It’s fair to say that Microsoft’s Surface didn’t get the reception the company was hoping for. The tablet debuted last October and tanked shortly thereafter, thanks to an overly ambitious price point, poor software selection, and the myriad issues surrounding Windows 8. In late May, Microsoft put the tablet on sale at its own TechEd conference, with Surface going for $100 and Surface Pro for $399. Now, Redmond is extending a significant discount program to educational institutions.
The Surface (tablet only) will sell for $199. The Touch Cover takes the price to $249, while the Type Cover will go for $289. One point of confusion is that Microsoft is offering this price to institutions, not individual students. Presumably it’s an offer that schools can extend to their own student bodies, but it’s not clear if MS is requiring up-front bulk purchases or putting other restrictions on the transactions. Regular students can take advantage of a free Touch or Type Cover offer that MS is offering at the moment, if you’re willing to pay full price.
No matter what spin it might try to put on things, Microsoft is rather obviously dumping unsold Surface hardware at firesale prices rather than carrying it around — but at $199, Surface is actually a pretty good buy. No, it won’t break speed records, but it’s easy to carry around, the screen quality is excellent, and it’s a capable media player if you don’t need MKV support. I wouldn’t buy a Touch Cover for any significant typing needs — they’re incredibly stiff and hard to use — but the Type Cover was reportedly better in this regard.
Surface RT worked really well for reading the news and video/audio playback. Having access to Windows Explorer was occasionally handy, even if there’s no “desktop” software to speak of. The fact that it ships with a Metro version of Office isn’t the huge endorsement it would be on a different platform — you won’t want to do a lot of content creation on Surface, period. However, it’s a bonus if you want a device that’s capable of handling advanced documents and with Office compatibility.
As for the reason MS may be dumping Surface RT stock now, that’s not hard to guess. Either the company is going to pivot away from ARM altogether, or it’ll take another crack at introducing an RT tablet. Hopefully, it’ll be the latter. Getting ARM up and running on Windows was a smart long-run move for Microsoft. The ARM SoCs available in 2013 are significantly stronger than the Tegra 3-based Surface RT that Microsoft used for the first-generation device; a second-generation Surface RT could easily outpace Intel’s 32nm Clover Trail and challenge AMD’s Kabini/Temash architecture.
