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Microsoft says its latest tablet can replace a notebook. Now the company’s putting its money where its mouth is by offering shoppers up to $650 in credit when they trade in select MacBook Air models for a Surface Pro 3 tablet.
As WinBeta notes, you’ll need a working device, you’ll have to take it into a bricks and mortar Microsoft Store (online trade-ins aren’t allowed), and you’ll need to make the trade by July 31st. Oh yeah… you’ll also have to think you want a Surface Pro 3 more than a MacBook Air… an idea I suspect many existing MacBook Air owners won’t subscribe to.
Here’s a roundup of tech news from around the web.
- Microsoft Store: Get up to $650 credit when you trade in a MacBook Air for a Surface Pro 3
Sure… if you’ve got a MacBook Air that qualifies for the full $650 trade-in value, you might be able to get even more than that by selling it on eBay. But that’s still a pretty good discount for anyone who actually thinks the trade is a good idea. [Microsoft Store] - What to expect from Google IO (maybe): Wearables, TVs, cars, Android refinements, etc
Google’s annual developer conference starts Wednesday, and while it’s not clear if we’ll see the next version of Android, Google is likely to focus heavily on the recently announced Android Wear platform for smartwatches as well as software for TVs, cars, and more. [Ars Technica] - Sprint unveils the Samsung Galaxy S5 Sport… it’s basically Sprint’s version of AT&T’s Galaxy S5 Active
Samsung’s rugged version of the Galaxy S5 phone is coming to Sprint this summer, and it’s a Sprint exclusive… thanks to a name change. [Sprint] - Samsung Galaxy Note 4 leaks suggest it’ll have a super-fast Exynos 5433 processor
It’s best to take benchmark reports with a heavy grain of salt… but it looks like Samsung’s next Note phone could have a chip that’s pretty dang fast. [G for Games] - In case you were wondering if Amazon’s Fire Phone appeals to tech geeks/developers… no.
Last week Amazon unveiled its first smartphone. This week a poll at Hacker News shows that almost none of the users of the rather geeky site plan to buy one. This tells us nothing about Amazon’s core audience of regular Amazon customers and first-time smartphone buyers. [Hacker News] - Amazon now offers selected TV shows for free, ad-supported viewing (in its iOS app)
Speaking of Amazon, the company is now letting folks use its Amazon Instant Video app for iOS to stream some ad-supported TV shows for free. There’s still no Instant Video app for non-Kindle Android devices at all. [TechCrunch] - Sunshine is a paid tool for S-Off, Bootloader unlock on the HTC One (M8)
Tired of having HTC patch the exploits that allowed hackers to enable S-Off on older firmware? Then pay to help fund development of new tools like Sunshine. It costs $25, but it’s the best tool to fully unlock the capabilities of the latest HTC devices. [TheRoot Ninja] - Microsoft Surface Pro 3 wins a 1 out of 10 repairability score from iFixit… but look at the pretty pictures!
Let’s face it… you probably weren’t going to try to fix this thing at home anyway. But it’s always nice when someone else takes it apart to see what’s under the hood… so you don’t have to do it yourself. [iFixit]
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I have an older Macbook Air (3,2) that I run Linux on. It works well (after spending an afternoon dealing with UEFI nightmares), but the performance is a bit on the slow side. I wonder if I should take MS up on their offer and install Linux on the Surface 3.
just compare the processors installed in each of them by running a google search like “CPU ‘x’ vs CPU ‘y'”
Then compare the amount of RAM installed and factor in the lousy iFixit scores Microcruft gets for their entire surface series.
get a life microsoft.
My MBA was the final straw with Apple stuff, I bought mine and ended up with severe buyers remorse. It felt like a £1,100 glass and metal netbook – very underpowered, anything of worth running on it would generate so much heat you could fry eggs on it. I’ve had a HP between then and last month (which was great), but I recently bought a Surface Pro, it’s only a 1st gen model – was on sale via MS. There is no comparison with the MBA, it blows it’s socks off. I am gearing up to try Linux on mine, but the hardware is nicer than the MBA and can handle heavier tasks, I’m doing 3D modelling, rendering and artwork with the pen. Really nice productive tool, great for watching media on too. I just worry about it’s lack of reparability, as I don’t want to have to buy another machine for quite some time.
