It was bound to happen, and we all knew it, we've known it for a long time, and we now have the confirmation: Windows RT is dead. Your Surface RT hasn't magically just kicked the bucket, but by announcing that RT based devices (it's unclear if this means all of them, or just the Surface RT and Surface 2) will only receive a subset of Windows 10 functionality, they're doing the same thing to the platform's users they did to Windows Phone 7 users when "Windows Phone 7.8" was announced. Even RT devices that stay running Windows 8.1 should continue receiving security patches for another nine years, but it's abundantly clear that it's only barely on the back burner within Microsoft, and there's no secret really awesome Surface 3 with a four-gig Tegra K1 or X1 in the pipeline.
I like Windows RT a lot, both because I have long really liked the idea of Windows and its attendant applications on different types of hardware, and because the Microsoft Surface RT tablet was nearly the perfect computing device for me when I bought it in late 2012. People like to forget this, but at the time, both the netbook and CULV markets had almost completely cratered, meaning that there wasn't very much in the way of small computers for less than $600-800. Windows 8.0 had created a perceived change in what was "needed" in computers, so the class of "good enough" netbooks and highly portable CULV systems were killed off prior to the launch of Windows 8.
People like to forget this, but the Microsoft Surface RT and its buddies the Yoga 11 and XPS 10 were actually really important when Windows 8.0 launched, because of the aforementioned lack of small, inexpensive laptops that got reasonably good battery life. (There was no shortage of $400 Inspirons and Pavillions, but they were not what I'd consider a portable computer.) Intel-based tablets such as the Latitude 10 and ThinkPad 10 did ship eventually, but they were using an Atom chipset that had downright terrible performance, few of these devices were aimed at consumers, and they were all very expensive, in addition to having terrible battery life.
The situation improved a lot with Windows 8.1, which not only improved performance on all existing hardware, but brought with it the Microsoft Surface 2 and Lumia 2520, which improved performance on the RT platform significantly. Unfortunately for RT, Intel introduced the Silvermont/Bay Trail Atom cores and tablets such as the Venue 8 and 11 started to come out. This new generation of Intel-based hardware was faster, cheaper, delivered iPad-like battery life nearly as well as the ARM hardware had done. In addition, Microsoft introduced some pretty nice new software licensing deals, meaning that the smallest of these devices now included Word, Excel, OneNote, and PowerPoint, either perpetually (such as the Venue 8 Pro I have) or for a year but with added online storage with an Office365 subscription.
For a while, it looked like Windows RT could co-exist with the Bay Trail devices, until Microsoft released Windows 8.1 Update 1, which further improved performance, and lowered the overall requirements for Windows 8 to 16 gigabytes of disk space and just a gigabyte of memory. It took a few months, but the effect of both this, and Intel selling some of its chips to manufacturers at a loss is that we have computers such as the HP Stream 7 and Stream 11, which as reviewed are surprisingly fast and actually useful for desktop applications, in addition to providing interesting competition to Chromebooks. It likely also helps that Intel is also using the lowest end Bay Trail chips as a loss leader to get both
The real difference, I think, is that if you buy an HP Stream 11 or a Dell Venue 11 Pro, you can put PuTTY, Notepad++ and Paint.Net on it, and use it just like you used your Windows 7 computer. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it highlights the fact that Windows RT and users of RT devices have really been the biggest victims of the Windows "app gap," because RT users can't just install PuTTY if there are no good modern interface SSH clients. Microsoft's unwillingness up to this point to allow unsigned code to run on the Windows RT desktop runs counter to the Microsoft's own talks about Windows 8 (all editions, on all hardware) being an uncompromised experience, and in particular, the Surface RT tablet being great for both work and entertainment.
