7 ms·

Actual product page: http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/products/surface-3 http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/products/surface-3 And buy now page with

Actual product page: http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/products/surface-3 http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/products/surface-3 And buy now page with tech specs: http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/productID.314885500#buy-product http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/productI... Looks like $499 for 64GB storage and 2GB RAM, $599 for 128GB storage and 4GB of RAM (WiFi models; 4G LTE model pricing wasn't showing for me).

venomsnake 12y ago
MS have really low bar for high end laptop. 16G at least of ram or go away ... Edit: It was about 3 pro ... ignore.
Someone1234 12y ago
That 2 GB, 64 GB model just looks painful to use. I've seen a lot of Windows installs use up more than 64 GB, in particular as WinSXS grows as more updates are installed (thus more duplicate DLLs are stored). If anyone asked me, I'd describe 128 GB as the "minimum" storage needed for Windows. And even then you aren't storing much if any user data on it. 4 GB is the minimum I'd run anything newer than Windows XP on. The SSD's speed might be able to "save" the 2 GB from being completely unusable, but it is still going to be damn slow with the amount of paging that's going to occur. Honestly, I get that Microsoft wants to hit that magical $500 figure, but that device is going to give a really poor use experience in my opinion.
- Vexs 12y ago
  I really can't even use a computer that's less than 4 gb these days, especially once chrome gets it's grubby hands all over my RAM. Just running baseline I find that most windows systems take up about two GB of RAM, and after you load up chrome, word, whatever; it hits the 4GB+ range. I mean, we're starting to see phones with 2GB of ram, it's completely unacceptable for a modern tablet.
  - dman 12y ago
    How much RAM does the Ipad have?
    - dagw 12y ago
      Does it matter? The normal usage patterns for Windows (and OS X) is very different and requires more RAM than the typical usage patterns on an iOS devices
    - mikeash 12y ago
      Current iPads have 1GB of RAM. They also constantly evict background applications and even backgrounded tabs in the web browser. Switching browser tabs on iOS is always a gamble as to whether it'll reload the page or not. This makes it impossible to, for example, write a comment in one tab while referencing some material in a different one with any kind of reliability. iOS is extremely memory efficient but it comes at a cost which can be quite high for some.
      - ZanyProgrammer 12y ago
        The iPad Air 2 is the first iOS device with 2 GB of RAM, I believe.
        mikeash 12y ago
        Whoops, clearly I'm a bit behind the times. Thanks to both of you for the updated info.
      - knweiss 12y ago
        The iPad Air 2 has 2 GB RAM.
  - Someone1234 12y ago
    Indeed. I currently only have Chrome, Outlook, and Lync open and am using 4.2 GB of RAM. Over half of that is Chrome alone. Now, granted, the OS does use more RAM has availability increases (I have 16 GB) however Chrome is a beast no matter what.
- falcolas 12y ago
  If I recall correctly, the memory reported as being used by the OS includes disk caches. I'd also want at least 4GB, though, if I'm running a full windows install and want to multi-task.
- cwyers 12y ago
  It feels like the Surface 3 is coming out a few months too early in some respects, as the disk space improvements in Windows 10 are going to make it a lot more palatable on the $499 model: http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/03/16/how-windows-10-achieves-its-compact-footprint/ http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/03/16/how-wind...
  - drzaiusapelord 12y ago
    This is my feeling as well. I just don't want a Windows 8 machine. Its clear it was a transition OS full of compromise, half cooked ideas, and a "lets just ship" mentality, which MS had to embrace considering it was practically a non-player in the mobile space in 2012. I'm hoping 10 comes out with a more refined understanding of modern OS expectations, especially when your OS is both a desktop and mobile OS. I find it amusing that 8 came out with this large install size when SSDs were becoming the norm. I guess Redmond can't move fast enough to avoid this outcome. They saw 1TB drives being the norm in 2009-2010-ish when they started this project and couldn't pivot fast enough to stop it. Now things like the sxs folder being 20gb is the norm. Or still defaulting to a 1996-like "make your swap file twice 2x your RAM size" mentality. I have 16gb of RAM. I sure as hell don't need a 32gb swap file. The only reason I have a swap file is because DirectX seems to expect one for many games, so I have a token 512mb one just for gaming. No other application expects one. MS really needs to contemporize with Win10. There's just way too much legacy cruft in 7 and 8. Win8 on that sexy Surface hardware is like driving your Ferarri on a dirt road.
    - MichaelGG 12y ago
      The Windows memory model is different. With some OSes, you can happily over allocate and everything's great. Malloc won't fail, and so long not every page ends up being touched, you're fine. But as soon as you go over, bam OOM killer. On Windows, every allocation gets reserved by actual memory, so it's easier to run into a situation where you would start failing malloc. So having swap is more important. Also, I think that anonymous mmap is backed by the pagefile. So anything using mmap without specifying a file is going to increase your pagefile needs.
    - 12y ago
- stinos 12y ago
  128GB minimum storage? You'd have to be installing like a lot of software then? Even my main development machines (2 Visual Studio versions, 2 Matlab versions, 2 Labview versions, Office and utilities) only take 70-80GB. I think a more typical user like my mom who only uses a browser, office and some utilities would be just fine with 64GB for Windows and software. Also a bare Windows 10 install uses about 1 GB of ram after startup so there is some room to play with. Not that I'd ever buy something running full Windows and only has 2GB of ram, nor ever recommend it, just pointing out that depending on who is going to use it this machine might effectively do the trick.
  - Someone1234 12y ago
