Well in that case, how can there be "real" ones and "fake" ones? Also, I looked it up and the only requirements are: - a certain class of processor and attendant Intel software - a maximum height while open - a minimum battery life - USB 3.0 - a maximum resume-from-hibernation time - a minimum transfer rate for storage (apparently low enough to be achievable by traditional hard drives) Nothing about requiring an SSD or not having optical drives or having really fast processors or anything else. I think the term just doesn't have the weight that Guido Jones is attributing to it.
Yes it's not an IEEE standard, but the very article you linked shows both the base prices (in the ranges I talked about, at least mostly) and most of them have SSD's.
There is nothing in that NPD data that should be a surprise to anyone, except the Surface sales (which weren't NPD, just industry gossip). PC sales are in secular decline, and Win8 was not going to change that, and certainly not in a month. The goal of Win8 is for Microsoft to use its position on a massively-huge, but sinking, PC ship to muscle in some room on the growing mobile... um, life raft? Okay, my metaphor sucks. But the point is, PC sales going down is the cause, not the consequence, of the radical changes in Win8.
And anyone who has used Windows 8 on a desktop for any length of time will realize it's pretty similar to Windows 7. If you only had the Start screen/tablet-style interface that would be something more to cry doom over. Still, most businesses and consumers will migrate slowly, as with any version of Windows. How many places still use XP, now 11 years old? But maybe this will pave the way for the triumphant return of BeOS.
I suspect businesses will migrate to a new version as Win7 reaches the end of extended support, in 2020. Consumers will migrate as/if they buy a new PC.
Start to migrate, you mean. Lots of companies consider the complete support cutoff a decent signal that they might maybe want to start thinking about considering the possibility of dipping their toes into the idea of the whisper of the notion of maybe starting to think about figuring out what they might need to do if they ever hypothetically were to start thinking about upgrading their machines. Edit: I was thinking of the mainstream support cutoff. NEVER MIND.
Does anyone use it for anything at all? I mean, not that too many people used BeOS either, but it did have some things going for it at the time, since Linux sucked from a non-superpowered-user perspective, consumer Windows sucked in a whole lot of ways, and Mac OS was the suck king of suck mountain. What's the niche for Haiku these days? Is there one?
