News Microsoft's Surface hits trouble

I am surprised. Microsoft hardware are usually above and beyond. The Surface itself, built-quality is a tank. It's just it's keyboard accessories that SOME people have issues with. It simply looks like that the manufacture of the keyboard is unable to keep up with it's production quality. In other words, Microsoft had been had, by trusting a company that decided, in order to meet demand, and maximize profits, release faulty products. This is nothing new, and very common with manufactures in China. Apple was smarter, they produce a wide quantity but verify themselves the built-quality before giving the go. This is why for example, the iPhone white took AGES to come out. I won't be surprised if Apple noticed that the white isn't the same between devices. A move that I hope that Microsoft will take form now on. The only hardware that Microsoft ever produced that is sub-par is the XBox 360 revision 1. Everyone screws up. Nvidia did, AMD did, ATi back in the day, Dell, HP, you name it.
Yet, I don't see people freaking about Nvidia GPUs, especially when for many their GPU cost more than the surface, whether it's the GPU in their PC, or their expensive laptop.

I am glad that Steven Sinofsky has been fired, clearly he rushed the Surface release. I mean Office was supposed to be a later release, he pushed an immediate release, where you can see that Office is far from being done porting it. Remember when Valve ported Half Life on Linux, they got ~12fps at first, but now it's fine? This is the same. Office was ported, but some serious optimization was needed, and instead of waiting, it was rushed out. What should have happen, is that Microsoft give away Surface RT to developers, so that they can test their software out, so that you don't have games like cut the rope that can play fine on a microwave, is choppy on the Surface RT, this would give time for Microsoft to finish it's Metro app to start giving a good impression to people, and finish off Office.

I agree, FINALLY! Hopefully now, this will continue, and also make people stop looking for the lowest price possible, and look for quality everywhere else. So that we have decent laptops, decent desktop by OEMs that don't fall apart, and better warranty coverage and service. A product doesn't need to be in metal to be in good quality (See Lenovo business line products), but it doesn't mean to use the plastic used in water bottle to make a laptop either.

The problem is that the PS3 and XBox 360 was overpowered for it's small form factor, hence why these consoles are so freaking loud. Also you have to remember that both PS3 and XBox 360 was not only getting fastest processors but also the cheapest.. meaning really old tech. Which means, hot hot hot. It's like if open a PS3, and change the GPU with a GTX 400 series. Magma will spill out of this thing. I think what will happen, is that as followed:
-> Microsoft is aiming the XBox as an entertainment system, and casual audience the most.. you can see this with the current state of the XBox 360. You'll see a small performance bump, which will translate to WiiU like graphics in terms of polygon count, and simialr texture sizes, but a bit better visuals as they only render on 1 screen. The rest will be invested in PVR like features. While it will have it's Halo games, I think it will be like what Nintendo did with the Wii. have hardcore games, but mostly games targeted casual games. I mean look at their past few E3, their casual gamer segment gets bigger and bigger, and so it's entertainment... while it's hard core gamer segment is getting MUCH smaller, showing 3-4 games.. and about the same ones every E3 (COD, Halo, and 2 FPS/Adventure third party games). Oh and I forgot the obligatory sports game which is on all console and PC, let's ignore that.

-> Sony PS4, NO WAY they'll do a massive loss console. It didn't work with the PSP, didn't work with the PS3, and didn't work with the PSVista. Yet, by not aiming fancy specs and ridiculous price system, they fair very well. See PS2 (GameCube was more powerful, yet didn't fair well). Sony is no financial situation to sale a console at a loss. So I expect a late launch, and not only that, a minor bump in specs. Perhaps this time, most games will be in 1080p, or 720p with AA. As Sony focus is on gaming only, and rendering on 1 screen, the graphics will better than the WiiU and the next XBox, however, not much above next XBox, it will be very close.

