[bitdiffusion]

More FUD about the disk space issue... yes - there is a large recovery partition and yes - you can delete it to free up space. Any yes - perhaps MS would have been better off if they included a USB drive for recovery purposes (although I imagine trying to walk the average user through "booting from USB" to restore their partition would be a support nightmare).

This is just like the "omg - the desktop is gone and all we are left with is Metro!". Um yes... unless you "show desktop" and move on with your life...

And the "purpose of the surface pro"? How about "a tablet for those who need to be productive in a windows environment"?

[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 We need to delete superseded update from winsxs, shrink the default massive page file, delete the hibernate file on machines that don't need it, manually stop superfetch/defrag even though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.

[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.

[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.

[jiggy2011]

When the best way to defend your new OS is to say "You can do this and pretend it's just like the old one!" you're probably in for a hard time.

The surface pro seems to be a weird use case. It's going to come in at a price point where you could get a mid range Windows 7 laptop and an ipad mini or Nexus 7 for the same price and the combination of these 2 devices is probably more useful.

[bitdiffusion]

It's not in defence of the OS - it's a rebuttal to the people who ignore all the other benefits of upgrading to a newer OS and cite the (often repeated) notion that the desktop as we know it is gone for good.

[bgilroy26]

>When the best way to defend your new OS is to say "You can do this and pretend it's just like the old one!" you're probably in for a hard time.

Isn't this a best practice for UI overhauls? Whenever Google changes Gmail that's exactly how they handle it.

[rmrfrmrf]

I'm not really afraid, uncertain, or doubtful of the disk space issue. I just think it's straight-up misleading and represents Microsoft's gross misunderstanding of what makes the mobile model successful.

[nextparadigms]

FUD? So you're implying that Microsoft giving users a lot less space than they are promoting in commercials and on the label a lie?

[bitdiffusion]

They give you hardware that is capable of storing the advertised amount of data - they advertise it the same as any other vendor (nobody advertises "usable diskspace" unless there is a 59GB iPad out there).

When do you think hardware vendors should start specifying available disk space as part of their SKU? When it's less than 10%? 20%? Should this value include pre-installed applications?