You're probably already aware of Client Hyper-V, but since you didn't mention it, I'll drop a mention here; not only isn Win8 lighter weight than previous versions (making it a good choice for a host OS), it also includes a seriously excellent hypervisor-based virtualization system.
As for *nix tools, there's things like Cygwin, and even Interix (full POSIX environment running on top of the NT kernel, but not through win32). Sadly, Interix appears to be deprecated; it's still possible to use it in Win8 but it may be gone in Win9. I've been using Interix bash as my primary command line on Windows since 2006. It also offers ssh (both client and server), incidentally (although you have to install them it a Microsoft-funded repository rather than having it in the base install).
As for "advanced command parser", have you looked at Powershell? Included in all recent versions of Windows, and in some ways much more powerful than *nix shells. Commands consume and produce, and pipes pass, objects. These objects are sometimes just strings (especially if you pipe in text), but are often more complex data which are simply presented in text form when the end of the pipe is reached. PS also supports aliases (and comes pre-configured with a bunch of *nix-like ones), command completion, scripting, and so on. Additionally, because it's built on top of.NET, you can actually create.NET objects and invoke methods on them in your scripts, which is handy if you're familiar with the framework. It's basically.NETscript.
4) Improved out-of-the-box multi-monitor support (it's been likened with Ultramon, but without requiring third-party software). 5) Client HyperV. If you do anything with virtualization on your PC, or have even thought you might like to, this is a solid reason to look at Win8. There simply aren't any better virtualization solutions available for client Windows versions right now, certainly not at anything close to the same proce. 6) If you use multiple computers (most of us, probably, just like I imagne most use multiple monitors when posible), the ability to use Lindows Live for single-sign-on and profile roaming is excellent. 7) The Windows Store, which holds both "Metro-style" and desktop apps (at least on the x86 version of Win8). You may choose to avoid it for its tablet-friendly UI, or for the fact that it's basically a DRM system (like other commercial and integrated "app stores"), but you may find the ease of software discovery, installation, and updating to be useful. 8) Built-in antivirus. Just like a certain vocal portion of/. has been clamoring for MS to add for ages.
They sot of have. It has a new, touch-friendly UI, but Windows Mail and Windows Calendar are included as pre-installed "Metro"-style apps on Win8 and Windows RT. However, the feature sets are different (improved, for the most part). For example, the new Windows Mail can use ActiveSync (i.e. it can connect to Exchange servers) and can connect to Hotmail/Windows Live, in addition to POP3 & IMAP. It also includes templates for connecting to Gmail and Yahoo. I don't believe it offers as good of filtering capabilities as the Vista version had, though, and the touch-centric UI isn't quite as nice to use with a mouse.
I'm not aware of any $200 netbooks with 1920x1080 screens (or netbooks at anything else in "netbook" price range, either).
A $200 netbook won't have an SSD, 4GB of RAM, and a Core i5 (quad-core, 64-bit, virtualization-capable, etc.) CPU. That means, among other things, no Client Hyper-V.
Netbooks don't have touchscreens or stylus input. Their keyboards can't be removed or folded out of the way for easy use when not at a desk. They're highly portable laptops, but not -on-the-go devices like tablets.
Netbooks, especially cheap ones, don't have cases strong enough to use as a skateboard (yes, you can do this with a sirface, meaning you relaly don't need to worry about the screen getting cracked in your luggage or something) or dropped onto a cement floor.
Netbooks, especially cheap ones, tend to have screens and keyboards smaller than the Surface, which makes typing a pain.
Netbooks don't have rear-facing cameras, and frequently only have one (crappy) speaker.
A $200 netbook might be able to run Win8 Pro, but it won't come with it, so you'll have to buy a copy from elsewhere and install it yourself if you want to connect it to a domain or use BitLocker.
Kind of, except you can fold the keyboard all the way back behind the screen, making it a slightly-thicker-than-normal ARM tablet (it has all the tablet features, like touchscreen and minimal hardware buttons around the screen). The keyboard can also be folded past 180 degrees to act as an adjustable stand.
Expandable storage only for media? Well, I'm not sure if you're counting documents and so forth in there, but if so, carry on. With that said, what are you going to need more than the Surface's built-in storage for *other* than media? However, if you decide you must have it, use the various Windows system tools (disk management, Powershell, whatever you want) to either turn "C:\Program Files\WindowsApps" into a symlink* to a folder on the SD card, or make the SD card's mount point *be* the WindowsApps folder (or anywhere else you want). * Yes, Windows supports true symlinks, and has since Vista. No, I'm not talking about junctions or kernel-object-only links. The command is "mklink" and, while its syntax is slighlty different from "ln", it can do all the same things.
The iPad has more peripheral device support than USB2? Bahahahahahahahahaha, that's a good one. There are probably thousands of iPad peripherals by now. There are over 100,000 USB2 (or lower) peripherals. I'm not talking about screen covers and bluetooth keyboards here (although it supports those... and USB or BT mice and other BT-connected PC peripherals, for good measure), but things like printers, scanners, cameras, media players, external storage, game controllers, USB speakers/headsets, GPS devices, add-on cellular radio (for a hell of a lot less than buying it integrated on an iPad), and so forth.
Ruggedized cases are a win for the iPad, but form factors are a win for Windows RT (if not specificlaly for Surface) and a loss for iPads. You can get your iPads in two sizes, and two resolutions. That's it. Via added-cost, third-party peripherals, you can make them sit up like a laptop screen or connect a keyboard, but you can't make them have a 12" screen, or a different aspect ratio, or anything like that.
First you complain about not being able to use the SD card for anything except media (even though that's not true) and then you claim that people don't want file management at all. Make up your mind, please... and also consider that "technical users" are users too, and it's nice to have a tablet OS that doesn't make us jump through hoops to get full filesystem access.
