Not so tough times for Microsoft and Surface

Microsofts not dead yet folks. Where are the Three Amigos when you need them.

.Microsoft has sold 400,000 Surface Pros since launch, according to a Bloomberg report.
That's not a bad start for a very pricey tablet -- starting at $899 -- considering that the Windows 8-based Pro launched only about a month ago.

More at the source

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57574468-75/microsoft-surface-pro-sales-hit-400k-in-a-hurry/

 

[chrisa]

What can i say.. I'm multi-talented :>.

As per the reference on the BOM'd out number for the iPad Mini.. refer to:

Apple's iPad Mini margins run between 40% and 55% - Computerworld_

The $300-400 was just a guesstimation on my part. If its higher than that, I would be very shocked. I also forgot to factor in if people got the extended warranty(which often is pure profit).

And anybody can tell you the iPad does not compete with the Surface Pro as long as they understand the capabilities of each device. They're two entirely different markets based on whether or not you want to be able to run as a laptop with all the functionality of a full PC while preserving all the functionality of a tablet.

You're a marketing pro ?

I thought you were a windows programmer, as well as an economics professor.

 

[BillWindows]

Be fascinating to see what uncle Tim produces from up his sleeve. You might be surprised.

I thought you and Ray8 were Windows lovers, you seem to be more interested in what Apple does or might do than what Microsoft does.
I think Uncle Tim might be peeing in his pants right now, he's being attacked by Samsung and Microsoft at the moment. That's the reason he sent his mad little mate Phyllis Diller out to bad mouth Android and the Galaxy S4 the other day.

Everything they're doing is defensive, I don't think they've got anything left in the tank, they're iPad4 sales dropped by nearly 6 million in one month.

Oh yeah, Windows phone sales seem to be going up at a reasonable amount as well. The Apple world is shrinking.

 

[chrisa]

The reality is that the vast majority of people do not need or want a tablet that is a full blown computer. It's almost a niche market. It might be a reasonably sized niche market, but niche none the less.

You know what we call a niche market that sells 400K devices at $1k+ per in the US alone in its first month(not including OEM sales)?

A very profitable market. The whole point is to make money and Microsoft just made a ton of it, with a lot more on the way as they open up territories and start getting traction with the new device line. At what point will you stop calling it niche? 1mil devices a month? 2?

The only problem that Apple is facing has been created by Samsung who have laid down the gauntlet with 7"-8" tablets, which have created huge interest in a smaller form-factor tablet. Add to that large mobile phones like the S III and IV, that are pretty capable in themselves, and the portable market is covered.

Oh, thats the only problem eh? Not the fact that the original ipad is winding down and going to be bounced out of the form-factor by the Surface Pro?

So that also creates a problem for Microsoft, as no one is going to be interested in a 7" Windows Pro tablet. What can you effectively do with it? You'll have a small screen, it's not going to be powerful, you won't have a good battery life etc. You might make a 7" RT, but then you're competing against an established market with more apps and peripherals than you can point a stick at.

You would make a 7" RT in a completely different casing and call it the Surface Mini. No hurry. Their mistake was they tried to do both at the same time. They should have done the Surface Pro and then once it gained traction they would have seen they needed a 7" Mini rather than a 10". Hindsight is 20-20, though. The nice part about the way it shook out though is RT really concealed the fact that the Pro was a completely different device line to those who didn't know any better. I doubt they really planned it that way, and i don't think they even had a clue how successful Pro is going to end up being. The whole thing smacks of a 'landing in a pile of s**t, and coming up smelling like a rose.'

And laptop and desktop users get ignored.

Pure laptops are officially dead in the water. I'm sure OEM's will still continue to sell to some extent, but it'll be a niche market .

Desktop is still getting love from Microsoft as all of the advancements of the touch have been carried over to it. What the Desktop really needs to survive though is to make the next big leap in capability with applications that can take advantage of that and differentiate it from Mobile processors. Something like the Xeon Phi PCI-e Teraflop cards being used in regular PC's to severely boost computational ability.

