If you want to get something educational for your children, why not just buy the simplest Kindle and load it with books? Sure, you won't have a color screen and flashy games, but for younger children the various electronic features will probably be enough to satisfy their desire to explore. People often overestimate what it takes to keep a child staring at a screen for hours on end. Tthey could actually read something edifying and there wouldn't be quite the same distractions as an Android tablet.
Not all kids can read [1]. Furthermore, I just went to my daughter's K-grade parent teacher conference and the teacher plainly said that the iPad can elicit learning that the computer or analog equivalents can not... and the teacher in fact was *not* an iPad fan, she just uses her class iPad (loaded with only educational apps) as a reward for kids who behave properly.
And a generic "tablet" doesn't necessarily win here, either - it needs to be sufficiently non-laggy for Kids to feel it's immersive. False touches and ghost movement are a huge interest-killer for the tykes. Perhaps Android tablets will be there soon. Just not today.
If you are a parent I disagree. Amazon put some great work into making the Fire family friendly.
They made a great presentation. I'll be interested to see what the feature implementation is like.
However, the entire idea that my kid is presented with Ads during lockscreens pretty much makes the idea of the Fire HDs pretty abhorrent to me. Perhaps other parents will respond differently, but I don't let my kids watch Ads - my bigger one is trained to fast forward on the DVR when she gets TV time and chooses, and the little tykes (when they're big enough) will be watching stored video or things like Nick Jr.
Where does Amazon get off doing this? They're not the publisher. The device is paid for. The books are paid for.
The device and the books are being sold at a loss; or to put this another way, you're not the one paying for them. Amazon has discovered that consumers don't care what the catches are - in this case ads and the formation of an Amazon monopoly respectively - so long as things are cheap. In fact it will probably be the most successful Kindle yet.
How can you say this for sure? Amazon has, to this day, refused to provide any sales numbers on their Kindles - any of them (except maybe the original Fire, of which 5M were made, and apparently 5M were sold - though the last ones were at a steep discount).
Until they do, you can't say for sure whether their idea that "customers don't care" is valid - because you don't know if their product is popular or they're just dumping them until they win the market.
Check it out - fantastic dialogue and impressive realization of future tech: downloadable personas, backups, and lots of drugs and guns. Quite an enjoyable read:
THough in theory I agree with you on customer protections, there is a limit when buying and selling of these can effectively be used as arbitrage.
So simply, when the products are bought in sufficient quantity as to be purchased for resale, then sold, it's more like a financial transaction than a purchase... and at that point the buyer loses the "customer protections".
Note in this case ArenaNet only suspended those who traded excessive quantities that wouldn't indicate personal use. I say, good for ArenaNet - they aren't in business to cater to gold farmers or profiteers - those folks can go have fun in that MMO called the securities markets (and they'll deal with similar rules there too).
: Are all these "stories" posed as questions really fooling anybody? I see less and less interesting news and more stories designed purely to provoke chatter. Oh boy, Unix vs Windows should get lots of posts! Maybe next time you can work Apple in there too.
It's like the blogger feedback ploy - end your crappy blog with a question and more people will respond.
Are you new here? Slashdot invented this kind of blog entry.
Are there still babies being born with Down syndrome and Spina Bifida ? I though tests of those (and others) were performed on all pregnant women, resulting in abortion in those cases.
There are numerous couples around the world who have tried and tried to have a baby and never succeeded. For them, when finding out that their 20-week-old fetus may have a birth defect wouldn't change their mind about keeping the baby. Also some religious folks don't like these checks, so they see it as fate that they get a baby with disabilities (and they care for and love them the same as a normal baby).
I'm guess you've never been pregnant - despite what the right-wing says, getting an abortion even if your baby has defects, is very very traumatic and really not desired for many pregenant women. The bond that develops is a tough one to break - even if you know life will be difficult for the baby.
