TheBigM72

No Microsoft employee has made any comments on the upgrade situation of any kind. The person whom you speak of is a Microsoft evangelist but he is not a Microsoft employee, he is the same as any other Microsoft Partner.

He is about as connected to it as say a national distributor of Apple products – i.e. not connected at all. It is the internet blogoshere circus that leapt on the information.

armpitofdeath – at no point has there been any official communication from MS on the issue. Only journalists with “sources” and other third parties have been making these stories so the will-they, won’t-they criticism is unfair IMO.

They have been zipped up on the issue.

1) Android isn’t free, all the Android majors are signed up to pay to royalties to MS. So the first notion is wrong.

2) The amount that MS charges OEMs for Windows 8 is much smaller than retail. MS expects ARM devices to be cheaper than x86 PCs and license fees do adjust accordingly.

3) Android manufacturers still do not have meaningful traction or competition for Apple in the tablet space, iPad still dominates (and no, don’t bother comparing a £100 junk tablet with an iPad2/3, only things like Galaxy Tab 10, Motorola Xoom etc, in the UK they had to slash prices on these things). So even without price as a differentiator, the OEMs are keen to push the Windows tablets in the hopes they might get better success than they’ve had so far with Android. Once iPad’s virtuous cycle of lock-in is broken then they might think about beefing up Android as a no.3 player.

It’s like the phone market but reversing Android and Windows positions.

Who the hell cares about that folder apart from Microsoft, users are not supposed to go in there. Simples.

I thought about your response for a while and alongside the differing directions of MS’ “authentically digital” and Apple’s faux-realism. Given moves towards all-digital working, I think the concept of word processing as typing on paper is an abstraction that should go away.

In this particular case, I think it’s just as easy for me to level the charge of habit v intuition at you. You’re focusing on the UI element I interact with if using the mouse pointer (which I don’t anyway, I tend to use the scroll wheel, the page up/down keys or the right-hand scrolling edge of my trackpad).

I think in this instance the Apple way is counter-intuitive. It’s trying to use a real-world paper metaphor which doesn’t need to exist – as you say “grab the document”. In windows I’m not even thinking of a document just movign towards the text I want to see. Thinking I want to go down a page and being able to do it by: scrolling down with scrollwheel, mousing down, page down key, arrow down key etc seems a lot more aligned to me with less mental work than thinking “ok, this monitor is like a fixed porthole on a piece of paper, move the paper up to see further down the document”.

On any decent laptop, the internals are more than powerful for “everyday” tasks. For the same money, you used to be able to get a significantly mroe powerful Windows PC than Mac equivalent but that just isn’t relevant any more.

I’m more than happy with the speed of my PC running Win8 CP and that’s only a Core 2 Duo. The integrated graphics in Ivy Bridge (Intel HD 4000) are plenty for most things other than playing serious games.

So what matters these days? To me at least, it’s things like screen, keyboard and trackpad, size and weight, connectivity (especially WiFi performance).

Macs have been ahead in a number of these areas for some time though I think Windows PCs are catching up again slowly. Ultrabooks are catching up with the Air for portability, certain brands are good at keyboards like Lenovo Thinkpads, you have more choice (and thus more chance) of finding top WiFi in a Windows laptop (something like the Intel Ultimate-N 3×3 card). Starting to see more ultrabooks at 1600×900 resolution.

Connectivity is anyone’s game – some care more about USB3 ports, some will want Thunderbolt.

In general so far, you can find a Windows laptop that can beat the Mac in individual areas but it’s next to impossible to find one that is as good as a Mac on an all-round basis. (My experience in comparisons is more with the Air than the Pro but I think it still applies). The nearest competitor I’ve seen is perhaps the Samsung Series 9 (900X4C) but that’s even more expensive than the Mac.

If you want an awesome laptop, the Macbook is very tough to beat. If certain things like price matter more to you, you can compromise on other aspects and get a Windows laptop. Do note that the Macbooks are much worse at running Windows than they are OS X, the software and hardware are tuned for each other running OS X but the Windows drivers aren’t great so perhaps OS will drive what you do?

