7 ms·

Saying Goodbye To Windows 8

41 points by samaysharma 12y ago

NicoJuicy 12y ago
Best productivity shortcuts (even when on 2 screens) {Windows Key} + {Arrow Left} {Windows Key} + {Arrow Right} (hit multiple times, to transfer a screen from left to right) {Windows Key} + {Arrow Down} {Windows Key} + {Arrow Up} I seriously don't care about any of the other windows tools as i don't use it.
- TobbenTM 12y ago
  {Windows Key} + {Shift} + {Arrow *} to move windows between screens. Can only move "sideways" though, so even if you have screen on top of each other, one have to move windows sideways.
- ygra 12y ago
  Win+Shift+←/→ to move windows between monitors without first docking them to a side.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Hey! It works! I wonder how many other keyboard gems are hidden away...
- willhinsa 12y ago
  Those shortcuts are also valid on Windows 7.
- Vaanir 12y ago
  Like the others have mentioned, use <Shift> to add extra awesome. Also, I would love it if Microsoft implemented a way of having multiple desktops, so I could switch between them with a shortcut like those. I am sure there is a possible 3rd party solution though?
  - yulaow 12y ago
    There are already strong rumors that multiple desktops will be a feature in the new windows9. In an interview on the /build/ 2014 some MS devs said that now that they have made a dumb-ui for the common consumer they can finally improve the desktop to the needs of power-users
- jim_h 12y ago
  It works great for the Win8 'Apps', but not regular windows applications (Firefox, Adobe, etc) for my setup. Probably something taking over my shortcuts.
  - mattlutze 12y ago
    That's an interesting issue... I've never had an issue on Windows 7 or 8 using the [Start} + arrow key to set a normal window to half-screen. Do you use any productivity enhancing system tools?
- SippinLean 12y ago
  Now if only Windows would "remember" these snapped window positions after you close and re-open a window/app. It remembers windows that you manually size, but not ones that you snap. Sigh.
higherpurpose 12y ago
I think the 8 in the title is unnecessary.
josephyu0305 12y ago
Hmm, for me it is ok if windows 8 will say good bye, because windows 7 for me is best stable OS and User friendly than other OS
george_srs 12y ago
The article currently mentions this in the "Update": > Update: Your author is a moron. Microsoft did in fact promise this [running Metro apps in windowed-fashion] in the future. I had my wires crossed.
- castell 12y ago
  It is still there. I wonder if it's a joke from an editor?
TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
Real or not, that screenshot looks awfully nice. I wouldn't mind having live tiles on the Start Menu.
- anonymfus 12y ago
  This screenshot, also as "promise" mentioned in update, was taken from Microsoft's Build 2014 Day 1 keynote from April. Relevant fragment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4S5F0Ckrc8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4S5F0Ckrc8
- Cakez0r 12y ago
  I love the start menu too. Though I don't understand how it fits in if they're keeping the start screen too...
  - supergauntlet 12y ago
    Perhaps they’ll allow the use of both through some settings option.
jpalomaki 12y ago
I would have preferred them to work on these new ideas to make them work better. The idea of modern UI was good. The traditional freely movable windows are usually not using the desktop space very efficiently unless you spend a lot of time positioning them or use some third party utilities and configure them properly. I have a feeling that especially "normal users" very seldom use for example two windows side-by-side - even though this might be good for productivity. The modern UI style was more like a tiling window manager. 8.1 made it possible to split the screen vertically among n applications. It would have been nice to see them explore this further to allow other kind of configurations as well. The main problem with modern UI from my perspective was the lack of application. There was only few modern UI apps available and most of them pretty useless, tiny utilities. Now Office (even Outlook), no Visual Studio etc. A "simple" fix would have been to allow users to run the old applications the same way as modern UI apps.
- 7952 12y ago
  As a tiling window manager it could have been very good. You could have had slots that matched the Windows Phone aspect ratios instead of dividing the screen vertically. The slots could feel like a mobile app whilst the rest of the screen would feel like a normal windows desktop.
- Touche 12y ago
  They should have gone full-on tiling WM. Make it completely dynamic, as many tiles as you want, vertically or horizontally split.
- ASneakyFox 12y ago
  I make use of unnaximized Windows all the time. You don't need to see the whole window to use it. For instance when debugging a prism I only need to see the "output" panel portion of my ide window. Some people only use one program at a time. But the win7 system already works well for that. If they want to change how windows work it should be after some testing and exprimentation. Don't just change it to be different.
baconstrp 12y ago
Sold my beloved SurfacePro on eBay last week. It is a great piece of hardware, but .. in one word: Windoze8, alas As a grown up PC fanboy, I found myself work/dev more efficient with less frustration on mac nowadays. Operating system is a productivity tool, and Windows has turn into this emo teen girl I can not recognize or share an easy conversation with anymore. Picked up a refurbished MBA to keep me coding on the move.
- guardian5x 12y ago
  What were you productivity issues? What made coding so difficult? I use a Surface Pro 2 daily. Its like a Netbook replacement for me as it is very mobile and still capable and with the docking station at home i have a full keyboard and big screen.
  - allegory 12y ago
    Just a note from me, as I tried one for a week. Not enough RAM! My 2011 MBP has 16Gb of RAM and my 2014 HP Z420 has 32Gb of RAM. I can barely spin up our product on a machine with 8Gb of RAM without killing everything else I'm doing on first. Then SQL Server doesn't give the RAM back inevitably leading to the service being restarted to release it. Granted this is a big product but in this day and age, 8Gb shouldn't be the cap for anything. Also both the keyboards were shitty and the thing crashed occasionally (blue screen) when I tried plugging it into my desktop monitor - an old 22" Dell TFT. The big thing for me, is that I actually had a better experience using my Android tablet with a keyboard/mouse plugged in and remote desktop to my workstation in the office. That kills the massively powerful portable computer use case dead for me. Was perfectly usable over a 3G connection as well.