What the app gap has done is ensure that the Surface RT is not very great for entertainment or casual usage, and (with the addition of Outlook when Windows 8.1 dropped) is very good at most basic office productivity tasks. The Surface RT, in part because I can treat it just like one of my Windows 7 computers in this manner, has been great for productivity because I can open documents off of my shared network locations or my SharePoint server, connect to my VPN, use the Type Cover to control remote desktop sessions, and use the same Word/Excel/PowerPoint/OneNote and Outlook that I do on my big computers at home and work. I would be lying if I said it wasn't annoying that there isn't a Spotify application for the New Interface, however. I can go to the Spotify Web Player, but that
There aren't any details yet on exactly what will happen. Microsoft has said that it plans on bringing "some" of the Windows 10 functionality to RT devices. My fear is that Microsoft will introduce some of the new universal modern interface applications, the new web browser, and will subsequently nuke or nerf the things that I use from "desktop" windows, such as the ability to get to the desktop and map drives, PPTP VPN access, or desktop Office 2013.
Fortunately, it's not difficult to restore the Surface RT to Windows 8.0 or 8.1, at which point it should be possible to run it as a Windows 8.1 computer (the way I am now) while still receiving Windows 8.1 security updates for the foreseeable future. The worst that could happen is that Microsoft could remove Windows 8.1 RT from its typical decade-long support cycle, which would otherwise have seen the Surface RT receiving security patches until sometime in 2022 or so. (It's unclear whether or not the hardware will last that long and what will have happened to things like the Office document format between now and eight years from now, but it is comforting to know that that may still be in the cards.)
Despite the fact that Microsoft appears to still be making and selling both the Surface 2 and the Lumia 2520, there are several more practical options available today, once my particular Surface RT comes up for replacement. I have had a lot of success with the Surface form factor, attributed mainly to the availability of the physical keyboard that attaches easily, and the kickstand. Over my time with the device, I've rarely felt hampered by the fact that it works poorly on my lap. Unfortunately, almost no other Windows tablet on the market today is quite as nicely put together. In an ideal world, a Surface 3 with a Bay Trail, Cherry Trail, or Core M chip will become available, but there is no dearth of accessories to try out on the smallest tablets, or small Bay Trail based notebooks available.
The somewhat unfortunate thing is that if Microsoft doesn't release a "Surface 3" then that type of product will have lost its relevance to me. I like the Surface Pro 3 a lot, but I think that it's a little too expensive for me to use as my bag computer and writing companion, especially when the Stream 11 and similar machines exist.
The Surface RT is slow at rendering web pages, but fortunately that's only its secondary task, so I will definitely be hanging onto mine for the foreseeable future. It still gets better battery life than the vast majority of portable Windows laptops, and as a product that sits close to the $100 tablets and $200-300 laptops in performance but aside the $800-1200 Surface Pro 3 and MacBook Air in build quality, the Surface 2 remains a somewhat unique product. I continue to like this trade-off and hope Microsoft agrees.
I've always felt Microsoft wasn't getting quite as much mileage out of Windows RT as it could, and there have always been little things about it that annoy me. From the start, I saw its potential as the tablet that could do all the things the iPad couldn't, but people wanted to do – open Excel and Word documents from network shares. Windows RT could do those things, but some licensing issues and the fact that Microsoft never opened up Windows RT to, say, joining a domain, meant that many organizations chose to avoid using them, even when it was the best option for the task at hand.
I also felt like Windows RT was under-utilized (i.e. not utilized at all) for very small tablets, which magically became a thing right before Windows 8.1 shipped, tablets with styluses, which would have made sense from the beginning given the presence of OneNote, and things like small-box or all-in-one computers, where you're really looking for an appliance with Word, Excel, and a web browser on it. A Windows RT with Ethernet running on a 21.5-inch all-in one computer would have been near perfect for computer lab or kiosk situations.
But, that's a side of Windows RT we will never know. At the end of the day, RT does still have a few years left of usefulness and patches in its current form. You may even gain a few years and Microsoft may even string us along a little further as Windows 10 gains functionality over the next several years.
At this point, however, my energy is going elsewhere. Somewhat ironically, in the time between when Windows RT and the Surface RT were introduced, and now, Microsoft actually made some of what made the RT appealing to begin with possible on the iPad, but I'll talk about that at a later date. Until then, there are x86-based Windows tablets, and x86-based netbooks have made their triumphant return.