Of course if price and computing performance really matter – you can get a beast of a laptop for £800 where the Macbook Pro equivalent might cost £1,000 more but you still have the sacrifices on design, trackpad etc.

I’ve scrolled in documents on friends’ Macs using the two-finger gesture. I found it very strange. Especially as the gesture was in the opposite direction to the direction of the page. With a scrollbar, I pull down to go down the document and vice versa but on these two Macs it was the opposite which I found pretty counter-intuitive (i.e. push your fingers up the trackpad to go down the document – I guess the concept is that you’re pushing the “paper” up so the bit visible on screen is further down the document – bit of skeuomorphic thinking there I reckon).

The other thing is, whilst plenty of people, Mac users especially rave on about gestures, I’ve never been sold on them. I’ve always been an external mouse-using guy. I can appreciate that using gestures on a large trackpad saves the need to carry a mouse however but I’ve never been particularly fond of gestures anymore than I need to use them. Definitely not to the extent of learning one, two, three and four-finger gestures.

So far, pinch to zoom has been the only multi-touch gesture I’ve needed. My current laptop does one finger scrolling using the right and bottom edges of the trackpad – not sure why two-finger scroll is better than one-finger scroll.

Apps on Win8 can be organised into tidy blocks. Why does anyone click on apps anyway. I keep about 8 apps on my superbar and the rest are start>search>open.

In that respect Win8 is similar – hit winkey, type beginning of app name, hit enter, it’s superfast. What’s nice in Win 8 is that searching for some things in Win7 was really slow or you needed to type virtually the whole name to get the results, I’m finding start search in Win8 a whole lot better.

I read the blog post.

The screenshots you saw are not at all the final version. The final look won’t be revealed until RTM. Even the Release Preview will only have “hints” of the final look for the desktop. There also further improvements to mouse operations in Win8 that are partially in RP and remainder in RTM.

We need to keep sailing this wave for a while and reserve final judgment until about 3 months after RTM.

Just for your own benefit, it’s jugular by the way not juggler.

Let’s assume for a moment Windows RT devices are tablets only. Ideally, you would have only the metro side of Win8 on these. MS only put the desktop on there because of Office.

In this context, I am not worried that Mozilla cannot build a desktop browser. They should be allowed to build a Metro browser however and my understanding is that they are. This deals with complaint one. Their second complaint is that IE10 gets access to Win32 APIs but they don’t. I can understand MS is keen for a great browser and are keen to push away from Win32 access to others (slippery slope). Ideally, MS need to make their own browser using WinRT APIs only and set this standard for other browsers.

The fact they are not doing this right now is perhaps a sign of the immaturity of the WinRT APIs but that’s where they need to get to.

Thus, I would say, either allow Mozilla temporary access to these Win32 APIs in a highly protected way and all their engineering needs your approval or just work on ramping WinRT quickly enough so neither IE nor any other browser needs Win32 APIs at all on the tablet.

Giving Mozilla unfettered access to Win32 could result in quite negative impacts on security and battery life – two issues where MS is really trying to catch up to Apple’s reputation.

Is Pages any good for writing equations (i.e. mathematical symbols, fractions, greek alphabet etc etc)?

Re the iPad/Mac symbiosis – I can see the icloud benefits and compatibility of files with iWork on both – any other major things between the two?

Not right now he doesn’t but the idea is that he’s testing out WP with the Arrive and may get a Lumia WP8 if one ever arrives on Sprint.

Nadomars, I thought you were giving the Arrive to your mom?
Protip: you can swipe away the toast notifications if you don’t want them right now or click on them to go to the relevant app.

Apps: facebook, Twitter: mehdoh, carbon, rowi; Accuweather, Adobe Reader, Amazon Kindle, ESPN, LinkedIn, Flixster, IMDB, Netflix, Polyglot, Paul Thurrott, Prime TV, Shazam, SkyDrive, Skype, TED, TWiT, WhatsApp, WMPoweruser, Youtube Pro

In windows it is one step further required: install a pdf printer then any application can “print to pdf”.

But the print many pages to one side of paper has been available in print dialogs for as long as I can remember.