Also, when my daughter was born, she had to be checked to see if she had spina bifuda - she didn't but we were worried for some time... medical science is not quite there yet on detection and prevention.
Unless you didn't want the new models, then it would suck. For example I wouldn't want the new 4S phone because it has a dualcore that drains the battery faster than the old 4 model. If I order the "4" then that's exactly what I want..... not Apple to upgrade me.
Do you have anything to back this up? 4S *may* cause increased battery drain if you have the geo-fencing turned on (ie, location based reminders) - I used those for a week before I realized that it was draining my battery much faster.
In the case of your Beetle dealer, it was entirely possible that the manual shift was either sold from underneath his feet (ie, more attractive buyer) or the auto-shift had some nifty incentive for him.
Hey, Wild West swings both ways, ya know? You cannot tell government to stay out of your way and then come back whining when it does.
It's usually IP theft from state owned companies... so it's a completely valid compliant. Examples - look at Cisco vs. Huawei, or the issue of high-speed rail.
the main reason for me wanting to move away from London as soon as possible and leave this wreck of a housing market behind.
This is a major reason we did not relocate to London. My wife wanted to move back to Europe and had a nice transfer with her company to the London office, but the rental market is a complete nightmare.
Despite Silicon Valley being expensive compared to the rest of the US, we would've had a 2-3x cost of living increase in order to live there, and that's excluding transportation costs.
There's not a single car sold in America that gets 50+ mpg, which does not mean that such cars don't exist or are impossible
My 2005 Prius actually gets 53.4 mpg - and has for the past 9 months since I've been commuting a lot. I've measured and compared (in aggregate) the actual gas consumption and it measures up to about 1-2mpg variance per week.
Many turbo-diesels also get well over the 2015 proposed standards (like high-40's low-50's) and are available today.
Apple has been too successful. They've got $100bil in the bank, and growing. All the other computer makers are in the doldrums, and are could come to the verge of bankruptcy just by making some more bad decisions.
It just won a billion dollar settlement which is the beginning of their campaign to obliterate choice in tech.
Why are you conflating the PC and tablet/phone markets? The fact remains that PCs can do quite a bit of things that tablets/phones can not. And making the phone capable of these things isn't in the financial interests of Apple... they'd rather sell you two devices.
The PC industry has been rotting from the inside for a decade or more - take a look at the bribes Intel paid in numerous quarter to the likes of Lenovo/Dell/HP to keep them from using AMD products:
...by 2004, the rebate payments amounted to more than a third of Dell's earnings. For the 3 month period between August and October of 2004, Dell received approximately $304 million in rebates from Intel and reported income of $846 million, so that the rebates amounted to 36% of net income. Thereafter, the proportion of rebates to net income rose steeply. In 2006, Dell received approximately $1.9 billion in rebates from Dell, and in two quarterly periods of that year, rebate payments exceeded reported net income.
Dell wasn't the only corrupted vendor, pretty much all of them took kickbacks. It's amazing Apple was even competitive in the PC market for the past decade - it's clear that Steve Jobs was amazed too, since he pretty much declared the PC war "lost to Microsoft" in the late 90s as Apple moved on to the iPod and other markets.
I've never heard of it being OK to shoot wounded soldiers or people who are trying to take them away to get medical attention, and certainly not when there's children in their car (since they don't have the resources for proper ambulances and such).
It's really pretty sick just how evil Americans are now, and what kinds of crimes they will defend. Americans make Nazis look not-so-bad.
War is sick - that has not changed since the dawn of time. Instead of blaming the soldiers who are fighting the war, perhaps you should blame the people who got us into the war? Especially since it was unnecessary and nothing good has come of it.
In the case of Apple, it's clear that Samsung was directly copying Apple on many fronts - hell, look at their Samsung Stores or their power adapters. This case however, will immediately be appealed and this is nowhere near the last we'll hear of it.