 

[chrisa]

Be fascinating to see what uncle Tim produces from up his sleeve. You might be surprised.

I thought you and Ray8 were Windows lovers, you seem to be more interested in what Apple does or might do than what Microsoft does.
I think Uncle Tim might be peeing in his pants right now, he's being attacked by Samsung and Microsoft at the moment. That's the reason he sent his mad little mate Phyllis Diller out to bad mouth Android and the Galaxy S4 the other day.

Everything they're doing is defensive, I don't think they've got anything left in the tank, they're iPad4 sales dropped by nearly 6 million in one month.

Oh yeah, Windows phone sales seem to be going up at a reasonable amount as well. The Apple world is shrinking.

Or.. as Kosh would say, 'The avalanche has allready started, its too late for the pebbles(Apple) to vote.'. They're being taken apart on all fronts. They'd better hope the Watch is a barnburner with the public. This is really going to be a year of shakeouts for the industry with winners and losers being ultimately decided. Its going to be fun.

 

[BillWindows]

Be fascinating to see what uncle Tim produces from up his sleeve. You might be surprised.

I thought you and Ray8 were Windows lovers, you seem to be more interested in what Apple does or might do than what Microsoft does.
I think Uncle Tim might be peeing in his pants right now, he's being attacked by Samsung and Microsoft at the moment. That's the reason he sent his mad little mate Phyllis Diller out to bad mouth Android and the Galaxy S4 the other day.

Everything they're doing is defensive, I don't think they've got anything left in the tank, they're iPad4 sales dropped by nearly 6 million in one month.

Oh yeah, Windows phone sales seem to be going up at a reasonable amount as well. The Apple world is shrinking.

Or.. as Kosh would say, 'The avalanche has allready started, its too late for the pebbles(Apple) to vote.'. They're being taken apart on all fronts. They'd better hope the Watch is a barnburner with the public. This is really going to be a year of shakeouts for the industry with winners and losers being ultimately decided. Its going to be fun.

As far as I know the Mickey Mouse watch is the only thing they've got left up they're sleeve.

 

[chrisa]

I thought you and Ray8 were Windows lovers, you seem to be more interested in what Apple does or might do than what Microsoft does.
I think Uncle Tim might be peeing in his pants right now, he's being attacked by Samsung and Microsoft at the moment. That's the reason he sent his mad little mate Phyllis Diller out to bad mouth Android and the Galaxy S4 the other day.

Everything they're doing is defensive, I don't think they've got anything left in the tank, they're iPad4 sales dropped by nearly 6 million in one month.

Oh yeah, Windows phone sales seem to be going up at a reasonable amount as well. The Apple world is shrinking.

Or.. as Kosh would say, 'The avalanche has allready started, its too late for the pebbles(Apple) to vote.'. They're being taken apart on all fronts. They'd better hope the Watch is a barnburner with the public. This is really going to be a year of shakeouts for the industry with winners and losers being ultimately decided. Its going to be fun.

As far as I know the Mickey Mouse watch is the only thing they've got left up they're sleeve.

Dick Tracy!



And they have the long-rumored Apple iTV (the TV itself, not just the set-top box), but they've pushed that back to 2014 based on 'low yield' or something with the device screens, so it won't help them this year while the manufacturing gets worked out.

 

[jimbo45]

The reality is that the vast majority of people do not need or want a tablet that is a full blown computer. It's almost a niche market. It might be a reasonably sized niche market, but niche none the less.

You know what we call a niche market that sells 400K devices at $1k+ per in the US alone in its first month(not including OEM sales)?

A very profitable market. The whole point is to make money and Microsoft just made a ton of it, with a lot more on the way as they open up territories and start getting traction with the new device line. At what point will you stop calling it niche? 1mil devices a month? 2?

The only problem that Apple is facing has been created by Samsung who have laid down the gauntlet with 7"-8" tablets, which have created huge interest in a smaller form-factor tablet. Add to that large mobile phones like the S III and IV, that are pretty capable in themselves, and the portable market is covered.