The iPad supports Windows networking and can join Homegroups? This is news to me. Actually, it looks like it can do Windows networking - at least somewhat - but doesn't support Homegroups. I expect that it can handle media servers just fine. I expect that it *can't* handle WMA/WMV codecs, although I may be mistaken about that too (Windows, including RT, handles mpeg4 MOV video files and AAC audio just fine).
If the Surface Pro is a MBA competitor, even though the MBA doesn't have a touchscreen, stylus support, the ability to remove or fold the keyboard out of the way entirely, or any of the other tablet features of Surface? Like it or not, Windows 8 tablets (as opposed to Windows RT ones) are definitely still tablets; they are just *also* PCs, and compete in both markets (although admittedly they are unlikely to beat the iPad on price).
Microosft's branding, at least around Windows*, really and truly sucks. I try to keep people informed (it's "Windows RT", not "Windows RT 8") when discussing the technology, in the same way that I correct people who say "Droid" when they mean "Android" or "computer" when they mean "monitor". Microsoft doesn't make it easy though. I'd think it was some conspiracy to confuse, except that the handful of MS employees I've met who defend that branding appear to honestly think that people *love* the Windows brand, so incompetence seems at least as likely. Considering they at one point officially announced "Windows Phone 7 Series", claiming their branding people are thoroughly incompetent seems like a fairly defensible claim.
1) Possibly true, but hardly a big deal. My phone can't play Flash at all, and remakrably enough, I don't miss it. A few years ago I might have.
2) At a minimum, they'd need to be recompiled for ARM anyhow; how many "current Windows programs" do you have the source for? With that said, I expect hackers will find a way aroung this limitation.
3) FALSE! Sideloading is officially supported, and free. The marketer-spiel talks about installing from the official store the same way that Android ads talk about Google Play or the Amazon Kindle store, but you can run homebrew (or your organization's internal apps) to your heart's content.
4) Yet. It's growing very quickly Given the number of development techologies supported (everything from C/C++ to HTML5/JS, including all those XAML skills that everybody on/. seemed to think MS was killing off) they're making it pretty damn easy to develop for, too.
5) The built-in Windows Mail and Calendar apps can connect to Exchange just fine. I'll certainly grant you that it's not as good as full Outlook, but this thing is *NOT* intended to replace your workstation PC. Your smartphone can't run Outlook either (unless you have a WinMo antique, and that was a crippled version)...
6) See #2. We'll see how long that restriction lasts... In the meantime, there's a Remote Desktop client, so you can run third-party apps on somebody else's desktop (from your tablet) just fine.
7) That's true of pretty much all non-PC computing devices at launch. Windows RT is not billed as a PC OS, and while I think MS was stupid to lock it down as hard as they have, you're under no obligation to buy it either. If I wanted a Linux-based tablet, I wouldn't buy an iPad either...
Where did you get the idea that Winows RT doesn't support sideloading? It absolutely does. Officially, there are two purposes to sideloading: org-specific internal apps, and developers testing their apps.
Enabling sideloading is pretty trivial; launch Powershell as Admin (yes, Windows RT comes with a full scripting environment, and can run it as admin!) and enter the command Show-WindowsDeveloperLicenseRegistration. Enter Windows Live credentials and your computer or tablet will be unlocked for sideloading. It's fast and free, including for renewal.
Unless you want an OS that supports memory page combining. Or Client Hyper-V. Or built-in ISO mounting. Or user sync across Windows Live (for non-domain accounts, obviously). Or the various improvements to things like the file operations dialogs, Task Manager, and so on. Or the new backup tools. Or the system reset function (do what amounts to a wipe-and-re-install of the OS in minutes, optionally preserving user data). Or the ability to limit background data usage (intended for cellular data connections, but useful for anybody on a metered link). Or any of the various other non-"Metro" features of Win8.
Seriously, stop acting as though "Metro" is the be-all and end-all of Win8. There's a lot more to it than that; in addition to a slew of desktop improvements, the actual *operating system* portion of it has been substantially improved.
I've been using Win8 for over a year (MSDN access) so yes, I absolutely have used it.
So what if there's no actual button called "Start"? The same corner of the screen still works, if you're using a mouse, and the same keyboard key still works. As I said above, if you use the search interface, you'll "see" the Metro-style Start screen for a fraction of a second. It's completely irrelevant.
"Start menu folders with items underneath..." what is this, 1995? I literally don't remember the last time I opened a Start menu folder. It probably happened some time in 2012, but I can't recall it. Start search is the future (for that matter, Start search was the present... 6 years ago). I used to maintain elaborately organized Start menu hierarchies. I also used to restart Windows when changing screen resolutions. The world has moved on!
Computer Management can be launched from the Start search, or from Windows Explorer (no need to use Start at all!) For there, you can use Local Users and Groups to add new users, change passwords, whatever. I have tried it. I suspect you're the one who hasn't... or at least, you have no clue how to do Windows computer administration (you can also do it from the command line, for that matter).
I don't know how it stacks up with the other items you requested, but the IS12T (a Windows Phone 7 device, released in Japan) is waterproof (and of course uses a touchscreen).
Windows Phone actually has a pretty healthy app store these days (they crossed 100k a while ago). It's not going to equal the iOS or Android stores any time soon, but it got a very late start and grew faster than the "big two" did at the equivalent times in their existence.
Have you actually gone and checked on your friend's phone for the apps you'd want to use? The iOS and Android app counts are increasingly filling in the "long tail" of very niche apps, "dedicated apps" that simply wrap a website, and so on. Most of the big deals in mobile apps are already on WP7, and with WP8 that will only get better (since contrary to some remarkably inaccurate info that keeps circulating, WP8 can run WP7 apps just fine).
What functionality are you looking for in Windows Phone that it doesn't have? Not the early versions, but WP8 or even 7.8 or Tango?
Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware of some missing functionality. I'm the first one to claim that MS left out some functionality that they shouldn't have. But, I'm curious what *you* think is missing, because the majority of complaints on that front that I've read are either severely outdated or outright false.
