Surface 2013: good bye iPad?

[olikana]

there's only 1 problem : apps or software to take advantage of it.
unfortunately not even windows developers are caring to make tablet friendly versions of their software.
so far there have been only sporadic attempts and nothing really as good as what is available on iOS.
the hardware is already great and companies like lenovo, asus etc have released windows 8 pro tablets which are even better than microsoft's own surface.
all sporting i7s and long battery lifes, although expensive are much better than any ipads currently on the market.
still apps for metro and regular windows8 are few and far between.
if all windows daw and plugin developers would make a tablet friendly version of their software (all that's needced would be a GUI redesign) iOS would be already history for musicians.

[Cintronic]

I have a Windows 8 tablet right here. It's a cool tablet, but at 10" with non-touch optimized audio apps, it's pretty much unusable for that purpose. Studio One, Reaper, Tracktion......they all are really awkward to use, because they were designed for a mouse. Until that changes, Windows 8 isn't a good audio solution, in terms of strictly tablet use. Obviously when you add a keyboard and mouse that changes, but you might as well just use a laptop at that point.

I assumed you could adjust any parameter on screen with a touch. How come this is not possible?

[olikana]

I have a Windows 8 tablet right here. It's a cool tablet, but at 10" with non-touch optimized audio apps, it's pretty much unusable for that purpose. Studio One, Reaper, Tracktion......they all are really awkward to use, because they were designed for a mouse. Until that changes, Windows 8 isn't a good audio solution, in terms of strictly tablet use. Obviously when you add a keyboard and mouse that changes, but you might as well just use a laptop at that point.

I assumed you could adjust any parameter on screen with a touch. How come this is not possible?

most windows software requires some sort of keyboard command (ctrl+shift+alt etc etc) to operate fully.
also the GUIs are often too small to be finger friendly and menus are a nightmare even with a stylus.
i don't know why windows developers are not delivering touch friendly version of their software.
maybe they think the market is too small to bother....but potentially it could be huge.
i'd buy a good windows 8 pro tablet instantly if there was any good audio software for it.

[egbert]

This stuff about the interface and its suitability for touch has come up in some of the other threads here about Windows pads in general and the surface products. Look at something like the Mixer in most DAWs like Cubase. There are lots of small controls - buttons, rotary knobs and sliding faders. Clicking the small buttons, and grabbing and dragging the other controls to a precise setting with a mouse pointer can be quite tricky on very high res screens. With a much larger object like your finger tip it is hard to see what your are operating and even harder to precisely control it.

To make something like the Cubase mixer touch friendly, the scale of many of the elements would have to be considerably enlarged. It might be great on a 46 inch touch screen HD TV but not on a 17" laptop screen.

Take a look at the dedicated touch things being built for the iPad or Android touch screens. The elements (faders etc) are enormous compared to the sort of thing you see for mouse controlled software.

The scale of a mixer built on a row of touch faders pretty much needs to be similar to the scale of hardware fader banks and mixing consoles. These, afterall, have been designed with the constraints of manual operation in mind all along.

[Leslie]

Two points:
1. Windows RT is dead
2. Windows Pro tablets have some potential, providing that major music app developers are willing to jump on the Win Touch bandwagon and release touch updates...
At this stage there is nothing substantial released, but these are early days.
Also, Windows doesn't have anything like "Core Audio" and relies on third party drivers like ASIO.
That makes it very difficult for potential Win app developers to create low latency audio and native MIDI support.
Give it another 2 or 3 years and Win Touch should hopefully be on the par with curent iOS apps

[egbert]

@ Leslie re point 1.

Yep - Lenovo and Asus and others are cancelling Windows RT products. Whether MS can breathe new life into its comatose form is another matter - I gather they have new versions of the hardware still coming. I guess it depends on how far they get with Windows phone products which Nokia seems to be having some success with. In the event that they manage to get some share of that market, then there is potential for the non-x86 Nvidia and ARM based stuff to run on "Windows" tablets. I don't imagine Steve B. is keen to throw in the towel any time soon. Running x86 code in emulation is most likely a losing strategy compared to the power efficiency of ARM/Nvidia stuff running native code.