    > 128GB minimum storage? You'd have to be installing like a lot of software then? Nope. Windows grows over time. So a Windows install that fit into 40 GB would grow to over 100 GB over a two or three years. Heck we had to pull an entire rack of servers because the idiots that set them up partitioned the drive into a 100 GB C: and a massive D:, and Windows consumed all the space on C: just through Windows Update and then started falling over. We had to rebuilds the machines with a 200 GB C: and they have been running fine ever since.
    - Spearchucker 12y ago
      Err I'm running Windows 8 on a 32Gb HP Stream 7. Heaps of music, and 3 movies, and the recovery partition and still have 17GB free. What causes your install to grow so much?
      - Someone1234 12y ago
        Windows Update mostly.
        bhauer 12y ago
        And you can clean that stuff up with the disk cleanup app. You don't need to retain those old install files forever.
- slantyyz 12y ago
  >> That 2 GB, 64 GB model just looks painful to use. That really depends on your use case. I've been using the Asus Vivotab Note 8 for several months (2gb/64gb), and I haven't even come close to feeling a need to put an SD card in it yet. I use it as a complement to my laptop. Mostly for consumption, communication and note-taking with OneNote. I don't think you'd want to do any heavy lifting on an Atom-based machine -- you'd be better off with a Pro in that case. I'd love to see Microsoft release a Surface Mini with that Surface Pen. Having a Wacom pen on my Vivotab is great, except at the edges.
- rayiner 12y ago
  I'm running Word, Outlook, and several chrome tabs on Win 7 and I'm at 2.7gb. This is a tablet, not a desktop replacement.
- BinaryIdiot 12y ago
  > I've seen a lot of Windows installs use up more than 64 GB Windows installs themselves or with other software installed? The latter makes sense but I've never seen anywhere close in the former. 32GB would be a bad idea but 64GB I think is fine for the majority of people.
  - vacri 12y ago
    I find it a bit disturbing that giving an operating system 32GB would be considered too small. I've not played with win8, but my win7 install started out at 20GB, and damned if I can figure out what consumes all that space out of the box.
    - BinaryIdiot 12y ago
      > I find it a bit disturbing that giving an operating system 32GB would be considered too small. I've not played with win8, but my win7 install started out at 20GB, and damned if I can figure out what consumes all that space out of the box. I just don't think 32GB is big enough in general minus some space for the OS but I don't think I've had the same type of issue as you. The majority of my OS installs have been roughly 10GB which isn't far off from iOS and might include some restore stuff. But it's also been a while since I checked.
- cc438 12y ago
  Windows' use of WinSXS and RAM scales with the available capacity. That behavior with WinSXS particularly irks me as it implies acknowledgment that most of those files are unnecessary, yet there's nothing you can do to combat the cancerous tumor that grows in a 128-256gb partition. I've found 2gb to be perfectly usable with Win7 and 8, Chrome's voracious appetite for memory would be a sticking point, except I've noticed that it does a better job of managing itself when RAM is limited. Chrome runs just fine on 1gb Chromebooks despite having just 768-512mb available most of the time. I will say that the Atom processor is a concern with Chrome even though I know the latest versions are roughly 2-3x more powerful than the Pineview dual core I had in my old Dell netbook. Chrome routinely maxed out the processor on every page load while Firefox and IE never needed more than 25% of the available CPU horsepower. Tripling the available power would eliminate the 5 second lockups I experienced but it could still be a slow, stuttery user experience.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- Joeri 12y ago
  I have a 32 GB asus t100, with a 32 GB SD card, and have about 15 GB free overall despite a full complement of software. 64 GB is doable, especially now that they've changed things so you're not losing space to a recovery partition. Doable, but not great, just like the 2 GB RAM. I may end up replacing my t100 with the 128 GB surface 3, especially given the small price difference.
- ChicagoDave 12y ago
  I would rate this as a simple-use tablet, not to be used for complex tasks like development with 20 apps open. So if you need it for office apps, email, web surfing, and then a few simple-use apps, you're going to be okay. And the SD slot allows you to add 64gb more space. It's pretty much a student machine. Not Pro. If you're a Pro, then buy a Pro or get a MacBook Pro and VM Windows. But as just a tablet, this is _close_ to a great deal (I think they can do better and probably will drop the price by the holidays).
- JimA 12y ago
  The WinSXS bloat has been fixed in the latest versions, so the disk space required for an OS is more or less static now, barring any new functionality that requires new files.
imaginenore 12y ago
For $500 I can get a real ultrabook. Like Dell XPS 11 2560 x 1440 display 4GB RAM 128GB SSD http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/665236/Dell-XPS-11-XPS18-9091CFB-2/ http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/665236/Dell-XPS-11-XPS...
- dman 12y ago
  Not a very fair comparision since at this point that laptop is EOL'ed and its original price is 1199.
  - josefresco 12y ago
    Oddly, I ventured out to find the current price of the XPS 11 and Dell doesn't even publish it. You have to call for pricing (oh how Dell has changed). The XPS 12 starts at 149 so I'm assuming the 11 is a bit lower? http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-11-9p33/pd?p=xps-11-9p33&view=pdetails&isredir=true http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-11-9p33/pd?p=xps-11-9p33&view=p...
    - dman 12y ago
      XPS 11 is end of lifed and discontinued from what I understand.
  - imaginenore 12y ago
    EOL or not, many of its specs are better. Some are worse, I admit.
- falcolas 12y ago
  With a shorter battery life, more than twice as heavy, and cumbersome to use in the "tablet" mode. The deep discount on the $1200 ultrabook also seems unusual, like they're having a fire sale just to get it out of stock.
  - vonmoltke 12y ago
    Considering the reviews I found[1], I suspect "fire sale" is exactly what this is. [1] http://www.engadget.com/products/dell/xps/11/ http://www.engadget.com/products/dell/xps/11/

