Drives die, y'know? It shouldn't require a trip to your authorized service technician to replace one.If you were holding out for a Surface tablet with Windows 8 Pro, Microsoft has confirmed that they will be available in January. Just be sure to bring a bulging wallet.In a blog post on Thursday, Microsoft Surface general manager Panos Panay revealed that Redmond plans to offer two versions of the Surface running full Windows, both of which will be priced significantly higher than the ARM-based versions running Windows RT.The entry-level Surface with Windows 8 Pro will ship with 64GB of solid-state storage for $899. A second version with the same specs but 128GB of storage will go for $999.By comparison, the least expensive Surface with Windows RT and 32GB of storage lists for $499 – 44 per cent less than the cheapest version with Windows 8 Pro. A Windows RT Surface with 64GB of storage will set you back $699.What's more, the top-end Surface with Windows RT comes bundled with a Touch Cover, which doubles as a keyboard. Neither of the Windows 8 Pro models will include a cover, so if you want a keyboard you'll need to fork over an additional $120, bringing the total to $1,019 for the 64GB version or $1,119 for the 128GB version.

The new Surface models' high price tags mean they'll be hard-pressed to win over fans of the top-selling tablet to date, Apple's iPad. The latest-generation fruity fondleslabs range from $499 for a 16GB version to $699 for one with 64GB (keyboards not included).Microsoft's argument is that the Surface with Windows 8 Pro isn't just any tablet. According to Redmond's marketing materials, it "runs current Windows 7 desktop applications and integrates with your existing enterprise management infrastructure." In other words, it's a business device, not just a consumer toy.That means it also supports "the full Office experience," including Outlook, Access, Visio, SharePoint Designer, and other business-oriented components of the Office suite. Surface with Windows RT only supports Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.But hang on – Surface with Windows RT might not be able to run every Office application, but the ones it does support come bundled at no extra charge. Surface with Windows 8 Pro doesn't include Office, so add that to your shopping list, as well.Mind you, the hardware specs for the Windows 8 Pro version of Surface are beefier than those of the Windows RT version. In addition to the increased storage, the Windows 8 Pro tablet bumps the RAM from 2GB to 4GB and packs a third-generation Intel Core i5 processor in place of the Windows RT version's Tegra 3.

Like the Windows RT Surface, the Windows 8 Pro version has a 10.6-inch display, but it runs at 1920-by-1080-pixel resolution instead of 1366-by-768, and it supports ten-point multi-touch instead of five. One can't help but note, however, that these displays are still a far cry from the latest iPad's 9.7-inch, 2048-by-1536 Retina display.The Windows 8 Pro Surface also includes a full-size USB 3.0 port and a Mini DisplayPort, and – flying in the face of the late Steve Jobs' wisdom about tablets – it comes with a stylus. According to Microsoft, the pen pairs with technology called Palm Block that "will prevent your handwriting from getting interrupted if you accidently place your palm on the screen as you write."With specs like these, Surface with Windows 8 Pro really competes less with the likes of the iPad and Android tablets and more with Ultrabooks, many of which now offer similar components – including touchscreens – and are priced comparably to the Intel-powered Surface.But Surface is still a tablet, not an Ultrabook, and Microsoft has yet to prove its case that a significant chunk of the market is looking for tablets to replace traditional PCs and laptops. Sales of Windows 8 PCs in general have been slow, which points to a market that's resistant to dramatic change. According to the NPD Group, sales of Windows 8 tablets "have been almost non-existent."

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And if customers do decide they want Windows 8 tablets, there are plenty of manufacturers with more experience designing and building them than Microsoft. Surface with Windows RT buyers have reported a variety of odd manufacturing glitches, which may be minor problems for a casual-use tablet but would likely be deal-breakers if they cropped up on an expensive piece of kit designed for general-purpose computing.Not that any of this will dissuade Microsoft. It has already bet a lot on Surface, and in October CEO Steve Ballmer said the company "obviously" plans to make more hardware.How obvious those plans remain in the second half of 2013 will likely depend a lot on how customers react to the launch of Surface with Windows 8 Pro in January – the exact date of which is as yet unspecified. Apple landed an important punch against Microsoft some years back by becoming a popular platform among devs building new applications.The resource-vampire Windows Vista, Microsoft’s effective hiatus on new releases, the power of MacBooks and rise of the web as a runtime saw Microsoft lose its grip on an influential and demanding segment of the IT community.