There is a whole lot more use for nuclear waste if you have reprocessing plants - France makes money reprocessing nuclear waste then providing energey for their neighbors like the UK and Germany who are too chicken-shit to properly manage nuclear power. Even the US, due to the "proliferation" scare has basically killed nuclear power by crippling reprocessing as an option for at least several generations (until we have no other choice).
Personally I have both a tablet and an e-reader (iPad/Kindle3) and for $300-400, you could get both e-ink and LCD Kindles, for example. If reading detailed image-based PDFs is your thing I'd probably recommend 10" tablet at least. Reflow on text doesn't help there as much.
Depicted a horribly powerful state government, ineffective against the nightmarish dream moths in a depressing Ankh-Morpork like city sans humor. Many protagonists die or get brain-wiped - dreary stuff.
The sequels were even more depressing (Iron Council as well).
Ubik was wonderfully existential (esp. listening to the audio book), but Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch was way too acid-trip for me. I do agree that dystopian doesn't necessarily mean depressing (except for 1984 - that had me sad for weeks).
A few years ago Apple fans were proudly shouting that the iPhone had 70%+ of the smartphone market
[cite needed] The iPhone has never been more than 20-30% of total smartphone sales. See here for a glimpse of 2010 [1] and 2011 [2] numbers - none are are even as high as the 32% you are quoting (from where?). Fact is, Android (particularly Samsung) have replaced Nokia, RIMM and Blackberry, not to mention Windows mobile/phone devices. iOS has never been stronger - and neither has Android.
Apple executives are terrified that what happened with the desktop market - Apple initially gaining huge market share, and then falling to below 5%
Unless you never lived the 80's you know this isn't true - Apple pioneered with their AppleII, but IBM always had the corporate market which they basically gave away to Microsoft due to poor agreements on software licenses. Apple's share has never amounted to a large percentage of computing device sales.
Apple has always been about profits and not marketshare.
Holding a 10" tablet (or even a Kindle Fire / Playbook - they're heavy) in bed while reading is tough. That's why I own a Kindle3 - if the iPad Mini get the weight down a lot over the iPad3, it will be enough for some folks to sway decisions to buy over other 7" tablets or e-ink ereaders like the Kindle/Nook.
Transformer Infinity. Absolutely superior to the latest ipad in almost every way for a similar price. The ipad has an extra inch of screen on one side due to having a different aspect ratio, and a little more battery but no more endurance. That's its only advantage
Are you serious? This AnandTech article [1] proves you wrong on about a dozen points (ie, color gamut, GL benchmark, wifi 5ghz support etc..). But all of this is irrelevant - the Apple ecosystem is still superior including apps and content - that and the usability of the device, fit and finish is what sells folks.
I do agree that the Transformer series is a pretty good differentiator from the iPad given the keyboard dock. Microsoft's Surface looks like it's going to target this niche pretty hard, so Asus must be doing something right.
So to get back to a car analogy. I see the ultrabook as trying to be a GMC Caballero.
If that's the case, then how come all the laptop vendors are pushing to make their laptops look and feel like a Macbook Air? I have a feeling your analogy doesn't hold.
You can make a 11" MB Air (or equivalent ultrabook or even souped up netbook) be as responsive as a much larger laptop. In fact, given it only comes with a (very fast) SSD, it's a given that it will outperform almost any non-SSD laptop when it comes to anything processing even mildly relying on storage speed (even compared with the MB Pro). Processors, memory and storage have overtaken software's capacity to utilize it in recent years.
The MB Air (and the ultrabooks after it) are what all laptops will look in a few years... just like almost all cars today have unibody construction, cab-forward design, rack-and-pinion steering and other innovative features in years past. It's not a new category. It's the future of laptops.
The Surface? I still don't get the idea of a pen-based or touch-based laptop. The transformer (prime) is what the surface wants to be and it's not a runaway hit. The synthesis/hybrid of touch based UI and WiMP interaction models is unwieldy, and absent some UI innovation, is weaker than either interaction model alone taken to it's extreme (as is the case with a pure tablet or laptop).
