MS gained critical mass as the PC market boomed - that's the only reason they are around. Until a few years ago they were also able to help hardware vendors sell new stuff by deliberately turning each new OS into a performance hog, helping vendors justify selling new stuff. Vendors in turn helping MS push their new OS because of reasons.
That aside, MS is mostly known for stifling innovation rather than bringing it on. The odd kinect or something aside.

Apple on the other hand always did well when the control-freak Steve Jobs was in charge. Say what you want, but the man knew what he was doing. His analysis of the market and his reflection on end-user computing in general were and still are fun and enlighting to listen to. Apple never, or very rarely, wastes your time with broad-strokes and/or half-assed bullshit. When they make a statement on their position or product line and why they have it that way it's usually spot on. With Gates and Balmer it is either boring or bullshit.

Steve Jobs was personally interested in building computers that don't suck. He truly wanted devices that he would use every day. His tantrums when someone delivered crap were feared and his persistance in pushing his people to better output was legendary. MS compared to Apple is like American cars compared to German cars. The German cars where all driven by the CEOs of the companies that built them themselves - in motor city each boss had a chauffeur. Ferdinand Porsche would notice instantly if a product he had was shit - because he used them every day. Crysler? Not so much. Look at Detroit today, and you know where that attitude lead them.

As much as I dislike a company having so much power, Apple deserves to be on top. They've turned tech-stuff into fashion and can ask 800$ for a new iPad from the next guy (and girl!) on the street. I won't fall for it - my Lenovo Yoga 2 is way better in every aspect and cost less than half - but most people will.

How MS can even remain in the market that strong is beyond me. Subscriptions for an Office Package? An OS? You've got to be kidding me! ... I personally expect MS to be squished a little in the next few years, if not crushed. Apple from the high end, Google+Huawei+Xaomi etc. from the low end. No, no, sorry folks, my bet is on Google and the fruit crew and MS losing ground is long overdue IMHO.

I bought an HTC Flyer about a year after it came out. I like my HTC phone, I liked the design of the tablet and its enclousure is still one of the best ever built. I mostly wanted to fiddle with it and programm a little for Android.

Turns out that I used it every day, for real work and leisure on the go. Calendar, docs, portable hotspot, reading, watching movies or short videolectures on the go, listening to music, audiobook, taking notes, playing games, etc. I'm since convinced of the feasibility of tablet computing.

I've recently decommisioned the HTC Flyer after more than 3 years of every-day full-scale use and bought myself a 10" Lenovo Yoga 2 Android with LTE module. Awesome device. Good enclosure, 9600milliamp battery, cost less than half of the inferiour iPad Air 2. It runs for 3+ days without charging and I plan to use it as my primary mobile computing device. Will carry my MacBook Air around less because of this I suspect.

As a result I'm using my 4,5 year old HTC Phone even less, which in turn means its battery runs even longer. On top of that, you can use the Yogas battery to charge your phone - that's a feature they (Ashton Kutcher) actually advertised on the Yogas first presentation.

There are pretty decent web IDEs and PHP environments for android out there.

My 2 cents.

Would a vertical maglev be feasible? ... It would be worth a try. ... However, I guess a handful of buildings becoming to high for our current tried and trusted elevator technology is a luxury problem.

Spartan! Kraken! ... Gotta love those codenames. You get a pretty good impression of what kind of movies the crew at microsoft has been watching lately. :-)

Wasn't that the other programming language whos users would look down on us Basic programmers? My good friend from school was one of those. Now he's a teacher and I'm a software developer.

Pretty much sums it up, doesn't it?

OK, jokes aside: Seriously, who cares how a PL is "rated" - whatever that's supposed to mean. How much it's used and how it gets the job done, or, more precisely, how much do I get paid for using it is what counts.
Example: I love Python. I'm measurably more productive in Python. But I do PHP at work. Why? Wordpress and Typo3 are built with PHP. Python only has Plone and that has almost no market here in Germany.

Its that simple.

And to be honest, there are many neat exotic programming languages out there - all of which I would love to have the time to look into, but don't. Pascal definitely isn't on that list.

My advice to anyone today would be to let go of Pascal and however it is "rated" and learn some other flash exotic language - perhaps one of those countless new ones that run on the Java VM (Scala, Closure, etc.), no?

My 2 cents.

Seriously guys, this is fucking outrageous! I' writing my first post on my brand new tablet just a minute ago and you're abysmaly flaky mobile version double posts again. So it wasn't android 3.2 after all.

