Mac sales are going down too, just so you know. It seems the general population is moving towards Android and iOS, with the majority of people using their smartphones for all their computing needs.

Actually, Apple has very high market share with iOS. It is cannibalizing their own macintosh lines. It is possible for OSX to vanish. Windows won't because the enthusiast and gaming PC markets (themselves at least as big as the OSX market) will continue to use it - the OS is just a part to them - and those markets are still growing.

I'm running a dell xps that I installed Win8 on. It was running Win7 before. It has never, ever failed to sleep/hibernate or wake back up using either version. It's certainly much faster with 8, coming to life from a full hibernate in 6 seconds (2s from sleep). I have a custom-built desktop that ran W7 and now runs 8. It only ever restarts under 2 scenarios - either an major update was installed or the power goes out. It is always asleep instead of off, and never has a problem waking up. The problem you are referring to is probably not related to windows so much as it is related to a badly configured machine or crappy hardware.

OSX uses this same mechanism to achieve it's fast boot times. My understanding is the Linux even uses a similar trick to get the GUI and services up faster (since the kernel already boots very quickly)

We've had a few developers install 8 at work. They haven't found it to be a hindrance at all. I installed it on a machine in order to run VS12, and I haven't been slowed by the OS at all. The desktop is still there. They keyboard shortcuts are still there. Everything works effectively the same way but looks a bit different.

Show me an ultrabook that runs Crysis - it's only a 5 year old (or so) game, so by now ultrabooks should be able to run it on max settings.

Those 20 lb mobile desktop replacements are fine when you have to compromise. However, even LAN parties are dominated by desktops to this day, as the mobile GPU parts, while having advanced, still don't hold a candle to their desktop counterparts, and never will.

Either that or they read the news. In terms of value, Angry Birds is exactly suited to just killing some time - pretty much all mobile games have little to no real value.

You silly laptop gamers, *real* gamers use desktops :s

Of course, since we're talking about windows, the desktop space was implied. I can forgive your transgression just this one time.

Is that why chrome is installed on enough machines to be the most commonly used browser in the world (we already know windows is the most common OS in the world). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

Quite the opposite. $1500 gets an amazing desktop machine - quite top-of-the-line in terms of performance and parts composition. We find these mobile systems too compromised for the sake of mobility. Paying $1000+ for these ultrabooks is quite ludicrous. Everyone wants to be like Apple, I suppose. They keep it up, they will get apple's tiny mac market share.

Are we? Do explain.

Fine for regular folk. Us enthusiasts have vastly higher expectations, and we're not a shrinking market.

[quote]... iOS has never had a single issue of malware in the wild[/quote]

No. The first worm was in 2009, and it was possible to jailbreak iOS from safari (it still is, in some cases) -- http://appleinsider.com/articles/09/11/09/first_known_iphone_worm_rickrolls_jailbroken_apple_handsets.html

Aside from that, I do expect to be able to jailbreak my devices. If that costs me something in day-to-day security, I'm completely fine with that. I always want ultimate control over my hardware. The reason why you think Android is malware infected is because we have the option of installing our own software without the store. This is why developers are complaining that it's a platform for piracy - there is a path for software onto the device that is user-controlled. Also, google supplies the bootloader unlocking tools, effectively giving their blessing to people who want to jailbreak.