The trend is changing... Intel and ASUS are pushing more and more into convertible Ultrabooks / Laptops / Tablets.

Devices you can use both as a laptop and as a tablet.

The best way to describe Windows 8 is that it is an OS that wants to be touched and in all the right places. Windows is getting pimped up and wants the iPad treatment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UciKe5EbjqQ

LOL! Jahahahahah!

They should make one for Diablo 3. pr0n with the devil! :D

Nope.

Kinda getting sick of portable devices. Ill just buy another copy of Windows 7 Ultimate and pirate Windows 8 (im telling everyone i know to avoid it hahahahha)

Kinda getting sick of desktop machines. :p I don't think I'll ever get a new desktop machine. Been having my lappy for two and a half years now, the portability beats the high gaming performance any day. :p

To each his own. While I do understand your reasoning, I prefer having a powerful multiscreen tower setup as my main workstation and a not-quite-as-powerful laptop for travels.

I read a few weeks ago that they were going to be eight different sku's. Was that some sort of crazy rumor or just plain bs?

Looks that way. Until 3rd party ones such as XBMC are made compatible. Alternatively the price of Windows 7 should drop significantly from various companies to make way for stock of 8 so you could get Home Premium for a decent price. 8 just looks like a gimmicky mess completely ill suited for the average home pc user. Touch screen is a terrible technology and the last thing I want is a monitor covered in smudges from dirty fingers.

That figure probably includes versions of Windows for servers. MS has a really bad habit since about XP of creating large numbers of slightly different versions of Windows to milk the market.

It wouldn't surprise me if there were 4 versions for server targetting different markets.

Most of them were the evaluation SKU's (windows uses an internal SKU list to determine what version you have if you fail WGA checks your moved over to the eval mode..

No, if you're not crazy....

Me too, but even with my ASUS Transformer, I'm still trying to figure out what the touchscreen brings to PC machines that have also a proper keyboard and a mouse. Quite frankly, the fact that Transformer has a physical keyboard, and that I can even connect a proper mouse to its USB port (and it even knows how to use it) is nowadays more important to me than the ability to detach the Transformer screen (tablet) from the keyboard. I hardly ever do the latter, only when some stupid Android app insists that I must keep the screen in an upright position, like a smartphone.

It is pretty good for scrolling bigger-than-the-screen pages to different directions, playing casual "spot five differences"-picture games, and possibly for some finger-painting apps, but other than that... frankly, I don't know anymore.

For smartphones and tablets without any keyboard it makes more sense, but I think the virtual keyboard is still so damn cumbersome to use that I wouldn't want to write even this message with one. Let alone trying to e.g. copy&paste text between windows, trying to add an URL to this message etc.

Oh, and GOG.com is sometimes quite hard to use with a touchscreen, or then I am missing something. E.g. when I bring a mouse pointer over "My Account", I get the different options like "Logout" etc. With a touchscreen it is hit-and-miss: sometimes pushing "My Account" with your finger brings the options, sometimes it records it as a mouse click and moves you to the "My Account"-page instead, etc. Very inaccurate and incoherent.

I find it kinda interesting that I still find web browsing with my ancient Nokia E66 phone (running Opera Mini or Opera Mobile as the web browser) easier than with the newer Huawei Android phone. Clicking on links is certainly much easier and precise by moving the mouse pointer with the directional pad on E66, than trying to click a tiny link with my fatty fingers on a Huawei touch screen.

Maybe someone will come with the true touch-screen killer apps that will make us all go "why no one ever thought of that???", but until then, it is starting feel like a mere fad to me.

I especially find it ludicrous how I read somewhere that nowadays more and more companies don't give their employees PC laptops anymore, but tablets. WHAT??? What exactly do those people do for their living? Read Twitter and play Angry Birds?

"Who needs to be productive when we can all just have fun with our dozen fart apps in our offices?"

Probably the owners want their employees to have toys similar to theirs.

EDIT: Yes, I will always consider the tablet as a toy, unless it allows me to connect all my hardware to itself, just like a desktop or a laptop would, allows virtualization, installation of other OSes... basically, everything you can do on a desktop / laptop.

agreed and for anyone to put win8 on my gram's computer would be a dick move. She has a hard enough time running xp and doesn't take to change well