5 ms·

I just don't really get why they can't do what Apple does. There are two metaphors here, one for fingers, one for keyboard and mouse. For systems with a keyboar

I just don't really get why they can't do what Apple does. There are two metaphors here, one for fingers, one for keyboard and mouse. For systems with a keyboard and mouse, use the metaphor that suits them better. Seems simple.

JoelSutherland 14y ago
For systems with a keyboard and a mouse, Windows 8 is just Windows 7 with a new, full screen start menu. If you unplug your keyboard and mouse, you get a UI that is designed for touch. Makes sense to me.
mtgx 14y ago
Because they didn't do this with the customer in mind. They did it for themselves. The main is because they are very "weak" on the ARM architecture, so they need to somehow tout the ability that you can also run legacy apps, even though that's always been possible on Windows tablets, and people never cared, because they were still unoptimized for touch, just like the one that exist now will be. And second, probably because they didn't want to be the ones that actually push the knife deep into their decades long partner, Intel, and they wanted to drag them along in the "post-PC" era.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  afaik, ARM based Windows tablets will not run legacy applications.
  - WiseWeasel 14y ago
    But they do still have a desktop, which is a bit of a head-scratcher. Why not go all-metro for WinRT? Will anyone write any non-metro Windows software for ARM, apart from Microsoft's own Office?
    - jiggy2011 14y ago
      From what I remember of the demo, the desktop is for the Intel version only and the arm version is 100% metro. Just google'd this though and couldn't find anything confirming either way. If this is confusing people on HN, think what it will be like for consumers since the two devices look very similar. Imagine trying to explain to someone that their laptop can't run software X that someone else's otherwise identical (or near enough) laptop can because "it has an ARM chip not an intel one". Instead of saying " Supports Windows 8 " , non metro software will now have to say " Supports Windows8* " I wonder how many developers will bother with metro since we already have a bewilderingly huge choices of platforms to support with our software, including "Just give up and do a web app".
      - digikata 14y ago
        Reminds me of when Microsoft's marketing-based product management crazily shoehorned the ".Net" moniker onto everything that the company sold whether it made sense or not. Now the actual .Net technology was pretty nice when everything settled down - but I don't understand now that Microsoft finally managed to make decent virtual machine technology foundation, why they're pushing forward with a path with Windows 8 (ARM) incompatible with Win 8 (x08) why not something a bit closer to run everywhere on a VM?
        jiggy2011 14y ago
        I'm assuming you can do that and MS will encourage people to write code for .Net rather than C++. You would probably need to add some thing for metro but I'm guessing MS will try and make it as painless as they can.
    - Tloewald 14y ago
      My guess is that they decided to ship an incomplete Windows RT rather than wait until they could do the obvious thing (provide a complete metro). It's a question of practicality winning over perfection. Think of this as MS Tablet 1.0. It's not perfect, but Windows 9 will be better, and so on. Will anyone develop software? I'm sure they will for one definite reason - hope. Lots of folks in the ecosystem with skills in ms tool chain etc. who will prospectively develop stuff. But key developers will only ship stuff if the platform is successful. Windows 8 is certainly a sign that MS is steering in the right direction. Its income base isn't disappearing immediately, so it may have the time to do its usual thing of getting it good enough in version 3. Windows 8 seems close enough that MS might even have it right by version 2. Here is where I think Microsoft may have screwed the pooch: * Orphaning WP7. * Possibly orphaning/pissing off its third party partners. (When will they give up their abusive relationship?)
- tikhonj 14y ago
  Or, maybe, because they thought having a single device rather than two was an advantage? I would certainly rather have a single tablet that could also act like a laptop as opposed to both a tablet and a laptop.
  - CountSessine 14y ago
    But you can't have that. There are too many hardware constraints. Current ARM chips have less than 1/10 the memory bandwidth of current Intel notebook CPUs and in real-world benchmarks are MUCH slower. Ditto tablet vs notebook GPUs. At best, Microsoft is making a tablet with a keyboard, not a notebook/tablet hybrid. I love my iPad. But Surface isn't going to save me from buying a laptop. There are lots of things that I've found that I just couldn't move over to my iPad, and none of those are going to move over to a Surface either. So at the very, very most, Surface saves you from buying one of these: http://www.zagg.com/accessories/logitech-ipad-2-keyboard-case http://www.zagg.com/accessories/logitech-ipad-2-keyboard-cas...
