He was a huge fan of the Surface 1 when most other people were calling it terrible, so this is not in any way surprising and not an indication that Surface 2 is likely to do any better than Surface 1.
The problem is that while Surface is an amazing device for people like him, there are very very few people like him to sell them to. "A mobile drawing machine I can also play games on" is just not a mass-market demand.
I was a Microsoft intern last summer. They gave all the interns a Surface Pro at the end of the internship. As a student, I've used my Surface to dodge any use of paper this semester. OneNote + Wacom stylus is a great combo.
Friend of mine got a similar experience with a galaxy note 8.0, for much cheaper. Add a keyboard case and you can write papers on it too. Runs faster than her netbook or her iPhone.
Galaxy Note 8 does not run Matlab, Mathematica, AutoCad, Visual Studio, LaTeX, Linux, Virtual Machines, or any of the stuff that I used throughout my college life.
Being a student is _more_ than just taking notes in class. First and foremost, I need to be able to do my homework... and for an Engineer, that also means being able to use high-powered mathematical programs.
I think he means running linux using a vm. Possibly with vagrant for dev/testing purposes. As far a I now there isn't a general purpose vm for android/arm.(There are some javascript x86 emulators with linux and probably something else but I don't know how easy it is to use for developmnt). android by default doesn't have even a minimal linux cmdline toolset although you can install it.
But not necessarily the Vim / Shell / Apache / MySQL environment which is very useful to Computer Engineers. At least, that sort of stuff is not easily done on a (non-rooted) Android Tablet yet.
Well that is a relatively specialized requirement. For most students their computer is email, web, photos on the web, facebook, word processors, textbooks and some light spreadsheets. More specialized students can spend $800 more to get something like the surface pro 2.
* Graphic Designers require Photoshop... maybe Maya, 3d Studio Max or Blender as well.
* Other art majors will benefit from pretty much anything in the Adobe Suite: not just Photoshop, but Premier, After Effects (for Video Editing).
* I'd bet that a Communications major would use the same tools as art majors / graphic designers use.
* Architecture majors require CAD of some kind. Ditto with Landscape Architecture majors, Civil Engineers and Mechanical Engineers. Building homes and testing how they look like in virtual environments: turns out to be useful ya know?
* Everyone in the Biology field uses some form of statistical software. (The one that was big in my school was SAS, but IIRC there are lots of competitors)
* Actually, to hammer the above point even more, any subject that ever touches upon advanced statistics more or less requires training in SAS. So not only Math/Statistics majors, but Business, Sociology, Psychology, Economics, Health Policy (with potential applications into nursing...)... a lot of people use SAS.
* Any "lab" science practically requires Labview. Be it Physics, Chemistry, or Materials.
Basically, every major except English in the top 10 list requires advanced programs that run on Laptops. For many of these purposes, I guess a $2000 Macbook Pro would be usable... but the $899 Surface 2 just seems like a better buy in comparison.
IIRC, even English majors touch upon specialized software in the form of Library Management Systems, but I'm not very familiar with those.
I was, too. I take it to class every day. I used to not take notes at all, but now I do because it's easy. I have all my lecture notes for the whole semester right there. A tablet at a Surface RT pricepoint with a Wacom digitizer will storm the student market.
I agree that Mike is not necessarily an indicator of overall market acceptance, but then again he isn't really representative of that.
I post these because, despite my own preference for Apple, he represents a very specific demographic of power users and his opinion is very well thought out.
He's more of an average Joe than a power-user. Maybe my definition is wrong, but I think one of the qualifiers for being a power user is knowing how computers work. He admits in the review that he doesn't really know anything about computers unless it has to do with making awesome cartoons.
I'd argue that not being a power user is what makes him such a good spokesman for Microsoft.
I define "power user" by what they do, not what they understand. I consider him a "power user" because his workflow goes beyond the standard browse the web, send email, write some Word documents. He uses a suite of programs specific to his profession and has a workflow situated around those programs and the OS.
