Please Slashdot, do your worst :)

Kudos for providing some actual useful info for an MS product on Slashdot. Unfortunately it's a rarity around these parts.

Lenovo sales are up; Apple sales are down. Those two facts alone show the problem isn't Windows 8, but then again there's nothing like reinforcing a narrative many here wants to believe no matter what with creative stats anyway.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/if-you-make-pcs-and-youre-not-lenovo-you-might-be-in-trouble/

This is an anti-MS website that's why. The folks here just want to hear about how Microsoft screwed up - any other narrative isn't welcome.

Win8 really isn't that different from 7 with the bonus of being able to run Metro apps if you really want to. Granted, I don't like all the UI changes either but I do like the improvements - synced data & apps, faster kernel etc. It really is an improvement over all, but it is a change.

Some places are still offloading old inventory but the vast majority of high-street retailers for example are selling all Win8. This is another Slashdot attempt at convincing everyone Win8 is terrible and Microsoft are doomed - it's been the same tired narrative for as long as I can remember, the only variables are the version-numbers of [product]. Flame away, my crimes of going against the group-think will not go unpunished I'm sure.

Are you really suggesting there's no-one that has vested interest in seeing MSFT do badly?

Isn't a technology enthusiast site first & foremost?

Interesting how you say "balanced to Microsoft" - is that an admission this place is just a PR machine against it? I'm really asking as sincerely as I can.

You've come to the wrong place if you wanted constructive criticism - Slashdot it only interested in positive reinforcement that Microsoft is doomed and anything it produces is in every way inferior to anything else on the market. You'll see no article that shines any positive light on MS here.

So please take your facts & reason and take them elsewhere :)

But in all seriousness, the Surface Pro is a great device - laptop & tablet in one. Yes there's some trade-offs but no other tablet let's you run legacy WinApps in quite such style, IMO.

Who needs proof to prop-up the years-old narrative here that Microsoft are only & can only be evil? What makes me chuckle are the responses to generic "Microsoft to force [evil_action] for [product_name]?" are so often "Well I for one won't be buying this then", as if they were ever going to....

Slashdot aren't interested in reality, just reinforcing their narrative of it. Granted not all but certainly there's never a post here on anything good+MSFT, which is a shame because this is supposed to be a tech site not a politics site.

Yes because not investing in the huge R&D effort to port Office to "Linux" (which one?) is the same as filtering an API usage based on device ID.

Those stats from the other day compared percentage of all machines at the time running Vista, and a % of all machines now running Windows 8, with the % now after 2 months of W8 users less than it was after the same time period of Vista being out. There are a lot more PCs now than there were then so it was a false equivalence. Windows 8 may or may not be the most popular Windows ever; it's very different on some levels (not on others) for one thing and people don't like change, but for sure it's not tanking as many on here would love everyone to believe.

I appreciate much of Slashdot don't want Windows 8 or Microsoft to survive any longer than necessary but has it really come to creative number massaging to convince the world of a narrative you're going to believe anyway? How are /. nerds any different from any PR/sales drones at this point?

Windows 7 is vulnerable to 100% of malware without AV software installed - there are plenty of anti-malware solutions that catch 100% that work with Windows 8. I'm not sure what your point is other than perhaps some subtle FUD spreading.

Disabling secure boot allows this no problem.

Citation (badly) needed.