There’s a pretty simple answer to this Sean: it’s competition. As you say Intel carefully defines what an ultrabook is and OEMs make PCs to that definition. Any competitor based on AMD etc needs to keep up with that definition or its products won’t sell relative to ultrabooks.
Intel’s marketing seems to be generally towards thin & light devces but giving them a memorable name so sleekbooks will benefit from this too.
Second ultrabooks can have rotational magnetic HDDs, if they have a small piece of flash soldered onto the motherboard is ISRT instead – you don’t need to have an SSD as the system drive.
Not everyone can afford or wants to afford a $1,000 device, democratisation through lower prices evenwhen compromises need to be made is a good thing, choice is a good thing.

Thanks all for the continuing posts.Although I came here to learn etc I do wish to make a number of points for your own information, especially for those of you who switched in the Vista era or earlier. Plus part of this is me thinking out loud. Whilst a lot of the points below are pro-Windows, I seem to be “getting” Mac a bit more now so the head is saying stick with what you know and go Windows and the heart is saying go with the bouncing beachball of Mac.

1) As far as I’m concerned, Windows is in the “it just works era”. Even using the Win8 consumer preview, I’ve had zero problems. My understanding has always been that Windows has had superior peripheral support than Mac? I especially remember in the noughties, you had a period where only a subset of printers etc supported Mac. Windows has been plug-and-play for a great number of years. Probably Apple has caught up and now they’re similar in this aspect?

2) I’ve never had a virus or malware and good user behaviour goes a long way to prevent this. Win8 now comes with its MSE and defender products pre-installed and so I don’t even need to think about purchasing anti-virus products. Also with Win8, I will be able to get almost all software I need through a curated app store which should help.

3) I prefer USB3 to firewire or thunderbolt – it’s available on more accessories, those accessories tend to be cheaper (the reason I’ve generally opted for USB2 ext. HDDs over firewire ones) and USB devices will work on pretty much any device without any need for adapters etc.

4) I’m not a software developer or A/V guy though I do want to get into some photo editing later in the year. I’m a finance guy and so maintaining speed and proficiency at using keyboard shortcuts in Excel 2010 probably matters (apparently the shortcuts in Excel 2008 or 2011 are different?). But then again, I’ll always have my work laptop so maybe I don’t need to run it on my personal machine.

5) I find wireless network support great in Win7 – there’s a discreet little thing in the system tray by which to connect and disconnect from networks and it all happens real fast.

6) You guys have got me pretty excited about Macs, if it was my first computer ever, I would probably go Mac. Because of the need to support my parents (they are very slow to understand computers despite not being that old) I would probably make them go Mac a few months after I did.

7) Cost – I was checking out things on the Apple store and some of the other apps you guys have recommended to me – thanks again for those! :-) I realised there would need to be a substantial investment, the machines are obviously at the premium end of the market, but then there’s the investment in iWork and all those other cool little apps plus the hardware accessories like the keyboard, mouse etc. In Windows I could use my existing copy of Office and transfer it over to the new machine and the rest is freeware so no additional software cost.

7b) Ease of move over to Mac – I use a little software utility called MozBackup to backup my firefox profile and port that to new machines but I think it’s Windows only. I would need some help on how I can transfer my firefox profile to Mac version of firefox or something. These days, a large part of anyone’s computing life is inside their browser, moving my bookmarks, history, cookies, saved passwords, add-ons like lastpass etc in one fell swoop is highly desirable.

My Dad has tens of thousands of highly organised email folders in Thunderbird (he refuses to move to labels in GMail or anything else) – I would need to transport that into some mail client on Mac.

8) I agree gesture support is far superior on Mac to Windows, in no small part due to the hardware and drivers as well as native OS support. I’ve always preferred using an external mouse with my laptop, the few times I tried using gestures on friends’ MBAs it felt very strange.

9) iWork compatibility – When I was working on a group assignment, this guy converted our work (in powerpoint) into keynote format (annoyingly without asking us and meaning only he could make changes but that’s another story). When he re-exported a copy back into powerpoint, there were a lot of little errors that he needed to then go and fix. Also, at £72, it costs almost as much as a three-user copy of Office Home and Student.

