He is directly rebutting one person's opinion, not coming up with a talking point after consulting with a survey of people's reactions to the new announcements. Who's to say it's not the parent that was mistaken?

Using the Surface as a tablet for drawing has been a huge use-case for visual artists from day 1. Just see this positive review of the original Surface Pro by Gabe from Penny Arcade: https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2013/02/22/the-ms-sur...

And his follow-up post yesterday on the Studio https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2016/10/26/the-surfac...

That's a pretty good endorsement.

I know several artists who bought the Surface for exactly this reason and found it disappointing. The hardware in the Surface Pro is pretty mediocre unless you spend a lot of money on it (at which point a Cintiq Companion becomes an intriguing idea if you don't know what Wacom's customer support is like).

Most of those artists ended up buying iPad Pros to replace them with.

"Making an excuse for it is nice and all, but it simply is a case of charging a premium for old tech"

This is a weird complaint to me. So what if the display hardware is dated if it is perfectly up to the task it's presented with? Maxing out the specs on a machine for no other reason than to max out the specs seems to me to be nothing but a waist.

The GP was the one making the complaint. I have no interest in the device. But if it is important to people, then it is important to people.

And even if it is perfectly suited the the rest of the hardware and any additional RAM/performance would be wasted[1], that's not a good excuse to overcharge for old commodity hardware.

[1] I would be extremely surprised if the rest of the system were designed around the video card. Actually, designed twice, since there are two video card options.

Depends if you want it to be great for years to come as well.

Another pro tip: when marketing to professionals, they will get it over time. If you're a real professional, you will follow the news, see the reviews and tests, and after a while you will understand new technology that was not properly marketed in the first place.