Most - not all, but definitely most - of the people I know who've tried WP7 not only like it, they're planning to go with WP8 even though it means buying new hardware (and since some of these are Nokia Lumias or other gen2 devices, that means buying new hardware before the end of a two-year contract). I won't pretend that this is in any way a scientific study, but I live in Seattle so, even discounting MS employees (which I am doing here) I see a lot more Windows Phone devices than the total marketshare would suggest.
Additionally, I've heard a *lot* of interest in the Lumia 920. Not so much in the other models, but both current iOS and Android owners seem quite interested in the 920.
In the pre-iPhone days, Windows Mobile had more market share in the smartphone space than iPhones do today. The problem was that it was a very niche market, and Microsoft let their product stagnate too long.
All laptop touchpads these days support multi-touch; APple may have been the first but it's been available on HP and Lenovo, at least, for well over a year now (I don't know when it was first introduced; I don't upgrade hardware that often).
Touchpad and stylus peripherals (for laptop or desktop, or for that matter tablet) are available, and they certainly work on Win8. Win8 uses the NT6.2 kernel, so *any* driver written for NT6.x (that is, Vista, Win7, or the various releases of Server 2008) will work fine on Win8 as well.
Just host the.APPX file on your website, and give the user instructions on sideloading it. It's quite easy, actually, although they do have to enable sideloading first (a single Powershell command).
You'll probably make a hell of a lot more money selling through the Windows store than you will selling through your own site, or through traditional retail channels, of course. But you aren't *unable* to sell through those channels. It's just going to have less exposure to the users and require a less intuitive interaction on their part.
People are already hosting (non-commercial, homebrew) APPX packages on forums like XDA-Developers. Typically those aren't packages which are also going through the store - they're either pre-release versions or various sorts of hack - but some are perfectly acceptable apps that the author wanted to allow the community to use for free instead of requiring that they purchase them through the store.
It took you 15 minutes to type "upd" while on the Start screen? Dear $DEITY, I hope you aren't managing anything important anywhere, if your idea of how to interact with a computer is stuck in the last decade...
Shell extensions that cause menu entries on right-click are, I bleieve, controlled from the registry. WindowsKey + "reg" + Enter, and you're in regedit.
Changing the IP is almost exactly the same as in Win7 as well; you can either do it from the command line using netsh (Win + "cmd" + Enter to start cmd.exe, or you can Win+R for the Run dialog and type the netsh command directly) or you can do it from the GUI (from the Desktop, exactly as in Win7. From the Start screen, type "view net", press down twice or click on Settings, then click "View Network Connections" or highlight it using the arrow keys and hit Enter).
I'm not even a "network admin" except of my home network, but I can tell you how to set up the Windows firewall (Start + "firew" + Enter) to prevent access to any machine off the local subnet. As for preventing settings modification, just give them a limited user account and don't give them the admin password, and you'll probably be fine. If the default ACLs aren't sufficiently restrictive, you can modify them.
Seriously, Win8 is almost identical to Win7 in terms of admin control. If you'd actually tried (and were competent to do any admin work at all) you'd know this already. No, the 3 year old wouldn't be doing that kind of thing, but they also probably wouldn't be saying it can't be done, either. Is the "SKILLED IT USER" who falsely believes something to be impossible actually more skilled than the 3-year-old who has no reason to try? Neither of you can do it, but the three your old doesn't make idiotic posts on/. to showcase his ineptitude.
The sad thing is, both you and the parent are completely wrong. It took *far* longer to get to that kind of stuff in XP than it does in Vista, Win7, or Win8, because the NT6.x versions have an instant search. I can hit the Windows key, type "eve", and hit Enter, in well under a second... and behold, the Event Viewer launches! Additionally, the Resource Monitor in Win7 (Win + "reso" + Enter) is *very* useful for figuring out what is slowing a system down, or thrashing the disk, or other things like that. It can also do things like suspend processes, which previously required third-party software. I still install the sysinternals tools, but I use them a lot less than I used to.
So, don't use the "Metro" stuff. It's really, really easy not to... just run in the desktop! You know, like you have been doing for years. Yes, your screen will look funny during the fraction of a second between when you hit the Start button and when you hit Enter after typing the first few characters of the program you want to run. Whoop-de-do.
Win8 actually offers some improvements specifically for multi-monitor systems. Things like extending the taskbar across all monitors, and showing the taskbar buttons for running programs on the monitor that they're running on. With that much space, you shouldn't even need to open Start for even a second; you can just pin *all* the programs that you use in any given month (if you really, *really* want to avoid looking at the new Start screen).
Funny how, in all this ranting and wailing and gnashing of teeth, *all* of which is centered on "the new UI", you never hear anybody talk about things like improved multi-monitor support. Obviously, that's not a tablet-oriented feature. Contrary to/. popular optinion, Win8 is actually useful and intended for use on things other than tablets!
You'd never know it to read the discussions on Win8 around here, though...
You missed the point. The reason I brought up Vista was that you seemed to be under the impression that there was an app compat issue with win8 (according to an admittedly somewhat strict parsing of your claim that "an extensive pilot program to make sure 7 would run everything important to the business. 7 passed. We are fairly certain that 8 will fail.") It was to contrast the popular opinion (that Windows Vista, or Windows 8, are incompatible) with the truth (that all PC builds of NT 6.x have the same app compatibility).
If your point was not that you expect Win8 to be incompatible with your software, you may want to take more care in how you phrase your predictions regarding it. As it is, it appears that you are spreading FUD, presumeably intentionally (since you appear to speak from a position of knowledge on the subject). I can sertainly understand businesses choosing to only upgrade their OS every 6 years or so, instead of every 3 (the latter being approximately the gap between Windows versions). I can somewhat understand the confusion over the new UI (I honestly find the Charms bar to be a bigger change than the new Start screen, since the way I use it the Start functionality has had almost no change at all). The hardware requirements part is pure bull - Win8 has lower requirements than Win7 - which reinforces my belief that you either really don't know what you're talking about or are intentionally spreading FUD.
