? What's not to like? Start menu takes all of 10 min to replace. After that it might as well be win 7 except with a slightly improved explorer and task manager and support for a better version of .Net (which I use in my work).

The POS part was that out of the box you see the start menu and you either like it or not. Those that aren't very technical pretty much just say: "why can't I just get it with the thing I know already?" and the stores for the most part have said: "okay". Heck my 60 year old tenant got a Win 8 laptop and was worried he wouldn't be able to figure it out. A day later is was saying that it was fine/he had no problems. It is the need for getting the device off the store shelves and people playing with it for a day or two that killed the sales of Win 8. People fear change and your Best Buy minimum wage sales guy isn't going to know/be bothered educating customers that they can get they system back to what they want with less effort than they use to get a cup of coffee.

I agree with the aero. Never had a lesser version of Win 7 but my understanding was that the versions that didn't support aero you also didn't get aero snap: that is the only bit I care about. Glass interface was pretty I suppose but it was really the half screen left, half screen right etc that made my day when I switched. You get that in Win 8+ + a better task manager, better windows explorer the option (not for me but some like it) for metro apps etc. The only complaint as someone that didn't like metro was that I had to spend 20 min online searching for the start menu replacement tool I liked the best.

As for color schemes: you don't have to use the stock ones you can customize to your hearts content. There are third party tools to bring back most of the ui all the way back to win 98 style if you want. Would have been nice if MS had given the "classic mode" option out of the box like they have done with every version since 98 but ... oh well we aren't in the 90's any more I don't miss the suspenders and striped Erkle shirts.

They are trying drastic things but I don't know if people care enough to notice. For example upgrades from 7-> will be free for the first year win 10 is out. Not sure how they are going to map which version you can go to from which version of the predecessor but still that is pretty sweet. At least according to what I heard on Windows Weekly they aren't even going to check if your version of windows is legitimate before allowing the upgrade. Meaning should you care to get a pirated version of windows 7 Ultimate and upgrade all the way up to whatever the equivalent ends up being for win 10 and the win 10 version will be legitimate ie no Win Genuine advantage complaints or whatever. I think MS has realized that people get windows with their computers and those that pirate aren't going to pay you so you might as well give away the software and get the whole ecosystem up to the latest and greatest (and use that to sell the idea of building stuff for the Windows store/hopefully at least get a few dollars from them when they buy a game or something) rather than allowing the latest and greatest look like a failure because people aren't replacing computers every 3 years like they used to.

Next up is they are integrating app stores and XBox with the PC. Only a part of the market I suppose but if you have a decent computer that means if you feel like getting a XBox game but can't be bothered dropping a few hundred on the device for the few games you want to play you'll still be able to get them on the PC (how that plays out in the market we'll see but could be fun). Probably not a huge deal for people that are big into gaming because they probably have a console vs PC preference but for the casual gamer that wants to be able to drop $30 on a game and play with a friend who is playing on their Xbox: not a problem.

I don't touch metro apps myself but Win 8.1 is still a nice, albeit smallish, upgrade vs win 7. As a .Net developer for a starters .Net 4.5 and in win 10 time frame C# 6 are huge improvements for my work. But also just simple things like task manager having more and better displays of what is doing what on the system. I used to have to open up process explorer once a week or so to track stuff down. Now I can do most of that right in task man. Similarly: perhaps a sign of my neurosis but I like progress bars, getting them for file copies and the pausing and restarting functionality is nice.

Anyways, back when Win 8 came out I think I paid about $29 for the upgrade so I could go to a hackaton that was using it which I think is all it was really worth. Now MS has gone to free upgrade model they are essentially going through the pattern that Apple did 3-5 years ago: get the initial sale then keep the customer happy with free upgrades till they decide to replace their machine.

My understanding is it isn't the hardware: Bootcamp has crappy drivers for windows side of things and things that would make sense like having the fan slow down under light load and such only work when running OSX. Apple then gets to claim 10hr battery life and when people complain about 3-4 hour battery life in windows Apple gets another chance to say why they are better.

Another example (might be MSs fault, Apple's, graphics card maker (ATI for this version?)) but the retina iMac 5k but only in OSX. There still isn't native res support on the Windows side from what I heard. So you've paid effectively a $500 premium for the retina screen over last years model and when using windows you get either a blurry 4k monitor (because of odd partial pixel scaling) or got to drop back down to 1440p like the old one was.

Anyways if you are looking for something like the Air on the windows side I suggest the new XPS 13: better res screen, better CPU, you get your windows license with it (don't have to pirate it or claim your mixed use computer is dev only if you have MSDN), your USB 3 ports have power share, it is actually thinner (though a bit heavier) than the air etc. The only thing is the macs have thunderbolt (if you are one of the 1% of people that actually have a peripheral that uses it and don't need it already as your mini-displayport connection for an external monitor) and the SSD is probably a bit faster I think they use PCIe in all their systems vs SATA3.

My understanding is some of the problems people have is that macs often have customized hardware. It might be a Nivida X card but with their own special crap added to support a non-standard connector say. Anyways the bootcamp version does a bunch of crap that makes windows suck more than it needs to on a mac. Ex from what I heard: fans in mac book pros often run full speed all the time in windows but proper power management happens when running OSX. They also do things that are kind of arbitrary like only support target display mode when running OSX on the target. Sure there'd be some work to port the functionality to windows but IMO if you buy an expensive computer and part of the selling point is that it can run windows too then features that require you to attach a cable to the system should work regardless of the OS. I can see not having iChat in windows land but features like target disk, target display, power management etc: fundamental features of the hardware IMO.

