https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--unnNrpz...

I think it paints a clearer picture as to why the Surface was singled out among the equipment.

[1] http://deadspin.com/bill-belichick-is-sick-of-those-stupid-m...

It's not a good tablet, and it's not a good laptop. It attempts to sit in the middle which is not what I want.

I was expecting the tablet interface to be a lot more finished, but there are a lot of rough edges and missing features.

I'll be going back to iPad on the next cycle.

As a long time OSX user as well, I was surprised to see how unpolished Windows 10 Desktop is as well.

* http://blog.rfvenue.com/karl-voss/

"... at the Super Bowl we manage ... basically anything D/C to light that is allowed inside the NFL venues.

That view is reinforced here: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/patriots-bill-belichi...

"Microsoft's hardware isn't necessarily the culprit here, merely the victim. The NFL uses a lot of wireless hardware—communications headsets, public Wi-Fi networks, private networks for the tablets, networks for the press, and more."

if they had, would the surface tablets have been able to use it? I'm not aware of any licensed spectrum that standard wifi cards are capable of communicating on.

QB just threw an interception, lets look over the play that just happened to see what he overlooked and how we can adjust.

The problem with technology in this case, is that there is no room for error. You have 40 seconds to call the next play, if you swipe wrong, something crashes you don't call a time out to call IT, you are just fucked. So 100% reliability will trump convenience, no software or hardware is 100% reliable.

If there is some software developed specifically for his /the NFL's use, you have a code base that's giving the entire platform a bad image.

My TWC cable net connection has been dropping on a daily basis for the last two months. Resetting the modem solves it until the next outage. (TWC has since replaced a shit ton of stuff to fix this).

So everyday, my two special snowflakes would get pissed when the Wifi would go nowhere. They would text me expecting me to fix it even when I'm in the office. They would text me when I was watching football (my only sacrosanct timeslot). They would text me when taking a dump. I could feel my blood pressure rise everytime I heard the phrase "The WiFi is down!"

So no, I think you're completely wrong about youngsters being less perturbed. When I was their age, my motto was "I want my MTV..." Their motto is "I want my WiFi..."

Oh, I don't know if I'd go that far. If since you were young you awakened each morning by being beaten with a stick, you might think that's just the way of things, but it's still unpleasant and you'd probably pay a good sum to make it stop.

No, the difference is that the oldsters have been putting up with this shit for over thirty years (flashing VCR clocks, anyone?). You've shaved one yak, you've shaved them all.

as the median age of user rises, quality requirements increase dramatically.

Because oldsters don't "get" technology? They don't want to give up their pen and paper? No, because they've got thirty years of experience backing their decisions: your shit doesn't work, and until proven otherwise they're going to stick with that assumption. I know I'm personally surprised when a piece of purchased technology does what it says on the tin.

So it has nothing to do with oldster vs. youngster. It has to do with "busy man has a job to do, a job that has nothing to do with yaks or shaving them" vs. "I'm going to spend my time dicking around with this tablet when I should be calling plays".

Sometimes I don't need to remember everything I've drawn on a whiteboard. And what's more, if I'm using a smart board that reboots in the middle of brainstorming, I'm thrown majorly off my groove and it may take a long time to recover my train of thought after troubleshooting.

So the complexity affords tremendous flexibility, but unavoidably at the cost of reliability.

The alternative interpretation is that younger users will put up with lower quality even when it is not rational.

Football isn't the most important thing in the world, but within it communication and data-gathering are mission-critical. If your processes are not reliable, that's a problem. You're accepting a risk that they will not work when you need them. And the trade-off is for an incremental improvement when they do work? Why would a rational actor find that acceptable?

Rather than being an old luddite, maybe Belichick is one of the few coaches with enough clout to call out the NFL's solution as being unacceptable.

There are parts of this that I like. The battery life, display, and WiFi connectivity are pretty awesome.

The OS, shell tools (there is a shell, it's just ... completely fucking crippled), advertising-orientation, lack of any user-centric controls, lack of user-centric data management, alteratives to store your data on the cloud^W^Wsomebody else's server, a ham-fisted locked-down experience from Samsung, crap hardware design and crap warranty service from Logitech.

I know all of that can be far better than it is, and that each of these companies are paying people whose jobs it is to specifically make the experience suck.

That is what this grumpy old techie's view is.

In my experience, that isn't limited by age - and if anything I see the opposite, with the young being so used to great UX that their concept of technology stops at the GUI.

So we're watching a TV episode my mythtv recorded and heavy rain always knocks out the OTA PBS signal so there's some digital breakup and the kids are like "skip it, its broken" because they are from an era of infinite youtube entertainment where something as good or better is always a "next" button away. They have no pity or empathy bad content is to be euthanized with aggressive application of the "next" button. Meanwhile I'm an old timer and I have invested in this episode of The Woodwrights Shop and I want to watch this damn episode even if I only get to see half of it between the signal breaking up. When I grew up an episode of Star Trek cost like $40 and was purchased on a VHS (or Beta) video tape and content was incredible valuable as the minimum wage was like $3/hr; for my kids content is infinite always available and totally worthless. You can always hit next and find something free that's probably better.

They are about the same with apps and games. Unless a game operates in what old timers would call newbie mode where its impossible to fail and you get little skinner box rewards every 10 seconds, they just delete it and find something "better". The game crashed? Don't restart, delete and reload. Oh well, for better or worse every game has 500 clones on ITMS to load on the ipad. Maybe clone #283 will be better than this one!

I also see a behavior with old people where TVs used to cost like a months salary so you replace them like windows, either roughly never, or when they break. How do I explain this to grannie that I can argue all day but when the CRT emission and therefore brightness drops in the amount of time I've spent arguing with grannie I could have earned enough money to buy a TV better than what she'd be throwing out, but great depression this and that and surely a smart electrician like me can replace a vacuum tube in her TV like uncle so and so did in 1962 and it would be all better and ugh ugh ugh so once again old people have a touch of early adopter syndrome and even junk is not to be thrown away, not realizing that modern stuff is both disposable and cheap. The only thing worse than arguing with an elderly relative about their 1980s magnavox TV is arguing with another old relative about their $100 2012 model thats already burned out the backlight because old people watch 18 hours per day of TV.

Also worth noting that some of the reporters were complaining at last week's game that the WiFi was down in the press box at Gillette Stadium at the start of the game. There could have been a bigger networking issue going on there.

The Pats use Extreme Networks WiFi gear in the stadium.

The incentives for all parties involved in this situation is less than ideal.

http://newsdiffs.org/article-history/www.nytimes.com/2016/10...

Belichick was also unhappy with the other communications systems at the game, like the ones between the press box and the sideline and between the coach and the quarterback. “Those fail on a regular basis,” he said.

He noted that the league does not supply the equipment to the teams until a few hours before the game, making troubleshooting difficult.

“So I would just say there are problems in every game,” he said. “There were problems last week, but there were problems the week before that, too. Some are worse than others. Sometimes both teams have them, sometimes one team has them and the other team doesn’t have them.”

[0] http://www.nfl.com/videos/new-england-patriots/09000d5d8226f...

Here's several coaches confirming it: http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2015/09/12/coaches-say-...

Also, the teams communication devices are provided by the NFL, and have nothing to with the individual teams: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2564764-nfl-issues-statem...

Lastly, I'm not sure the tablet failing for Bill Belichick, but not the opponent, supports your claim that Belichick is trying to gain an unfair advantage out of this.