But you can do that in Windows through the print dialog.
I do it all the time for lecture notes in powerpoint and pdf formats – I print four slides per page, double sided.
For normal text I print two pages per side.

Thanks for all the responses chaps, much appreciated. Even if I don’t go Mac, I’ve learnt a lot about “the other side” in a positive atmosphere :-)

Upgrade to the iPhone 4, sell as BNIB, buy the Arrive for $100 and pocket the difference in cash.

Apple hardware is certainly high quality, but right now it seems kinda boring how they all look the same. There’s no choice of colour either. You also pay for it. If I got a Samsung Series 9 (2012), I could be confident no-one else would have one either.

If I got a Mac, I would try and use OS X exclusively, Windows Retail is not cheap.

The more I think about it, I really feel like I need to try Mac out properly – this concept of dragging content into an application sounds really cool. I’m going to try and find an older second-hand system because I’m keen to wait until end of the year to make a proper investment. How old do you think will still provide me with a good idea of current Mac experience.

This list is pretty key for me.
Airplay on Apple TV (using an iPad) looks appealing. iCloud looks handy for my parents.
The Windows points all apply to me.

I think says: iPad, Apple TV for my parents. Just need to decide between Mac and Windows 8 for my parents (two laptops and a desktop).
Windows 8 ecosystem for me.

This is really helpful :-)

Perhaps I will wait, at least to see how the RTM W8, WP8 and app stores pan out before deciding.

On your Macbook pro is fantastic for most things: could you give me some specific examples e.g. names of apps that are mac-only and awesome or just particulars to the OS?

To give you something that’s functional but not finished whilst trying out the OS.
There’s a reason these apps have a large “App Preview” written across the top of them.

Look at the cookbook apps for examples of great apps.

I’ve read through your replies now guys: here is where my head’s at now. I don’t seem to encounter most of the windows pains you guys have had re: popups, dialog boxes, wizards etc. It was a huge problem in Windows XP, somewhat in Vista but much, much less so in 7. I’m currently running Win8 CP and don’t really counter those problems.

I have seen a colleague at business school use Mac software to create really beautiful documents: He took our group report from Word and made it look so professional within Pages pretty quickly. He took our Powerpoint and made it flashy in Keynote quickly (actually that made it seem like Keynote was geared more towards home use than professional use). BUT, I expect to be using a Windows machine and Office in my next job and I suspect I’ll want to stick to Office for Windows to maintain proficiency (e.g. keyboard shortcuts in Excel differ between Mac and Windows apparently).

A guy at the Apple store showed me a little about how things work in Mac like with Finder – it felt so alien not navigating through a filesystem. On the hand, it’s a lot simpler and navigating a folder structure can be a pain but only having Finder? Seems straitjacketing.

The non-object oriented style of Mac also seems double-edged. Fantastic if you want to use iLife or have one app for each task as default if you want to use lots of different software on the same file, it’s harder – is that right?

I prefer metro on my phone but I’m thinking my parents and I might prefer iPad at the tablet level. They’re also slow to understand computers so I would have to teach myself about Macs and then teach them.

Although I was keen to get into a single ecosystem (against Vlad’s advice), I’m thinking about sticking with Windows on the desktop simply to avoid the mental retraining for me and my family but going iPad for tablets. I reckon my Dad will respond to that faux-real ethos better than I did.

Thanks for joining the thread grahamnp – I’ve heard similar sentiments lots of times, I guess I’m really just looking for specific examples like Sparrow and you mentioned Reeder so I can determine whether it is beneficial for me and other members of my houehold. I don’t have access to a Mac unfortunately, should have taken advantage of one when I was an undergraduate.

They are currently “preview apps” – the final apps will be much better.
The People hub and mail app in windows phone are highly regarded.
Look at something like Flip Toast too.

Skaryon Pretty sure Word et al have file history too but maybe the feature is more exposed in Pages?

Guys, just “Believe in Steve”.

Except ours is called Sinofsky instead of Jobs.