The new Intel Medfield processor (X86 based) is very competitive with the ARM architectures when it comes to processing power and battery life. A tablet powered with a Medfield processor should provide plenty of battery life. And since it's X86 based, it'll run all those Windows apps.
Were it that simple - all those apps that are touch-insensitive. Let's face it - customer is screwed if they want existing x86 apps on a tablet - it is not in the interest of Microsoft, nor Intel, nor even the (big) software shops. Which leaves the Metro divide - new hardware (profits for manufacturers and Intel!), new software licenses (yay for software devs - profit!) and new framework that is touch-competetive with Android and iOS (survival for MS's monopoly rents - yay for MS!).
Of course, the alternative is an iPad with iCloud, 4G built-in and years of UI framework that has resulted in real and usable apps. Combined with SaaS/Cloud solutions, this could be a winner for the enterprise.
I seem to recall Windows 3.1 being the point where Windows started to dominate the desktop OS market
Which it cannibalized from it's command-line OS (MS-DOS) market-share dominance. Fact remains, Microsoft basically inherited dominance of the computing market from IBM who foolishly ceeded rights to Microsoft for their OS - combined with the clones, Apple really didn't stand much of a chance, nor did they ever have much marketshare (despite their mindshare).
Consequently, Apple's vision of post-pc reality is shaped by their previous failure to dominate the direction of computing - through supply-chain wizardry, patent control (some would say abuse, but the USPTO has been asleep at the wheel for sometime if not outright corrupt), and wise business deals that outprice or lock out competitors while providing a usable, desirable product for their users.
All of this is a bit academic, however - in a few years Android will be even more dominant in the mobile (possibly mainstream by then) space - Android/ARM will utterly destroy Microsoft, and even Apple will have a hard time fighting it.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to get something educational for your children, why not just buy the simplest Kindle and load it with books? Sure, you won't have a color screen and flashy games, but for younger children the various electronic features will probably be enough to satisfy their desire to explore. People often overestimate what it takes to keep a child staring at a screen for hours on end. Tthey could actually read something edifying and there wouldn't be quite the same distractions as an Android tablet.
Not all kids can read [1]. Furthermore, I just went to my daughter's K-grade parent teacher conference and the teacher plainly said that the iPad can elicit learning that the computer or analog equivalents can not... and the teacher in fact was *not* an iPad fan, she just uses her class iPad (loaded with only educational apps) as a reward for kids who behave properly.
And a generic "tablet" doesn't necessarily win here, either - it needs to be sufficiently non-laggy for Kids to feel it's immersive. False touches and ghost movement are a huge interest-killer for the tykes. Perhaps Android tablets will be there soon. Just not today.
[1] http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/14/tech/gaming-gadgets/ipad-autism/index.html
If you are a parent I disagree. Amazon put some great work into making the Fire family friendly.
They made a great presentation. I'll be interested to see what the feature implementation is like.
However, the entire idea that my kid is presented with Ads during lockscreens pretty much makes the idea of the Fire HDs pretty abhorrent to me. Perhaps other parents will respond differently, but I don't let my kids watch Ads - my bigger one is trained to fast forward on the DVR when she gets TV time and chooses, and the little tykes (when they're big enough) will be watching stored video or things like Nick Jr.
The device and the books are being sold at a loss; or to put this another way, you're not the one paying for them. Amazon has discovered that consumers don't care what the catches are - in this case ads and the formation of an Amazon monopoly respectively - so long as things are cheap. In fact it will probably be the most successful Kindle yet.
How can you say this for sure? Amazon has, to this day, refused to provide any sales numbers on their Kindles - any of them (except maybe the original Fire, of which 5M were made, and apparently 5M were sold - though the last ones were at a steep discount).
Until they do, you can't say for sure whether their idea that "customers don't care" is valid - because you don't know if their product is popular or they're just dumping them until they win the market.