As for "we did not need to", for sufficiently strict definitions of "need" you probably didn't need to use anything newer than NT4. Obviously, there are advantages to not using a 16-year-old OS, but there are also advantages to not using a three-year-old OS. It's up to each individual or organization to decide when those advantages make upgrading worthwhile, and it's not my place to attempt to convince your organization to chose a specific point. However, as a fellow member of this community, I *will* ask you to avoid the dishonesty (be it intentional or otherwise).
That's a good point, but it doesn't really solve the SSD problem. TL;DR: Win7 supports the TRIM command, which tells solid-state storage when supposedly-valid data is no longer required. Without this command (which XP lacks), SSD performance degrades rapidly over time under real-world usage.
The issue is that Flash storage doesn't actually support modifying a portion of a data block; it instead reads the entire block into volatile memory, modifies one portion of it, and then writes it back to persistent storage. Since each block of the persistent storage has a limited number of writes, the write usually occurs onto a fresh, unoccupied block. (Obviously, the SSD controller needs to maintain a mapping between the logical address of the written data, which didn't change, and the physical block that is storing it, which did change.) This is called wear leveling, and it is vital to the health of Flash storage. In its basic form, it works just fine up until the point that that the entire storage has been written to. At that point, the SSD starts re-using the blocks that it (at one point) had data in, but then needed to modify that data (and remember that "modify" can be any kind of write, including things like changing filesystem metadata or writing a new file). Meanwhile, the blocks of the storage that aren't getting modified sit there, static.
The problem occurs when a lot of data is deleted. The OS now knows that addresses 0x10000000 through 0x70000000 are free for use. However, the SSD doesn't know that. Since a file deletion only consists of removing the node in the filesystem, the data is allowed to remain because, on a magnetic disk, there's no need to clear it. However, if an address in that range of old deleted data - say, 0x20000000 to 0x20000100 - becomes highly volatile, the SSD now has a problem. It can't overwrite any of blocks that are storing the rest of the deleted data, because it thinks that the data there is still valid. Instead, it must copy the entire block where there the logical address of 0x20000000 is currently located and write it to a new location (many, many, many times) without ever overwriting data that is actually deleted. Instead, that highly volatile block ends up being written repeatedly to a relatively small number of physical blocks, wearing down their longevity.
In the worst case, you could end up with a filesystem that is 99% free space, an SSD that thinks it is 99% full, and one block on the SSD that keeps geeting written to the few locations that aren't being used to store "valid" data on the SSD. That's not a realistic case, but it's an extreme form of the real-world typical usage of storage on workstations. There's usually a large amount of unimportant (deleted) data being stored on the SSD, not linked to by anything in the filesystem but consistently maintained intact by the drive controller because the OS wrote to those addresses once, and might, at some point, ask to read them again. This both slows down the SSD and lowers its useful life.
The solution is the TRIM command, which tells the SSD that a range of logical addresses (which the drive controller will map to physical blocks) are no longer holding important data, and can be freed up for wear leveling (without even the need to read in the data that they currently contain before overwriting it). Win7 uses TRIM whenever data is deleted, meaning that the SSD and the OS both have the same idea as to how much of the storage is available for overwriting. So long as the storage doesn't get overly full (and SSDs reserve a portion of their capacity so that they always have somewhere to write to, even once blocks start going bad, without appearing to lose capacity), the SSD will remain highly performant.
Microsoft's branding around Windows sucks abysmally, but that's no excuse for just getting it wrong. The correct information is easy to find. Please stop muddying the waters with brand names that outright do not exist.
There is no such thing as Windows 8 RT. Windows RT and Windows 8 are very nearly identical, but Windows RT is expressly *not* marketed as Windows 8.
There's no such thing as Windows 8 Phone. Just like there was no such thing as Windows 7 Phone. Windows Phone is the name of the OS family. Windows Phone 8 is the new version. As with Windows 8 and Windows RT, it runs on the NT kernel, but that doesn't make it the same product any more than RHEL, Android, and Chrome OS are the same product (even though they all run Linux kernels).
Windows RT is intended for those who want an iPad-class device that also supports multiple users, filesystem access, sideloading, Windows networking, USB peripherals, scripting (powershell, CMD, WSH), Office, and Xbox integration, plus regular updates from the OS developer but many different hardware options to choose from. They want the low cost and low power usage of ARM, in a device that is cheaper, lighter, and gets battery life than an ultrabook at the cost of computing power and backward complexity.
It's not intended to replace people's PCs, or their smartphones, or their consoles. At least, not any more than the iPad or Nexus 7 are intended to replace such things. It's a decent alternative to a Kindle Fire (there's already an official Kindle app, and unlike the Fire you don't have to do any jailbreaking to control how the FS is allocated). It supports game controllers but is more multi-purpose than a console (and has less mastery of gaming). It's much more accurate to say that Windows 8 can run WinRT apps than it is to say that Windows RT runs Win8 apps.
OK, now I'm curious. The only thing I know of that you could do on XP Pro but can't do on Win7 Pro is enable the POSIX subsystem, and hardly anybody seems to use that. If you use Win7 Enterprise instead - which is the volume-licensed edition, and therefore what reasonably large businesses would be expected to use - then you get everything.
I'm not going to bother arguing about gains in functionality with you; you're intentionally blinding yourself if you can't see the vast improvements that things like BitLocker, instant search, Aero Snap, taskbar pinning (much better than quicklaunch), and so on provide. That's leaving aside the under-the-covers stuff like 64-bit, SSD support, ASLR and other huge security improvements, a memory manager that actually knows how to make good use of over a gig of RAM, instant resume from sleep and much faster startup and resume from hibernate, etc.
