I don’t know what MS seem to be up to but bringing out the new Surface ONLY on an Arm processor and stating that the new flagship MS hardware won’t run WINDOWS programmes (like Cubase) seems to me to be like shooting yourself in the foot.
Granted the Surface pro (out in three months) will actually have a real processor and will, it seems, be a very powerful laptop/tablet. I may get one if I feel flush, but so many people are going to get the first Arm type and find that there favourite applications are not going to run. I guess th press will slate it.
Seems to me like a giant mobile phone!
Win 8 seems to start making sense if you have a Surface type of machine has both touch and keyboard. Logically I can see the ‘best of both worlds’ thing going on, but there is a bit of a schizm in the software. For example I understand the two versions of IE10 dont actually speak to eachother (the app version and the application version).
Also theboot security features seem to need new firmware and many other security features are bypassed by current applicatrions (I read this somewhere but am no expert).
I just don’t get it really. I could understand it better if the Surface pro was available now with a real CPU
I wonder what Cubase 7 will look like on this operating system?
The current Surface is much in line with other tablets on the market already. All Android and Apple tablets can’t run real PC/Mac software either. The only competition the i5 surface has is the ASUS Transformer which does run on ‘real’ windows.
As far as I know, this first surface was never going to be a PC replacement, it was going to be a tablet like all other tablets: One that runs content made for it.
It is possible to install a desktop Linux on several Android devices and many standard applications will just run fine (Gimp etc). Ubuntu, Arch and several others have native ARM versions in their depositories. This is the magic of open source - if you have all sources then you can just recompile everything for a different platform and it works (at least in theory).
I’ve tried this with Ubuntu on my HP-Touchpad. While this worked remarkable well from a technical standpoint it was a frustrating user experience when I tried to actually do something useful with the device. Desktop software just doesn’t work very well with touch devices. Attaching a bluetooth mouse and keyboard helped but this really felt like cheating.
the present surface is the budget surface
the surface Pro will have win8 pro on it and an i5 processor. not some cheesy tegra/atom or soc chip.
in other words finally a tablet that can run real programs on a real OS and transfer your work back an forth from tablet to desktop…
showing up in 3 months…
I think the Surface Pro will be fantastic. Much better than all that iCra*p nonsense. Being able to run proper programs is huge for me. I also think that once any initial kinks of Windows 8 have been ironed out, it will be fantastic.
ok ipad spec’s (or android tablets) are VASTLY less than the surface Pro you cant even compare the 2
one you can install apps on the other real programs…
one a bogus processor the other a real one.
more storage, more ram… in other words the surface pro is a laptop cramed into a tablet space… HUGE difference fanbois… and the price is only $300 more than an ipad…
No, it was a serious question. I have a tablet and I use it for many different things. But I never even use the available power of my ARM tablet for these things and I can’t image any realistic scenario where I might need more power except maybe games.
Of course I have jobs that need more juice but all these jobs either require lots of external gear too what makes a tablet totally pointless or it requires much more fine control than a tiny screen with big fingers can offer (image manipulation. 3D animation, video processing, audio editing etc.).
The biggest problem is the tiny screen and the huge control device (finger), not the processor. You will not be able to control any regular desktop application on a 200 dpi screen with your finger alone. Even a mouse will be very fiddly at these high resolutions. So this will leave you alone with all the RT apps from the app store that will run just as fine on the lower powered (but highly specialized) ARM devices.
If you plan to attach a mouse and a keyboard anyway then I’d suggest that you get a regular notebook for half the price with even more power. Wait a few years until the app store has reached a usable level of professional audio apps with touch support and invest in a Windows tablet then.
I too might be tempted to use the Surface pro. I had a transformer running Android and got rid of it. Itr seems to be for people that want to keep up with the weather in kentucky or order a pizza locally, or follow the celeb gossip. In other words someone from a completely alien planet.
This seems to be the thing about these tablet jobs they seem to be their to fufil lifes trivia rather than serious apps.
I also recently installed Ubuntu on my desktop but I could not find the drivers for my sound (Focvusrite liquid 56) so that was then end of that experiment. I thought I might surf more safely with Linux.
The Computing world seems to be fragmenting into lots of operating systems I wonder where that will leave Cubase?
Would you want Cubase on an Ipad mini? Or maybe even your phone? Cubase 7? where will it go?