    - recoiledsnake 14y ago
      Surface Pro has an Ivy Bridge processor.
      - CountSessine 14y ago
        That's nice. Then it'll come with a notebook's battery life too.
cooldeal 14y ago
I for one am glad that someone is taking on the space between the Macbook Air and iPad so that I don't need to spend on and lug around two devices. If you want an iOS clone, there's always Android. Why should Windows too play a me-too copycat and reduce choice to the user? What benefit is there to that?
- jamesaguilar 14y ago
  I don't want an iOS clone. I want desktop Windows to continue to exist. As it is, I will be forced to use a touch UI on my desktop, which is less than optimal for keyboard-and-mouse.
  - metrop0219 14y ago
    Not really, you're only forced to see it when you hit the windows button. Other than that you can live happily ever after in desktop land.
- rbanffy 14y ago
  Too bad this device will run neither iOS nor OSX.
- zanny 14y ago
  Why not the Transformer tablets? I'm planning on doing a lot of oss development for it when I get one of the infinities - I figure someone will be putting out a good vim port among other things, designed for either attached or bluetooth keyboards.
majormajor 14y ago
Apple's approach requires you to have multiple devices to get both the tablet and full-on-workstation experience. I don't want multiple devices. I want a single device that can adapt to different uses—the Surface tablet looks just about perfect as a starter laptop replacement to me. I'm hoping it'll do to my MacBook Pro what the MacBook Pro did to my desktop PC: relegate it to infrequent use for a few specialty cases that need a bigger screen or the full laptop form factor or something.
- jamesaguilar 14y ago
  OK, that's great, but why does what you want have to affect my experience on the desktop? You want a touch UI that also gives full desktop functionality. Presumably they can deliver that to you via the Surface UI. Why can't they have a Surface UI and a Windows UI?
  - majormajor 14y ago
    That's a good question, and mirrors my own frustration with post-10.6 Mac OS X trends... I guess since I basically never use the Start menu, I just haven't gotten the impression that it will particularly change my desktop Windows interface. I believe both companies see increased convergence for 90% of use cases down the line, and Microsoft's just making a more dramatic transition. I can see the argument that it's premature to make the big jump at this point, before there's a Metro app ecosystem or anything (and I'd be very antagonistic towards any dramatic changes to the non-Metro interface, since for the things I use my PC for, I don't want Metro), but I can also see an argument that it's better to make the painful transition early. And I'm gradually just resigning myself to the fact that the things I want a computer for aren't the same as most people's... so whoever provides the least-painful way to still get power-user stuff done in a "Post PC" world will get my money. I'm very intrigued about running Lightroom on a Surface Pro and tossing it in my bag with my camera...
- jsz0 14y ago
  I don't want multiple devices Do you want a 2 pound tablet though? That's the big problem with the Surface Pro. The original iPad at 1.5 pounds was generally considered to be too heavy by a lot of people. I can't imagine adding an additional half pound to it and being able to actually use it as a tablet anymore.
dmethvin 14y ago
So are you saying Microsoft should force people to use either touch or mouse on a device, but not both? What if your device supports both touch and mouse, for example a notebook with a touch screen? Windows 8 will have to approach that head-on if they are going to have tablets that simultaneously support touch, mouse, tablet, or even Kinect-like gestures via the camera.
- jamesaguilar 14y ago
  My preferred solution at the moment is that they do what they are doing for Windows 8's surface UI for both touch and hybrid devices, but also continue with the strain of Windows that is targeted to mouse-and-keyboard.
akmiller 14y ago
Where Microsoft is going makes much more sense to me (I actually think Apple may be headed that direction too as each release of the desktop OS seems to add more and more iOS features). It seems like Microsofts end game is that you will have one device and the interface for interacting with that device will depend on where you are. If docked at home with external monitor, keyboard, and mouse you get more of the desktop feel. Unplug the device and take it with you and you have more of the touch based interface.

