Look at all those saps in China stuck working in all the high tech sectors manufacturing plants, you think their standard of living is any good. Trust me people no nation ever improved its status with factories.

As much as I dislike Best Buy, some of these ideas seem good: new checkout lines, presumably faster, better online pick-up options and a place in the center of the store to find help.

However, if their "technology support" plans are just expanding the current "Geek squad" offerings then that will further alienate people and lead to more bad word of mouth.

I wish this was how it was done! I hope someone working at MS reads this and takes heed, but I know better....

Yeah if you were in Netflix's position what would you do? Potentially piss off the people who set the prices for the content your customers want access too or shit on part of your customer base? It puzzled me too for a bit, then I realized there was probably some business contracts where they could not name the studios as being a cause, I mean there are only about 6 major content distributors and they all march very closely together.

In fact all the stories that reported the price increase only speculated it was due to a probable licensing rate rise, no one besides Netflix has the real numbers, the rest is speculation.

I know I did not even blink about missing an optical drive from my latest build. Even MS supports creating a boot-able USB drive with Windows 7 on it! Granted you need an existing copy of windows but still. I cast my vote firmly in the fewer moving parts camp.

Apple can do this because their software is tied directly to the hardware, MS is solely a software company, realm of computers anyways. Office and Windows are currently the most profitable divisions of the company http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/04/microsoft-beats-estimates-but-not-apple-in-third-quarter-earnings.ars I'm sure they would sell more upgrades at a lower price but the question to answer is: "What price point nets them the most money?"