Oh, thats the only problem eh? Not the fact that the original ipad is winding down and going to be bounced out of the form-factor by the Surface Pro?

So that also creates a problem for Microsoft, as no one is going to be interested in a 7" Windows Pro tablet. What can you effectively do with it? You'll have a small screen, it's not going to be powerful, you won't have a good battery life etc. You might make a 7" RT, but then you're competing against an established market with more apps and peripherals than you can point a stick at.

You would make a 7" RT in a completely different casing and call it the Surface Mini. No hurry. Their mistake was they tried to do both at the same time. They should have done the Surface Pro and then once it gained traction they would have seen they needed a 7" Mini rather than a 10". Hindsight is 20-20, though. The nice part about the way it shook out though is RT really concealed the fact that the Pro was a completely different device line to those who didn't know any better. I doubt they really planned it that way, and i don't think they even had a clue how successful Pro is going to end up being. The whole thing smacks of a 'landing in a pile of s**t, and coming up smelling like a rose.'

And laptop and desktop users get ignored.

Pure laptops are officially dead in the water. I'm sure OEM's will still continue to sell to some extent, but it'll be a niche market .

Desktop is still getting love from Microsoft as all of the advancements of the touch have been carried over to it. What the Desktop really needs to survive though is to make the next big leap in capability with applications that can take advantage of that and differentiate it from Mobile processors. Something like the Xeon Phi PCI-e Teraflop cards being used in regular PC's to severely boost computational ability.

Hi there
apart from gamers (a niche market as there are other platforms now for gaming such as XBOX etc) who REALLY needs Teragaflop processing power Even in large server farms FAST I/O is probably more important and for typical people even an i3 is more than sufficient.

You see on these very Forums how people put Crazy amounts of RAM (32 GB etc) in their machines and have dual i7 processor cards and are STILL disappointed with performance - when the simple matter of replacing a spinner or two by an SSD would yield them far better results.

Desktop computing IS in terminal decline -- it will of course soldier on for a few years yet but in a hugely diminishing market -- the whole nature of work is changing -- for example Smart meters in houses for utilities can eventually generate the bills themselves and the only thing the utility company has to do is issue default notices to late or non payers -- a whole layer of office staff now have GONE (thankfully not "off shored").

There's no reason in future why the payment couldn't be sent from the BANK to THE METER instead of the company as well Now that gets rid of another set of people using desktops in a workplace-- the meter is a SMART device and there's a whole scope out their for handling the built in OS'es for these types of devices -- C'mon youngsters - there's money to be made from these types of ideas.

Computers will be probably only used in a workplace as a tool where Human intuition is required such as when very quick split decisions have to be taken on Stock trading whether to open / buy / sell / close positions etc -- a lot of this stuff can't really be done analytically but often requires "gut feel" by the trader.

I.T development / maintenance will also require "classical" computing as will forms of Engineering and content "authoring". However for other typical daily commercial jobs this market is dying faster than the Dodo. Computing is NOT disappearing -- just the types of devices that people have been used to for about the last 40 years or so.

Ms is finally embracing this new era -- not before time I might add.

Cheers
jimbo

 

[chrisa]

Be fascinating to see what uncle Tim produces from up his sleeve. You might be surprised.

I'm open to being surprised.

But you can't turn a company on a dime and unless they've been bs'ing everyone about the prospects of getting a truly touch-capable version of OS X that can work off the Air and their Mac lines, they have absolutely no design path that leads to a Convertible(nor are they likely to even be in the Prototyping stage for one given their insistance that the PC is going away). A simple incremental OS X upgrade won't cut it. And most rumors lead to a Watch(sooner) and a TV(later) being the primary new devices in the pipeline.

Their entire development model is predicated on the PC being a dead system in favor of mobile and new device lines. If thats not the case, and Microsoft is able to move mobile PC's with all the functionality of a tablet and being touch-capable, they're in real trouble because they've left their PC's out to rot. They allready have enough to deal with from Samsung as it pertains to cellular phones.

