Microsoft offers Surface-as-a-Service from its own stores (pay-by-month Surface tablets)

The Register ^ | Jun 10, 2016 | Simon Sharwood

[dayglored]

Very interesting....

[dayglored]

Surface as a Service ... PING!

You can find all the Windows Ping list threads with FR search: just search on keyword "windowspinglist".

[usconservative]

Brilliant!!!

I’m liking this Satya Nardella guy more and more.

[dayglored]

Used to be, with a Windows computer, you owned your hardware, and you owned your FOSS software (assuming you had some), but you "licensed" your Microsoft software for restricted operation.

Now you won't even own the hardware. It's sorta like renting the entire computer. (Assuming you consider Surface a computer as such, not just a tablet.)

There's probably a market for this, given the relatively rapid turnover of hardware today, compared to years ago when you kept the same hardware around for more than 3 years...

[dayglored]

So at the end of your rental/lease/subscription period, you return the Surface to Microsoft or your local dealer you got it from.

How do you guarantee that you removed all your private information from it?

You don't want them reading it, and you don't want the next person who rents/leases/subscribes the hardware you had reading it... I wonder how they guarantee privacy?

Who ya gonna trust?

[RegulatorCountry]

If you do the math, I’m certain it’s cheaper to buy outright. But, there are always people who don’t have the money who will lease. There are others who just want to keep current hardware with a replacement warranty, with cost being secondary.

[dayglored]

The Surface Configurator

[kosciusko51]

You can’t guarantee privacy unless, as part of the lease, you get to keep the hard drive(s).

[dayglored]

No hard drives. This is all SSD I’m sure.

[dayglored]

Looks like a high-end Surface Book with an i7 CPU, 16GB RAM, 1TB disk, and an 18-month subscription (minimum) is gonna run $220./month before taxes & fees.

That's something over $4000 with the taxes.

[PAR35]

You can’t guarantee privacy unless, as part of the lease, you get to keep the hard drive(s).

Last century thinking. Under the seat license program (which this basically is), it will all be on MS servers in the 'cloud'.

[dayglored]

Whereas at the low-end, a Surface 3 with an Atom CPU, 2GB RAM, 64GB disk, and 18-month subscription will run about $50./month.

About $900. total.

[kosciusko51]

Oh, good point. I’m not connected to the cloud, so I don’t think that way.

[kosciusko51]

Sorry, force of habit. I still use hard drive when I reference internal storage media. Of course, PAR35 has a good point about all the data being stored in the cloud.

It’s almost like we are going backwards to the mainframe connected with (no-so-)dumb terminals.

[RinaseaofDs]

If it isn’t a solid state drive, you can use a magnet on it and you are good to go.

[GingisK]

Since disk platters are in a shield, a really strong magnet would be required.

[Dr. Sivana]

If it isn’t a solid state drive, you can use a magnet on it and you are good to go.

Besides the shielding, even if you did have a a heavy duty magnetic, you may mess up the low level formatting info on a modern SATA drive, which could make the drive fail completely. Modern drives don't allow you to do real low level formatted from the OS, as he drives come pre-encoded. Anyone who had to low level format drives with DEBUG, etc. appreciates the convenience, but some control is the cost.

[dayglored]

> Anyone who had to low level format drives with DEBUG, etc. appreciates the convenience...

Wow, my neck neck nearly snapped with the whiplash from that comment... blast from the past! Ah, yes, DEBUG. [shudder] I wrote a good number of programs using DEBUG's built-in mini-assembler.

You're quite right, of course. Remember when hard drives came from the manufacturer with the bad sector table printed (dot matrix of course) on a piece of paper taped to the top of the drive? I thought it was a Big Deal when OnTrack came out with a utility that would let you enter the bad sector map semi-intelligently.

Of course that kind of foolishness went out when they went to variable sectors-per-track formatting. And the modern "low-level format" takes care of all that internally so that the SATA or other interface only sees an unbroken list of data blocks.

It boggles my mind that fdisk and similar formatting tools still talk about heads and sectors. That's all insanely out of date on rotators, much less SSDs.

[upchuck]

Somewhere down the road MSFT will offer everything they have on a rental basis. Imagine Windows 10 as a Service :)

[GingisK]

The idea was to destroy the drive’s content.