I agree. While the Surface RT isn't perfect, and has a rough start, this is the first time Microsoft is doing this serious and a huge worldwide scale (unlike the Zune which was U.S only). You are bound to have issues. And to be honest, I don't think anyone here could have done any better. And it's still MILES better than what OEMs have ever done.
All Microsoft has to do is:
-> release a firmware update for the wireless card to support more routers (this is something Microsoft has to push with the wireless manufacture, although, Microsoft might need to make a revision 2 of the Surface with a newer revision of the wireless card in it to solve this problem. So for the user, an exchange should solve the problem, once it's corrected.

-> updates on WinRT to improve performance.. already they have just release a bunch of update for this, which does this, and improve start time of apps.

-> Finish optimizing Office and release it

-> And finally, have a serious talk with the manufacture of their touch cover (lawsuit?, and/or do affairs with someone else, if no arrangement and compensation could be made?)

In others, nothing that can't be fixes within a few months.

It was a VERY smart move for Microsoft to hold the Surface Pro and see how the Surface RT does. This has minimized the mess greatly.

 

Yes but iOS is like a pocket calculator compared to Windows RT in terms of features. I guess Microsoft should have put Windows CE with Pocket Office suit (it features a long list of feature such as: changing fonts that consists of a hand full of them, you can put text in bold, underline, and just recently.. italic.. Woooooooo!!! Oh and you can save and open documents.. that's about it! POCKET!!!. Those that used Windows CE knows exactly what I am talking about.)

Look, I am not saying that Microsoft could have not a better job at minimizing the OS size by doing some clean up work. For all we know, it might be Office and all Windows built-in utilities that need libraries and .NET which needs also other libraries, which needs also other libraries and so on and so forth, which makes the OS big, and I don't think anyone here even with the know how, would even attempt to clean this mess up. Yes it should be scraped and restart from scratch, which is what Microsoft will probably do with Windows 9 RT version. But for now, this is what it is.

If you are not happy you can:
-> Not buy it
-> Return the device if you already bought it
-> File a complain to the appropriate governmental agency and the Better Business Bureau.

In this case, the guy clearly wants to make money.

 

It gets worse as any update to the OS gets stored, not simply what is applied. Plus hardlinks take up space according to the OS, even though pyhsical space in Flash memory isn't used (all previously versions of windows have this issue as well, but generally less of an issue that you have a 15GB Windows folder, when in reality it is only 7-8GB, when you have a 120GB SSD, or 500GB harddrive, or what not), also IIRC updates to programs also leave full backups on the device of previous versions. Not sure in WART does dUpdates like iOS does now, but even then, if it is keeping previous versions in some form to be able to backout, simply installing a few GB of programs and a few updates later to OS and apps could easily eat the little that was left of a 32GB tablet.

Frankly, beyond issues with WART itself, the storage and update methods seem to be an absolute cluster F. I have to agree, having roughly 50% of claimed space used by the OS and "required" files before you have any user accessible space is rather disinquenous. Both my iPhone 5 and iPad 2 are 16GB models and IIRC when completely bare have roughly 14.2GB of user accessible storage space. A 32GB surface on the other hand (or WART in general) has something like 15-16GB of user accessible storage space...barely more than an iOS or most Android 16GB devices have available to the user. I am fine that WART is a lot bigger for the OS and some of the included things (like Office RT) eat up a lot of storage...but they need a much better way to market it if their 32GB WART devices are the equivelent of 16GB iOS/Android devices for user storage. Or the fact that a 64GB WART is closer to a 32GB iOS/Android device than it is a 64GB iOS/Android device (more like a 48GB if such a thing existed).

The fact that Win 8 RT also seems to SUCK when it comes to space utilization AFTER you account for the OS, recovery partitition and Office RT also means realistically you are going to have a lot less effective use of the space that is left in the long run as well.

Oh, and with that microSD card slot...great that it has it, sucks that you CANNOT incorporate anything on it in to your libraries on the device without some "hackage". I mean, really, wtf is the point then?

 

In the end of the day

Quality is just something that can change person to person. The surface has got mixed reviews and now the general public has decided they are not very intrested in it. If sales of this device were apple like then the other win 8 rt manufactured would not of delayed or canceled there product launch.( at least 5 rt products have been delayed, major developer support is very low.)

