Welcome to the post-post-PC era: A review of Microsoft's Windows 8 Preview | Hacker News Reader

Welcome to the post-post-PC era: A review of Microsoft's Windows 8 Preview

bgr.com

12 pointszacharye8 comments

I disagree that we will ever see a FULL fusion of desktop and touch OS's. Sure the OS may present two interfaces and they will be married closely but honestly I don't ever want to see "one interface to rule them all".

Fact is we're used to doing things on desktops that are precision. Pointers are very accurate and we can manage large amounts of data on-screen very well. Touch UI's are different by design because simply put our fingers are fat lumps of meat. We need to alter the UI when it will be a touch experience to account for that lack of accuracy.

To try to ultimately merge these two I think is a mistake. You're bound to loose some of the qualities that make each UI ideal for its intended use. I don't want to tap tiny icons with my finger, I don't want to scroll huge tiles with my mouse. I don't see why it's such a bad thing to accept that they are two completely different use cases with different capabilities.

Who really needs the precision of mice and the power of a general purpose OS? There are millions of people who don't understand computers at all, and yet use one as part of their job. What if their PCs were replaced with a tablet and a handful of single-purpose apps?

Sure. For many people that would be just fine.

However, the UI designers seem to forget all about the guys and girls sitting at their workstations doing precision work, designing, programming, architecting, editing, writing, etc, where you don't use your fat fingers to touch screens and where screen real-estate IS important.

I would love to see a Windows 8 review by someone who understands both tablets and PCs... but this isn't it. The author has so bought into the Microsoft view of the world that I genuinely wonder what they've been doing for the past five years.

We are now entering the post-post-PC era, and its focus is the PC. A new, smarter, more versatile PC. A PC that lets users browse the web casually in bed and work with massive databases in SQL Server. A PC that can run a $0.99 news reader as well as it can run proprietary $99,000 CRM software. A PC that is as ideal for playing Angry Birds as it is for running a modeling environment that allows its user to build schematics for a skyscraper. This is the future of computing.

Er, no. No it isn't. That was the model that MS were pushing for a decade or so with 'Tablet PCs'/UMPCs and it has failed utterly. Most people DO NOT WANT a single device that can do all that, because the necessary design trade-offs produce a device that isn't very good at anything. Apple's realization of this fact (and their execution) is why they're the biggest company in the world, and why Windows Phone and Windows 8 are playing catchup.

The machine I tested Windows 8 on is a pre-release dockable Samsung tablet with a 1.6GHz Intel Core i5 processor and 4GB of RAM. Yes, it’s a tablet with a fan. It’s also a tablet that can run your existing desktop-grade enterprise software, consumer software and lightweight Metro-style apps. Get over it.

A Core i5 in a tablet? What's its battery life? I bet it sucks. People aren't going to 'get over it', they're just going to buy iPads.

It's nice to see MS executing again. Windows Phone looks great. Windows 8 looks promising, if they can negotiate the backwards-compatibility waters of a new architecture. But I hope MS can see what they've been doing wrong for the past decade better than this guy, or their further decline is assured.

Hey, if I could plug my iPad into a dock and get full OSX rocking Photoshop and XCode, I'd be all over it. Who needs a Macbook Air?! That's the dream of Windows 8. iPad for the road, MBP for home.

The real problem with Windows 8 is that it, ironically, doesn't work very well with a mouse. Even if you docked your Win8 tablet and tried to live entirely in the Desktop mode, you can't. You'd keep getting a jarring fullscreen animation bumping you into Metro mode. Reading an email in Outlook on the Desktop? Whoops! You just clicked on a link that opened up Metro IE instead of Desktop IE. Cue fullscreen page transition... Gestures that are simple and intuitive with touch are hidden and awkward with a mouse and keyboard.

There are 316 millions iOS devices, with nearly half of that sold in 2011.

I don't know the actual install base numbers, but presumably it is close.

1 billion isn't far off

not more than 2 years ago we've heard of the 'post-pc' buzzword, people haven't got rid of pcs yet and now we have a 'post-post-pc' era? really?! btw which web are we now in, since web 2.0 is passe?

"...to the post-Microsoft era", you mean. And end of an epoch; goodbye, it was nice knowing you, though I can't say I particularly enjoyed it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com