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You're probably already aware of Client Hyper-V, but since you didn't mention it, I'll drop a mention here; not only isn Win8 lighter weight than previous versions (making it a good choice for a host OS), it also includes a seriously excellent hypervisor-based virtualization system.
As for *nix tools, there's things like Cygwin, and even Interix (full POSIX environment running on top of the NT kernel, but not through win32). Sadly, Interix appears to be deprecated; it's still possible to use it in Win8 but it may be gone in Win9. I've been using Interix bash as my primary command line on Windows since 2006. It also offers ssh (both client and server), incidentally (although you have to install them it a Microsoft-funded repository rather than having it in the base install).
As for "advanced command parser", have you looked at Powershell? Included in all recent versions of Windows, and in some ways much more powerful than *nix shells. Commands consume and produce, and pipes pass, objects. These objects are sometimes just strings (especially if you pipe in text), but are often more complex data which are simply presented in text form when the end of the pipe is reached. PS also supports aliases (and comes pre-configured with a bunch of *nix-like ones), command completion, scripting, and so on. Additionally, because it's built on top of .NET, you can actually create .NET objects and invoke methods on them in your scripts, which is handy if you're familiar with the framework. It's basically .NETscript.
4) Improved out-of-the-box multi-monitor support (it's been likened with Ultramon, but without requiring third-party software). /. has been clamoring for MS to add for ages.
5) Client HyperV. If you do anything with virtualization on your PC, or have even thought you might like to, this is a solid reason to look at Win8. There simply aren't any better virtualization solutions available for client Windows versions right now, certainly not at anything close to the same proce.
6) If you use multiple computers (most of us, probably, just like I imagne most use multiple monitors when posible), the ability to use Lindows Live for single-sign-on and profile roaming is excellent.
7) The Windows Store, which holds both "Metro-style" and desktop apps (at least on the x86 version of Win8). You may choose to avoid it for its tablet-friendly UI, or for the fact that it's basically a DRM system (like other commercial and integrated "app stores"), but you may find the ease of software discovery, installation, and updating to be useful.
8) Built-in antivirus. Just like a certain vocal portion of
They sot of have. It has a new, touch-friendly UI, but Windows Mail and Windows Calendar are included as pre-installed "Metro"-style apps on Win8 and Windows RT. However, the feature sets are different (improved, for the most part). For example, the new Windows Mail can use ActiveSync (i.e. it can connect to Exchange servers) and can connect to Hotmail/Windows Live, in addition to POP3 & IMAP. It also includes templates for connecting to Gmail and Yahoo. I don't believe it offers as good of filtering capabilities as the Vista version had, though, and the touch-centric UI isn't quite as nice to use with a mouse.
I'm not aware of any $200 netbooks with 1920x1080 screens (or netbooks at anything else in "netbook" price range, either).
A $200 netbook won't have an SSD, 4GB of RAM, and a Core i5 (quad-core, 64-bit, virtualization-capable, etc.) CPU. That means, among other things, no Client Hyper-V.
Netbooks don't have touchscreens or stylus input. Their keyboards can't be removed or folded out of the way for easy use when not at a desk. They're highly portable laptops, but not -on-the-go devices like tablets.
Netbooks, especially cheap ones, don't have cases strong enough to use as a skateboard (yes, you can do this with a sirface, meaning you relaly don't need to worry about the screen getting cracked in your luggage or something) or dropped onto a cement floor.
Netbooks, especially cheap ones, tend to have screens and keyboards smaller than the Surface, which makes typing a pain.
Netbooks don't have rear-facing cameras, and frequently only have one (crappy) speaker.
A $200 netbook might be able to run Win8 Pro, but it won't come with it, so you'll have to buy a copy from elsewhere and install it yourself if you want to connect it to a domain or use BitLocker.
Kind of, except you can fold the keyboard all the way back behind the screen, making it a slightly-thicker-than-normal ARM tablet (it has all the tablet features, like touchscreen and minimal hardware buttons around the screen). The keyboard can also be folded past 180 degrees to act as an adjustable stand.
Expandable storage only for media?
Well, I'm not sure if you're counting documents and so forth in there, but if so, carry on. With that said, what are you going to need more than the Surface's built-in storage for *other* than media? However, if you decide you must have it, use the various Windows system tools (disk management, Powershell, whatever you want) to either turn "C:\Program Files\WindowsApps" into a symlink* to a folder on the SD card, or make the SD card's mount point *be* the WindowsApps folder (or anywhere else you want).
* Yes, Windows supports true symlinks, and has since Vista. No, I'm not talking about junctions or kernel-object-only links. The command is "mklink" and, while its syntax is slighlty different from "ln", it can do all the same things.
The iPad has more peripheral device support than USB2? Bahahahahahahahahaha, that's a good one. There are probably thousands of iPad peripherals by now. There are over 100,000 USB2 (or lower) peripherals. I'm not talking about screen covers and bluetooth keyboards here (although it supports those... and USB or BT mice and other BT-connected PC peripherals, for good measure), but things like printers, scanners, cameras, media players, external storage, game controllers, USB speakers/headsets, GPS devices, add-on cellular radio (for a hell of a lot less than buying it integrated on an iPad), and so forth.
Ruggedized cases are a win for the iPad, but form factors are a win for Windows RT (if not specificlaly for Surface) and a loss for iPads. You can get your iPads in two sizes, and two resolutions. That's it. Via added-cost, third-party peripherals, you can make them sit up like a laptop screen or connect a keyboard, but you can't make them have a 12" screen, or a different aspect ratio, or anything like that.
First you complain about not being able to use the SD card for anything except media (even though that's not true) and then you claim that people don't want file management at all. Make up your mind, please... and also consider that "technical users" are users too, and it's nice to have a tablet OS that doesn't make us jump through hoops to get full filesystem access.
