Why not just buy an actual C64 setup on eBay for a fraction of the price of this thing? There are always a few on there and some of them come with a large selection of game disks. ~Philly

Yeah, well, Microsoft had years to make Windows Mobile not be a complete piece of shit, and they just couldn't be bothered to try until the iPhone showed up and Apple started eating their lunch in the mobile space and publicly embarrassing them. I've been using company-issued WM phones since 2006, and the experience has been uniformly terrible-- to the degree that I no longer trust my company phone when I'm on call, and have the calls sent to my personal phone (which, yes, is an iPhone).

It's a little too late for Microsoft to be telling me, "But, baby, I can change!" and expect me to believe it and/or be interested in giving them another chance. I suspect many others feel similarly.

~Philly

"Apple finally made the break between OS 9 and OS X. If MS attempted such a break, their business customers would revolt."

Except, they sort of did with Windows 7, and they solved it the same way Apple did-- an XP compatibility environment.

Technically, there's not much stopping them from doing it for real-- throwing out all the 20 year-old, backward-compatible cruft and making a fresh start from the ground up, while providing a VM for legacy applications. Virtualization technology has improved by leaps and bounds over what was available when Apple transitioned from 9 to X. Hell, since 2006 I can (with the help of VMware or Parallels) run Windows apps on my -Mac- and have it be damn near seamless, there's no reason Microsoft couldn't do the same thing.

~Philly

They've been flogging tablets for 10 years. They keep doing the same stupid shit over and over again, which is trying to stuff desktop Windows into a smaller form factor for which it is too bloated and battery-hungry, with a UI for which it was not designed nor suited, and try to use "it's the Windows you already know!" bit as a selling point. Even if they do rework a version of the Windows UI to be more touch-friendly, the second you launch an app (which will most likely NOT be touch-friendly, because it was designed for "the [desktop] Windows you already know!") you're right back to hurting for a mouse/stylus and keyboard.

Seriously, what the hell has Microsoft been doing? It's been a year since the iPad was announced, and the best thing they have to battle it is still a PowerPoint deck of FUD? Yeah, good luck with that, Steve. By the time you have a horse to put in the race, the race will be over. iPads have been making their way into corporations and meeting with wide approval. Apps are being written for them. They are going to be nice and entrenched by the time any possibly-viable competing product comes off the assembly line, and then Microsoft will learn what it's like to be on the bad side of corporate technology inertia.

At my last job, about 10 years ago, UPS dropped off a 21" CRT. The dead center of one side of the box had a hole in it the shape and size of one fork of a forklift, and there was the pleasant tinkling sound of broken glass when the box was moved. Unfortunately the receptionist who signed for it didn't notice that when it was dropped off. We didn't even bother to open the box, we just called the vendor and arranged a swap.

The president's office at that company was very close to where the UPS trucks would park when delivering to the building. One day I was in there working on her laptop when they pulled up outside. The driver went in the back, and then one by one I saw the packages for our building come arcing out and hitting the ground outside the truck.

After those incidents I stopped using UPS whenever possible. When I cannot avoid using them, I use an absurd amount of padding and insure the package up the wazoo.

Great story, I always wanted to see a filmed version of it.

~Philly

The Xserve has been largely redundant since Apple discontinued the Xraid.

It's not like there aren't other options. Apple promoted and sold a Promise RAID unit as a replacement, and the guys who were on the former Xserve RAID team formed a new company to make and sell a unit that is a worthy successor to the Xserve RAID in capability and appearance. I haven't had the chance to play with one yet but I understand they're pretty nice.

~Philly

I know the iMac had the irDA port. It didn't bear mentioning because nobody used it-- it was little more than a curiosity, and vanished from the iMac by January of 1999 when the 3rd revision came out.

And the previous reply was right, you are completely missing my point about USB. The iMac wasn't the first PC with USB-- which would be why I said it had been on PC motherboards since 1996-- but it was the first to basically force its adoption through the elimination of legacy ports.

Remember the Gates on-stage BSOD while demoing connecting a USB scanner in Win98? Remember the "plug and pray" jokes? USB support in Windows wasn't what I would consider usable and trustworthy until 98SE (shipped in May, 1999), so people with the option to do so would stick with their trusty serial and parallel peripherals for their Windows PCs. Meanwhile Apple had been selling computers with only USB ports for nearly a year, driving demand for USB peripherals.

~Philly

Though 3.5" floppy drives had been around since 1982, they did not meet with success until the 3.5" floppy drive was chosen for the original 1984 Macintosh (quickly followed by the Atari ST and Amiga the following year). Apple was not too far ahead of their time when they killed the floppy in 1998, but they saw where things were going and made the right call-- Mac users who still really needed a floppy drive were able to buy an external one. Windows users questioned it because they weren't (really, still aren't) accustomed to being able to boot from any device with an OS on it that's connected to their computer, so floppies were their lifeline.

Though USB had been on PC motherboards beginning in 1996, nobody did anything with it until Apple put it in the iMac in 1998 and excluded all other port types. Lots of people will argue that Microsoft finally adding USB support to Windows (in Win95 OSR2) was the tipping point, but that's bull. Windows users had the option of clinging to their peripherals that used the ancient parallel and serial ports, and cling they did. iMac users had no such option, and the popularity of the iMac meant that if hardware makers wanted iMac owners' money, they had to start churning out USB-based peripherals for them.

As an aside, Firewire did not appear in a Mac until the Blue & White G3, in January of 1999. It did not appear in an iMac until the 6th revision, in October of 1999. Apple's view was that USB and Firewire were complementary... USB for low-bandwidth stuff like keyboards and mice, and Firewire for hard drives, video cameras, and other high-bandwidth devices. Intel was the one that had the apparently inferiority complex and started working on USB2, to compete. Based on my experience using both, Firewire 800 is superior to USB2, and if I have the choice between those two I'll always pick Firewire. (As for the future, Firewire 1600 and 3200 have been approved by the IEEE but aren't in any shipping product, I haven't seen a USB3 device in the wild yet, and Light Peak is a wildcard at this point.)

To sum up, Apple is the tech company that is not afraid to chop off legacy stuff at the knees, and by doing so indeed often drags the rest of the industry kicking and screaming with it.

~Philly