Even Google is making noise and indications that they may start to move to a more fully-functional PC to compete with Windows by evolving the Chrome OS beyond just web pages.

 

[jimbo45]

Be fascinating to see what uncle Tim produces from up his sleeve. You might be surprised.

I'm open to being surprised.

But you can't turn a company on a dime and unless they've been bs'ing everyone about the prospects of getting a truly touch-capable version of OS X that can work off the Air and their Mac lines, they have absolutely no design path that leads to a Convertible(nor are they likely to even be in the Prototyping stage for one given their insistance that the PC is going away). A simple incremental OS X upgrade won't cut it. And most rumors lead to a Watch(sooner) and a TV(later) being the primary new devices in the pipeline.

Their entire development model is predicated on the PC being a dead system in favor of mobile and new device lines. If thats not the case, and Microsoft is able to move mobile PC's with all the functionality of a tablet and being touch-capable, they're in real trouble because they've left their PC's out to rot. They allready have enough to deal with from Samsung as it pertains to cellular phones.

Even Google is making noise and indications that they may start to move to a more fully-functional PC to compete with Windows by evolving the Chrome OS beyond just web pages.

Hi there
absolutely

Look at the new Samsung S4 !!! I WANT ONE -- and I like my SIII -- this thing will just FLY off the shelves --and it's in the market just at the right time as the economy is showing signs (at last) of turning around for a lot of people.

Apple TV is DEAD IN THE WATER -- we now have NETFLIX, HULA, SKY GO etc which don't even need set top boxes and more and more TV's are smart TV's with direct Internet connection possibilities etc. (BTW who writes the OS'es for these things --it's a TV but still has an embedded OS in it !!). So the APPLE TV device is out of date before it even appears.

SKY GO and services like that are even more flexible as they now allow you to download the movie / show and watch it OFFLINE at your own convenience for up to 30 days -- so even if you have slow broadband you can download say at night and then watch the next day (or next week -- at will).

As for SAMSUNG --look at this.

BBC News - Samsung Galaxy S4: First impressions

Anybody get the Apple Core remover out of the kitchen yet as I think we'll have a nice Apple Crumble for our dessert at Lunchtime today.



Cheers
jimbo

 

[chrisa]

Hi there
apart from gamers (a niche market as there are other platforms now for gaming such as XBOX etc) who REALLY needs Teragaflop processing power Even in large server farms FAST I/O is probably more important and for typical people even an i3 is more than sufficient.

Gaming on the PC has always been lightyears ahead of the XBOX lol.

As per who needs the processing power? We honestly don't know yet. Its just like the old saying misattributed to Gates 'Who is going to need more than 640K of ram?'. People will find uses for it. But this isn't an incremental upgrade by any means, the Xeon Phi has 50+ cores, all in the form factor of a video card brick that fits in your PCI-e slot. a Teraflop is a Trillion floating point calculations per second.

Per Wikipedia: ' a single-core 2.5-GHz processor has a theoretical performance of 10 billion FLOPS = 10 GFLOPS'

You're talking a daughterboard thats 100x faster than current systems are at number crunching. It is not incremental. What could this be used for? Advanced flight simulators, space simulators, physics implementation in MMORPG's, speeding up Rendering, speeding up Video Editing, Running your House.

Desktop computing IS in terminal decline -- it will of course soldier on for a few years yet but in a hugely diminishing market -- the whole nature of work is changing -- for example Smart meters in houses for utilities can eventually generate the bills themselves and the only thing the utility company has to do is issue default notices to late or non payers -- a whole layer of office staff now have GONE (thankfully not "off shored").

Where we disagree is with the word Terminal. Decline yes, terminal no. PC's aren't going anywhere. They simply won't be as used as they have been in the past, when that was simply the only option available. They simply need to make sure they do things that the mobile products can't. Things for which you need the size and space that the form factor of a full PC provides.

 

[jimbo45]

Hi there
apart from gamers (a niche market as there are other platforms now for gaming such as XBOX etc) who REALLY needs Teragaflop processing power Even in large server farms FAST I/O is probably more important and for typical people even an i3 is more than sufficient.