venomsnake 12y ago

MS have really low bar for high end laptop. 16G at least of ram or go away ... Edit: It was about 3 pro ... ignore.

Someone1234 12y ago

That 2 GB, 64 GB model just looks painful to use. I've seen a lot of Windows installs use up more than 64 GB, in particular as WinSXS grows as more updates are installed (thus more duplicate DLLs are stored). If anyone asked me, I'd describe 128 GB as the "minimum" storage needed for Windows. And even then you aren't storing much if any user data on it. 4 GB is the minimum I'd run anything newer than Windows XP on. The SSD's speed might be able to "save" the 2 GB from being completely unusable, but it is still going to be damn slow with the amount of paging that's going to occur. Honestly, I get that Microsoft wants to hit that magical $500 figure, but that device is going to give a really poor use experience in my opinion.

Vexs 12y ago
I really can't even use a computer that's less than 4 gb these days, especially once chrome gets it's grubby hands all over my RAM. Just running baseline I find that most windows systems take up about two GB of RAM, and after you load up chrome, word, whatever; it hits the 4GB+ range. I mean, we're starting to see phones with 2GB of ram, it's completely unacceptable for a modern tablet.
- dman 12y ago
  How much RAM does the Ipad have?
  - dagw 12y ago
    Does it matter? The normal usage patterns for Windows (and OS X) is very different and requires more RAM than the typical usage patterns on an iOS devices
  - mikeash 12y ago
    Current iPads have 1GB of RAM. They also constantly evict background applications and even backgrounded tabs in the web browser. Switching browser tabs on iOS is always a gamble as to whether it'll reload the page or not. This makes it impossible to, for example, write a comment in one tab while referencing some material in a different one with any kind of reliability. iOS is extremely memory efficient but it comes at a cost which can be quite high for some.
    - ZanyProgrammer 12y ago
      The iPad Air 2 is the first iOS device with 2 GB of RAM, I believe.
      - mikeash 12y ago
        Whoops, clearly I'm a bit behind the times. Thanks to both of you for the updated info.
    - knweiss 12y ago
      The iPad Air 2 has 2 GB RAM.
- Someone1234 12y ago
  Indeed. I currently only have Chrome, Outlook, and Lync open and am using 4.2 GB of RAM. Over half of that is Chrome alone. Now, granted, the OS does use more RAM has availability increases (I have 16 GB) however Chrome is a beast no matter what.
falcolas 12y ago
If I recall correctly, the memory reported as being used by the OS includes disk caches. I'd also want at least 4GB, though, if I'm running a full windows install and want to multi-task.
cwyers 12y ago
It feels like the Surface 3 is coming out a few months too early in some respects, as the disk space improvements in Windows 10 are going to make it a lot more palatable on the $499 model: http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/03/16/how-windows-10-achieves-its-compact-footprint/ http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/03/16/how-wind...
- drzaiusapelord 12y ago
  This is my feeling as well. I just don't want a Windows 8 machine. Its clear it was a transition OS full of compromise, half cooked ideas, and a "lets just ship" mentality, which MS had to embrace considering it was practically a non-player in the mobile space in 2012. I'm hoping 10 comes out with a more refined understanding of modern OS expectations, especially when your OS is both a desktop and mobile OS. I find it amusing that 8 came out with this large install size when SSDs were becoming the norm. I guess Redmond can't move fast enough to avoid this outcome. They saw 1TB drives being the norm in 2009-2010-ish when they started this project and couldn't pivot fast enough to stop it. Now things like the sxs folder being 20gb is the norm. Or still defaulting to a 1996-like "make your swap file twice 2x your RAM size" mentality. I have 16gb of RAM. I sure as hell don't need a 32gb swap file. The only reason I have a swap file is because DirectX seems to expect one for many games, so I have a token 512mb one just for gaming. No other application expects one. MS really needs to contemporize with Win10. There's just way too much legacy cruft in 7 and 8. Win8 on that sexy Surface hardware is like driving your Ferarri on a dirt road.
  - MichaelGG 12y ago
    The Windows memory model is different. With some OSes, you can happily over allocate and everything's great. Malloc won't fail, and so long not every page ends up being touched, you're fine. But as soon as you go over, bam OOM killer. On Windows, every allocation gets reserved by actual memory, so it's easier to run into a situation where you would start failing malloc. So having swap is more important. Also, I think that anonymous mmap is backed by the pagefile. So anything using mmap without specifying a file is going to increase your pagefile needs.
  - 12y ago
stinos 12y ago
128GB minimum storage? You'd have to be installing like a lot of software then? Even my main development machines (2 Visual Studio versions, 2 Matlab versions, 2 Labview versions, Office and utilities) only take 70-80GB. I think a more typical user like my mom who only uses a browser, office and some utilities would be just fine with 64GB for Windows and software. Also a bare Windows 10 install uses about 1 GB of ram after startup so there is some room to play with. Not that I'd ever buy something running full Windows and only has 2GB of ram, nor ever recommend it, just pointing out that depending on who is going to use it this machine might effectively do the trick.
