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Microsoft cuts Surface Pro tablet prices by $100

Discounts come just days after the tech titan reveals that marketing the tablets has cost more than the revenue they have brought in.

Steven Musil Night Editor / News
Steven Musil is the night news editor at CNET News. He's been hooked on tech since learning BASIC in the late '70s. When not cleaning up after his daughter and son, Steven can be found pedaling around the San Francisco Bay Area. Before joining CNET in 2000, Steven spent 10 years at various Bay Area newspapers.
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Steven Musil
The Surface Pro. Microsoft

Microsoft reduced the price of its Surface Pro tablet this weekend by $100, a few days after revealing that it has spent more money on marketing the in-house tablet than it has generated in revenue.

The reductions, which were first reported by The Verge, cuts the price of Microsoft's 64GB and 128GB tablets to $799 and $899, respectively. The discounts come three weeks after Microsoft cut the price of its Surface RT tablets by 30 percent.

Sales of Surface RT tablets, which debuted last October, have been seen as tepid. The tech titan revealed on Tuesday that it has earned $853 million in revenue from its Surface tablets since their debut last fall. However, that is less than the $900 million the company had to pay for Surface RT inventory adjustments and also less than the $898 million Microsoft paid for Windows 8 and Surface advertising.

Even though Microsoft revealed its revenue from the Surface tablets, it did not release the number of units sold or specify the individual revenue from either the Surface RT or the Surface Pro. In March, Bloomberg reported that Microsoft likely sold around 1.5 million Surface tablets to date. Though 1 million of those sales were for the RT version, that number was about half of what Microsoft initially expected, according to Bloomberg.

In comparison, Apple reported last month that it sold 14.6 million iPads in the last quarter alone.

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