It turns out that much of the self-laudatory hoopla wasn’t wildly off base. And if the idea left you skeptical - well, you probably won’t be won over by this initial incarnation.Īt that June Surface event - and then at a smaller press briefing at its Redmond, Wash, headquarters last week - company executives spent so much time lavishing praise on their own design choices and technical innovations that I wondered if they’d somehow convinced Apple’s Sir Jonathan Ive to tutor them. If you were excited by Surface based on its unveiling in June of this year, I think there’s a good chance you’ll be excited by the shipping product. Microsoft provided me with a unit for this review, and I’ve been using it for a little over a week. It starts at $499 for a 32GB model: the same opening price as the current full-sized iPad, but with double the storage. Surface for Windows RT goes on sale at Microsoft Stores and some temporary pop-up retail outlets, and at, this Friday. As such, they’re the clearest possible expression of where the company thinks the PC should go. But they’re also PCs - the first ones which Microsoft has created on its own in its 37-year-history. (One, Surface with Windows RT, runs Windows RT, the version for devices based on ARM technology the other, Surface with Windows 8 Pro, uses full-blown Windows 8 and isn’t due until early next year.) They’re iPad competitors, and that’s important. In June of this year, the company unveiled Surface, a pair of tablets it designed from scratch.

It could also make suggestions to its hardware-manufacturing partners, But it couldn’t, you know, try to build the PC of the future.

Sure, it could write a new operating system. A wildly ambitious attempt - maybe even a visionary one.īut for all Microsoft’s power and influence over the PC industry, it was in no place to reinvent the PC single-handedly. Instead, with its radically new, touch-centric interface, it was an attempt to reimagine the PC for the post-PC era.

Follow Microsoft first demoed Windows 8 at the Wall Street Journal‘s D Conference in June 2011, it was instantly obvious that it wasn’t a Windows upgrade in the conventional sense.

Microsoft tablet computer