow even further.
When one considers the terrible sales of the Surface Pro, and the Billions of dollars that Microsoft has lost trying to sell it, and the incredible success and huge numbers of iPad Airs and MacBook Airs being sold, it really makes it clear that hardly anyone buys into Microsoft’s sales pitch that the Surface Pro is a better tablet than the iPad and a better notebook than the MacBook Air.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
