I'm just the opposite. I have the ipad mini and a Surface RT and I cant wait to get rid of my ipad. Its an annoying piece of technology as I found out. It has apps but its missing something. The Surface is more "complete". I can't insert a memory card in my ipad, I can't insert a usb key in it either. I cannot watch a movie on it, then command it to send the video to my WDTV HD. I can't even multitask on the ipad like I can on the Surface. IOS 7 offers the 4 finger swipe but that is the most unnatural method of doing anything. I can't even use it in this forum to type because the keyboard gets confused and will not keep focus on what its doing.
Beyond any of this, there are a good number of very nice apps on my Surface and it gets the job done quite nicely. I don't miss what I don't have and I don't covet as a general rule. I just discovered Readiy. Another well done app for the RT. Never knew it existed before my son got the Surface 2. I used another really good news app called News Bento. It doesn't have a name you'll find on IOS circuit but it has a good sized audience here.
Point is, apps is only a part of the story for serious people in this spectrum. The rest is what we can grow out of this ecosystem and our imagination push us the rest of the way. There has to be room for that. and that my friend, you can't find on any other platform.
That describes the dilemma of the situation very well. On the one hand, the Surface does many things that I can't do with my iPad. If that wasn't true, then I'd have no incentive to make the switch in the first place. Hardware connectivity (hdmi, microSD, USB, keyboards, etc.) is a tremendous draw. So is having a virtually full featured version of MS Office.
The heart of computing devices, it's
raison d'?tre is to get things done. Things get done through applications and hardware. "Our imagination" sounds nice, but it won't create the applications needed to get things done. Sometimes those things are simply leisure and entertainment. Other times it is productivity. Other times, creativity.
I'm not talking about simplistic appified websites. Illustration programs, audio recording apps, music and video playback apps. Yes, technically they exist. But they are very basic. XBox Music is a pretty poor app for music playback. It's primary focus appears to direct users to its music service rather than playback. The default Video player does the same thing. That would be fine if there were quality alternatives. There aren't. MediaMonkey shows promise but has glaring bugs and deficiencies.
And on an on it goes. Shortcut live tiles for websites makes it convenient to visit sites directly without the need for special apps (like a dedicated facebook app or twitter app). But they only show up as tabs in the browser, not as standalone entries in the task manager... that makes switch between apps and those tabs cumbersome. And makes having them share a screen difficult.
I've been a software developer for over 30 years. I have plenty of experience tweaking, tinkering, and cobbling together solutions to work around deficiencies. But I'm looking for something that "simply works". When I want to record a podcast episode, jack in my Blue Yeti mic, fire up the audio recording app and go. Spend a few minutes in post-recording editing, cropping, and tweaking. Done. I can do that easily on the iPad with the software available but the hardware hook-up is a kludge. I can easily set up the hardware on the Surface to do that, but the software simply doesn't exist to do that.
When we minimize the importance of applications to portray a more positive picture we run the risk of "settling for less". Fans of the platform are forgiving, but that won't encourage others to join in.
And so it goes.
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