Apple's tight integration of hardware and software gives them a significantly greater advantage when it comes to releasing hardware that people actually want with software that further fuels their excitement. It's not like the established players (Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung) will go broke or lose Microsoft's partnership overnight; the former three will probably, as hinted by the article, concentrate more on their enterprise products (as they should, as they are very good in that space and invest truck-lodes of their R&D budget there anyway) and Samsung will probably be used as the key hardware manufacturer for executing Microsoft's vision (which allows them the opportunity, if it's successful, to exit the direct-to-consumer business completely).

I think MS is very much on the right track. Despite some idiosyncrasies, it is pretty easy to see the amount of effort they've invested in making Windows 8 friendly for content consumption *and* creation. If the hardware is right (i.e. comparable to iPad) and comes with Office and a tight screen for drawing and writing on, I'm hard-pressed to believe that these won't sell.

I don't agree with most of your post. Here is why:
IE 10: Better HTML 5 support - not much else - who cares? Everyone that uses the default browser by default because they don't want to deal with downloading and installing new stuff. And everyone that will be using Metro by default (most likely)
Sign in with MS Account: Who cares? Is anyone gonna use this? Heck yeah; SSO is good! (Live lets you create an account with your primary email as the username, so very convenient for lots of folks.
Picture Password and PIN Login: Picture pass is kinda cool, but PIN login? Really?this will be *REALLY* useful on tablets. Think of trying to login on a train with a touch keypad.
Ribbon in Windows Explorer: Holy cow no thank you.I think, and my experience supporting others supports this, that the ribbon has helped a lot of people navigate Office much easier. So it follows that it will make improvements on the Explorer side. We'll agree to disagree here.
Refresh and Reset Recovery - How about making it so you don't need recovery in the first place? How is this better than a decent backup system? This thing is going to be pushed hard on tablets. Wouldn't it be convenient to factory reset your Windows tablet just like you can on your iPad or Android tablet?
Native USB 3 - This shouldn't be a Windows 8 "feature," this should be in a service pack for Vista and Seven Good chance it will be; remember USB1.1 support for Windows 98? Rolled back to 95 via OSR2 update.
New Windows Task Manager - Yawn You obviously haven't supported Windows enough to know how much of an improvement it is. (Yes, third-party tools do it better. It's still good for the improvements to be native.)
XBox Live integration - I don't think anyone will care about this - are they thinking about competing with steam? Good luck. You do know how popular XBox live is, right?
Family Safety - Wasn't this included with Windows Live? Yawn Antivirus in Windows Defender - In other words, they are just including MSE. Which is awesome since people can stop paying McAfee/Symantec for their bloated products and not have to worry (as much) about making sure everything is up to date.
Secure Boot Support - Holy cow no thank you Yeah, that does kind of suck.

...it's laundry list of issues just don't make it attractive when I can easily resolve them by buying a comparably nice phone that runs Android. Yes, the UI is incredible and a huge leap from their previous iteration. Yes, the quality of its applications is significantly better as is the set of phones it currently runs on. However, almost all of the applications I currently use on Android are *still* unavailable and all of the ones that are available pale significantly in comparison to their Android or iPhone partners. A few examples:

• Yelp: Very popular app I use for finding, mostly, good restaurants to try. Awesome on iPhone and Android. Slow and awkward to use on Windows Mobile, and lack of proper multitasking causes it to lose state every time I use it.
• Evernote: Very popular app for storing notes and other various pieces of information. I use this religiously, mostly because it's easily accessible from PCs and their Android releases are really, really good. Tons of missing functionality on Windows Phone (no alternative layout options, can't attach anything, at least from the last time I tried)
• Google Voice: I use this almost extensively to call and text people. It works pretty well on iOS and integrates so deeply in Android one could easily mistake it for being native. Notifications barely work on the third-party clients I've tried on WP and the UX is just not there.
• Maps: Great native app, but you need a third-party application to get public transit directions (it works somewhat awkwardly last time I tried it) and no GPS-guided voice navigation, which is included with Android and works really, really well.

Additionally, WP is supremely locked down and jailbreaking is not as simple (or, for some phones, impossible) as it is on Android or iOS. This makes a lot of the things we can do in iPhone and Android impossible in WP. For example, it's possible (and very easy) to backup text messages on iPhone and Android. No way to do this on WP at this time of writing and I don't think they get backed up when you sync with Zune. To worsen matters, WP is *still* vulnerable to a two-year old SMS bug that can make a phone completely inoperable (even after a reboot) when it receives a special text message!