JoelSutherland 14y ago

For systems with a keyboard and a mouse, Windows 8 is just Windows 7 with a new, full screen start menu. If you unplug your keyboard and mouse, you get a UI that is designed for touch. Makes sense to me.

mtgx 14y ago

Because they didn't do this with the customer in mind. They did it for themselves. The main is because they are very "weak" on the ARM architecture, so they need to somehow tout the ability that you can also run legacy apps, even though that's always been possible on Windows tablets, and people never cared, because they were still unoptimized for touch, just like the one that exist now will be. And second, probably because they didn't want to be the ones that actually push the knife deep into their decades long partner, Intel, and they wanted to drag them along in the "post-PC" era.

jiggy2011 14y ago
afaik, ARM based Windows tablets will not run legacy applications.
- WiseWeasel 14y ago
  But they do still have a desktop, which is a bit of a head-scratcher. Why not go all-metro for WinRT? Will anyone write any non-metro Windows software for ARM, apart from Microsoft's own Office?
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    From what I remember of the demo, the desktop is for the Intel version only and the arm version is 100% metro. Just google'd this though and couldn't find anything confirming either way. If this is confusing people on HN, think what it will be like for consumers since the two devices look very similar. Imagine trying to explain to someone that their laptop can't run software X that someone else's otherwise identical (or near enough) laptop can because "it has an ARM chip not an intel one". Instead of saying " Supports Windows 8 " , non metro software will now have to say " Supports Windows8* " I wonder how many developers will bother with metro since we already have a bewilderingly huge choices of platforms to support with our software, including "Just give up and do a web app".
    - digikata 14y ago
      Reminds me of when Microsoft's marketing-based product management crazily shoehorned the ".Net" moniker onto everything that the company sold whether it made sense or not. Now the actual .Net technology was pretty nice when everything settled down - but I don't understand now that Microsoft finally managed to make decent virtual machine technology foundation, why they're pushing forward with a path with Windows 8 (ARM) incompatible with Win 8 (x08) why not something a bit closer to run everywhere on a VM?
      - jiggy2011 14y ago
        I'm assuming you can do that and MS will encourage people to write code for .Net rather than C++. You would probably need to add some thing for metro but I'm guessing MS will try and make it as painless as they can.
  - Tloewald 14y ago
    My guess is that they decided to ship an incomplete Windows RT rather than wait until they could do the obvious thing (provide a complete metro). It's a question of practicality winning over perfection. Think of this as MS Tablet 1.0. It's not perfect, but Windows 9 will be better, and so on. Will anyone develop software? I'm sure they will for one definite reason - hope. Lots of folks in the ecosystem with skills in ms tool chain etc. who will prospectively develop stuff. But key developers will only ship stuff if the platform is successful. Windows 8 is certainly a sign that MS is steering in the right direction. Its income base isn't disappearing immediately, so it may have the time to do its usual thing of getting it good enough in version 3. Windows 8 seems close enough that MS might even have it right by version 2. Here is where I think Microsoft may have screwed the pooch: * Orphaning WP7. * Possibly orphaning/pissing off its third party partners. (When will they give up their abusive relationship?)
tikhonj 14y ago
Or, maybe, because they thought having a single device rather than two was an advantage? I would certainly rather have a single tablet that could also act like a laptop as opposed to both a tablet and a laptop.
- CountSessine 14y ago
  But you can't have that. There are too many hardware constraints. Current ARM chips have less than 1/10 the memory bandwidth of current Intel notebook CPUs and in real-world benchmarks are MUCH slower. Ditto tablet vs notebook GPUs. At best, Microsoft is making a tablet with a keyboard, not a notebook/tablet hybrid. I love my iPad. But Surface isn't going to save me from buying a laptop. There are lots of things that I've found that I just couldn't move over to my iPad, and none of those are going to move over to a Surface either. So at the very, very most, Surface saves you from buying one of these: http://www.zagg.com/accessories/logitech-ipad-2-keyboard-case http://www.zagg.com/accessories/logitech-ipad-2-keyboard-cas...
  - recoiledsnake 14y ago
    Surface Pro has an Ivy Bridge processor.
    - CountSessine 14y ago
      That's nice. Then it'll come with a notebook's battery life too.

