Meh, it's all about choice. Choice is nice to have. Sure I'm not going to use 450 million devices, but even if I use 5 devices it is significant to me. Do I really need a mouse and keyboard on my tablet? Yes at times I do. Just right now I made the choice to connect to my keyboard and mouse on my tablet to reply to you, all I had to do was place my tablet down near them and start typing. I could have chosen to hunt and peck on the screen keyboard, or I could have chose to pull out my stylus and handwrite my response to be text recognized. Choice is nice to have.
Every time I hear someone use "isheep" or your new term "mssheep" I know they are a fanboy on one side or the other. Most users in the real world are pretty eclectic and utilize whatever serves their needs best. I have a variety of Apple, Microsoft, Android, etc etc products and I use all of them.
IMO we went backwards with the introduction and adoption of the ipad, once again that's my opinion. Windows 8 Pro tablets are not meant to take us to the future, but rather to the present where we should never have had to have a 3rd operating system/device in our lives.
Like I said, it's all about choice. I can choose to make my win8 tablet a "dumb tablet" and run it like I would my ipad, that choice is there. Or I can choose to run it like my laptop or desktop, that choice is also there, and everything in between. Now that I have been shown that choice I will never go back, but once again that's just me.
You see it as choice, I see it as MS's stagnated thinking. It's something they've gotten very good at as they have lived off of what they built for a business over the past 20 years.
If you're not using the tablet as a tablet, then what you're really talking about is a thin and light laptop. That's what I've gathered from your previous posts. If the touch based OS isn't something you're using, then why get a tablet in the first place? MS is trying to live with one foot in the past and one in the present as they're not willing (or don't know how) to push forward.
For all those people who consider the iPad a toy, that it doesn't do business things, you're clearly not using any of the thousands, tens of thousands, of apps dedicated to business. Most of the iOS apps are not just small screened versions of desktop apps. They use the very basis for a tablet as part of the app.
Please explain to me what you do on the surface as a desktop based program? And then ask yourself why they (MS) have not made the app based around the very different functional aspects of the surface?
Sure, they've given you a choice of yet another netbook to do things the same way they've always done them, which is exactly how MS wants it.
And you like my MSheeple comment? Remember, I used MS based systems for decades. I hear people talk about blindly following Apple and it should be pointed out that there are more blind followers of MS than there are Apple, for now. Heck, a whole category of business has been built around blindly following (and fixing) MS products.
I may be different, but I'm tired of using crash prone software on crap hardware. There are a lot more better choices out there for doing the same sorts of things MS built their business on. And it goes beyond Apple.
Remember, I'm not using an iPad myself - I see no real purpose for me, right now. I'm typing this on my 13" mba, a superb thin and light laptop that gives me about 7 hours of normal usage and lets me open, edit and send any Office document, spreadsheet or presentation without ever opening a the horrid, crash-prone Office Mac apps. And I can do so on a usable 13" screen, fantastic keyboard and awesome touchpad (another thing that MS has not been able to duplicate or figure out). And I love being able to text people (who have an iPhone) from my mba using messages, given the speed benefit of using a real keyboard brings.
I remember the days of handwriting recognition - I used to use a Compaq iPaq back in the day and all I can say is I'm a much faster typer than I am a hand-writer.