The iPad supports Windows networking and can join Homegroups? This is news to me. Actually, it looks like it can do Windows networking - at least somewhat - but doesn't support Homegroups. I expect that it can handle media servers just fine. I expect that it *can't* handle WMA/WMV codecs, although I may be mistaken about that too (Windows, including RT, handles mpeg4 MOV video files and AAC audio just fine).
If the Surface Pro is a MBA competitor, even though the MBA doesn't have a touchscreen, stylus support, the ability to remove or fold the keyboard out of the way entirely, or any of the other tablet features of Surface? Like it or not, Windows 8 tablets (as opposed to Windows RT ones) are definitely still tablets; they are just *also* PCs, and compete in both markets (although admittedly they are unlikely to beat the iPad on price).
Microosft's branding, at least around Windows*, really and truly sucks. I try to keep people informed (it's "Windows RT", not "Windows RT 8") when discussing the technology, in the same way that I correct people who say "Droid" when they mean "Android" or "computer" when they mean "monitor". Microsoft doesn't make it easy though. I'd think it was some conspiracy to confuse, except that the handful of MS employees I've met who defend that branding appear to honestly think that people *love* the Windows brand, so incompetence seems at least as likely. Considering they at one point officially announced "Windows Phone 7 Series", claiming their branding people are thoroughly incompetent seems like a fairly defensible claim.
1) Possibly true, but hardly a big deal. My phone can't play Flash at all, and remakrably enough, I don't miss it. A few years ago I might have.
2) At a minimum, they'd need to be recompiled for ARM anyhow; how many "current Windows programs" do you have the source for? With that said, I expect hackers will find a way aroung this limitation.
3) FALSE! Sideloading is officially supported, and free. The marketer-spiel talks about installing from the official store the same way that Android ads talk about Google Play or the Amazon Kindle store, but you can run homebrew (or your organization's internal apps) to your heart's content.
4) Yet. It's growing very quickly Given the number of development techologies supported (everything from C/C++ to HTML5/JS, including all those XAML skills that everybody on /. seemed to think MS was killing off) they're making it pretty damn easy to develop for, too.
5) The built-in Windows Mail and Calendar apps can connect to Exchange just fine. I'll certainly grant you that it's not as good as full Outlook, but this thing is *NOT* intended to replace your workstation PC. Your smartphone can't run Outlook either (unless you have a WinMo antique, and that was a crippled version)...
6) See #2. We'll see how long that restriction lasts... In the meantime, there's a Remote Desktop client, so you can run third-party apps on somebody else's desktop (from your tablet) just fine.
7) That's true of pretty much all non-PC computing devices at launch. Windows RT is not billed as a PC OS, and while I think MS was stupid to lock it down as hard as they have, you're under no obligation to buy it either. If I wanted a Linux-based tablet, I wouldn't buy an iPad either...
Where did you get the idea that Winows RT doesn't support sideloading? It absolutely does. Officially, there are two purposes to sideloading: org-specific internal apps, and developers testing their apps.
Enabling sideloading is pretty trivial; launch Powershell as Admin (yes, Windows RT comes with a full scripting environment, and can run it as admin!) and enter the command Show-WindowsDeveloperLicenseRegistration. Enter Windows Live credentials and your computer or tablet will be unlocked for sideloading. It's fast and free, including for renewal.
Unless you want an OS that supports memory page combining. Or Client Hyper-V. Or built-in ISO mounting. Or user sync across Windows Live (for non-domain accounts, obviously). Or the various improvements to things like the file operations dialogs, Task Manager, and so on. Or the new backup tools. Or the system reset function (do what amounts to a wipe-and-re-install of the OS in minutes, optionally preserving user data). Or the ability to limit background data usage (intended for cellular data connections, but useful for anybody on a metered link). Or any of the various other non-"Metro" features of Win8.
Seriously, stop acting as though "Metro" is the be-all and end-all of Win8. There's a lot more to it than that; in addition to a slew of desktop improvements, the actual *operating system* portion of it has been substantially improved.
I've been using Win8 for over a year (MSDN access) so yes, I absolutely have used it.
So what if there's no actual button called "Start"? The same corner of the screen still works, if you're using a mouse, and the same keyboard key still works. As I said above, if you use the search interface, you'll "see" the Metro-style Start screen for a fraction of a second. It's completely irrelevant.
"Start menu folders with items underneath..." what is this, 1995? I literally don't remember the last time I opened a Start menu folder. It probably happened some time in 2012, but I can't recall it. Start search is the future (for that matter, Start search was the present... 6 years ago). I used to maintain elaborately organized Start menu hierarchies. I also used to restart Windows when changing screen resolutions. The world has moved on!
Computer Management can be launched from the Start search, or from Windows Explorer (no need to use Start at all!) For there, you can use Local Users and Groups to add new users, change passwords, whatever. I have tried it. I suspect you're the one who hasn't... or at least, you have no clue how to do Windows computer administration (you can also do it from the command line, for that matter).
I don't know how it stacks up with the other items you requested, but the IS12T (a Windows Phone 7 device, released in Japan) is waterproof (and of course uses a touchscreen).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujitsu_Toshiba_IS12T (stub article; look at the references section for more info).
Windows Phone actually has a pretty healthy app store these days (they crossed 100k a while ago). It's not going to equal the iOS or Android stores any time soon, but it got a very late start and grew faster than the "big two" did at the equivalent times in their existence.
Have you actually gone and checked on your friend's phone for the apps you'd want to use? The iOS and Android app counts are increasingly filling in the "long tail" of very niche apps, "dedicated apps" that simply wrap a website, and so on. Most of the big deals in mobile apps are already on WP7, and with WP8 that will only get better (since contrary to some remarkably inaccurate info that keeps circulating, WP8 can run WP7 apps just fine).
What functionality are you looking for in Windows Phone that it doesn't have? Not the early versions, but WP8 or even 7.8 or Tango?
Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware of some missing functionality. I'm the first one to claim that MS left out some functionality that they shouldn't have. But, I'm curious what *you* think is missing, because the majority of complaints on that front that I've read are either severely outdated or outright false.
