Of course, Microsoft beat both of them by years and years. I’ve had a ZunePass (now Xbox Music Pass) for years. But it’s nice to see Google catch up, and to snicker at Apple for being so far behind.
I’ve never found the weight or thickness to be an actual problem in daily use. Especially once you factor in the ‘cases’ that you almost need for other thinner, lighter phones… and the bonus of wireless charging.
I think you’re wrong. I use Win8 on a non-touch laptop (trackpad though), a non-touch desktop (keyboard/mouse), and a touch tablet. I love it in all places. I love the way everything syncs together.
If you “couldn’t get used to it”, then I can only imagine that you didn’t try very hard or very long (I found there was about 2 weeks of frustration and googling before it “clicked”). Now I can’t imagine going back to Win7. The vastly faster booting/shutdown/sleep/resume… the new File Explorer, File History, Storage Spaces, Task Manager, and more. What’s not to like? Yes, you have to take a few moments to go to the Control Panel, Defaults section and switch your app defaults to desktop apps when run on a desktop. Big deal. And yeah, you need to take a few moments to configure the start screen for the way you use it (unpin everything you don’t care about, pin everything you do, pin your most access apps to the desktop taskbar, and arrange into groups), but so what? That tiny amount of effort, and I’m more productive than ever.
It has plenty of compelling reasons. The speed alone is enough. The syncing across machines, integrated skydrive, IE10, and more… seriously, other than a bit of an up-front learning curve, what’s the down-side?
Xbox Live gives you a ton of features, including far better multi-player action & interaction than other ‘free’ services. And providing all that requires huge server farms, software support, and more. Why should all of that required infrastructure be offered “for free”? The monthly cost has always struck me as quite reasonable (especially when purchased in bulk, on sale). The amount of whining I see for this has always puzzled the hell out of me.
How is it “bullying” with others use your intellectual property without properly licensing it? Given the number of companies that don’t fight at all but settle, it seems those claims are likely to be perfectly valid. Maybe you’re just MS-bashing.
