[drzaiusapelord]

>although I imagine trying to walk the average user through "booting from USB"

How is that any worse than the current status quo of every Windows product ever sold? I'd say it would be harder to walk mom through deleting the restore files when she calls and says her tablet won't hold all her movies and music.

Let's just face it, MS made a very stupid decision. I could see this happening during the Vista era, but SSDs have been mainstream for YEARS now. Windows should have a smaller footprint and holy hell, should not have a 12-18gb cab file to restore from on limited storage.

Enthusiasts spend way too much time making Windows SSD friendly. We need to delete superseded update from winsxs, shrink the default massive page file, delete the hibernate file on machines that don't need it, manually stop superfetch/defrag even though windows is supposed to do this on its own, etc.

>And the "purpose of the surface pro"?

In the age of affordable ultrabooks, who knows. Essentially you're buying an ultrabook without a keyboard and with a super tiny screen.

That said, I love the RT product and if the RT tablet was $299 it would sell like hotcakes. Especially if the 'desktop mode' didn't exist. MS should never have bothered with the Pro line and instead should have made a proper android and ios competitor.

[Shorel]

> MS should never have bothered with the Pro line and instead should have made a proper android and ios competitor.

What for?

MS competitive advantage is backwards compatibility with an EXTREMELY HUGE catalog of Windows apps. Nothing more. Anything else doesn't matter.

A 'proper RT tablet' would throw away that competitive advantage and sell as well as the Windows Phone 7.

In fact, the mere existence of an 'RT runtime Store' practically throws away that competitive advantage. Specially now that Steam is expanding from selling games to sell some Windows applications.

What is the right way to me: sell Windows (7 is good enough) computers, with good hardware (competitive with Apple laptops) and with a Full Windows App Store. Not RT Store, Full Windows API applications Store.

I should be able to buy Office, Autocad, Adobe Acrobat, etc from there. Now that would have been huge. The first week would have been a financial success for WinRar, Sublime Text, Ditto, and lots of other programs people use everyday.

[dpark]

The screen isn't "super-tiny". It's 10.6". Compared to an 11" ultrabook, you're not loosing a lot of screen space (especially when you consider the 11" ultrabook probably has a much lower resolution than the Surface Pro). If you're comparing against 13" or larger ultrabooks, then sure, the Surface Pro's screen is small (though still higher resolution than most 13" ultrabooks), but then that's a different conversation, and one that people already have every time they choose between an 11" and a 13" ultrabook.

P.S. Disclosure: I work for Microsoft.

[drzaiusapelord]

The popular ultrabooks and all of the ones I've seen in real life are 13". My comparison is between 10.6 and 13, which is a pretty big difference. Regardless, I can see how this is arguable.

[dpark]

Definitely, if you want a 13" screen, the Surface is a poor substitute. But by the same token, if you want a 15" screen, a 13" Ultrabook is a poor substitute. It's a tradeoff between portability and screen size. If you're willing to go down to the low-end of screen size for sake of portability, the Surface Pro looks very competitive with 11" ultrabooks. If you're not willing to go to that screen size, then the Surface Pro isn't really an option.

[pavlov]

...it would be harder to walk mom through deleting the restore files when she calls and says her tablet won't hold all her movies and music.

You can just tell her to buy an SD card and insert it in the computer. Unlike iOS, Windows actually supports disk expansion.

[drzaiusapelord]

Hold on. She paid a premium for the extra space, but now has to buy yet another storage device because MS filled her drive with restore crap?

[itomek]

We are buying two PROs the minute they come out. They have expandable memory slots and the beauty of having a nice tablet and a full blown laptop is great. My wife can't wait for it to come out.