cooldeal 14y ago

I for one am glad that someone is taking on the space between the Macbook Air and iPad so that I don't need to spend on and lug around two devices. If you want an iOS clone, there's always Android. Why should Windows too play a me-too copycat and reduce choice to the user? What benefit is there to that?

jamesaguilar 14y ago
I don't want an iOS clone. I want desktop Windows to continue to exist. As it is, I will be forced to use a touch UI on my desktop, which is less than optimal for keyboard-and-mouse.
- metrop0219 14y ago
  Not really, you're only forced to see it when you hit the windows button. Other than that you can live happily ever after in desktop land.
rbanffy 14y ago
Too bad this device will run neither iOS nor OSX.
zanny 14y ago
Why not the Transformer tablets? I'm planning on doing a lot of oss development for it when I get one of the infinities - I figure someone will be putting out a good vim port among other things, designed for either attached or bluetooth keyboards.

majormajor 14y ago

Apple's approach requires you to have multiple devices to get both the tablet and full-on-workstation experience. I don't want multiple devices. I want a single device that can adapt to different uses—the Surface tablet looks just about perfect as a starter laptop replacement to me. I'm hoping it'll do to my MacBook Pro what the MacBook Pro did to my desktop PC: relegate it to infrequent use for a few specialty cases that need a bigger screen or the full laptop form factor or something.

jamesaguilar 14y ago
OK, that's great, but why does what you want have to affect my experience on the desktop? You want a touch UI that also gives full desktop functionality. Presumably they can deliver that to you via the Surface UI. Why can't they have a Surface UI and a Windows UI?
- majormajor 14y ago
  That's a good question, and mirrors my own frustration with post-10.6 Mac OS X trends... I guess since I basically never use the Start menu, I just haven't gotten the impression that it will particularly change my desktop Windows interface. I believe both companies see increased convergence for 90% of use cases down the line, and Microsoft's just making a more dramatic transition. I can see the argument that it's premature to make the big jump at this point, before there's a Metro app ecosystem or anything (and I'd be very antagonistic towards any dramatic changes to the non-Metro interface, since for the things I use my PC for, I don't want Metro), but I can also see an argument that it's better to make the painful transition early. And I'm gradually just resigning myself to the fact that the things I want a computer for aren't the same as most people's... so whoever provides the least-painful way to still get power-user stuff done in a "Post PC" world will get my money. I'm very intrigued about running Lightroom on a Surface Pro and tossing it in my bag with my camera...
jsz0 14y ago
I don't want multiple devices Do you want a 2 pound tablet though? That's the big problem with the Surface Pro. The original iPad at 1.5 pounds was generally considered to be too heavy by a lot of people. I can't imagine adding an additional half pound to it and being able to actually use it as a tablet anymore.

dmethvin 14y ago

So are you saying Microsoft should force people to use either touch or mouse on a device, but not both? What if your device supports both touch and mouse, for example a notebook with a touch screen? Windows 8 will have to approach that head-on if they are going to have tablets that simultaneously support touch, mouse, tablet, or even Kinect-like gestures via the camera.

jamesaguilar 14y ago
My preferred solution at the moment is that they do what they are doing for Windows 8's surface UI for both touch and hybrid devices, but also continue with the strain of Windows that is targeted to mouse-and-keyboard.

akmiller 14y ago

Where Microsoft is going makes much more sense to me (I actually think Apple may be headed that direction too as each release of the desktop OS seems to add more and more iOS features). It seems like Microsofts end game is that you will have one device and the interface for interacting with that device will depend on where you are. If docked at home with external monitor, keyboard, and mouse you get more of the desktop feel. Unplug the device and take it with you and you have more of the touch based interface.