iPad users are frustrated says Bill Gates

While Microsoft’s Surface tablets may not be doing very well, ex-Microsoft boss Bill Gates has some choice words against competitors. In an interview with CNBC, he talked about the limitations of tablets, specifically the iPad, and praised Microsoft’s Surface tablets.

When he was asked about the declining PC market, Gates said that tablets have been growing in popularity, and that it’s “going to be harder and harder to distinguish products” that are PCs and tablets. According to him, Microsoft’s Windows 8 tablet, the Surface, brings the “portability of the tablet but the richness of the PC.”

iPad users are frustrated that they can’t create documents, according to Gates

According to Gates, productivity isn’t the strongest suite of tablets like the iPad.  “A lot of those users are frustrated, they can’t type, they can’t create documents, they don’t have Office there,” he said. While the bit about lacking Office and the ability to create documents may be true, the sales figures for the iPad tell a different story than the “frustration” mentioned by Gates.

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One of the major reasons the Surface hasn’t been doing very well may be because of the Surface RT, which runs on Windows RT. Tablets running on Windows RT don’t use power-hungry PC-like chips with x86 architecture. Instead, they use the relatively lighter and more energy efficient ARM processors, which use less power than its x86 counterparts. The downside of this is that RT tablets can’t run x86 software, including almost any Windows desktop software. This severely cuts down on the usefulness of tablets running on Windows RT.