- Someone1234 12y ago
  > 128GB minimum storage? You'd have to be installing like a lot of software then? Nope. Windows grows over time. So a Windows install that fit into 40 GB would grow to over 100 GB over a two or three years. Heck we had to pull an entire rack of servers because the idiots that set them up partitioned the drive into a 100 GB C: and a massive D:, and Windows consumed all the space on C: just through Windows Update and then started falling over. We had to rebuilds the machines with a 200 GB C: and they have been running fine ever since.
  - Spearchucker 12y ago
    Err I'm running Windows 8 on a 32Gb HP Stream 7. Heaps of music, and 3 movies, and the recovery partition and still have 17GB free. What causes your install to grow so much?
    - Someone1234 12y ago
      Windows Update mostly.
      - bhauer 12y ago
        And you can clean that stuff up with the disk cleanup app. You don't need to retain those old install files forever.
slantyyz 12y ago
>> That 2 GB, 64 GB model just looks painful to use. That really depends on your use case. I've been using the Asus Vivotab Note 8 for several months (2gb/64gb), and I haven't even come close to feeling a need to put an SD card in it yet. I use it as a complement to my laptop. Mostly for consumption, communication and note-taking with OneNote. I don't think you'd want to do any heavy lifting on an Atom-based machine -- you'd be better off with a Pro in that case. I'd love to see Microsoft release a Surface Mini with that Surface Pen. Having a Wacom pen on my Vivotab is great, except at the edges.
rayiner 12y ago
I'm running Word, Outlook, and several chrome tabs on Win 7 and I'm at 2.7gb. This is a tablet, not a desktop replacement.
BinaryIdiot 12y ago
> I've seen a lot of Windows installs use up more than 64 GB Windows installs themselves or with other software installed? The latter makes sense but I've never seen anywhere close in the former. 32GB would be a bad idea but 64GB I think is fine for the majority of people.
- vacri 12y ago
  I find it a bit disturbing that giving an operating system 32GB would be considered too small. I've not played with win8, but my win7 install started out at 20GB, and damned if I can figure out what consumes all that space out of the box.
  - BinaryIdiot 12y ago
    > I find it a bit disturbing that giving an operating system 32GB would be considered too small. I've not played with win8, but my win7 install started out at 20GB, and damned if I can figure out what consumes all that space out of the box. I just don't think 32GB is big enough in general minus some space for the OS but I don't think I've had the same type of issue as you. The majority of my OS installs have been roughly 10GB which isn't far off from iOS and might include some restore stuff. But it's also been a while since I checked.
cc438 12y ago
Windows' use of WinSXS and RAM scales with the available capacity. That behavior with WinSXS particularly irks me as it implies acknowledgment that most of those files are unnecessary, yet there's nothing you can do to combat the cancerous tumor that grows in a 128-256gb partition. I've found 2gb to be perfectly usable with Win7 and 8, Chrome's voracious appetite for memory would be a sticking point, except I've noticed that it does a better job of managing itself when RAM is limited. Chrome runs just fine on 1gb Chromebooks despite having just 768-512mb available most of the time. I will say that the Atom processor is a concern with Chrome even though I know the latest versions are roughly 2-3x more powerful than the Pineview dual core I had in my old Dell netbook. Chrome routinely maxed out the processor on every page load while Firefox and IE never needed more than 25% of the available CPU horsepower. Tripling the available power would eliminate the 5 second lockups I experienced but it could still be a slow, stuttery user experience.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
Joeri 12y ago
I have a 32 GB asus t100, with a 32 GB SD card, and have about 15 GB free overall despite a full complement of software. 64 GB is doable, especially now that they've changed things so you're not losing space to a recovery partition. Doable, but not great, just like the 2 GB RAM. I may end up replacing my t100 with the 128 GB surface 3, especially given the small price difference.
ChicagoDave 12y ago
I would rate this as a simple-use tablet, not to be used for complex tasks like development with 20 apps open. So if you need it for office apps, email, web surfing, and then a few simple-use apps, you're going to be okay. And the SD slot allows you to add 64gb more space. It's pretty much a student machine. Not Pro. If you're a Pro, then buy a Pro or get a MacBook Pro and VM Windows. But as just a tablet, this is _close_ to a great deal (I think they can do better and probably will drop the price by the holidays).
JimA 12y ago
The WinSXS bloat has been fixed in the latest versions, so the disk space required for an OS is more or less static now, barring any new functionality that requires new files.

