The result is Surface 3, as well as a mobile-broadband version, Surface 3 (4G LTE). It’s the thinnest and lightest Surface we’ve ever shipped. It runs full Windows, including desktop applications. It includes a one-year subscription to Office 365 to help you really get down to work. And it starts at just $499.
I was genuinely excited when I read about this Surface 3. I actually really like the Surface concept, but the Surface Pro 3 is simply too powerful (and thus, too expensive) for my specific workload (minor translation work, proofreading, watching some videos, some browsing, that sort of thing). A quad-core Intel Atom Surface with proper Windows (x86-64!) seems like a perfect machine for me, and the price, too, looked great: $499 for the basic model, and another $129 for the keyboard (even if Microsoft does not know how to red).
And then I saw the European prices. Oh boy. The basic model is a whopping €609, and the keyboard is another €155. That’s insane, and utterly ruins the value proposition for the Surface 3 in Europe.
Great device, terrible, terrible pricing.
500$USD = 640$CAD. They didn’t do their homework properly like with the 1st wave of WoA tablets.
The Type Cover and Surface Pen sold separately. And 2gigs RAM? Sad.
http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msca/en_CA/pdp/productID.314888…
You been living under a rock? $500US converts to $634 CAD as per this morning. Their pricing is dead on.
Actually $499 == €463, so at €609, that’s a 32% markup for living in Europe. As Thom says, basically makes it a rather bad option.
To be fair to MS, most hardware does this in the UK and Europe.
But you have to add VAT for the Euro which on average 20%, so the difference is 12%, still too big.
We always get screwed on pricing here. Belgium in particular is pretty expensive.
A lot of Belgians go to Holland or Germany to buy their electronics more cheaply.
Yeah, and on top of that you have these high Sabam taxes on blank media. A disk of 1TB+ has an Auvibel tax of 9 euro excl(!) 21% VAT. There is zero illegal music/software on my disks, yet I have to pay this extortion fee.
The bastards even tried to tax our internet connections, fortunately they failed.
Edited 2015-04-01 14:50 UTC
Yeah, SABAM is particularly evil.
Even when they have been exposed multiple times, they are still allowed to get away with this.
Remember when the TV show basta exposed them for the crooks they really are? Not even an inquiry was done. They were not reprimanded, even when it was exposed that what they are doing is illegal.
Artists never get their money from SABAM. SABAM just keeps it.
By lifting a tax off of illegal downloads makes them an accomplice to illegal activities.
Hell, i’d gladly pay the tax if it meant i could legally download everything i wanted (which is how they sold it to the public initially), but no. They just claim that you download music illegally, and they want their “fair” share.
Anyway, this is another topic entirely.
PS: Did you know that the enterprise also pays this tax? I am a consultant in storage systems, and the capacity that goes into enterprise storage systems is taxed for this as well …
Edited 2015-04-02 08:43 UTC
Even $499 is too much.
You can for instance get the Asus Transformer Book with 500 GB storage and a keyboard dock for over $150 less.
http://www.amazon.com/Transformer-Detachable-Laptop-Tablet-Metallic…
Which has terrible reviews…
Care to share a few? I have yet to see those terrible reviews…
Also much lower resolution, smaller screen, half the SSD-Storage, far worse camera’s, twice as thick and quite a bit heavier as well.
That device is certainly interesting but different in so many ways from the Surface 3 that comparing it directly doesn’t make much sense
That’s a pretty steep price.
Even when you consider that the European price will include about 20% VAT, and the US one won’t include any kind of sales tax, it’s still about 10% above the US rates.
Apple used to be a terrible offender for this kind of things – for the longest time it’d be the case that you could work out their GBP price by swapping the $ for a £. They stopped doing that years ago. These days once you factor in VAT their prices tend to match the USD ones pretty closely. I just did the maths, and the starting prices for the iPad Air 2 are actually cheaper in Europe than the US. The prices for the new MacBook are essentially on par.
Companies have historically felt entitled to add a premium to their prices to hedge for currency exchange fluctuations. Apple realised years ago that even though they might end up taking a hit if exchange rates move against them it’s bad PR to gouge their customers. Of course it helps that they sell in such high volumes and have sufficiently large margins to absorb the hit.
Microsoft seems to be slow on the uptake. Some things don’t change.
For the record, sales tax in the US varies by city, county, and state.
Online purchases are no longer immune to sales tax. Amazon now collects sales tax where I live.
Of course there are states without sales taxes at all, those are still tax free, sure.
For the record, list of states without sales taxes:
Alaska
Delaware
Montana
New Hampshire
Oregon
I live in one of those states, at least according to the info I gave Apple when creating an iTunes account.
:O
In the Olden Days Apple were made in the US. Now they are made in China. There is no expensive shipping or currency fluctuations to worry about.
What kind of flash memory does it have – eMMC or SATA (or PCIe)? I’m guessing eMMC.
Unfortunately it is eMMC.
However on [1] the first number you see is “Starting at
$799” with “Keyboard and Office applications sold separately.” That’s a lot of dough for the 64GB/i3 model to make me uninterested (and let’s not even start about the $1949 version).
The basic model is 630GBP in the UK, which is about $950, which compared to the $799 US price it’s high, but it reflects the usual price differences between US/EU versions. In the German online store [2] it’s 799 Eur though, which is ‘only’ approx. $860, which is cheaper than the UK price (as usual I might add).
[1] http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/products/surface-pro-3
[2] http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msde/de_DE/pdp/Surface-Pro-3/pr…
You’re talking about the Surface Pro 3, which is more expensive.
This article is about the (still overpriced) Surface 3.
True…
We can still use it to compare national price differences.
That model (i5 128gb) cost’s about the same as 1037 USD in Denmark. Yeah…
Edited 2015-04-01 11:18 UTC
they must be having a good laugh at apple corp.
Why? Do you think they are so insecure that they are checking out what Microsoft is doing in this space
Apples stuff runs Apples software. Microsofts stuff doesn’t run Apples software. People that want to run Apples software have no where else to go but Apple, so Apple can continue to laugh and rake in the giant profits.
But looking on the hardware side there isn’t much for Apple to be laughing about:
If you compare this to an iPad it is a slightly worse tablet (thicker/heavier) but priced roughly the same. It is more useful though with the ports and because you can also use it for non-tablet things.
If you compare it to any MacBook/MacBook-Air that Apple makes the Surface 3 or Surface Pro 3 seem the better choice to me. Less compromises and more balanced hardware for the money
The price is fine; the world currencies are not. The US economy is back in the driver’s seat. If you want US biz quality, you need to pay a US biz premium. There’s always Asus if you want something cheaper in every way.