iPad 4 128GB vs. Surface Pro
The cat is out of the bag and Apple is here to cure your storage short comings, at a premium for sure. Doug did us all a favor and explained the specifics of the new comer. Starting February 5th, the mighty fruit tablet will go on sale in its new 128GB configuration for $799 wifi and $929 for the Cellular option. Now then, at $929, I refuse to believe and extra 64GB of storage is justified for anyone! Why not just enjoy the 64GB and learn to adopt a could base solution, with Skydrive, Dropbox and Apple’s own iCloud, there are plenty of options to go around.
But here is where the 128GB iPad 4 starts to loose its shine, the Surface pro weighs in at 64GB of storage, full Ultrabook spec with an i5 processor and 4GB of RAM, an included pen and full blown Windows operating system (Windows 8) all starting at $899! Do you see something wrong with this picture? Sure, the Surface pro starting configuration is half of the available memory of the iPad 128GB, sure it also lacks the data connection option, but for the functionality, this thing is placed very competitively.
So how do they stack up? Well, just know that with the iPad you get that famous “instant on” ability because of its ARM architecture nature, a crap load of apps and a nicely designed super thin device. On the surface side, you get full functionality of a PC with the ability to run legacy and power user apps, a super think design for an Ultrabook and a pen!
What would you pick?
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Doesn’t Windows 8 with EFI offer the instant on functionality as well? After all, we are talking about resuming from a standby state, not from a cold boot. If we are talking about cold boot, the iPad would be smoked by the surface pro easily. Given that, I think your last paragraph about the iPad having instant on over the Surface Pro is mute at best.
I agree with you till an extent, even from a standby state, the machine will take 3-5 seconds to reach login. Although still fast, its not as fast as rt or iPad.
That then brings us to something I forgot to mention, battery life. The arm machines will enjoy many times the battery life…. One more thing to consider. Plus the push notifications, surface pro will not support those either.
Apple is clearly scared. On one side they are hammered with cheap Android Tablets, which are closing the gap between iPads and Androids sales. Now with Surfaces (RT and Pro) and some of the higher end Android tablets like Transformer, Galaxy Tab, Lenovo Tablets and Yoga, Nexus line, Kindle HD, Nook HD, the lead of Apple iPads is going to be very minimal. And now they have poor sales of MBAs (that’s why they along with BB ran a $200 off of MBAs over the last weekend) and downward stock outlook is making them to bring on iPads more frequently with minimal changes. iPad 4th gen little updates and a newer connector released at the same time as Surface RT and now iPad 4th Gen with 128 GB just before Surface Pro. Of course Surface Pro is full fledged computer and iPad is a companion device.
Enjoy the 23GB of free space on your surface ‘pro’ while I have well over 100GB of free storage to fill on my next iPad. I travel over 50% of the year. That means for over 180 days out of the year, I’m not at my house AT ALL. I have to have as much stuff in as compact a device as possible. I *WILL* be trading my 64GB 3rd Gen iPad for an ATT 4G 128GB 4th Gen as soon as I get back from my next trip in a month.
FACT.
Doesn’t the Surface Pro have a SD card slot? The RT does. I don’t know what a 64GB SD card costs, but it can’t be much…
Ever tried to run apps off an SD card before? It’s inherently a bad idea. For one, SD cards only have so many write cycles before they eat themselves, and that’s only after you get past their insanely slow read and write capabilities. For photos, audio and video, that’s fine, but when you’re talking an entire file system running under windows, an SD card is just not going to be a great storage solution.
Have fun with that.