imaginenore 12y ago

For $500 I can get a real ultrabook. Like Dell XPS 11 2560 x 1440 display 4GB RAM 128GB SSD http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/665236/Dell-XPS-11-XPS18-9091CFB-2/ http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/665236/Dell-XPS-11-XPS...

dman 12y ago
Not a very fair comparision since at this point that laptop is EOL'ed and its original price is 1199.
- josefresco 12y ago
  Oddly, I ventured out to find the current price of the XPS 11 and Dell doesn't even publish it. You have to call for pricing (oh how Dell has changed). The XPS 12 starts at 149 so I'm assuming the 11 is a bit lower? http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-11-9p33/pd?p=xps-11-9p33&view=pdetails&isredir=true http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-11-9p33/pd?p=xps-11-9p33&view=p...
  - dman 12y ago
    XPS 11 is end of lifed and discontinued from what I understand.
- imaginenore 12y ago
  EOL or not, many of its specs are better. Some are worse, I admit.
falcolas 12y ago
With a shorter battery life, more than twice as heavy, and cumbersome to use in the "tablet" mode. The deep discount on the $1200 ultrabook also seems unusual, like they're having a fire sale just to get it out of stock.
- vonmoltke 12y ago
  Considering the reviews I found[1], I suspect "fire sale" is exactly what this is. [1] http://www.engadget.com/products/dell/xps/11/ http://www.engadget.com/products/dell/xps/11/