Finally, you need to use Zune to sync stuff. I personally hate using a huge software package to sync stuff, and while Zune is pretty nice, it's still a huge step backward from not needing anything at all on Android.

It's not that Windows Phone is bad; it's just that they don't have anything valuable enough for most Android or iPhone users to switch over. It's great for people new to the smartphone world, but that segment of the market has been pretty small for a while now.

I bought a pair of Klipsch s3 In-ear headphones about a year ago for $35. These are, hands down, the best canalphones you are going to get for that money anywhere. Full stop. J&R might still have an open-box pair for $15.

If you're into cans on your head, the Sennheiser HD201S is $30 or so. These sound just as good and don't leak too much.

I've bought really expensive headphones over the years (not worth it if you abuse them like I do); these are my new go-tos. Good luck!

I have a Windows Phone as well, a HD7. (I use a Galaxy SII on a daily basis, though.) I *loved* using it. The Windows Phone team got a lot of things right, especially with their UX. The Zune application is, hands down, the best mobile music player out there today and its integration with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is phenomenal (i.e. makes a third-party application for this useless).

The problem is that UX advances isn't nearly as important for users as it was when iPhone broke ground. There is definitely a baseline that competitors in this market need to meet, but like regular computers, people (at least in Europe, Asia and US where smartphones are king) care way more about apps and looks than anything else. Windows Phone is still very light in this department, which is preventing it from really taking off. Case in point: Angry Birds is free on almost every OS (even Chrome!)...except on Windows Phone (2.99). Words with Friends, another super hit, isn't even available there.

He's been vehemently against Nokia's decision to leverage their smartphone strategy on Windows Phone. For more awesome reading explaining why, check this out.

As explained in the link above, it's not Nokia's decision to use Windows Phone on their smartphones that is the chief problem. They are, essentially, hedging their entire existence on the platform, which is a very bad bet for a company whose popularity has always been stronger in Europe, Asia and developing nations. It's almost like a Kodak in reverse in that they are, more or less, giving less importance to their bread and butter and more importance to a huge, HUGE risk. (Notice that HTC and Samsung, the top dogs in the non-iPhone smartphone world, use more of their resources for building Android and their own OS's than Windows Phone.)

The sole fact that, to this day and despite a very recent system update, Windows Phones still have the crippling text-message-of-death bug clearly demonstrates where Microsoft thinks they're at with the OS. I haven't seen any of the major players on Android/iOS commit serious time to Windows Phone yet; until this happens, it's a sinking ship.

For many people, handing out a business card is much quicker than using something like Bump. They also add a layer of expression and professionalism that is easily lost with other mediums. There are people who charge companies a bunch of money per hour just for customising cards, and for good reason; some companies get hoardes of new business just from their cards alone.

I'm not giving up my cards anytime soon. Actually, I need to refresh my design soon! (I take pics of all the cards I get and store them in Evernote; no more mountains of cards or clouding up my address book.)

Cooperative education (at the college level) and intern/externships (at high school or college level), more or less, give people the same experiential value described here. I was part of the co-op program at my school (which boasts a 99% placement rate, which I found to be true), and I had no problems landing a great (and extremely well-paying) job before graduation. A lot of the people I interviewed with were impressed by the year and a half of work experience I accumulated during school. Most good co-op or internship programs also teach you how to interview, create a sharp resume and make good first impressions, which is an absolutely essential skill to have (that so many people seem to lack, at least if my limited recruiting experience is indicative of anything).

Community college or technical school would have been way cheaper (free in the former case), but I'm not sure if I would have had the same network, accessibility or approach to things I do now had I gone down those routes.

I would think that most people who absolutely needed to remote into their machines over the Internet would use some kind of tunnelling to a jumpbox or remote access appliance to RDP to an internal server...

Memory management has improved somewhat in their later releases and I believe Mozilla has changed the plugin system to be compatible with their new release cycle. Additionally, the JavaScript engine is so much faster in later releases and HTML5 support has improved a lot as well.

Let it die.

(Then again, I became a Chrome user recently and haven't looked back. Their plugin and web app support is fantastic and built-in Firebug capabilities are great. Really love how well it synchronises with Google services and their Android version is looking very promising.

