Microsoft Wants You To Trade Your MacBook Air In For a Surface Pro 3 365
mpicpp writes with news about a new Microsoft trade-in program to encourage sales of the new Surface Pro 3. Microsoft is offering a limited time Surface Pro 3 promotion via which users can get up to $650 in store credit for trading in certain Apple MacBook Air models. The new promotion, running June 20 to July 31, 2014 -- "or while supplies last" -- requires users to bring MacBook Airs into select Microsoft retail stores in the U.S., Puerto Rico and Canada. (The trade-in isn't valid online.)...To get the maximum ($650) value, users have to apply the store credit toward the purchase of a Surface Pro 3, the most recent model of the company's Intel-based Surface tablets.
Not likely. (Score:5, Informative)
The MBA and MBP are both fine machines. My wife get's a computer that works most of the time. I get a computer with a bash shell on which I can do my thing. Neither have shown any tendency to falls apart, unlike every Asus, Lenovo, Toshiba and HP we've had.
Re:Great deal! (Score:1, Informative)
the MacBook Air isn't a tablet though. It runs the full version of OS X (and Win 8, or whatever else you want to install for that matter).
Re:Not likely. (Score:5, Informative)
What he means, I think, is that most computer companies make "consumer grade" machines and "commercial grade" machines. I've not has an Asus or Lenovo, but I've had Toshiba, HP, and Dell. With respect to Dell, I've had both consumer and commercial grade machines, built to higher specifications. Most recently I purchased a Dell Latitude 5000 series laptop--in Dell's explanation of this computer in comparison to the 7000 series, it gave the 5000 series a build quality of 3 out of 4 stars, it gave the 3000 series 2 out of 4 stars (still Latitude--which implies the consumer grade stuff is 1 out of 4 stars for build quality). The consumer grade machines seem to be designed to last about 2 years or less. The commercial grade machines are designed to last more like 4 years.
The problem is, you have to pay a premium for the commercial grade machines.
With Apple, there is no "consumer grade" and "commercial grade"--they're all made to high specifications.
Re:Not likely. (Score:3, Informative)
The Macbooks run MacOS, not IOS.
Re: Not likely. (Score:3, Informative)
The thing that looks right about the construction of the current Mac books is that the monolithic aluminium case doesn't have any flappy bits to fall off. Why other manufacturers do not do something similar is beyond me.
I forgot to mention a Sony laptop. That also failed. The bottom panel came off, the disk failed and the CD drive failed. So I can't install linux on it because the CD isn't working and it won't boot linux from a flash drive, presumably because of something stupid Sony did. So it's dead and I'm not putting any more work into it..
To be fair, an older Mac book pro suffered badly when my wife dropped it. It was heavy and so crushed its own corner when it landed. The air just got a little dent in the corner when she dropped it. I don't drop my laptops, so it's not a fair comparison.
But since then I decided we would only get Mac books (since the Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge/Haswell genre) and screw the cost. The improvement in reliability is very apparent, and the TCO is probably lower because they last longer.
Re:Not likely. (Score:0, Informative)
anon to prevserve mods:
The UI is just another UI. I couldn't give a crap about the UI.
incorrect - I give a very big crap about the UI. The UI is what drove me away from windows, the 3.1, 95, w2k, xp, W7 changes finally became so annoying with W7 that I tried something different - OSX. (FWIW, I have tried multiple versions of Linux over the years, the UI was so terrible even windows overall was better for a desktop. I had also run OS/2, Solaris, Irix, and a few others over Windows, so that should tell you how much a UI matters for a desktop)
But its unix underneath, the 2560x1600 resolution is excellent. The keyboard is acceptable.
I can type into bash shells as if it were Linux. I can ssh and scp as if it were linux. I can write and compile code on it as if it were linux.
The python Point of Sale front end that I wrote for my wife's store, that runs on Linux, also ran first time on the macbook.
You can do all those things like they were unix.... Linux copied unix. Let's give credit where it's due. Honestly, I'm glad Linux is around, but it's a crappy monolithic pile under the unix trappings. We're starting to really see some of that pain. Having said that, it's still worlds better than MS in architecture.