A couple of weeks ago Microsoft was forced to concede defeat and slash the price of its Surface RT tablets by about 30 percent. It later took a $900 million hit for a mountain of unsold RTs and CEO Steve Ballmer told the world that the company got carried away and built too many tablets, just in case anyone did not know that already.
Now Microsoft is cutting the price of its other tablet, the x86-based Surface Pro. The cut is far less substantial, $100 or just around 10 percent. However, the Surface Pro will remain quite expensive even after the cut. The Pro, like other Windows 8 tablets, is just too expensive to build and Microsoft doesn’t have much wiggle room. The Surface Pro will now cost $799 and $899 in 64GB and 128GB flavours.
It’s hardly a bargain and the Surface Pro is not a successful product. It never was, like its Windows RT based sibling. Analysts believe Microsoft sold just 1.5 million Surface tablets to date, but since there is no breakdown between the Surface RT and Surface Pro, we don’t know how many Surface Pros are in the wild.
Judging by the sales figures, the Surface Pro might be a very collectible oddity in a couple of decades. It might even end up in a few museums, where curators will use it to explain to our kids how Microsoft lost the plot in the early 2010s and single-handedly wrecked the PC industry.