Most - not all, but definitely most - of the people I know who've tried WP7 not only like it, they're planning to go with WP8 even though it means buying new hardware (and since some of these are Nokia Lumias or other gen2 devices, that means buying new hardware before the end of a two-year contract). I won't pretend that this is in any way a scientific study, but I live in Seattle so, even discounting MS employees (which I am doing here) I see a lot more Windows Phone devices than the total marketshare would suggest.
Additionally, I've heard a *lot* of interest in the Lumia 920. Not so much in the other models, but both current iOS and Android owners seem quite interested in the 920.
In the pre-iPhone days, Windows Mobile had more market share in the smartphone space than iPhones do today. The problem was that it was a very niche market, and Microsoft let their product stagnate too long.
All laptop touchpads these days support multi-touch; APple may have been the first but it's been available on HP and Lenovo, at least, for well over a year now (I don't know when it was first introduced; I don't upgrade hardware that often).
Touchpad and stylus peripherals (for laptop or desktop, or for that matter tablet) are available, and they certainly work on Win8. Win8 uses the NT6.2 kernel, so *any* driver written for NT6.x (that is, Vista, Win7, or the various releases of Server 2008) will work fine on Win8 as well.
Just host the .APPX file on your website, and give the user instructions on sideloading it. It's quite easy, actually, although they do have to enable sideloading first (a single Powershell command).
You'll probably make a hell of a lot more money selling through the Windows store than you will selling through your own site, or through traditional retail channels, of course. But you aren't *unable* to sell through those channels. It's just going to have less exposure to the users and require a less intuitive interaction on their part.
People are already hosting (non-commercial, homebrew) APPX packages on forums like XDA-Developers. Typically those aren't packages which are also going through the store - they're either pre-release versions or various sorts of hack - but some are perfectly acceptable apps that the author wanted to allow the community to use for free instead of requiring that they purchase them through the store.
It took you 15 minutes to type "upd" while on the Start screen? Dear $DEITY, I hope you aren't managing anything important anywhere, if your idea of how to interact with a computer is stuck in the last decade...
Shell extensions that cause menu entries on right-click are, I bleieve, controlled from the registry. WindowsKey + "reg" + Enter, and you're in regedit.
Changing the IP is almost exactly the same as in Win7 as well; you can either do it from the command line using netsh (Win + "cmd" + Enter to start cmd.exe, or you can Win+R for the Run dialog and type the netsh command directly) or you can do it from the GUI (from the Desktop, exactly as in Win7. From the Start screen, type "view net", press down twice or click on Settings, then click "View Network Connections" or highlight it using the arrow keys and hit Enter).
I'm not even a "network admin" except of my home network, but I can tell you how to set up the Windows firewall (Start + "firew" + Enter) to prevent access to any machine off the local subnet. As for preventing settings modification, just give them a limited user account and don't give them the admin password, and you'll probably be fine. If the default ACLs aren't sufficiently restrictive, you can modify them.
Seriously, Win8 is almost identical to Win7 in terms of admin control. If you'd actually tried (and were competent to do any admin work at all) you'd know this already. No, the 3 year old wouldn't be doing that kind of thing, but they also probably wouldn't be saying it can't be done, either. Is the "SKILLED IT USER" who falsely believes something to be impossible actually more skilled than the 3-year-old who has no reason to try? Neither of you can do it, but the three your old doesn't make idiotic posts on /. to showcase his ineptitude.
The sad thing is, both you and the parent are completely wrong. It took *far* longer to get to that kind of stuff in XP than it does in Vista, Win7, or Win8, because the NT6.x versions have an instant search. I can hit the Windows key, type "eve", and hit Enter, in well under a second... and behold, the Event Viewer launches! Additionally, the Resource Monitor in Win7 (Win + "reso" + Enter) is *very* useful for figuring out what is slowing a system down, or thrashing the disk, or other things like that. It can also do things like suspend processes, which previously required third-party software. I still install the sysinternals tools, but I use them a lot less than I used to.
So, don't use the "Metro" stuff. It's really, really easy not to... just run in the desktop! You know, like you have been doing for years. Yes, your screen will look funny during the fraction of a second between when you hit the Start button and when you hit Enter after typing the first few characters of the program you want to run. Whoop-de-do.
Win8 actually offers some improvements specifically for multi-monitor systems. Things like extending the taskbar across all monitors, and showing the taskbar buttons for running programs on the monitor that they're running on. With that much space, you shouldn't even need to open Start for even a second; you can just pin *all* the programs that you use in any given month (if you really, *really* want to avoid looking at the new Start screen).
Funny how, in all this ranting and wailing and gnashing of teeth, *all* of which is centered on "the new UI", you never hear anybody talk about things like improved multi-monitor support. Obviously, that's not a tablet-oriented feature. Contrary to /. popular optinion, Win8 is actually useful and intended for use on things other than tablets!
You'd never know it to read the discussions on Win8 around here, though...
You missed the point. The reason I brought up Vista was that you seemed to be under the impression that there was an app compat issue with win8 (according to an admittedly somewhat strict parsing of your claim that "an extensive pilot program to make sure 7 would run everything important to the business. 7 passed. We are fairly certain that 8 will fail.") It was to contrast the popular opinion (that Windows Vista, or Windows 8, are incompatible) with the truth (that all PC builds of NT 6.x have the same app compatibility).
If your point was not that you expect Win8 to be incompatible with your software, you may want to take more care in how you phrase your predictions regarding it. As it is, it appears that you are spreading FUD, presumeably intentionally (since you appear to speak from a position of knowledge on the subject). I can sertainly understand businesses choosing to only upgrade their OS every 6 years or so, instead of every 3 (the latter being approximately the gap between Windows versions). I can somewhat understand the confusion over the new UI (I honestly find the Charms bar to be a bigger change than the new Start screen, since the way I use it the Start functionality has had almost no change at all). The hardware requirements part is pure bull - Win8 has lower requirements than Win7 - which reinforces my belief that you either really don't know what you're talking about or are intentionally spreading FUD.