I really doubt the efficacy of this privilege when it's currently completely optional and advertising companies, by their definition, rely on less privacy to make a profit.

Until the do-not-track feature becomes a law (which I hope it does, though I'm sure these companies will find ways around it), there should be more education about NoScript and other such alternatives to those who really care about controlling their privacy and exposure.

HIIT and sprint/shot training is great and all, but most people will quickly shrug it off (or try it for a little while and quit it). Many (I'd argue most) people equate exercise to work, and many people hate work. Instead, most people envy those with fast metabolisms (even in they're "skinny fat" and are, on average, about as healthy as someone pushing obesity) and attempt to copy their lifestyles by becoming skinny with as little work and time investment as possible without changing eating patterns.

It's the same reason why microwave ownership exploded and is the raison d'etre for the oil change and car wash businesses, amongst many other things. Most people would rather pay a heap of money for other people to do the easy, simple things they can't/don't want/don't have time to do than take the few minutes and do it themselves. If people could pay other people to manage their own weight and make them look good, they would; a $60B strong weight-loss market proves this. It's not entirely their fault; it's very, very difficult to make time for things with work, kids and wife around unless the body is put first and foremost.

To make matters worse, a lot of people who try to lose weight or "look good for the beach" have horribly unreasonable plans for getting there. ("Looking good for the beach/girls/Facebook" feeds into that.) If many people (I'm tempted to say most) didn't think they could lose 30 pounds in 30 months or get rock-hard solid abs (and nothing else!) in a few weeks, then things like the South Beach diet and P90X would have failed immediately. It doesn't help that lots of parents, who were also very busy and didn't make the time to care for their bodies, didn't make the time to teach their kids proper eating habits and forewent breakfast and simple, reasonably-portioned dinners for McDonald's and frozen TV dinners. (The biggest irony about most people's weight-loss ideologies is that instead of eating the most sugary, fattening crap at breakfast time when their bodies need it the most, they make breakfast the lightest meal of the day and eat heavier as the day progresses! Willing to bet it's all because skipping breakfast became a habit.)

Staying in good shape and good weight isn't rocket science and isn't something made exclusive to sports professionals and Olympians. (Funny enough, a lot of these people have HUGE problems maintaining their figure post-career. Michael Jordan and Greg LeMond are kind of fat now, for example.) Eating reasonable portions appropriate to workload and moving around a bit are all that's needed to NOT gain weight. Moving around a LOT and/or eating reasonably is the way to lose weight, and working, stressing and RECOVERING muscles is the way to gain muscle. (Lots of dudes hit the gym and over-stress their bodies with barely enough sleep to let their muscles recover and grow.)

That's it. It's so easy, but is a HUGE mental challenge for lots of people.

Disclaimer: I lost 30 pounds from biking and walking a lot, dropped 3" from my waistline and have been able to keep it off for the last 4 years now. My metabolism isn't naturally great, but I don't think I've ever gained holiday weight.

A "classroom education model" could mean a completely virtualised classroom similar to today's online colleges. It could also be the concept of 'teaching anywhere' like some charter and experimental movements are currently exploring. Hell, it could even be a resurgence to home schooling. Regardless of what this means, I think it will be many, many years before virtual education becomes politically and socially acceptable at the college level and even longer before it works its way down (partially). (Online universities definitely exist now, but they are still very taboo to many companies. I think this will change, especially since more and more families are unable to pay for college without loans and more and more colleges struggle to strike a balance as a result.)

Real classrooms will always exist when poverty is a deciding factor. Think about many of the families living in today's "urban economic zones." Those moms and dads (if present) have to work 10-15 hours a day to make ends meet and barely have time to take care of their kids' basic needs, let alone home schooling duties. In many cases, this means that those kids are taking care of their siblings and have other issues going on that have to be dealt with. Does effectively removing the teacher completely in their first years of schooling help pave the way for their academic journey?

For the sake of argument, let's say some surprising research comes out in support of this idea. This means that the cost will fall on the parents amd the cities which these "zones" reside in. It's a huge lose-lose situation: parents will have to come up with more money to buy all of the new technology they'll need to make it work for their children, and the cities will have to spend a whole bunch of money laying down the infrastructure and up those parents' taxes to recuperate the costs.

Of course, this means that the 99% will grow even greater since the wealthier districts that can afford, comparatively, anything would have no problems laying this down, in turn giving their kids even more access to stuff kids in the former situation won't. The politics are obvious here.