No fooling? With over 30 years of embedded dev. experience, I never would have thought of that! (rolls eyes)

But what I have been trying to get through everyone's collectively addled brains is this:

The excuse that "Windows' 'Moderrn UI' has to be "simple", because they have to work with a wider-range of (Desktop-Class) GPU hardware" is patently absurd, due to the fact that the Windows' software engineers (OS and Driver Devs.) should be able to code an interface with as much "UI-finesse" as what is available in OS X (which is undeniably more "advanced" than the Windows 'Modern UI'), using any reasonable "Desktop-Class" GPU.

I do believe, however, that the main reason that MS decided to make "Metro" so bog-simple (no "shading", no "textures" and no "overlapping windows"), was because they wanted (which is way different than "had to" ) come up with an interface that wouldn't tax the capabilities of Phone and Tablet-Class GPU hardware.

IOW, whereas Apple wisely matched the UI of OS X and iOS more closely to the TYPICAL "Class of Devices" that they were running on (Desktop vx. Mobile), MS just "raced to the bottom" with "Metro", and forced all their "Desktop" users to unnecessarily suffer from a "Lowest-Common-Denominator" UI.

In short: Microsoft took the lazy way out, and then tried to pass it off as a "Unified" UI design.

Jeebus! Are you just TRYING to be obtuse; or do you REALLY have a mental defect?

Based on the fact that you can't FIND a "desktop"-Class GPU, that couldn't do stuff like Apple is doing with Mission Control and Spaces, and even at least support for two monitors.

And are you REALLY here to DEFEND Windows "Modern UI", or just argue against me?

Exactly.

I am an embedded Developer with over three decades of paid experience. Do these people really think someone like me (or me) doesn't realize that technically, these devices could be considered a "computing device"?

But, the less fanatical among us nerds, you know, the ones that don't have to prove that they are "smart enough" to get Linux to run on their toaster, just because they can say they did it (woohoo), realize that these are still, at the end of the day, Appliances with an Embedded microcontroller, or System-on-Chip, inside.

So, with that in mind, is a device with a mask-programmed microcontroller a "computer"? You can't run arbitrary code on it. Isn't the microcontroller just another form of ASIC at that point? You can't install Linux on it, any more than you can do so on your Cat. Yet inside that MCU, it's the same CPU core, same RAM, same peripherals, running the same instruction set. The only difference is that it has been built with a last-mask that happens to have a printed pattern on it that causes the part to act as a particular state-machine. But is it a "computer". No, it is not.

So please quit trying to Impress yourselves by declaring just any-old-thing that happens to have an MCU in it a "computer". Because, in just a very few decades (when it will be even harder to find anything that isn't an Embedded System), people will simply look at you like you're daft, punks.

I was simply pointing out that neither side is actually "right".

Then buy a Mac. Not one whit of "crapware". Macs used to come with "trial versions" of MS Office; but I don't think that has been true since they developed the iWork suite. They also had a "trial" version of that, too; but then started simply including the suite for "free" with new Macs.

Both Mavericks (current version) and soon-to-be-released Yosemite versions of OS X are distributed FREE; but are only licensed for use in Apple-Approved hardware.

Just because you might be clever enough to download Cisco's Router firmware from a Cisco download site (read "App Store") into a D-Link router (and even make it work), does not magically transmogrify that Firmware into Libre "OS" code.

That will never happen, unless you can make Nikon offer its DSLR cameras' OS ("Firmware") to Canon EOS Rebel owners, too.

When an "OS" is offered only for a particular manufacturer's products (which is undeniably the case for OS X, but not for Windows (or even Linux)), then it is more appropriately termed "Firmware", and should be considered simply one more BOM component, like the CPU or Memory.

The fact that Apple specifically states that OS X is licensed only for Apple-Approved hardware (and the fact that they are the authors and publishers of same), only strengthens their legal position.

All Apple has to do is start calling OS X "Firmware", and that neatly sidesteps the whole issue. No court is going to say that a product can't be sold with Firmware written by the same manufacturer.

Think about it.

Do we REALLY have to have this discussion each-and-every-time?

I argue that the iPhone and iPad really should not be called a "computer" (unless you also want to call your microwave oven, TV set, A/V receiver, DSLR, DVD/BD Player, VCR, etc. a "computer"), because there are simply absolutely no practical alternatives for the Firmware "OS" that completes the "product" design.

Even a "jailbroken" iPhone is still running iOS; otherwise it would be useless as a phone. All that the "jailbreaks" do is provide a method whereby "unsigned" software packages can be "side-loaded" into the iPhone. However, that unsigned software must still be developed in XCode to run under iOS.

I the case of the Mac, you may have had a (weak) argument; but now that Apple distributes OS X for free, I'm pretty sure that the Italians won't be interested in going after Apple.

I wondered the same thing. But now that the most recent two versions (Mavericks and Yosemite) of OS X are free (and iOS has been free for quite a while), I don't think that the Italian gummint could force Apple to assign a "price" to that which they are distributing for free.

Of course, the Fandroids will attribute this to "Apple fanboyism", and the wheel goes round and round.

Fist Prost, BTW.

No. I just assumed that anyone reading and posting on Slashdot understood that in both cases (Windows 8's "Whatever-Replaced-Aero-Glass"', and "OS X's "Quartz Compositor" (or whatever it is called these days)) that the difference between using those APIs (and the lower-level drivers and hardware) to acheive either the Windows 8 "Modern UI" or OS X's "Window and Desktop(s) Management" could not be attributed to having "tightly controlled" Hardware selection (in Apple's case), vs. "Anything Goes" hardware selection (leaving the Windows Approved Hardware List out of it for the moment), because, in each case, the actual underlying hardware and software was almost assuredly capable of presenting essentially the same complexity of display, and that the REAL difference was that Microsoft simply (and IMHO, wrongly) thinks their primitive UI is what "the people" actually want and need (but which "the people" have simply and roundly rejected, as referenced by W8's frighteningly-low adoption rate)..

Actually, I wasn't actually talking about the GPU-drivers, or their authors (except to attempt to make the point that OS X's advanced use of the WIMP UI (as compared with Windows 8) is not "rocket-science", GPU (or GPU-driver) wise; but rather the authors of the OS (as embodied by their employer, i.e. Microsoft or Apple) are the "Rocket-Scientists" here. Because it is the OS that contains the functions and functionality that enable all that cool (and useful!) Window and "Multiple-Desktops"-Management in OS X, that makes Windows 8 look and feel so downright antediluvian by comparison.

So, what I was saying to the GGP was that "This has NOTHING to do with 'Restricted Hardware' choices (because any number of readily-available hardware combinations could easily handle the task), and EVERYTHING to do with OS Designers and Developers, and their ability to solve the UI challenges in an elegant, easy-to-use way."

Seriously?

Within a very large "set" of possible motherboards, video cards, etc, What possible bearing would the range of a certain class of hardware that an OS can run on have to do with whether that OS uses featureless, monochromatic "tiles" that look like they were designed by a six-year-old (but which are running on a GPU that can crank out 25 zillion individually shaded and textured polygons per second), and which barely knows how to do an overlapping window, let alone multiple desktops, as opposed to an UI that actually looks like it was designed by someone who not only implemented easy-to-use features to compensate for systems with limited screen real-estate, while taking full advantage of systems with multiple displays? (Yes, I am fully aware that other OSes have supported things like multiple desktops for some time; but this is about Windows "Modern UI" vs. OS X).

So obviously, it isn't the tightly-spec'ed hardware (since what Apple is doing could be handled by any competent GPU designed in this century) (trackpad gestures notwithstanding). So maybe, just maybe, it is something else, eh?