As for "we did not need to", for sufficiently strict definitions of "need" you probably didn't need to use anything newer than NT4. Obviously, there are advantages to not using a 16-year-old OS, but there are also advantages to not using a three-year-old OS. It's up to each individual or organization to decide when those advantages make upgrading worthwhile, and it's not my place to attempt to convince your organization to chose a specific point. However, as a fellow member of this community, I *will* ask you to avoid the dishonesty (be it intentional or otherwise).
That's a good point, but it doesn't really solve the SSD problem. TL;DR: Win7 supports the TRIM command, which tells solid-state storage when supposedly-valid data is no longer required. Without this command (which XP lacks), SSD performance degrades rapidly over time under real-world usage.
The issue is that Flash storage doesn't actually support modifying a portion of a data block; it instead reads the entire block into volatile memory, modifies one portion of it, and then writes it back to persistent storage. Since each block of the persistent storage has a limited number of writes, the write usually occurs onto a fresh, unoccupied block. (Obviously, the SSD controller needs to maintain a mapping between the logical address of the written data, which didn't change, and the physical block that is storing it, which did change.) This is called wear leveling, and it is vital to the health of Flash storage. In its basic form, it works just fine up until the point that that the entire storage has been written to. At that point, the SSD starts re-using the blocks that it (at one point) had data in, but then needed to modify that data (and remember that "modify" can be any kind of write, including things like changing filesystem metadata or writing a new file). Meanwhile, the blocks of the storage that aren't getting modified sit there, static.
The problem occurs when a lot of data is deleted. The OS now knows that addresses 0x10000000 through 0x70000000 are free for use. However, the SSD doesn't know that. Since a file deletion only consists of removing the node in the filesystem, the data is allowed to remain because, on a magnetic disk, there's no need to clear it. However, if an address in that range of old deleted data - say, 0x20000000 to 0x20000100 - becomes highly volatile, the SSD now has a problem. It can't overwrite any of blocks that are storing the rest of the deleted data, because it thinks that the data there is still valid. Instead, it must copy the entire block where there the logical address of 0x20000000 is currently located and write it to a new location (many, many, many times) without ever overwriting data that is actually deleted. Instead, that highly volatile block ends up being written repeatedly to a relatively small number of physical blocks, wearing down their longevity.
In the worst case, you could end up with a filesystem that is 99% free space, an SSD that thinks it is 99% full, and one block on the SSD that keeps geeting written to the few locations that aren't being used to store "valid" data on the SSD. That's not a realistic case, but it's an extreme form of the real-world typical usage of storage on workstations. There's usually a large amount of unimportant (deleted) data being stored on the SSD, not linked to by anything in the filesystem but consistently maintained intact by the drive controller because the OS wrote to those addresses once, and might, at some point, ask to read them again. This both slows down the SSD and lowers its useful life.
The solution is the TRIM command, which tells the SSD that a range of logical addresses (which the drive controller will map to physical blocks) are no longer holding important data, and can be freed up for wear leveling (without even the need to read in the data that they currently contain before overwriting it). Win7 uses TRIM whenever data is deleted, meaning that the SSD and the OS both have the same idea as to how much of the storage is available for overwriting. So long as the storage doesn't get overly full (and SSDs reserve a portion of their capacity so that they always have somewhere to write to, even once blocks start going bad, without appearing to lose capacity), the SSD will remain highly performant.
Microsoft's branding around Windows sucks abysmally, but that's no excuse for just getting it wrong. The correct information is easy to find. Please stop muddying the waters with brand names that outright do not exist.
There is no such thing as Windows 8 RT. Windows RT and Windows 8 are very nearly identical, but Windows RT is expressly *not* marketed as Windows 8.
There's no such thing as Windows 8 Phone. Just like there was no such thing as Windows 7 Phone. Windows Phone is the name of the OS family. Windows Phone 8 is the new version. As with Windows 8 and Windows RT, it runs on the NT kernel, but that doesn't make it the same product any more than RHEL, Android, and Chrome OS are the same product (even though they all run Linux kernels).
Windows RT is intended for those who want an iPad-class device that also supports multiple users, filesystem access, sideloading, Windows networking, USB peripherals, scripting (powershell, CMD, WSH), Office, and Xbox integration, plus regular updates from the OS developer but many different hardware options to choose from. They want the low cost and low power usage of ARM, in a device that is cheaper, lighter, and gets battery life than an ultrabook at the cost of computing power and backward complexity.
It's not intended to replace people's PCs, or their smartphones, or their consoles. At least, not any more than the iPad or Nexus 7 are intended to replace such things. It's a decent alternative to a Kindle Fire (there's already an official Kindle app, and unlike the Fire you don't have to do any jailbreaking to control how the FS is allocated). It supports game controllers but is more multi-purpose than a console (and has less mastery of gaming). It's much more accurate to say that Windows 8 can run WinRT apps than it is to say that Windows RT runs Win8 apps.
OK, now I'm curious. The only thing I know of that you could do on XP Pro but can't do on Win7 Pro is enable the POSIX subsystem, and hardly anybody seems to use that. If you use Win7 Enterprise instead - which is the volume-licensed edition, and therefore what reasonably large businesses would be expected to use - then you get everything.
I'm not going to bother arguing about gains in functionality with you; you're intentionally blinding yourself if you can't see the vast improvements that things like BitLocker, instant search, Aero Snap, taskbar pinning (much better than quicklaunch), and so on provide. That's leaving aside the under-the-covers stuff like 64-bit, SSD support, ASLR and other huge security improvements, a memory manager that actually knows how to make good use of over a gig of RAM, instant resume from sleep and much faster startup and resume from hibernate, etc.