So today's the day Windows 8 actually goes on sale, and I did the thing I said I wasn't going to do, which is go stand in an actual Microsoft Store on my lunch break just to poke at a Surface. There's one in the mall near my office that opened a few months back, and it was busier than I expected for 12:30 on a Friday. Not "iPhone line around the block" busy, but busy.
Here's the thing that's bugging me and I don't think it's just me. The tablet on the table is called Surface. Fine. But ask the guy behind the counter what's actually running on it and he says "Windows RT," and if you ask him what that means compared to the Windows 8 laptops two tables over, you get a pause and then some version of "it's basically the same but different." I watched him give that same non-answer to two other people in the twenty minutes I was there.
It is not basically the same. The Surface RT cannot run your old desktop programs. Not Photoshop, not iTunes, not that weird accounting tool your dad's been using since 2004. It only runs apps from the Windows Store, plus the copy of Office that comes preloaded (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, sitting there in a desktop mode that looks exactly like real Windows and absolutely is not going to install your printer driver). Meanwhile a Windows 8 Pro machine, which looks nearly identical from six feet away, runs everything a Windows 7 box would. Same tile screen, same price range even, wildly different capability, and Microsoft picked the one branding move guaranteed to bury that difference. RT doesn't even stand for anything customer-facing, it's short for the ARM chip architecture the thing runs on, which is not information a person buying a tablet for their mom needs to be doing detective work on.
I'm not going to pretend the hardware is bad. The kickstand is genuinely clever, the Touch Cover clicks on with a satisfying little magnet snap, and the whole thing feels more solid than I expected for something that starts at $499 (32GB, no cover, add the Touch Cover and you're at $599). The screen's fine. Typing on the cover is worse than a real keyboard and better than glass, which is about where I figured it would land.
But I keep coming back to the naming thing because I think it's going to cause real support headaches around the holidays, when someone's aunt gets a Surface as a gift expecting it to run the same stuff as her laptop and it just... doesn't. There were already a couple of return-worthy complaints about this exact confusion from reviewers who got units early, and I don't think that's going away once actual non-tech people start unwrapping these in December.
Also, small aside, but does anyone else find the whole Start-screen-replacing-Start-menu thing more jarring on a desktop monitor than it is on the tablet? On the Surface it feels native, obviously, it's a touchscreen and the big tiles make sense with a finger. On the demo desktop machine next to it, with a mouse, clicking a giant tile to open Control Panel felt like using a kiosk at the DMV. I know you can still get to a real desktop, I know keyboard shortcuts exist, I know power users will adapt in a week. I'm just saying the store demo did not make a great case for itself to anyone who wasn't already sold.
I didn't buy anything. I did buy a coffee from the place two doors down that has started doing a maple thing for fall that is honestly too sweet, and I drank half of it walking back to work while thinking about how weird it is that "the operating system" used to just be one thing you didn't have to think about, and now there are apparently two Windows 8s and you have to read the box carefully to know which one you're getting. Anyway. Back to actual work now.