And has a (certainly decent for a tablet but) awful keyboard and trackpad compared to other ultra-portables. There are clear trade-offs here (there always are and there is nothing wrong with making clear and opinionated trade-offs) and I’m not sure whether the Surface Pro makes the right ones. No doubt Microsoft made all the right trade-offs for some people, the question is only whether those some people are more than a niche.
Right, at least the bad trackpad is offset by the fact that you can touch. The need for apple-level trackpad is offset by the fact that you can manipulate pages with your fingers, instead.
And from what I've heard and used, both the touch and type cover aren't "awful" or "terrible". They're not 'good' either, but I'd certainly put them in the 'usuable' category. Would I write a book on it? Hell no, but I'd also be tempted to swap my mac's chiclet keyboard for a mechanical keyboard anyhow. There is certainly room for improvement, but people in HN seem to have an particularly high disdain for the surface's covers... they're not the demon they're made out to be.
I think you slightly misunderstood me. I think the cover is pretty awesome. To me it seems like a winning combination with a $500 tablet. But a $1000 tablet/ultra-portable with the keyboard and trackpad? Is that the right trade-off to make?
If the products competing here are $1000 ultra-protables with pretty great keyboards and $1000 tablets with crappy keyboards, which has the bigger audience?
What is the most accessible creative occupation? Writing? STEM fields? Or drawing? We could draw before the written word existed. We could write before we created more abstracted languages like modern symbolic math.
I think the end game is to include high resolution, precise, accurate stylus input, a'la Wacom technology or something like it.
I cry a little every time I see a Microsoft product with Wacom built in and an equivalent Apple product without it. What I'd really like is something like a Surface 2 running Ubuntu or SuSE, but with an Apple-worthy battery life.
Maybe it can be done beyond the niche. My current guess would be no but I’m not super sure about that. Admittedly, do not expect any great insights from me in this regard, all I’m going on is that drawing (with a stylus) has been a (pretty big) niche application in computing for a very long time now and always nothing more. It’s useful for some people, but very far from everyone. Maybe that can change. Actually, I don’t really doubt that (look at all the previously niche-tech that’s in current smartphones because it became cheap enough and that had to find its mass-market applications first, stuff like gyroscopes) but I’m not sure whether it’s the Surface Pro that will do it.
But it has, admittedly, a better shot at doing it than anything else that came before it.
As it is, I think it's still in niche territory, but I think with some polish it could be a really great product. The big question is whether microsoft can pull off the polish, which historically they haven't been able to (maybe with the new management this will change).
There have definitely been many microsoft products I've seen that were incredibly impressive, but were simply not taken the rest of the way.
Maybe a 3rd party manufacturer can take where the surface is now, and provide that polish, which I think was the goal of the surface anyways. Show what is possible to 3rd parties and let them take the ball the rest of the way. If that can happen, then the surface will have done its job.