Now Dell’s making a play for the demographic that was lured by Apple, but it’s not pushing Windows 8 or even Windows 7 on its hardware – it’s promoting Ubuntu.Dell today released Project Sputnik, a Dell XPS 13 tuned to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS that had been unveiled as a Skunkworks project in May.Sputnik features an Intel i7 CPU, 8GB RAM and 256GB memory, a basic set of drivers, tools and utilities and is priced $1,549 with a year of support. The machine is only on sale in the US and Canada, but will go international next year.Standard price for the regular machine from Dell is $1,499; you can compare processor, memory and CPU with the relevant MacBooks from Apple here. As ever, Dell undercuts Cupertino on the price, so the question is do you want to splash out a little more for a PC running Ubuntu instead of Windows for dev?Barton George, Dell’s web vertical sector director, who initiated Sputnik, said the company is looking at expanding with a “beefier” platform option for devs. “The XPS 13 is perfect for those who want an ultra light and mobile system but we have heard from quite a few who would also like an offering that was more workstation-like with a bigger screen and more RAM,” he said in a statement.

Sputnik is part product and part experiment, with Dell reversing the standard OEM cookie-cutter approach to knocking out PCs by talking to devs and crafting software.Attention was paid to making sure the XPS 13 drivers worked with Linux out of the box, with efforts to lock down Wi-Fi, screen brightness and touchpad and multi-touch support. As software packages go, Sputnik has a basic install image here.Dell has departed from the norm by working with devs to build a profile tool and cloud launcher, which lets users build and install their own custom, web-centric development environment. In the past, IDE tools have tried to force devs into their own version of some kind of a fully equipped programming cockpit.The profile tools give developers access to profiles for things like Ruby and Android, letting you craft your own development environment and chains of tools. The Cloud launcher lets you build simulate cloud environments on the laptop and then upload them using Ubuntu’s JuJu. Ubuntu supports OpenStack for cloud dev and run time, and the cloud platform is also supported by Dell.

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George said the idea was to conduct Project Sputnik out in the open, soliciting and leveraging direct input from developers via the Project Sputnik StormSession, blog comments, and threads on the Sputnik tech centre forum for the Sputnik beta program. “It was the tremendous interest in the beta program that convinced us to take Project Sputnik from pilot to product,” George said.George has a history of trying to make hardware companies more attractive to devs – he was on the community side at Sun Microsystems before it was swallowed by Oracle. Dell has worked with Ubuntu shop Canonical to iron out the driver-Ubuntu wrinkles on Sputnik.Sun got open-source and Linux love following a torturous battle with its Solaris soul and a recognition its server business was in decline. Web and developers offered a hope, but it was a hope that never materialised financially for Sun’s server sales.

There’s no hint of an expectation that Sputnik will help Dell’s server sales, nor is this being pushed as the equivalent of the year of the Linux desktop. Dell is not going big on Ubuntu on Ultrabooks, continuing its caution of the past, where it has offered Linux on just a tiny number of relatively low-specced laptops subject to demand.Dell, it seems, is trying to identify the right machine for the right market. Whether that will lead to easing out Apple as the dev's choice, changing the way it builds PCs into something more collaborative or even circuitously floating more OpenStack clouds running on Dell hardware is a work in progress. Product Round-up Shopping for a mobile phone this Christmas? You could make the easy choice and get an Apple iPhone 5, one of Samsung's recent releases or take a punt on whether enough apps will emerge to make the Nokia Lumia 920 worth your hard-earned cash.But no matter how refined those phones, they're also common as muck, so they're never going to get you admiring or curious stares when you whip them out in the pub.