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Comment by SoftwareMaven | Hacker News Reader

I'm not convinced Surface Pro is going to be a hit. I think it will be too close to "laptop" to convince people to purchase it over an ultrabook. With its Intel processor, it will be faster, but heavier, hotter and will likely have worse battery life.

I think the decision process will then be "is the touch screen and a little less weight worth giving up the performance of a real laptop?" And (as much as I love my tablet), I think the answer to that won't be a resounding "yes".

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Do you honestly think one of the largest players in this market (and arguably, the smartest) would release a tablet that's heavier, hotter, and with worse battery life than an Ultrabook? Have you even looked at the specifications of the Surface Pro?

Microsoft knows exactly what they're doing. And I agree, due to it's similarity to a conventional laptop, they won't sell as much as they could. That being said, the Surface Pro is a bad-ass piece of machinery, and probably going to be hard to beat any time soon.

Aside from those points, I agree with what you said. From my perspective though, who in their right mind wouldn't want a tablet with a dual-core hyperthreaded Core i5 with 4GB of RAM and a beautiful 1080p screen?

I think the patent post probably meant hotter with worse battery life than other tablets.

I would want a tablet with a core i5, 4gb ram and a 1080 screen, IF it still feels light, runs cool, and battery lasts as long as an iPad.

No way the battery's going to last as long as an iPad...

Do you honestly think one of the largest players in this market (and arguably, the smartest) would release a tablet that's heavier, hotter, and with worse battery life than an Ultrabook?

How exactly do you figure that Microsoft is one of the largest players in the tablet market? PC market, yes, but they're a late new comer to the modern tablet world.

Now as far as asking whether they would release a tablet that runs hot and has poor battery life -- I don't know, would they release a tablet that suffers from 5+ second delays while typing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTtf_BgFS08 ?

I see the confusion. When I said heavier, hotter, and worse battery life, I meant as compared to the current Surface. I would expect Surface Pro to land somewhere right in the middle of Surface and an ultrabook. People already ask the question, "Is a tablet worth the tradeoff?" In this case, the positives will be less than they are now.

I'd have to agree with this assessment. I'm not sure where they got the idea from that people actually want to do work on these machines. I actually like the surface with metro UI purely as a tablet - the snap in keyboard is super convenient but I struggle to think of enough use cases where I would have it snapped in for more than 5 minutes - let alone fire up word or excel.

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