Alot of people on this forum and others assumed windows 8 would bring devs by the boatload for 400 mil users. That has not happened the general feeling doing the rounds on blogs of the major devs is pack of consumer intrest has delayed any dev work for the win 8 platform.

Tablets were out before the IPad all were a sales disasister, can any tablet but apple really claim they have made money on the sale of the device. ( nexus 7 and kindle fire been sold at a loss) dou't any other tablet has seen break even.

If I was thinking of making a tablet I'd probably not bother as unless your called apple you will not see a profit. ( and in business nothing else matters)

 

I know you have a real love for Microsoft Goodbytes and I have nothing against that, I like a lot of what they do. It has to be said though that here they were entering a market where their competitor(s) have a massive headstart and a huge slice of the market.

Yes everyone makes mistakes etc etc. but if I were them I would have made the QA on this thing military standard. They needed to make sure that no stories like this ended up in the BT front page. If something like this happened on the Ipad 4 no-biggie, it would be glossed over by their new "retina" display or ability to facetime via your dog's collar blah blah or some other stupid crap. If this device fails to do anything perfectly there are plenty of people stood waiting to say HA SEE! M$ CANT MAKE ANYTHING AS GOOD AS THE IPAD!!!!!!111!!11!!EXCLAMATION!!!11!!! APPLE RULEZ

 

I'd imagine that anyone planning to buy a Surface will not be put off by this publicity in any way, so it's unlikely to make a huge dent in the sales, which we all know will be much lower than the iPad initially anyway.

 

Indeed! If I worked for Microsoft I'd be giving him shares, or a job in PR

[QUOTE='[PUNK]
Yes everyone makes mistakes etc etc. [/QUOTE]
With two well established competitors covering both high and low end of the market, can Microsoft really afford to make mistakes? With reports of splitting keyboards and network problems, if I was in the market for a high end tablet this would put me right off.

 

Which is pretty much exactly my point

Disagree tbh, its a convenience device so it needs to be convenient and to a large extent that means not pissing about with firmware or driver updates. Obviously its not going to make a dent in Ipad sales but I'm not supporting it like a football team here. Its a product so the real question is whether microsoft can make any money not whether they can beat the Ipad.

 

I have an idea to solve this. Microsoft should just release the Surface RT without Office, leaving that as an optional download. That should free up another 5Gb or so.

Why not? If you buy a PC, the specs list the size of the whole harddisk, not subtracting all the software that is installed on it. Anyone knows that software is going to take up some of that harddisk space, and accepts that as a fact.

 

Not really. Windows on the desktop backups the old files before updating. This allows you to uninstall an update. This is great if a download got corrupted and now the system has been compromise because of this. So you can undo this. Same for Metro apps.

However, on Windows RT, updates are only kept for a few days. Then the OS assumes everything works well for you, and cleans it up. So the size is fairly controlled.

I agree. The library system should have been updated. Hopefully for Microsoft sakes, they should release an update for this. Either make its own Metro apps support adding folders from where ever, or update the libraries to support removable drive.

As I said, the best move Microsoft made is to fire the person who was responsible for this mess. What I would agree, is that Microsoft should have other people, such as Steve Ballmer personally heavy test the device with a small team before allowing the release, which seams to be what Apple did.. at least when Steve Jobs was around (now it doesn't seams to be the case at all). In other words, I think Microsoft knows their problem, they took action, a bit late, but at least it's not like Apple where they denies everything until a few days before a new revision of the product (iPod Nano 1st gen battery swelling, iPod Nano 1st gen easy scratch, iPhone 4 antenna problem, and so on and so forth). not only that, but based on reports, Microsoft gives people instant replacement, no question asked, of anything that doesn't work well at the store or online. Assuming it gets rectified soon, its all good.