Windows Phone is up to 8 already so maybe Win RT will take a few iterations and name changes before it finally gets some traction or is quietly and humanely put down. The alternative for MS is kind of like the old "turtles all the way down" scenario. Intel and AMD might turn out to be happy to enter an "x86 all the way down to wearable computing" pact with MS rather than get squeezed out of the portable space by ARM and any other emerging competition.

[IncarnateX]

2. Windows Pro tablets have some potential, providing that major music app developers are willing to jump on the Win Touch bandwagon and release touch updates...

Even if they do, I think iPad-is-dead-due-to-windows-tablets-prophets are missing out a significant point, namely that to some of us, tablets are exactly about NOT having a clusterfucked OS like Windows (or OSX for that matter) to deal with in the first place. The benefits are having a nice simplified and streamlined tablet OS with equally simplified apps instead of thousands of unused program functions, hundreds of background services that take up most of the CPU power, and not a least extremely complex software that collide with each other leading to tons of error messages to cope with.

Thus:
If you want a tablet, buy a tablet.

If you want a PC with a touch screen, buy a PC with a touch screen (with or without an attached keyboard).

Surface RT is a failed instance of the former, while Surface Pro might be a more or less successful instance of the latter. At the end of the day that means that none of them are going to kill anything iPad related in my book.

[VariKusBrainZ]

The only hope MS have is the Far Eatern Market where the purchasing culture isnt so driven by bling but by value for money.

White boys will pay anhting to be in

[robogone]

I think the Microsoft problem is twofold - the poor design decisions on RT as noted above, and the price for the pro version which probably means that they will struggle to compete with cheaper products, which includes the iPad.

[IncarnateX]

The only hope MS have is the Far Eatern Market where the purchasing culture isnt so driven by bling but by value for money.

White boys will pay anhting to be in

Well it does not seems to me that windows didn't try the bling appeal



It doesn't get more cheesy than that, does it?

So what is your theory on this? Did they fail because apple is much better blingers?

[egbert]

Interesting Reg article on 20 years of NT.

Sinofsky's legacy: Code bloat put on diet

In the past few years the code sprawl has been tamed, and it's the one bright note of Sinofsky's legacy that he took this seriously. WinMin was a long-term project to strip down the bloat away to something Cutler's founding team would recognise, a core of a kernel and components with a small footprint of a few tens of megabytes, rather than gigabytes.

Windows 7 was the first version to see the benefits of this, requiring lower resources than Vista, and Windows 8 is even nippier than 7. The result is that NT can be squeezed into tablets and phones: Windows Phone 8 today runs the ARM port of NT, smoothly and nimbly compared to Google's VM-powered Android.

If this article is anything to go by, the future for portable forms of Windows is tied up with this WinMin project.

[egbert]

Techeye on Intel's roadmap for Atom based SOCs for phones and tablets - their competition for ARM and Nvidia Tegra series.

[VariKusBrainZ]

The only hope MS have is the Far Eatern Market where the purchasing culture isnt so driven by bling but by value for money.

White boys will pay anhting to be in

Well it does not seems to me that windows didn't try the bling appeal

It doesn't get more cheesy than that, does it?

So what is your theory on this? Did they fail because apple is much better blingers?

I cant see that at work but im guesing youve missed the point of people buying overpriced products because theyre in and they are afraid to be different than the other boys and girls.

I had an iPhone given to me. While it did the job I didnt think it was worth the original new price or second hand price.

[polaris20]

The only hope MS have is the Far Eatern Market where the purchasing culture isnt so driven by bling but by value for money.

White boys will pay anhting to be in

Well it does not seems to me that windows didn't try the bling appeal

It doesn't get more cheesy than that, does it?

So what is your theory on this? Did they fail because apple is much better blingers?

I cant see that at work but im guesing youve missed the point of people buying overpriced products because theyre in and they are afraid to be different than the other boys and girls.

I had an iPhone given to me. While it did the job I didnt think it was worth the original new price or second hand price.

I can't take any comment seriously when it starts going in this direction. People buy Apple products for other reasons than that they're trendy, or that they're "bling", as you say. Stop being ignorant.

[Aural Chaos]

Lets revisit this thread in a year and laugh at the people who were sure the iPad was going to be killed by anything.....