Gaming on the PC has always been lightyears ahead of the XBOX lol.

As per who needs the processing power? We honestly don't know yet. Its just like the old saying misattributed to Gates 'Who is going to need more than 640K of ram?'. People will find uses for it. But this isn't an incremental upgrade by any means, the Xeon Phi has 50+ cores, all in the form factor of a video card brick that fits in your PCI-e slot. a Teraflop is a Trillion floating point calculations per second.

Per Wikipedia: ' a single-core 2.5-GHz processor has a theoretical performance of 10 billion FLOPS = 10 GFLOPS'

You're talking a daughterboard thats 100x faster than current systems are at number crunching. It is not incremental. What could this be used for? Advanced flight simulators, space simulators, physics implementation in MMORPG's, speeding up Rendering, speeding up Video Editing, Running your House.

Desktop computing IS in terminal decline -- it will of course soldier on for a few years yet but in a hugely diminishing market -- the whole nature of work is changing -- for example Smart meters in houses for utilities can eventually generate the bills themselves and the only thing the utility company has to do is issue default notices to late or non payers -- a whole layer of office staff now have GONE (thankfully not "off shored").

Where we disagree is with the word Terminal. Decline yes, terminal no. PC's aren't going anywhere. They simply won't be as used as they have been in the past, when that was simply the only option available. They simply need to make sure they do things that the mobile products can't. Things for which you need the size and space that the form factor of a full PC provides.

Hi there
I think these will be specialized boxes rather than a "PC". This makes more sense anyway as things like flight simulators etc aren't by nature of the beast going to be very portable. Even a "VR headset" is unlikely to give you the PHYSICAL movements you need to feel when using a flight simulator.

I wasn't saying COMPUTING POWER wasn't needed -- just for the typical HOME USER of a PC the processing power of even a low end laptop exceeds whatever they are likely to do on a PC. Other devices such as Holographic stuff, 3-D, Virtual reality and all sorts of other pieces of kit that don't even have a name yet or exist only in our imaginations will of course need HUGE exponential increases in compute power - but these aren't by any definition a "PC".

Cheers
jimbo

 

[Ray8]

@chrisa

Niche markets are niche markets and they can be profitable as long as they service a specific need and there is little to no competition. To that end, is the Surface Pro an entity on its own, with nothing else in the market offering anything similar? Microsoft has suddenly created an iPad?

I also said that Apple is facing fierce competition from Samsung. The 7"-8" tablets have forced Apple to respond and their 7" tablet is eating away at the 10" iPad market. Doesn't that actually say something about the market overall? Large tablets are falling out of favour, being supplanted by smaller tablets.

Smaller tablets by default are going to be limited in capability and that is not a space for the Surface Pro and its ilk. The Surface Pro doesn't even enter into the competitive ring as far as the general consumer is concerned when it comes to tablets. The Surface RT and its ilk are in the same boat. Line up the Apple, Android and Windows RT tablets and associated apps, and see which get a dance and which ends up as a wall flower.

I have no doubt that you believe that laptops are dead, considering the other beliefs that you have stated, but I think you've put way too much faith on tablets and the Surface Pro in particular. Only time will tell.

 

[chrisa]

@chrisa

Niche markets are niche markets and they can be profitable as long as they service a specific need and there is little to no competition. To that end, is the Surface Pro an entity on its own, with nothing else in the market offering anything similar? Microsoft has suddenly created an iPad?

Yes(as in its created a new device line like Apple did with the iPad). But given its price, it doesn't have to move the same units as the iPad to justify its success. Right now there is really nothing like it on the market and it taps a segment of buyers that the iPad can't touch. The only people who go for an iPad over a SP are people that don't need the added capability that the SP provides. Likewise, those who go SP... aren't going to find the capability they need buying an iPad. Its like the difference between a compact passenger car and a pickup truck. Pickup trucks are hardly a niche market, but they do move less units than passenger cars.