I agree. But as a software developer I must say, that: bigger your software is, the harder it is to maintain high quality.. as you test something a million times... and then someone goes "it doesn't work" on you and shows you it doesn't work, as he does a sequence of things that you never thought about or saw any relation, but ends up having one, and that doesn't make it work anymore. I imagine the same applies for hardware. Of course it's experience, and not only have a QA department (which Microsoft obviously has), but also EXPERIENCED department, where they know what to look for, and what to test. Yes, a lot more could have been done, I agree, especially considering Microsoft resources. All I hope for Microsoft sakes, is that they apply immediately what they learned to the Surface Pro, so that at least it gets mostly good reviews (which is wont' because it's Microsoft, people will complain how you can't use desktop app using your fingers, and that you have to use the digitize pen, so 1/10 score... even though this is obvious and the reason why the digitize pen technology was implemented), and of course fix the issues of the Surface RT.

The problem that Microsoft has, is the same as RIM with its blackberry. Do you honestly think that the BB10 will fair well? It won't. Even if it is, reviewers will find the most minute thing and act it's the end of the world. But when it's Apple...
-> Retina display on MacBook Pro 13inch with Intel GPU is chopy. the Intel graphic solution can't keep up, making the entire experience impossible to use >> No problems. It will be fix in a path.. probably... we have no info on this, and Apple is ignoring our calls... but its all good. It's Apple. 10/10!

-> Apple uses cheapo batteries that swollen and break system and calls it user fault, and not over it by warranty >> It's ok, it's Apple. 10/10

-> MacBook Air hinge breaks easily. >> It's ok, it's Apple 10/10

-> Choppy interface at the main menu, and not very polished >> It's ok it's Google. 9/10... no Apple logo.

-> What's this? A Microsoft or RIM device? Oh My FREAKING PINEAPPLE! the changeable default background is more blue this time!!!! It SUCKS OMG I have headaches non stop, I can't use the system, I am blind now because of it, it gave cancer, it's terrible. -500/10

I don't know how Microsoft can fix this (same for RIM). Yes, polishing their product to the extreme works.. it sure helped Win7. But I still think it's not enough. It's like an psychological allergy that people have with the brand names.

 

I agree. Some people sees the Surface as not selling well, but it is selling well. Microsoft didn't even expect to have this many sales, and have trouble filling orders. Its not a huge success in the sense that it will beat the competition, it's a success FOR Microsoft. So it's a success but not a success.

All it means to Microsoft, is that the Surface will not be a Zune. And that they have the confident to push into the tablet market. I am sure Microsoft didn't expect to even pass 3-5 million mark worldwide through the entire life of the Surface. I mean it's only available online for the great majority of people, and only on SOME Microsoft stores (US only).

 

Exactly. And all the metro apps not installed. That would be a nice ~500MB additional free space. And remove the recovery partition. You want to re-install? Get a PC and get the disk. On a trip, no PC? Too bad. There, now you have much more free space.

I agree.

 

Rim and Microsoft are hardly in the same boat goodbytes.

Rim currently dominates 2 markets 10-18 year old market ( The market that cant own a contract phone legally)
Business market ( There contracts dont expire till later next year as long as bb10 offers the items they need i cant see a widespread change been made)

Rims biggest issue is trying to make too many phones. If Apple offered to buy the BBM Service from them they would be setup for a good few years. ( I would be shocked if Apple has not considered buying a telephone provider like Sprint to compete with the tv companies on more equal terms)

Microsoft controls a desktop os market and that about it.

There hardware is another story, Mostly failures with poor quality control that has let down a good product.

Zune was a failure to compete with an Ipod. ( Never released outside of USA)( Sales were poor and it struggled to break even )

Surface rt sales would indicate another failure. ( Will it break even current sales suggest no )

the orginal xbox was pounded into the ground by the playstation ( Due to high price, Unrealiable DVD Drive. ( It never broke even and sales were poor)

Xbox 360 had a very high failure rate on release ( RROD)( I personally went through 4 consoles and i have friends who had 3 or 4 themselves) ( 2nd highest selling console of this generation, dominates in america has average sales in europe. ( Nintendo wii is top something close to 120mil units at last check))

Not exactly been hugely successful with alot outside of the xbox 360 which has now got above 60mil sales.

Microsofts biggest issue to alot of people i know is there Image, the 360s failure rates were widely published, Windows vista did not help. 42% of the windows population is still on Windows xp which is currently 12 years old.

Windows 7 in the passed 3 years has slowly repaired a degree of the damage that has been caused due to terrible quality control.