And why can't I turnoff ads in the mobile version?

Rob, what's going on? .... You guys need to get your shit together man - it's 2015, mobile web is standard now. Get with the effing programm. ... Do you need help?n

Perhaps you need help? I'll build a professional mobile version for credit alone.

(Please don't mod down - this needs attention folks. Seriously.)

Need to run special software tied to the OS? No? ... Install Linux.
Really, it's that easy.

Ubuntu can be a drag, in more ways than one, but it's worth a try - and it does look really cool. Seriously.
Suse and Redhat are hassle-free to install aswell. All three are definitly more hassle-free than any Windows installation you can do thesse days.

I've got Ubuntu 14.04 on my ThinkPad. And while it can be anoying (which OS isn't?), it is way ahead of Windows in usability and you can get tons of books and free info on the web for it.

Other than that I'd recommend Mac OS X or Chrome OS - but since you already have your laptop I guess that's ruled out.

Welcome to the camp. Enjoy.

Need to run special software tied to the OS? No? ... Install Linux. Ubuntu can be a drag, in more ways the one, but it's worth a try. Suse and Redhat probably are hassle free aswell. All three are way easyer to install than a fresh Windows.

Video NLE on Linux or, more preciseley, in the FOSS department, is lacking. In recent years there are some tools that have become feasible - Pitivi comes to mind - but Video Editing has always been a high-end specialised market. Anybody doing video editing professionally has a full-time job already and no time to programm software on the side.

On top of that, there has been a huge consolidation in the Video NLE market, with vendors and products dropping left, right and center or simply entrenching themselves in their established niche of mostly gouvernment or conglomerate funded media - such as Avid or Media 100.

The climax of this development was Apple sewerely screwing up final cut pro as they switched to App Store versions only. Lots of much needed pro features broke or disappeared without a trace and the people moved to Adobe Premiere Pro in droves.

Then again, that premiere pro and final cut where the last big players in the field shows that there's been quite some cleaning out.

With 3D it's a little different in FOSS, because we have Blender. But let's not forget that Blender is a very fortunate exception. It has a little built-in NLE and a very neat compositor, but still is mainly a 3D toolkit. It used to be a commercial tool and we managed to buy it free for 100 000€, keeping the lead developer at the same time (Ton Roosendaal). Despite being in active development, Blender still has tough competition in the professional field, although they've been feeling the heat from Blender free offering vs. their 900$ - 6000$ range of products.

What we need in video is a programm like Fusion or Shake going full FOSS and the lead developers staying with the product, funded by a foundation or something. Or a crew like Pitivi actually getting through and sustaining with their crowd-funding model and adding in all the pro features people want.

Personally, I'm going to look into Pitivi this year to see if it holds up on simple to mid-range video tasks. They appear to be very ... avid (no pun intended) and active. Maybe it's even matured further. But I don't expect miracles. If you want to do non-trivial video work today, you need tools like Fusion, Avid and the likes - and those are all closed-source.

Android has matured and leads in apps. And it's freely available for a wide range of devices already. I don't see anybody coming close to the package Google can offer, tie-in services included. Apple sells hardware - their services are a loss. MS sells business software, subscriptions to MS Office, Consoles and now tablets. AFAICT they are behind in comodity computing now.

Google makes money selling *you*. They can give away all their stuff for free, including their services. As soon as one vendor has to pay extra to adapt Tizen, there will be a strong incentive to look into Android again. Or Chrome OS as the case may be. All Google needs to do is perhaps offer a few cheap-and-easy co-branding options for their OS.

Google wants to bring the second half of humanity online, along with any hardware vendor that cares to emphasise the bottom line.
I think they have a very good chance of succeeding.

My 2 cents.

Genau!

Genau! Achtung! Verboten! Halt! Gesundheit! Fahrvergnügen! ... Did I miss any cliche German words? :-)

What are *your* experiences.

Way better than yours in German. Promise. ;-)

An easyer solution and way more fun :-):
Hawk vs. Drone: 1 - 0

Apple still has one thing going for it: Predictable hardware. Even after 15 years or so of OS X, the range of devces is fairly overseeable. If a crew gets Linux to run on a mac, they've like also gotten the drivers and all the extras to run halfway properly.

But that's about the only reason to get a mac to run linux. Besides, I'd pick up this device these days. Awesome project - deserves every support they can get.

Bottom line:
You buy a mac for the awesome hard- and software integration and their sleek product design. Using a mac without its OS isn't that smart, IMHO.