I also said that Apple is facing fierce competition from Samsung. The 7"-8" tablets have forced Apple to respond and their 7" tablet is eating away at the 10" iPad market. Doesn't that actually say something about the market overall? Large tablets are falling out of favour, being supplanted by smaller tablets.

Sure. It says that 7" is the sweet spot for pure tablets. Surface Pro isn't a pure tablet though.

Smaller tablets by default are going to be limited in capability and that is not a space for the Surface Pro and its ilk.

Of course not, but then you seem to be riding the wacky bus in thinking that MSFT would release a 7" version of the Surface Pro, which implies you still don't understand the device. They'd release a 7" version of the Surface Mini(a refactored RT that could solely run the apps) to compete in that line. Surface Pro is its own thing and 10" is the ideal form factor for it and it has absolutely no competition atm.

The Surface Pro doesn't even enter into the competitive ring as far as the general consumer is concerned when it comes to tablets.

Correct. But then, its not trying to. All pure tablets will be 7" from here on out and be their own device line completely seperate from the Surface Pro. Whether the RT can be refactored to a 7" Mini and compete in that line of products remains to be seen. It certainly can't compete at 10". The market has proven that. Of course, the market is also realizing that the 10" Original iPad can't compete at that form factor either, with having an exact same version of the product at 7". One of them has to go.. and it isn't the smaller one.

I have no doubt that you believe that laptops are dead, considering the other beliefs that you have stated, but I think you've put way too much faith on tablets and the Surface Pro in particular. Only time will tell.

Laptops will still hang around for a while, and still be sold as a niche from OEM's.. but they're really going to get factored out as people replace their old clunkers and get the SP. SP is like the Macbook Air of PC's(with pretty much almost the same form factor). The ability to have the functionality of a tablet is just butter.

 

[chrisa]

Hi there
I think these will be specialized boxes rather than a "PC". This makes more sense anyway as things like flight simulators etc aren't by nature of the beast going to be very portable. Even a "VR headset" is unlikely to give you the PHYSICAL movements you need to feel when using a flight simulator.

I wasn't saying COMPUTING POWER wasn't needed -- just for the typical HOME USER of a PC the processing power of even a low end laptop exceeds whatever they are likely to do on a PC. Other devices such as Holographic stuff, 3-D, Virtual reality and all sorts of other pieces of kit that don't even have a name yet or exist only in our imaginations will of course need HUGE exponential increases in compute power - but these aren't by any definition a "PC".

I agree. For the John Doe Grunt, a mobile device works just grand for them. But I firmly believe if all that stuff you mentioned are to take off, it will more than likely be built around the PC form factor. I've said before.. the biggest thing holding back the PC atm is the bottleneck of the single CPU(mind you it can have multiple cores, but that only provides incremental increases).

What they really, really need for cards like the Xeon Phi to take off is for someone to make like a Direct P API(similar to what Direct X did for video) for interfacing to it. An API that encapsulates and provides a front end for a lot of tasks for which parallel processing is ideal so that such stuff can easily be accessed via applications. Stuff like big number manipulation(where you have numbers in the thousands of digits that require array manipulation), exotic intensive calculations of all types, etc that can be offloaded.

 

[Ray8]

@chrisa

What makes the Surface Pro unique? I have a 10" tablet that runs Windows 8 without any real issues, but I choose not to run Windows 8 after I tried it on the tablet. There are many other brands around that run Windows 8. The Surface Pro is just another tablet.

I never suggested that Microsoft would introduce a 7" tablet, merely that it would be a pointless exercise for anyone to do introduce a 7" Windows 8 tablet, for obvious reasons. You must be channelling Bill and his comprehension deficiencies, to think that's what I was suggesting.

And you now profess to know precisely what form-factor all future tablets will take and that the Surface Pro will be the only Windows 8 10" tablet on the market without competition. Pray tell, why will the Surface Pro rule over all?

Do you have any of your wacky weed to spare, it'd be interesting to see what world others live in.