People who buy Apple dont care goodbytes thats what seperates them from other buyers, Most people see them as sheep who will buy anything that Apple make. For Apple to have that brand loyalty is something no other company out there has anything like and never will.

Most people are not loyal to microsoft and use it because they have little to no choice in the matter.

To compete with Apple you either must undercut them alot ( Look at nexus 7 sales (been sold at a loss) ) or produce a high quality product that people actually want and half the software to back it up with ( Samsung Galaxy S3). Take Apple and Samsung together they have all the profit in the smartphone sector, Apple has all the profit in the tablet sector.

In the next year i personally expect to see Nokia and Rim sold off for there parts ( Or patents as the case is ) To samsung and Apple respectively, Both have struggled in the face of a total change of user needs and have not adapted to it. Nokia still sells the 2nd most phones in the world it just makes £0 off the sales.

Expect to see the

Surface RT 2 next year with new and improved Touchpad, Wireless capabilitys and extra storage space. You read it here first. ( If its not released then Microsoft have surrendered the tablet market)

 

Really? None of my HP systems have any problems at all, some of which are much older than a year with nothing needing repair.

 

One of the things that really irritates me about Microsoft software products is the massive bloat associated with them. Windows 7 takes up about 30GB once installed, which is simply insane for something that equates to a base operating system with some basic tools like Notepad thrown in. This is the reason that any Windows machines at my school do not have SSDs, because the only SSDs that we can afford (the IT budget is very small) are 32GB, which is not enough room for Windows plus any additional software. The Karoshi machines on the other hand use up far less space (less than 10GB certainly, I hesitate to give any figures because I haven't measured it) and work fine on a 32GB SSD - and this is with all the software installed already.

As has been mentioned a few times in this thread, the whole megabytes/mebibytes confusion seems to have come into the light a bit more now. To set it straight - a MB (megabyte) is 1,000,000 bytes, or 1000x1000 bytes. A MiB (mebibyte) is 1,048,576 bytes, or 1024x1024 bytes. the HDD industry posts their figures as the decimal figures (MB, GB, TB) as those numbers are larger than their binary counterparts (MiB, GiB, TiB), which presents their hard drives as 'larger' to the general public, which equals more sales. This is not wrong in any sense.
What is wrong, however, is software incorrectly reporting the size. Ubuntu, Debian and probably all Linux distributions report HDD size using binary figures, but also the binary suffixes (MiB, GiB, TiB). Unfortunately Windows also uses binary figures, but uses the decimal suffixes (MB, GB, TB), which results in the confusion. For example, in Windows my C: drive is reported as 51,568,963,584 bytes, which is somehow rounded to 48.0GB - an obvious misrepresentation. 48.0GiB, however, is correct - which is what Linux reports.

 

Consumer products level? 'cause this is what we are talking about here.
If they are consumer products, then where manufacture errors, you you barely used them.

That is because you don't know how Windows works. They are many reasons why Windows takes a lot of space, here are some:
-> Windows creates restore points

-> Windows 8 makes an image backup of itself at setup on your local computer (they are ways to update it, so that when you hit the re-install button on the Control Panel, it restores it back to that last state you made once you installed Windows. OEMs uses it save a state after the drivers (and probably after the junk put in))

-> Windows uses WOW64 technology. Where it's Windows On Windows 64-bit, where you have Windows 32-bit ON Windows 64-bit, hence the 2 program files folders, with duplicated potential programs that a 32-bit software might use embeded itself, such as Windows Media Player (also for codec reasons), IE (also for plugin reasons), and the rest. This is how Microsoft
got 100% compatibility with 32-bit software under 64-bit software (note: I said 32-bit.. not 16-bit)

-> You have all the drivers built-in in the OS. And that list is extremely long. But this is how people can already have network, wireless, and everything or nearly everything up and ready after Windows is installed. This was much appreciated in Vista, and this is why it continues with 7 and now 8.

Please, school don't need SSD's. This is just luxury. Money could be better spent on other resources. The College I worked at, the IT budget was HUUUUUGGEE, and still didn't put SSD's inside our the school computers. Money was spent on better resources, such as in class rooms technologies.