A lot of premium "high end" laptops still max out at 16: Alienware (pretty sure), HP Origin gaming system, Macbook Pros etc. Dropping 2k+ on a laptop I'd expect more but nope. 8GB is decent for a mid level machine. + the system has a o hum CPU so the users it is targeted for are probably not doing anything that requires > 8GB ram (watching videos, surfing, maybe in this posters case some sysadmin or dev work on relatively light weight editors/IDEs). My home computer just has 4GB which I can live with for those uses and then VPN into my work where I have a reasonably powerful beast (XPS 8700 special edition, i7-4770k with 32GB ram, 256SSD, 4TB HDD).

16 Is my problem thinking about a new laptop for personal use but also to do dev work on during my commute. I routinely use 15-16GB of ram and I'm pretty sure I peak over that by a bunch when debugging and what not. It pretty much removes all mainstream laptops from consideration. I instead need one of those ugly 7lb square beasts. Pay a $1000 premium for say a W541 but then have to pay more to get > 1080p screen that I would have gotten in say a Y50-70, have a much lower performance GPU etc. Pretty much all you get for the premium price is the expandablity, support for a docking station and conformance to a "professional" design you'd see in a corporate space versus a pretty "toy" design that the mainstream gets.

I hope by Skylark timeframe 32GB of ram becomes the new preimium non-workstation replacement tank standard.

Fair enough. Some reviews I read said the single USB C port was going to be the new "standard" for laptops. ... I hope not. At least for Mac users "buy something else" doesn't really leave a lot of options: if Apple screws up the Air and doesn't update the other Macbooks significantly for a couple years ... you are stuck buying old or buying the new without something you want.

Oh and the next spokemen to market their product as X mm thin is getting a punch in the face. Thin is not a unit of measure. It was quite the first time I heard it no it is just silly. Especially since they are usually asking you to sacrifice functionality like ports, or mini vs full sized ports, or pay them an extra $200 for the privilege etc. Thin is just one aspect of the buying choice and like all features at some point it stops mattering, like arguing over a 300dpi screen vs a 400dpi screen: who other than the guy selling it to you cares?

Steve Jobs design is still kicking. Eventually they'll make a 1lb screen. You'll use a cable to attach a hub which will have the keyboard, battery, usb ports etc on it. All so they can say it is %20 thinner than last years razor blade and weighs less (even though you have to lug around all the other awkward crap with you).

Also: what about estate taxes? When they die does their estate have to pay the US + Belgium then their kids? Each to their own I guess but my preference would be citizenship wherever I'm living at the time and no other citizenships so their is no issue (hopefully) of falling on both sides of a war and ending up in an internment camp, double taxation, less hold on me in terms of if anyone ever decided they wanted to extradite me for something that is legal where I was living etc. I don't imply you plan on doing something seriously illegal just say run an online casino. You have US customers and they find out you are a US citizen. You might find a letter and a plane ride in your future since I suspect they could "bring you home" to face trial. Dido DMCA, RIAA, and the like. You can laugh at them when they send you letters telling you you face fines under a US law when you aren't a US citizen but once you have dual citizenship now you might have to worry every time you travel.

I'm not sure that is the case maybe just recompiled. I'd suspect the majority of apps are using APIs/libraries supplied by the vendors (Andriod, iOS), or tooling (ex. Xamarin). The APIs tooling would need to be ported/optimized but hopefully few changes at the "put widget here" side of the fence.

My understanding is the WP10 = W10 mobile. So things using Atom processors, tablets etc will be using the same OS as windows phone. At least that is what I heard in tech press speculation not directly from the beast. So if that is the case modern apps, including the new modern Office will work on both. Maybe more x86 products will move down to the smaller form factor just so you can get the desktop apps too but I think the size of the screen in practice you rarely would want it anyways.

Modern is both native and managed. You can use pretty much whatever you want to write it: C++, HTML5, javascript, .net languages and via ports a whole lot of other languages that can target .Net (ruby, python, haskell etc). The actual apis you use either way are native under the hood. So expensive stuff like window management and the like are all native.

WP10 you are (promised) to be able to run a lot of windows apps though. That said there isn't really that great a number of windows store apps to chose from anyways. I think in many ways MS is going the way Sun did in its last days. Open source everything, run it on all platforms and ??? profit? At least they have hardware (XBox, perferals, Surface), non-server room corporate customers and services worth paying for (Azure, OneDrive, Office 365) to some people. But still cloud (and I'm a cloud dev) is a great idea but it shrinks the margins for everyone. Computing systems are becoming commodity/interchangeable.

I guess maybe I should care more about the low end market I guess. I'm not that customer nor are most/all corporate customers. I buy $500 monitors not $500 computers. But I guess a lot of the market goes to ~$700 laptops and $500 desktops so in consumer land they might have a winner.

South bridge is pretty cheap: http://www.aliexpress.com/pric... . I guess the mobo would be simpler too giving you more savings but I don't think it would do it. Still say $300 for a crappy AMD based system and $500 for a 2X faster intel system: other than the dirt poor I know which one I'd recommend. Anyone using a computer for more than a glorified smartphone has time with a value. It doesn't take many minutes throughout the year to equal the cost difference. IMO you are almost guaranteed for professional use that all but the top end $5000 gaming rigs will earn their money back in their lifetime in employee productivity/retention.