Fixing Surface 3

Despite early problems, Surface product line has become a remarkable success with +1B dollar revenue per quarter. Surface Pro 3 was the turning point — much thinner and lighter design (800g, 9.1mm), bigger screen and plenty of computing power. It finally wasn’t positioned as iPad Air competitor. Not long after SP3 premiere, we get Intel x86 powered Surface 3. Entry level Surface tablet for non-pro users. Direct successor of ARM-based Surface RT and Surface 2. Having iPad Air on the market, people have been expecting thin, light and easy to maintain S3.

The reality was different however. Surface 3 weighted at 622g with 9 mm of thickness. That’s a lot for a consumer grade tablet in 2015. And it was not the only problem. The biggest issue with Surface 3 was little differentiation comparing to Surface Pro 3. It was neither thinner nor much lighter — just a less powerful and slightly smaller variant of SP3. And yes, cheaper. But still laptop-first. So what’s the advantage of Surface 3 over SP3 or SP4? Price. That’s it. Nothing more. Competing on price is not what Surface line is about. And it’s one of the reasons why S3 failed to gain mindshare or reach expected sales level.

How to fix it?

Let’s fix Surface 3 and think about ultimate Surface 4 design:

• Make it thinner and lighter. That one is obvious. If Samsung manages to fit Core M processor in 6.9mm body, fitting an Atom chip in thinner chassis (thinner than 9mm) is a must. Apollo Lake chips based on Skylake architecture are more power-efficient and it should let use smaller batteries —trimming some weight. USB-C will of course help with that.
• Make it tablet-first. Surface 4 shouldn’t be just a smaller Surface Pro 4. It must focus on tablet/touch use. Forget the desktop and Win32 apps. With preloaded Universal Windows Platform apps, S4 could be a very capable tablet that in some scenarios is transformed to a laptop with additional accessories (keyboard, pen).
• Make it mobile (LTE). Variant with modem should be a first choice, not an addition available in selected markets. In a connected world, Microsoft can’t force user to rely only on WiFi/MiFi solutions. Modem is the most elegant and convenient solution. And soon it will be a standard.
• Make it connected. Intel chips for years have had problems with connected standby and booting times. True mobile device should be ready to work in fractions of second, not in tens of seconds. Connected all the time for notifications and alarms. Old x86 paradigm of booting a device from a cold start is just unacceptable in 2016. It has to just work. All the time.
• Make the silo for the stylus. I agree that Surface Pro or Surface Book need full sized pen for comfortable use. But for a mobile-first device that is meant to use primarily without the keyboard, safe storage for a stylus inside the device would be very nice and it would definitely increase the pen usage for simple interactions with OS or quick handwritten notes. For now, majority of Surface users leaves the pen at the bag or at home.

Bonus:

• Make it ARM (again). And let Win32 die on mobile devices with Windows. It won’t gonna happen for many reasons, but it’s the only sensible way to go.