So Microsoft opened up preorders for the Surface on Tuesday. $499 for the 32GB model, bare tablet, no keyboard. Slap on the Touch Cover and you're at $599. It ships October 26th, same day Windows 8 actually goes on sale, and I have been staring at the order page for two days now with my cursor hovering over the button and I still haven't clicked it.
Here's my problem. Nobody has actually used one of these things yet. Not really. Microsoft did that stage demo back in June where the guy snapped the kickstand out and everyone clapped, and there have been a few hands-on blurbs from press events since, but there isn't a single real review out there. Not one. You're being asked to hand over five hundred bucks, sight unseen, for a tablet running an operating system most people have never touched, made by a company that has approximately zero track record building its own hardware. (Yes I know about the Zune. I'm trying not to think about the Zune.)
And the Windows RT thing is going to trip people up, I'm pretty sure of it. This is the ARM version — Surface RT, running on a Tegra 3 chip — which means it will NOT run your old desktop programs. No Photoshop, no iTunes, none of your existing Win32 stuff. It runs the new tile-y Metro apps and that's basically it, plus a special build of Office that comes bundled in (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, all preview versions). There's a second Surface coming in a few months, the Pro one, running actual Intel chips that can run real Windows software, but that one's not out till next year and will cost more. So right now you've got two products with almost the same name and wildly different capabilities, launching months apart, and I guarantee you my mother is going to buy the wrong one for my dad at Christmas.
I'm not saying don't buy it. I'm saying wait like two weeks. Let somebody else be the one who finds out the hard way that their favorite peripheral doesn't have RT drivers. I'll happily read their blog post about it.
Honestly the bigger tech story of the week for me wasn't even a product announcement, it was watching Felix Baumgartner jump out of a balloon capsule from something like 128,000 feet up on Sunday. I had the YouTube stream open in a tab at my desk most of the afternoon, half working, half refreshing, and when he actually stepped off the thing froze on me for a solid ten seconds because apparently I was one of about eight million people trying to watch the same feed at once. Eight million. Concurrently. On one stream. I've never seen anything like that happen on the internet before, honestly, not for a live thing that wasn't a scheduled TV broadcast being simulcast. It buffered, it dropped resolution down to something embarrassing for about a minute, and it held. That's the story nobody's really writing about, not the jump itself, everybody's covered that to death already, but the fact that live video on the internet just quietly proved it can handle an audience that size without completely falling over. Compare that to, I don't know, trying to stream anything live back in like 2009. It would have died.
Anyway. Two very different kinds of "we can actually do this now" moments in the same week, one of them cost half a billion dollars in balloon and pressure suit R&D and the other cost Microsoft a marketing budget and a kickstand hinge. I know which one I'm more excited about, and it's not the tablet.
If you did preorder a Surface already, tell me. I'm curious whether anyone in my circle jumped on it or if everyone's doing the same wait-and-see thing I am. I'll probably fold and buy one eventually, I always do, I just want to see one person's actual typing experience on that Touch Cover before I commit half a paycheck to finding out it feels like typing on a mousepad.