Check it out - fantastic dialogue and impressive realization of future tech: downloadable personas, backups, and lots of drugs and guns. Quite an enjoyable read:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40445.Altered_Carbon
THough in theory I agree with you on customer protections, there is a limit when buying and selling of these can effectively be used as arbitrage.
So simply, when the products are bought in sufficient quantity as to be purchased for resale, then sold, it's more like a financial transaction than a purchase... and at that point the buyer loses the "customer protections".
Note in this case ArenaNet only suspended those who traded excessive quantities that wouldn't indicate personal use. I say, good for ArenaNet - they aren't in business to cater to gold farmers or profiteers - those folks can go have fun in that MMO called the securities markets (and they'll deal with similar rules there too).
: Are all these "stories" posed as questions really fooling anybody? I see less and less interesting news and more stories designed purely to provoke chatter. Oh boy, Unix vs Windows should get lots of posts! Maybe next time you can work Apple in there too.
It's like the blogger feedback ploy - end your crappy blog with a question and more people will respond.
Are you new here? Slashdot invented this kind of blog entry.
Are there still babies being born with Down syndrome and Spina Bifida ? I though tests of those (and others) were performed on all pregnant women, resulting in abortion in those cases.
There are numerous couples around the world who have tried and tried to have a baby and never succeeded. For them, when finding out that their 20-week-old fetus may have a birth defect wouldn't change their mind about keeping the baby. Also some religious folks don't like these checks, so they see it as fate that they get a baby with disabilities (and they care for and love them the same as a normal baby).
I'm guess you've never been pregnant - despite what the right-wing says, getting an abortion even if your baby has defects, is very very traumatic and really not desired for many pregenant women. The bond that develops is a tough one to break - even if you know life will be difficult for the baby.
Also, when my daughter was born, she had to be checked to see if she had spina bifuda - she didn't but we were worried for some time... medical science is not quite there yet on detection and prevention.
Unless you didn't want the new models, then it would suck. For example I wouldn't want the new 4S phone because it has a dualcore that drains the battery faster than the old 4 model. If I order the "4" then that's exactly what I want..... not Apple to upgrade me.
Do you have anything to back this up? 4S *may* cause increased battery drain if you have the geo-fencing turned on (ie, location based reminders) - I used those for a week before I realized that it was draining my battery much faster.
In the case of your Beetle dealer, it was entirely possible that the manual shift was either sold from underneath his feet (ie, more attractive buyer) or the auto-shift had some nifty incentive for him.
Hey, Wild West swings both ways, ya know? You cannot tell government to stay out of your way and then come back whining when it does.
It's usually IP theft from state owned companies... so it's a completely valid compliant. Examples - look at Cisco vs. Huawei, or the issue of high-speed rail.
the main reason for me wanting to move away from London as soon as possible and leave this wreck of a housing market behind.
This is a major reason we did not relocate to London. My wife wanted to move back to Europe and had a nice transfer with her company to the London office, but the rental market is a complete nightmare.
Despite Silicon Valley being expensive compared to the rest of the US, we would've had a 2-3x cost of living increase in order to live there, and that's excluding transportation costs.
There's not a single car sold in America that gets 50+ mpg, which does not mean that such cars don't exist or are impossible
My 2005 Prius actually gets 53.4 mpg - and has for the past 9 months since I've been commuting a lot. I've measured and compared (in aggregate) the actual gas consumption and it measures up to about 1-2mpg variance per week.
Many turbo-diesels also get well over the 2015 proposed standards (like high-40's low-50's) and are available today.
In short, you're full of shit.
Apple has been too successful. They've got $100bil in the bank, and growing. All the other computer makers are in the doldrums, and are could come to the verge of bankruptcy just by making some more bad decisions.
It just won a billion dollar settlement which is the beginning of their campaign to obliterate choice in tech.
