MackinNZ: I have a customer who wants to purchase NOW. He won't be willing to wait 'till the end of Feb. I'll have to look for some other kind of tablet.
A5X: No they are not taking orders, said to wait till the February 20th. I called Harvey Normans shortly after Noels, and person on the phone said they had a meet about various things, said they are expecting MS Surface Pro 2 in the 3rd and 4th weeks of February, so pretty spot on there. Basically no 256GB model until then. Which is ages away when I am ready today.
I tried to consider a 128GB with 4GB model (just for now) from local store that I could of purchased today, but this is not what I want. Especially at 1.5K, really want to make sure if out laying that much, its going to last he distance, and should invest more into the 256GB model which is going to have a nice chunk of usable space 212GB vs. 72GB I believe it is from what I read.
Another thing to take into account, is with the 256GB model it has 8GB RAM, and not only that a 256GB mSATA SSD will perform faster than a 128GB mSATA SSD, as they all SSD tend to do when the capacity increases, the Channels/Interleaving increases and becomes faster.
One can only imagine that if you buy from the end of February shipment, hopefully definitive i5-4300U model.
Just borrowing from work for the weekend an HP Elitebook 840 to see how the i5-4300U performs, so far this little processor is pretty sweet.
with the 8GB 256/512 models the LPDDR3 RAM is dual channel so that is slightly faster than 4GB too
I like enjoy playing games on any platform, and don't mind older games too. The fact I can just plug in a xbox 360 controller and go for it, is sweet. Even though dual channel on 4GB, main problem is the system will reserve at least 512MB RAM for the graphics, although not much, does not leave much for the OS, especially if I don't want to close anything down while I am in the middle of other things (programs open), and want to take a quick game break.
I often place my systems into hibernation, that's where the 256GB will allow plenty of spare space to save a 8GB hibernation file quickly to the SSD, without worrying about running out or using up valuable SSD storage.
The NZ market is not terrible huge, I am not sure why a few unit cannot be injected into NZ. Looking at the pricing, would think profit margin could be higher, considering the end user price we pay here. Although I don't know the full story with taxes and overheads in NZ that could possible contribute to higher cost past on the consumer. I almost always ask for a discount, but with the Surface Pro's, that I am told, there is no margin in it and the retail stores cannot move anywhere with it. I would guess they can't adjust price as a retail assistant, and the some kind of rebate must be happening between Microsoft and the actual retailer in order for them to bother selling the product at all.
End of February is almost the start of autumn, such a long time away. Everyone hates waiting, wish this could be expedited.
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