They're now demoing the Surface Laptop. Thinner than a MacBook Air. Faster than a MacBook Pro. Longer battery life than either.

The downside? "Windows 10 S", which only runs apps from the Windows Store. The upside over Windows RT from the Windows 8 era? You can port Win32 apps to the Store today, don't think you could back then.

Edit: You can upgrade Windows 10 S to ordinary Windows 10 Pro for $50. Laptops that run Windows S from other manufacturers will start at $189.

Given the target market (schools) I think not being able to install downloaded software is only a good thing.

Also, did you see the performance demo? 10s was significantly faster than 10 Pro.

Not sure about the $999 for the cheapest model however. Does it include an Office 365 subscription?

> Given the target market (schools) I think not being able to install downloaded software is only a good thing.

Except that giving kids unfettered access to their computers allows them to flourish. See: BBC Micro, Raspberry Pi, Apple ][, the list goes on.

Except that having each kid able to brick their computer leads to significant problems for IT in debugging everyone's computer. As well as letting them move away from educational material extremely easily.

I agree that great things can happen when kids can truly explore their computer and take away the 'magic', but just handing all kids a laptop and having them go wild is not the way to do it. I don't what is, to be fair.

Handing them a laptop and having them go wild is exactly the way to do it.

If they brick it, they have to work out how to fix it.

As one of the kids who was lucky enough to get a BBC Micro, I had zero support. No-one else in my family even knew how to turn it on. No teacher at my school could support me because none of them knew how it worked either. If I broke it, I had to fix it. And no Stack Overflow, so no code to copy-paste. I had to go back to first principles every time and work out what went wrong and how I could make it go right.

Best education you can give anyone.

Which is all well and good until my students aren't able to - you know - do basic educational tasks because their computer 'is broken'.

If I - as a teacher - can do an immediate 'restore to neutral state' with core educational files and programs retained then by all means open them up.

Otherwise, I have to be curmudgeon and say that the existence of the computer in the classroom is to more effectively complete educational tasks. If having an open system gets in the way of that then the system should not be open.