Hopefully they get it right this time. The last ARM Surfaces (Surface RTs) were hot garbage, barely functional enough to do email and a little web browsing on.
Actually they were better than that. Users loved them (check out the star ratings on user reviews) and some are still in use.
The design was fundamentally flawed for other reasons, but they performed reasonably well compared to rival tablets, while also offering multiple log-ons, multi-tasking and full Microsoft Office, which those other tablets lacked. They also supported Active Directory, ditto.
Maybe I got a bad one then, but I was not real impressed with mine.
1.) Keyboard constantly flakes out and stops working - or the keyboard and touchpad works, but the touch screen stops working.
2.) Extremely limited software choices. You're stuck with whatever small subset of the garbage in the Windows Store was cross-compiled for Windows RT. Stuck with IE, no options to get Chrome or Firefox or something that works a little better.
3.) Extremely anemic performance. Mine chokes and dies trying to read email (in the godawful Metro Mail app) and browse the ticketing webapp that my company uses.
4.) Suffers the brunt of the awful Windows 8 Metro UI design changes.
5.) The operating system is effectively dead in the water, and won't be getting updates.
6.) Microsoft took a $900 million write-down on the product[1].
I haven't seen the keyboard problem. The main one I saw was a disappearing mouse pointer, which was fixed by removing and re-attaching the keyboard. Weird.
You could try a software reset for the performance problems, bearing in mind that the updates will drive you mad. Unfortunately you can't fix the slow CPU or the too-small RAM. However, the current performance should still compare reasonably with another 2012 tablet.
> The operating system is effectively dead in the water, and won't be getting updates.
Look out for Windows 10 on the Snapdragon 835 later this year ;-)
> Microsoft took a $900 million write-down on the product
Yes, I bet that hurt, even when you have the odd $100 billion in spare cash.
I agree with almost all you say, but you couldn't AD join a Surface. If that were to have been enabled by Microsoft, my conjecture is that it would have become the tablet for business as the market was still open at that point.
