wdolson
Posts: 10398
Joined: 6/28/2006
From: Near Portland, OR
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quote:
ORIGINAL: mc3744
I completely agree that Tablets won't replace "regular" PCs.
However tablets are indeed fantastic to consume content. And WitP can be consumed.
It's all clicking. Very, very easy on a tablet.
The only problem (in terms of usability) is the impossibility of zooming in and out in WitP, otherwise ti'd be just perfect.
I find that holding a notebook on your lap becomes unpleasant after a while, they usually heat up.
I tried Toshiba, Sony Vaio and Apple. They all heat up.
Notebook are also a bit cumbersome on planes. Yes they fit, but if/when you have to get up or food/drinks arrive they are nowhere as convenient as a tablet.
Since Apple went with Intel processors I switched from Windows (which I used from 3.1 to Vista) to Mac and I'm so happy (I don't work for Apple or have any Apple share  )
Anyway, it was just a provocation. I understand how difficult it'd be.
It's a stone in the pond. I believe, I could be wrong of course, that even the conservative world of wargaming should take a look at IT trends. It's not by chance that the Apple OS and that tablets in general are growing so fast and so relentless.
Not to mention the stability and reliability of the Mac OS. I only reboot when I have to update the system (or to switch to Win 7 to play WitP )
To be fair Windows can be pretty stable too. I often go 4 months between reboots (with XP).
Apple is very good at industrial design. Their products tend to be laid out intelligently and they also tend to be solidly built. Probably the best built laptops out there are Macbooks.
Their hardware is proprietary, which does make it more expensive to buy, but also simplifies the OS. Windows needs to support a much wider array of peripherals.
Additionally, virtually every bit of software out there runs on Windows, but only a subset runs on the Mac. Part of this is due to market share and part is due to the programmers out there. I have known few programmers who like MacOS and even fewer who program for it. Microsoft has a massive wing of the company that exists solely to support programmers writing software for Windows. Apple, as far as I can tell, does not put as much effort into supporting programmers.
If you get under the hood in Windows, it's a vast territory, but not too difficult to understand if you understand the fundamentals of computing. I've only been under the hood on MacOs a couple of times, but I found it bewilderingly complex. Maybe it would make more sense with some effort, but from what I've heard MacOs is tougher to program than Windows.
I can't say I'm a big fan of Microsoft, even though I worked there briefly, but they do a very effective job of supporting programmers and thus most new software is written for Windows. It has a bigger potential for return (more computers out there running it) and there is a larger pool of programmers writing code for it.
We'll see what happens as portable devices with different operating systems become a larger and larger part of the market. The cost for power in computing as well as the size keeps going down. That does make it possible that a large OS like Windows may move to some sort of pad computer in the next few years.
Windows CE, which is a sort of Windows light for portable devices has been around for a while now. It never really took off because there were other competitors in the niche Microsoft was aiming for that were already well established and in many cases cheaper. Pad computers might allow something like the full blown Windows to be installed in something the size of an iPad, which would open the entire market for pad computers up to all Windows aps.
Bill
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