The Surface line has officially crossed the billion dollar mark for revenue demonstrating a 24% growth from the previous quarter. In other words, the big holiday season looks to have been successful in pushing the Surface Pro 3, which drove the growth, into more hands than ever.
The Surface Pro is an amazingly well-built product. I’m glad it’s finding modest success.
Consumer device increases sales in the christmas quarter, news at 11.
Really isn’t a useful comparison. What did they sell in the year ago quarter?
Surface Pro is NOT a consumer product. Of course there are enthusiast (like my wife) that will buy it, but
* It comes without any crapware so surely not aimed at consumers
* It comes with Windows 8.1 Pro, not Home
* Did you notice that it is called Surface PRO as well?
* It starts at roughly 750 Euro without any of the much needed accessories like a keyboard and bluetooth mouse, so more realistically you would need to think to pay over 1000 Euro. That sounds a bit excessive for a christmas gift
The previous year they were only selling 10″ devices, including the RT line that they completely wrote off. Comparing with 1 year ago is not useful. (but it would show a major uptake in numbers, profits and public mindshare)
I like how selling 1 million very expensive devices in 3 months can be called “showing some modest success”. I don’t think there are many other hardware makers that sell several million of their top-of-the-line devices.
Now come on Microsoft. We all know that Surface Pro is on a 8 month release cycle and those 8 months are up. Give me
* a 14″ Surface Pro 4 with no bezels like that Dell XPS 13 (OR use the bezels for great speakers).
* Include broadwell CPU’s and remove the fan for even longer battery life and less noise
* At least 2 USB 3.1 ports
* A keyboard that can also work while detached and costs no more than 75 Euro (and half price when you buy it with the Surface Pro 4)
* Only 3 versions. I3/4 GB/128 GB/750 Euro. I5/8 GB/256 GB/1000 Euro. I7/16 GB/512 GB/1250 Euro
* The above advice is free but when implemented I would appreciate a free “life-time-sample”
Good tablets have big bezels on purpose so you can hold them! It’s a design feature. Only handhelds small enough to hold in one hand without touching the front (<6″ phone) can get away with no bezel on the side.
Nexus 7 sucks to hold in portrait, for example, but they did this because it was made to sell movies and music on google play, which don’t demand portrait holding. You can see from Asus’ newest tablet (ME572C) that they’ve added bezels back in.
I’m afraid that “Consumer Product” does not mean what you think it does…
Edited 2015-01-28 19:04 UTC
Clearly you don’t. “Consumer electronics are electronic equipment intended for everyday use, most often in entertainment, communications and office productivity.”
Interesting definition, but consumer electronics are not the same as consumer devices or consumer products though.
And besides definitions the original post indicated that it was normal for a Surface Pro to be sold more during the holidays. That is a consumer trend though and as I mentioned Surface Pro is too expensive for that. Surface Pro is a business product that is simply selling better than before
I bet they BLEW IT ALL on those stupid ads.
That has to be one of the most played adds of the entire year.
Anecdotally, the ads worked. I now regularly get questions about Surface from people who know nothing about computers and I.T. but have seen the ads and have added it to their “next PC” short list.
I like the surface, but … (and this is very personal and won’t matter to anyone else) … as with many computers nowadays, it’s not comfortable to use to me due to the massive resolution on a tiny screen. DPI scaling works only half of the time, as many UI elements in many programs are still tiny and unscaled.
Oh, and it doesn’t run linux right.
This with linux and a more modest res would be the ideal laptop-tablet-portable-thing for me.
Don’t use DPI-scaling if all you want is a lower resolution. Set a lower resolution instead.
Also, this is basically why Microsoft made “Metro”. No matter which resolution you run that in it always looks great.
Most programs now (Windows 8.1) actually work pretty well with high resolution mode. Chrome used to be an issue but it is getting better. (Desktop) VLC is still horrible and (App) VLC doesn’t work well enough for me
Agreed… this is what I did. I reduced the resolution and never looked back.
Thanks for the tips, but don’t want metro, nor windows for that matter.
What doesn’t run great with Linux? I have full support out of the box. Touch screen, Bluetooth, WiFi. I think the type cover took a small kernel patch iirc.
How is the battery life? I’m interested in looking in to this at some point.
I get 6 hours of full-on screen time, 10 hours of “reduced brightness airplane-mode” which is still good enough to greatly enjoy a few movies while being “parked” in a traphic jam for 5 hours during a 14 hour trip.
This might make it viable for me.
I’ve looked into it a while ago (like 3 months or so), and it wasn’t looking very good.
Could be because Adobe Creative Cloud subscribers have gotten discounts on Surface bundles. A friend of mine got one of those here the other day.
I wanted the note-taking ability of the Surface Pro 3. I have got a Surface 2, but envy the click-pen-twice-and-screen-turns-on-ready-to-take-notes. Too bad its locked down to only work with OneNote.
I scanned the article – it talks about gross this and gross that, but not a device count. Just 24% increased sales over last quarter.
So, Q3 2014 they sold 100 devices. Q4, 124 devices. Accounting can come up with all kinds of BS to make that a billion gross dollars, right?
Kind of like Windows Phone. I often joke that Cortana is a custom name, every phone gets a different custom name. Since they have not sold any yet, they can still advertise “Cortana”.
Overstatements and joking aside, you should see my point here.
A billion gross is simply about 1 million units.
For comparison, they sold about 10 million Windows Phones that quarter and Apple did 5 million “Macs”, 20 million iPads and 75 million iPhones.
In my book that makes Microsofts numbers impressive, but Apples numbers incredible
how long lived and how many got returned?
It doesn’t help to sell 1M units if 500K get returned.
It also doesn’t help to sell 1M units, but the follow on is only 100K units. (Assuming seasonally adjusted numbers as appropriate.)
It’s very annoying that since even the first Surface Pro came out, it’s often pictured with the ridiculously optional type cover, which is quite expensive (100 pounds or so in the UK).
Even with the Surface Pro 3 being touted as a complete laptop replacement, it’s still shown with the *still* optional keyboard, which is frankly bewildering. Throw in the type cover for free and I think this would sell in much larger quantities.