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The embedded version of Windows XP is a separate product and still does get support (including updates) until April 2019, a fact XP users can use to their advantage to continue getting updates.

Arguably a far, FAR more important metric than performance for the majority of users, given that tablets are used mostly for media consumption, is battery life. I have a feeling that the Surface Pro 3 will trail the field badly here. (I don't know what the iPad series can manage these days, but a good Android tablet can manage close to 20 hours of screen-on time at a brightness of 170cd/m2.

10% is almost no one (as far as Chrome Developers are concerned). Tab Mix Plus for FF (with side tabs) has 1,000,000+ users. Tree Style Tab (which is probably the most functional of all the side-tab clones) has only 100,000+ users. Vertical/Side tabs will never be native in Chrome :: too much effort for too few users.

Which is pretty interesting, I bet less than 1% of Chrome's Users have any interest whatsoever in "DevTools/Inspect Element". I wonder when that will get removed from Chrome.

Why don't you just make a slipstream CD/DVD with all the updates on it? It sure doesn't take that long to do and at this point in time if you're re-doing it on more than one machine per month you should have one anyway. If you don't know how this will give you the basic primer on it.

Heck, wasn't the iSight the only webcam for Firewire?

No. (I have one of these kicking around somewhere...worked much better than most of the USB webcams that were on the market back in the day.)

They just announced today that they added AirPlay support. http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/17/amazons-instant-video-app-adds-airplay-support-for-streaming-to-apple-tv/ and that their UK customers can stream purchased albums from the Amazon Cloud Player to their Sonos systems. http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/audio/1302640/sonos-gains-amazon-cloud-player-to-instantly-stream-your-purchased-albums I think other devices and OS choices are in the making. We should be able to stream all Amazon content to a variety of devices soon if these early steps are any indication.

All this an a sainted device from Google

Except people [including myself have been incredibly impressed with having a high resolution; quad-core; small tablet running latest Android....and so are the reviews. Top searches on Google

http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/tablets/google-nexus-7-1087040/review 4.5 stars
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/tablets/379261/nexus-7 3x 5 out of 6 and 1x6 out of 6
http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/laptops/1297408/google-nexus-7 5 out of 5 User 5 out of 5 expert
http://reviews.cnet.com/google-nexus-7/ 4 out 5
http://www.wired.co.uk/reviews/tablets/2012-11/google-nexus-7 9 out of 10
http://www.theverge.com/products/nexus-7/5831 8.8 expert 9.1 User
http://www.laptopmag.com/review/tablets/google-nexus-7.aspx 4 out of 5
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2406552,00.asp 4.5 out of 5

I know you love Apple but right now Apple need compelling products, priced competitively not fanatics spreading lies. It simply tarnishes the Apple brand more, and its been damaged enough just lately.

Asus has actually also annouced a line-up of Win8 hybrid tablets that will have 1080p screens going up to 14" - Transformer Book. It sounds like that would be too large to use it as a tablet proper, though.

Here's the link: http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/general/172902/firefox-uncovers-hidden-speed-boost-for-safari "Vladimir Vukievi was attempting to find out why the performance of Firefox 3 builds was hitting a plateau, when he noticed that Safari was happily drawing pages at twice the frame rate.

Digging around in Apple's WebKit engine, which drives Safari, he spotted over 100 undocumented "OS-secrets-only-WebKit-knows"."

I'm not comparing speed. I am just saying, Apple seems to have a history of building performance hooks into its OS which can only be used by software that it makes. It would be like if everything but iTunes was slower at processing MP3's because iTunes could access a better encoder built into the OS.

Of course what you fail to mention is that probably all these 100 "OS-secrets-only-WebKit-knows" APIs are just like the one he found in his search "why the performance of Firefox 3 builds was hitting a plateau, when he noticed that Safari was happily drawing pages at twice the frame rate." Because that super-duper secret API call allowed Webkit to do something that it couldn't do because it wasn't a program but instead a shared library, something that a program could do without calling that super-duper secret API: set a fucking flag in a fucking XML config file.

Yes, by setting this fucking flag in a fucking config file, fucking Firefox was able to suddenly update its screen twice as fast - all without needing to call some undocumented "OS-secrets-only-WebKit-knows". Ohh, and he was only able to find these super-duper-extra secret APIs because Apple has OpenSourced the fu-ntastic Webkit that calls them.

Here's the link:
http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/general/172902/firefox-uncovers-hidden-speed-boost-for-safari
"Vladimir Vukievi was attempting to find out why the performance of Firefox 3 builds was hitting a plateau, when he noticed that Safari was happily drawing pages at twice the frame rate.

Digging around in Apple's WebKit engine, which drives Safari, he spotted over 100 undocumented "OS-secrets-only-WebKit-knows"."

I'm not comparing speed. I am just saying, Apple seems to have a history of building performance hooks into its OS which can only be used by software that it makes. It would be like if everything but iTunes was slower at processing MP3's because iTunes could access a better encoder built into the OS.

Yes, the original article says

3... "As we all know, all zooming into a poor-quality image would do is give a muddled blurry mess on the screen. This technique was recently brilliantly parried in Red Dwarf."

Since Red Dwarf was cancelled in 1999, it makes me wonder how old this article is.

Also makes me wonder if they fired all their copy editors. "recently parried"?

OLED got some very nice properties over LCD and plasma screens, but I think the LED backlight was the killer. For the prices we're talking here, you can have a bunch of them selectively backlighting or not backlighting the screen. There's some trickery to this true, but if you look at some of the new LCDs out like this it says "a 240-block local dimming LED backlight". At that point you're starting to fake it rather well, with a dynamic contrast in the millions rather than in the thousands.