I can only imagine the SPro 3 is even nicer.
Bah humbug, this is gonna go down like a lead balloon!
Who wants to switch from the rotten apple to the evil empire?
Well, ok, if your Crackbook Air is beaten up so badly, that its ripe for the landfill, I guess you might try take the crummy $650 for it and then try to sell that Microcruft Surface turd on Ebay…
I plan to take MS up on this deal. MBA is my first experience with Apple and it has not been a good one: OS X frequently chokes with half a dozen Firefox tabs, inserting a USB drive sometimes hangs the system, and I lose WiFi connection a couple of times a week for no apparent reason. I’ve never had that many problems on a 3 yr old Windows machine. Sure, the S3 has its flaws, but the high res screen and active digitizer put it in a whole different category of utility.
How unusual. Perhaps you’ll have better luck next time.
Wish they would give me $650 for my surface pro 2!
Best Buy was running a special last week on MBAs. The deals were stackable so after applying the discounts and trading in my Surface 2, it was $450 (2014 11.6″ MBA 128GB) out-of-pocket, out-the-door.
I like neither Crapple, Greedle or Microcruft, due to justified dislike for large multinational corporations eating the world, but still, that was more of a clever move than trading the other way around…
Wow..These Co’s are just greedy MF..Is a battle of who can get their hands of the larger piece of pie…
Yeah, the only joy in it is, when one of the greed mongers miscalculates and looses a large chunk of cash or market share or better yet both!
Ok, I’m curious. What computer and operating system does a cool hipster like yourself run?
Using their stuff doesn’t equate to endorsing them or their cheesy tactics.
But whenever you have a choice, you can vote with your dollars…
LOL, anyone with a MacBook Air wouldn’t use a Surface Pro 3 even if you gave it to them for FREE! And I’m NOT an Apple guy.
First time Mac OS users may switch. I gave Apple a chance when I bought a MBP in 2007. After 2 years, I went back to Windows and Linux (Fedora and Ubuntu). My MATLAB and C++ simulations always ran the slowest on OS X vs Linux and Windows on the same MBP. The notebook itself also had overheating issues too. So long simulations eventually pegged the CPU to the lowest frequency no matter the OS.
I can live with different UIs and ways to do things but not if the same software runs slower (up to 2x in the worse case) on OS X. I can blame Mathworks and GCC but that doesn’t change the result.
Things may different now but that initial experiment with Apple was expensive enough in both time and money for me to go back. At least for another few more years.
Question: Were you running your software in Parallels or some other visualization software? Just curious. Is that why the speed hit? I think that option is pretty sweet though. I’d give OS X a try again (I learned a lot of design on MacOS back in the day) if I could legally run it on a PC, even in visualization and even with a speed hit.
I ran the native OS X versions of the software. I was surprised by the speed hit.
Interesting. Thanks for the reply.
(P.S. I need to pay more attention to my spell check —> visualization should be virtualization.) Sorry about that.
Tried a mba 11 once. It was a nice laptop especially at the time it was very light and premium before the onslaught of ultrabooks hit the streets. I also liked OSX in general better than windows. However I just ran into too many issues with compatibility with work apps that needed windows or internet explorer and wouldn’t play nice even with bootcamp or parallels. Office for mac kept on screwing some advanced spreadsheets up. So in the end had to say bye bye.
Hardware wise there are plenty of ultrabooks and this surface pro 3 that are just as nice. Still I guess some people like to feel trendy even though being in a room where lots of people have macbooks kind of defeats the trendy purpose!
You’d be surprised. Don’t forget many of the macs out there are running windows. Conversely Surface Pro 3 is capable of running OSX. And there are a lot of ppl out there that would love an OSX tablet, esp 1 with a stylus.
No desparation measures for Microsoft.
Nope.
No way.
Its not desperate. I mean, they are getting an amazing amount of press for $1300 (I am assuming someone other than ‘neveragainmac’ takes them up on it).
a brain-in-an-egg-yolk avatar. 🙂