Why are you conflating the PC and tablet/phone markets? The fact remains that PCs can do quite a bit of things that tablets/phones can not. And making the phone capable of these things isn't in the financial interests of Apple... they'd rather sell you two devices.
The PC industry has been rotting from the inside for a decade or more - take a look at the bribes Intel paid in numerous quarter to the likes of Lenovo/Dell/HP to keep them from using AMD products:
Dell wasn't the only corrupted vendor, pretty much all of them took kickbacks. It's amazing Apple was even competitive in the PC market for the past decade - it's clear that Steve Jobs was amazed too, since he pretty much declared the PC war "lost to Microsoft" in the late 90s as Apple moved on to the iPod and other markets.
I've never heard of it being OK to shoot wounded soldiers or people who are trying to take them away to get medical attention, and certainly not when there's children in their car (since they don't have the resources for proper ambulances and such).
It's really pretty sick just how evil Americans are now, and what kinds of crimes they will defend. Americans make Nazis look not-so-bad.
War is sick - that has not changed since the dawn of time. Instead of blaming the soldiers who are fighting the war, perhaps you should blame the people who got us into the war? Especially since it was unnecessary and nothing good has come of it.
Thanks Timothy... not.
In the case of Apple, it's clear that Samsung was directly copying Apple on many fronts - hell, look at their Samsung Stores or their power adapters. This case however, will immediately be appealed and this is nowhere near the last we'll hear of it.
There is a whole lot more use for nuclear waste if you have reprocessing plants - France makes money reprocessing nuclear waste then providing energey for their neighbors like the UK and Germany who are too chicken-shit to properly manage nuclear power. Even the US, due to the "proliferation" scare has basically killed nuclear power by crippling reprocessing as an option for at least several generations (until we have no other choice).
Personally I have both a tablet and an e-reader (iPad/Kindle3) and for $300-400, you could get both e-ink and LCD Kindles, for example. If reading detailed image-based PDFs is your thing I'd probably recommend 10" tablet at least. Reflow on text doesn't help there as much.
Depicted a horribly powerful state government, ineffective against the nightmarish dream moths in a depressing Ankh-Morpork like city sans humor. Many protagonists die or get brain-wiped - dreary stuff.
The sequels were even more depressing (Iron Council as well).
Ubik was wonderfully existential (esp. listening to the audio book), but Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch was way too acid-trip for me. I do agree that dystopian doesn't necessarily mean depressing (except for 1984 - that had me sad for weeks).
A few years ago Apple fans were proudly shouting that the iPhone had 70%+ of the smartphone market
[cite needed] The iPhone has never been more than 20-30% of total smartphone sales. See here for a glimpse of 2010 [1] and 2011 [2] numbers - none are are even as high as the 32% you are quoting (from where?). Fact is, Android (particularly Samsung) have replaced Nokia, RIMM and Blackberry, not to mention Windows mobile/phone devices. iOS has never been stronger - and neither has Android.
Apple executives are terrified that what happened with the desktop market - Apple initially gaining huge market share, and then falling to below 5%
Unless you never lived the 80's you know this isn't true - Apple pioneered with their AppleII, but IBM always had the corporate market which they basically gave away to Microsoft due to poor agreements on software licenses. Apple's share has never amounted to a large percentage of computing device sales.
Apple has always been about profits and not marketshare.
[1] http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/09/16/iphone_drops_to_23_8_smartphone_market_share_android_jumps_to_17.html
[2] http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/iphone_and_android_gain_marketshare_through_february/
Holding a 10" tablet (or even a Kindle Fire / Playbook - they're heavy) in bed while reading is tough. That's why I own a Kindle3 - if the iPad Mini get the weight down a lot over the iPad3, it will be enough for some folks to sway decisions to buy over other 7" tablets or e-ink ereaders like the Kindle/Nook.
