As eropple covered quite well, native Windows latency isn't up to industry standards. ASIO4ALL has been very good to me on the desktop OS, but I believe that is

As eropple covered quite well, native Windows latency isn't up to industry standards. ASIO4ALL has been very good to me on the desktop OS, but I believe that is very RAM dependent - I've never run it on less than an i5 with 8GB of RAM, whether XP, Win7 or Win10. Because it's free and community supported, I consider it simply an oversight by MS. Unfortunately I can't speak to Windows phones or tablets, because I'll admit that I've used iOS for that. There's simply too many good, well, excellent audio programs in that sector to try otherwise. My main ones are Propellerhead Figure, GarageBand, a few synths in production, and djay2 for fun playing tunes and mixing. The issue that Windows can address with the tablets (not sure about phones) is the ability to plug in a USB soundcard. This is an extremely helpful ability that iOS really doesn't support (again, the native CoreAudio deserves recognition as very good). I got a very small M-Audio (now owned by Avid) soundcard that runs ASIO drivers, has a mic in and phones out (both stereo), and I even got an Asus Netbook with 2GB of RAM to run Ableton Live 8 well enough to create loop-based tracks on the go! For live performance, people simply love the MacBook Pro platform because of stability, and I can understand. The more that Microsoft does though, the more attention that will be granted from software developers to try and capitalize on the potential market. If MS continues to keep their hardware/software combination friendly to more tech savvy type musicians, e.g. plugging in a soundcard and running desktop type software on portable hardware, then I think they'll be able to take some market share. I do have access to a Surface Pro 3, but because I'm happy and still working on my Lenovo ultrabook with Win10 (keeping my prior Win7 one as a 'desktop'), I'm not really anxious to go messing with that. But, for DJ type folks who use 'controllers' like the stuff made by Pioneer, a Surface Pro plus a controller with built-in audio is a compelling offering. Not cheap, but not a toy either!