Pro Surface and Surface RT Held Back by Price Alone

It’s fair to say that the analysts and tech bloggers who were concerned about the pricing of Microsoft’s Surface Pro and Surface RT tablets were pretty much bang on the money…so to speak.

The first Surface tablet, the Surface RT was launched in the fall of last year and concerns over its pricing in advance of the launch seem to have been justified as the criticism continues.  The basic Surface RT, the thirty-two gig version, retails for just under five hundred bucks.  As was predicted, if you want to be able to use the tablet efficiently, you’ll need to whack on another hundred bucks for the keyboard and a further a hundred dollars should you wish to add the black Touch Cover.

So all in all, it comes in at around seven hundred dollars for a tablet which by rights is a Windows 8 Lite slate that doesn’t do close to enough of the stuff we’d have liked.

If we take this a little further to the sixty-four and one hundred and twenty-eight gig Surface Pro models, the prices (for the tablet alone) rise to a single dollar under $900 and $1,000 respectively.  And let’s be frank – you’ve got to have a pretty happy bank balance to shell out just under a thousand dollars for a tablet – again without the keyboard that just so happens to be one of the biggest draws of the thingAnalysts are by majority still confident that Microsoft’s offering to the tablet marketplace could still be a decent enough success – but only if prices are lowered.

If we look at Samsung as an example, the Ativ Tab which was the Korean giant’s Windows RT tablet has now been confirmed as being discontinued from sales in Germany.  One of the reasons for this, claims a number of analysts, is the pricing.

At just shy of the equivalent of eight hundred dollars, consumers are much more likely to purchase the thirty-two gig iPad for less than five hundred.  It’s a lesson that Microsoft could probably benefit from heeding if they wish to be competitive in this end of the tech market.

But then again, everyone seemed to already know this long before the Surface RT release date and look what effect that barrage of projections had…zero.