<story><title>Surface with Windows 8 Pro – Pricing</title><url>http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2012/11/29/next-up-for-the-surface-family-surface-with-windows-8-pro-pricing.aspx</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>Permit</author><text>Everyone seems really blown away by the pricing and I&apos;m not sure why. This isn&apos;t an iPad, it houses a fully functional operating system that lets you run existing Windows 7 desktop applications.&lt;p&gt;In a use-case scenario I see it being more similar to a laptop than to the iPad. If I can run Visual Studio on it and it handles all my existing Windows 7 applications correctly, I&apos;d consider purchasing it. I don&apos;t look at it like it&apos;s a tablet I&apos;m going to be installing a Scrabble App on, though.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>smacktoward</author><text>The problem is that the pricing puts it into a weird space in the market. If you want to use it as a laptop, you have to add one of the covers (the $120 Touch Cover or $130 Type Cover) so you have a keyboard, and that puts the price of the package over $1,000. You can get a &quot;real&quot; laptop (even a Macbook Air!) for less than that.&lt;p&gt;An argument could be made that Surface Pro isn&apos;t just a laptop, but a laptop plus a tablet, in which case the appropriate price comparison would be the cost of a Macbook &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; an iPad. But the extra horsepower the Surface would require to run like a laptop would mean lower battery life and greater weight. So you get a tablet, but one that&apos;s less appealing than a tablet designed to only be a tablet.</text></comment>
<story><title>Surface with Windows 8 Pro – Pricing</title><url>http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2012/11/29/next-up-for-the-surface-family-surface-with-windows-8-pro-pricing.aspx</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>Permit</author><text>Everyone seems really blown away by the pricing and I&apos;m not sure why. This isn&apos;t an iPad, it houses a fully functional operating system that lets you run existing Windows 7 desktop applications.&lt;p&gt;In a use-case scenario I see it being more similar to a laptop than to the iPad. If I can run Visual Studio on it and it handles all my existing Windows 7 applications correctly, I&apos;d consider purchasing it. I don&apos;t look at it like it&apos;s a tablet I&apos;m going to be installing a Scrabble App on, though.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bunderbunder</author><text>Ditto.  As it is, I&apos;m seeing it as something that&apos;s price-competitive with my Macbook Air, but which can handily double as a tablet for when I want to kick my feet up to just browse the web or read a book.&lt;p&gt;Given that it actually sounds inexpensive to me, after you factor in that it saves having to spend an extra several hundred dollars if you also want a tablet.</text></comment>