 

[jimbo45]

Hi there
even a lot of the smaller tablets will be superseded by these:

Have a look at the new SAMSUNG GALAXY 4 -- I certainly WANT one -- this is probably the maximum size (5 inch screen)that you could conveniently call a "Phone" and that slight increase in screen real estate from the Galaxy IIIs - certainly not a bad phone either -- the 5 inch screen just about pushes the new phone into an area where you don't need an iPad mini (7 inch device).

That small increase in screen real estate to 5 ins. makes ALL THE DIFFERENCE --it really does. I can see myself getting one of these - and I'm NOT at all disappointed by the Galaxy IIIs either.

BBC News - Samsung Galaxy S4: First impressions

I WANT ONE !!!!!

Now we need a W8 phone to compete with this.

Bye Bye "Rotten Apples".

Cheers
jimbo

 

[Ray8]

Small company makes bold statement: Samsung's JK Shin: there's 'lackluster demand' for Windows-based phones, tablets.

 

[jimbo45]

Hi there
There's "Lacklustre" demands for Ferraris too if you go by these traditional methods of measurement.

Just because a market is small doesn't mean to say it's non existent or even not profitable.

Cheers
jimbo

 

[chrisa]

And you now profess to know precisely what form-factor all future tablets will take and that the Surface Pro will be the only Windows 8 10" tablet on the market without competition. Pray tell, why will the Surface Pro rule over all?

Keeping in mind that when I say Surface Pro, I include all OEM offshoot devices in that. By competition, I mean anything that isn't a Tablet PC(as a rule of thumb.. can it run full Photoshop?) running Windows 8 at 10". If all the competition Microsoft has is from OEM products at 10", they'll be minting money. Either from their own sales or sales of offshoots. Either way, its more Win 8 devices in the field.

And the uniqueness of the SP(or variants like it), is the ability to both replace a laptop(say Macbook Air) and a tablet(say iPad). Its like asking what the uniqueness of a phablet is? Its the merging of two devices so you only have to buy one.

And the market has allready spoken on 10" iPads and 10" pure tablets in general. Its less a factor of SP variants(allthough that doesn't help), and with the fact there is a cheaper 7" ipad model that does the same thing. People no longer need a 10" pure tablet, which is why the sales of 10" ipads are collapsing and why the sales of RT went off a cliff. The game in that segment changed.

 

[chrisa]

Hi there
even a lot of the smaller tablets will be superseded by these:

Have a look at the new SAMSUNG GALAXY 4 -- I certainly WANT one -- this is probably the maximum size (5 inch screen)that you could conveniently call a "Phone" and that slight increase in screen real estate from the Galaxy IIIs - certainly not a bad phone either -- the 5 inch screen just about pushes the new phone into an area where you don't need an iPad mini (7 inch device).

That small increase in screen real estate to 5 ins. makes ALL THE DIFFERENCE --it really does. I can see myself getting one of these - and I'm NOT at all disappointed by the Galaxy IIIs either.

BBC News - Samsung Galaxy S4: First impressions

I WANT ONE !!!!!

Now we need a W8 phone to compete with this.

Bye Bye "Rotten Apples".

Cheers
jimbo

It wouldn't be a bad idea to give any refactored Surface Mini(formerly RT) the ability to be a phablet(maybe even go with a slightly smaller form factor than 7" like Samsung did?), to further differentiate from the Pro. Samsung is doing the same thing as Microsoft and simply bridging devices, except lower down the chain with the phone and tablet.

There are actually starting to become so many devices i'm really not sure the market can support them all. Something is going to get shaken out. I could definately see Apple getting their lunch eaten from both sides as things center around phablets and convertibles and leave the pure tablet out in the cold. It just depends on if the phablets catch on or not. In all likelihood it could break down as:

Phone - Phablet - Convertible - PC.

But time will tell on that.. both the phablets and the convertibles really need to prove their markets(ipad mini allready has), and of course Apple folks are going to play stupid as to why anyone would want either. 400k + OEM sales in a month is a good start, especially given the Surface Pro is only available in the US and Canada.