It has been a long time coming, but the “day of days” has finally arrived. There’s been rumors. Speculation. Advertisements without pricing. And we’ve seen Xbox Music officially released into the wild as well, but up until today we’ve heard absolutely nothing official about what Surface RT might cost. But, the waiting is finally over, and we’re now able to see what Microsoft has been planning for so long.
But, sometimes, the rumors don’t add up, and this just happens to be one of those times.
The general belief was that Microsoft was going to price their own Surface tablet quite aggressively against the competition. During the tablet’s unveiling, they even said as much. However, it didn’t take long before the rumor mill started gushing out all sorts of interesting ideas. The best of which put the pricing for Microsoft’s custom-built tablet somewhere in the range of $200 to $300 when it finally arrived in stores later this year.
Taylor Martin asked you, quite a ways back, if you’d be willing to pick up a Surface for that price, and many of you said that you would. On the other hand, a lot of you said that you’d wait to see how well it did when compared to other tablets on the market. I think there are probably many of you out there who can guess how it might do against, say, Apple’s iPad, but hopefully only time will tell.
Earlier today, Microsoft officially announced how much the RT tablets would cost, and was even nice enough to offer up some bundles for those of you out there who are thinking about picking up the Touch keyboard at the same time. Pricing is pretty straight forward: $499 for the 32GB Surface RT without the Touch Cover; $599 for the 32GB Surface RT with the Touch Cover; and $699 for the 64GB Surface RT with Touch Cover.
Now, the most interesting part of that is the fact that there doesn’t seem to be an option to allow for someone to pre-order the 64GB Surface RT without the Touch Cover. An interesting move, sure, but one that I’m wondering isn’t the wrong one. It isn’t a big deal, more or less, but it does remove an option from customers, and we all know that customers love their options.
Pricing wise, it isn’t the bold move that we thought Microsoft might attempt, but I’m not all that surprised about that, to be honest. It’s already a bold move to see Microsoft creating their own tablet, and especially one that’s noteworthy as the Surface is. The possibility that they would price it somewhere around $200 to $300 was pretty optimistic, and even I’m not that optimistic when it comes to the mobile market.
However, $399 for the 32GB model is indeed a big step in the right direction for Microsoft. That’s undermining Apple’s new iPad by $100, and offering up 16GB more storage right out of the box. Microsoft needed to push their Surface under the iPad pricing, and it’s good that they’ve done that. That will at least give someone pause before pulling the trigger on a brand new tablet, especially when they realize that Windows 8 is powering Surface. (Even if it is “only” the RT version.)
But will it matter? As of the time of this writing, the pre-order page for Surface says that if you pre-order right now, the 32GB Surface RT without the Touch Cover will ship in three weeks. The other two models all say that if you pre-order now, you’ll receive it by October 26th. That’s the day Surface RT launches, by the way.
So, does the pricing work for Surface RT? Will it push potential customers in the direction of Microsoft’s first proprietary tablet running the brand new Windows 8? Or, will tablet owners still go for another tablet, like Apple’s iPad, even with the hike in price? Let me know what you think, Dear Reader.
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