Transformer Infinity. Absolutely superior to the latest ipad in almost every way for a similar price. The ipad has an extra inch of screen on one side due to having a different aspect ratio, and a little more battery but no more endurance. That's its only advantage
Are you serious? This AnandTech article [1] proves you wrong on about a dozen points (ie, color gamut, GL benchmark, wifi 5ghz support etc ..).
But all of this is irrelevant - the Apple ecosystem is still superior including apps and content - that and the usability of the device, fit and finish is what sells folks.
I do agree that the Transformer series is a pretty good differentiator from the iPad given the keyboard dock. Microsoft's Surface looks like it's going to target this niche pretty hard, so Asus must be doing something right.
[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/6036/asus-transformer-pad-infinity-tf700t-review/4
Of course, the devil is in the details. If they do it wrong, it will weaken their Outlook brand and push existing customers towards competitors.
What competitors? IBM/Lotus? Seriously, the groupware / enterprise email market is pretty much dominated by Microsoft already.
So to get back to a car analogy. I see the ultrabook as trying to be a GMC Caballero.
If that's the case, then how come all the laptop vendors are pushing to make their laptops look and feel like a Macbook Air? I have a feeling your analogy doesn't hold.
You can make a 11" MB Air (or equivalent ultrabook or even souped up netbook) be as responsive as a much larger laptop. In fact, given it only comes with a (very fast) SSD, it's a given that it will outperform almost any non-SSD laptop when it comes to anything processing even mildly relying on storage speed (even compared with the MB Pro). Processors, memory and storage have overtaken software's capacity to utilize it in recent years.
The MB Air (and the ultrabooks after it) are what all laptops will look in a few years... just like almost all cars today have unibody construction, cab-forward design, rack-and-pinion steering and other innovative features in years past. It's not a new category. It's the future of laptops.
The Surface? I still don't get the idea of a pen-based or touch-based laptop. The transformer (prime) is what the surface wants to be and it's not a runaway hit. The synthesis/hybrid of touch based UI and WiMP interaction models is unwieldy, and absent some UI innovation, is weaker than either interaction model alone taken to it's extreme (as is the case with a pure tablet or laptop).
The new Intel Medfield processor (X86 based) is very competitive with the ARM architectures when it comes to processing power and battery life. A tablet powered with a Medfield processor should provide plenty of battery life. And since it's X86 based, it'll run all those Windows apps.
Were it that simple - all those apps that are touch-insensitive. Let's face it - customer is screwed if they want existing x86 apps on a tablet - it is not in the interest of Microsoft, nor Intel, nor even the (big) software shops. Which leaves the Metro divide - new hardware (profits for manufacturers and Intel!), new software licenses (yay for software devs - profit!) and new framework that is touch-competetive with Android and iOS (survival for MS's monopoly rents - yay for MS!).
Of course, the alternative is an iPad with iCloud, 4G built-in and years of UI framework that has resulted in real and usable apps. Combined with SaaS/Cloud solutions, this could be a winner for the enterprise.
I wonder what the devs and users will choose?
Windows 3.1 vs the classic Mac System 7
I seem to recall Windows 3.1 being the point where Windows started to dominate the desktop OS market
Which it cannibalized from it's command-line OS (MS-DOS) market-share dominance. Fact remains, Microsoft basically inherited dominance of the computing market from IBM who foolishly ceeded rights to Microsoft for their OS - combined with the clones, Apple really didn't stand much of a chance, nor did they ever have much marketshare (despite their mindshare).
Consequently, Apple's vision of post-pc reality is shaped by their previous failure to dominate the direction of computing - through supply-chain wizardry, patent control (some would say abuse, but the USPTO has been asleep at the wheel for sometime if not outright corrupt), and wise business deals that outprice or lock out competitors while providing a usable, desirable product for their users.
All of this is a bit academic, however - in a few years Android will be even more dominant in the mobile (possibly mainstream by then) space - Android/ARM will utterly destroy Microsoft, and even Apple will have a hard time fighting it.