I Am Panos Panay With The Surface Windows 8 Pro Engineering Team AMAA

Hi, I am Panos Panay, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft working on Surface. We hosted a reddit chat on Surface RT back in October and I’m here with my team again today from 9:30-11:30am PST, to chat about Surface Windows 8 Pro. You may have questions about Windows 8, Microsoft, or other Microsoft products and I may not be the best person to answer those, but my team and I will try to answer every Surface question I can over the course of the 2 hours. This post can be verified here: /panos_panay, /surface and facebook.com/surface

EDIT: Battery life: /r/IAmA/comments/18063g/i_am_panos_panay_with_the_surface_windows_8_pro/c8ae355 The product was designed to take full advantage of Windows 8 coupled with the Ivy Bridge core processor from Intel. We created a product that did not compromise speed, performance in any way. With that, we wanted to be the best notebook/laptop product in its class, but still deliver you the tablet form factor. This product is optimized in every way to take advantage of the full third generation core i5 it runs, yet give the best battery life. If you compare it to say a MacBook Air, you will quickly see that pound for pound in battery size vs battery life, you will find optimizations that puts Surface best in its class. That said we picked a smaller battery to be sure we were able to give you the same performance and to keep it thin. This kept the weight under 2lbs, and still kept it thin enough to take advantage of our great Windows work for inking and give you a great inking experience (like pressure sensitive inking, ability to do kanji, great sketching). While these tradeoffs are challenges as much as they are opportunities, we think given the performance and experience you will be getting, it is an exciting product.

EDIT UPDATE: Storage Space and Pro 64gb model /r/IAmA/comments/18063g/i_am_panos_panay_with_the_surface_windows_8_pro/c8ae60l We designed Surface Pro (and the allocation of disk space on our systems) to have the power of full Windows 8, the ability to have a simplified and fast upgrade to full Office and the confidence of a recovery image already available on your device. Beyond the flexibility and confidence this provides, we also include an ability to extend your storage via microSDXC, USB 3.0 and SkyDrive (including 7GB of free storage). Initial reports out regarding available disk space were conservative (eg. 23GB available on 64GB and 83GB available on the 128GB system), however our final production units are coming in with ~6-7GB additional free space.
Available disk space is a design choice and a tough one to make as an engineering team. It is a clear set of tradeoffs to provide the customer more space while providing them the tools out of the box. We created a simple disk image with only a few critical applications out of the box installed to provide choice. There has also been questions about why including the recovery image by default. Ideally, you will never need your recovery image, however this is a choice we would prefer the customer to make vs. having the customer need the recovery image not realizing they needed to create one themselves. Marc DesCamp

We decided to ship a Pro 64GB sku as it provides full windows 8 and enough storage for a number of large application installs such as games, productivity apps etc. which usually run in the multiple GBs. It also provides you flexibility to extend storage should you need. If you plan to carry more personal items with you locally, our 128GB may be the better option for you.