 

Right, so Windows (7) being bloated is justified because it creates Restore Points (which don't actually work half the time, and anyway I am talking about clean install when there are [or at least shouldn't be] any restore points), 32-bit and 64-bit versions of each piece of critical core software (which all 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems do anyway, including Ubuntu) and that all the drivers are built in (again, so has Ubuntu, at least for the most part)? Somehow I don't see that as a valid reason, as Ubuntu definitely does not take up 30GB of space, although it has all the same features (minus the Restore Points, but a reinstall is usually faster anyway).

And when a 32GB SSD is actually the same price as a 500GB HDD, then why not use one? The cheapest 3.5" hard drive I could find on Scan was the Hitachi Deskstar 500GB (only SATA II, but a SATA III version is only a few pence more expensive) for just over £40, while a 32GB Sandisk is under £40, and a 60GB OCZ Agility is £46 (note: we were building the Windows machines a while back when a 60GB SSDs were aroung £60, but 32GB SSDs were £40).

 

Well first of all Windows 7 64-bit is 20GB, no drivers, no restoration point, no updates. So I don't know where you get your 30GB. Second, Linux doesn't have .NET 1, 2, 3 and now 4 to support, which is by itself several GB. While you can everything Windows does on Linux, you mostly use command line to do the same task or primitive GUI, while Windows goes all fancy, with HD icons for high DPI setting support, and so on. GUI consumes more space, fancier it is, the more space it takes. I think I don't have to explain this.
Linux doesn't care about support legacy side, Already getting a program to work found on the net, is a bit tricky at times, where it's picky about its distribution. Windows doesn't have this. Assuming its in 32-bit, and follows Microsoft guideline to the letter, programs from Windows NT4 still works on Windows 8. This means: very old files needs to be kept. If you open system32 folder or SysWOW64, and run each .exe's, you'll even some really old Windows panel dated back to Win95. Microsoft can't afford to drop anything. Already when they drop 16-bit support, with 64-bit Windows. you would think after all these years no one used them, but nope. Huge mess, even here. Personally I would have never imagine anyone still playing DOS games, but still they are. And they are other similar factors coming into play. You can drop the size of Windows, by opening the Feature panel, and uncheck all the items. Oh yes, plus you have space needed for the setup to install and uninstall Windows features, plus the space these features takes.

-> HDDs are slow
-> HDD's are large and bulky for a tablet
-> HDD's are noisy
-> HDD's don't like when you move it while it works (such as moving with a tablet and depositing a bit roughly on a table)
-> HDD's are more prone to failure (see above)... this means you need to have a panel to access it to replace it... this adds even more thickness.

Small SSD is better than HDD of any size for a tablet purpose.

 

Bytes, Kilobytes and Megabytes have been around a lot longer than when IEC created the mebibyte term a little over a decade ago. Yes mebi maybe technically correct 'now' but if people aren't use it...

Just because a organisation (Even the IEC) redefines the common meaning of a word doesn't mean the world follows it. Everyone should understand that the term Megabyte can refer to base 10 or base 2, but it should be 'assumed' that it's referring to base 10.

Ever heard anyone talk about their HDDs in tebibytes? Or do they use terabytes? How many megs is a download? or how many mebs?

Yes base ten naming is how it should be done if everyone changed, but hardly anyone is using the terms.

 

I still have an orginal HD Mp3 player the Ipod Classic think ive had it for 6 years + comes with a tonne of space. Cant say ive ever had an issue and it looks pretty bashed up from my pov.

This has gone way off topic though

Windows 7 does carry some bloat if you dont boot the restore points down to a smaller number and remove hibernate your looking at,

Whatever your ram is for hiber + 10% of the drive in restore points. + swap file. for most thats about 15gb of disk space just in 3 things that most say are essential ( I personally dont do hiber and have restore points down to the lowest it will go.) Then again ive also removed windows media player and all its crap that goes with it. ( media center and dvd maker ect )

Saves a few gbs. My windows 7 folder is currently a 12gb folder so pretty small, how people end up using 30gb id love to know.