    - GFischer 12y ago
      I wonder what the heck are you developing :) . Maybe a solution would be to have SQL Server on a virtual machine, or use an Azure SQL instance (in my very limited trial latency was a bit annoying though).
vanderZwan 12y ago
EDIT: Guys, just because typing "Visual Studio" works for you doesn't mean I'm lying - I just made the mistake of saying "Visual Studio" instead of "Visual Studio Express", I really do need to type "VS" to find it. Typing "Visual Studio" nets me one shortcut: "Try Other Visual Studio 2012 products". I can share a screenshot as proof if you want. My biggest (actually, only real) issue with my Windows 8.1 installation is with the type-to-search feature not being good enough. Let's say I want to start visual studio. You'd expect Windows Key + "Vis" + autocomplete to work. Nope. Visual Studio uses "VS 2012" as the shortcut name. Visual Studio is the name of the start menu folder, but the shortcuts themselves have names that are very unclear and unsearchable on their own. This is not limited to Visual Studio, lots of software (old and new) does this. Similarly, a lot of older software seems to simply have "uninstall" as a shortcut, without the name of the program. So typing "uninstall" will give me dozens of icons without any context about what program it belongs to. If I want to uninstall a program (without going through "Add or Remove Programs") I have to manually look up the start menu folder and click on the uninstall icon. The fix is easy enough: include start menu folders in the searching. First as labels giving context to search results. Second as search queries that can be done directly, or (ideally but more difficult to implement) as contextual information aiding the search. So something like "[program name] uninstall" resulting in the program name folder, the contents of which are then filtered to the shortcut with "uninstall" in the name.
- hudo 12y ago
  I never noticed this. When I type "vis", I always get VS 2013, 2012, etc ... shortcuts. In win 8 you have to explicitly search for files vs control panel items, and in 8.1 they removed that annoying feature, so you can just use win key + s for everything. It just works.
  - dhimes 12y ago
    Yeah, this is a pain in Linux too. The menu item "Document Viewer" was actually "evince." Say what? You could hunt the menu to see the command to be able to call it. Until Ubuntu did away with the menu.
anon4 12y ago
I don't know why you say goodbye, did I say hello? Here's hoping that Windows 9 will be good enough for me to move away from 7. I just want to dual-boot it for gaming, I have zero patience to deal with their new UI paradigms.
- dagw 12y ago
  I have zero patience to deal with their new UI paradigms. Me to, that's why I don't use it in Windows 8. Windows 8.1 can trivially work like a better windows 7, and the new UI is entirely optional.
- rplnt 12y ago
  What I do is I boot to windows for gaming (I use it for more than that, but as an example), on top of that I run VM with Fedora. No drawbacks as far as I can tell, yet multiple benefits like pausing the machine, snapshots (in theory), just alt-tabbing to select OS, ...
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  So Microsoft will get you to pay for something that's essentially Windows 7 SP3, and it's biggest feature is that "it looks like Windows 7 again"? Even if I liked Windows 9, I wouldn't buy it in principle.
  - freehunter 12y ago
    OSX got people to pay for the same OS, slightly updated, for a decade and a half. Only recently did they make updates free. Windows is quite exclusive in making major changes between OS releases (and now quite exclusive in charging for them).
- allegory 12y ago
  Similar state of affairs here. I installed windows 8 the day it came out, found it to be a pile of tripe, swore at it and rolled the machine back to 7 and vowed never to touch it again. Then our hand was forced with an 8.1 upgrade at work (built in HyperV saves us a ton of VMware licenses) so I ended up knocking that back to 7's UI as best as possible. Occasionally it still pokes me with Metro so I tend not to use it much even though the machine is a beast. I tended to work on my laptop at the time, an old T400 ThinkPad running Windows 7. The keyboard failed on that so I switched to an i7 2011 MBP I had lying around as a test machine. Chucked 16Gb in it and an SSD and it's very nice even though it's got a 1280x800 screen. So I'm sitting here now on a 2011 MBP on 10.9 with a Windows 7 VM and am relatively happy, the only persistent problem being that the quote and at keys are the wrong way round. Nice move Microsoft. Even the most platform tied of us are easy to lose!
chrisan 12y ago
So is the "every other Windows is good" rule remaining true? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4415403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4415403 / http://i.imgur.com/hVhvEhr.jpg http://i.imgur.com/hVhvEhr.jpg I've held back on win8 initially. I was going to try 8.1 once I found free time but now I feel like waiting for the beta of 9
- UnoriginalGuy 12y ago
  Considering you didn't list Windows 98 SE (which was a stand-alone release) and called Windows 95 "shit" (which is laughable if you were around in 1995 when relatively speaking it was far from "shit," pretty groundbreaking frankly), no. There is no pattern, people just alter history because they want there to be a pattern. We also have to ignore NT4, 2000, and the servers also.
  - chrisan 12y ago
    Not my graphic, however I agree with it as I used to be on the student helpdesk at college when we had to support 3.1, 95, and 98. Naturally our individual call center team's experience is an insignificant sample size. I don't think anyone believes it is actually every other exact release (hence the original quotes), but the feeling/humor is shared. Sorry you disagree.
al2o3cr 12y ago
Wow, talk about low expectations. "We're pretty sure the next version will remove the misfeatures the current version added!"
qwerta 12y ago
Obligatory question: can you maximize console window in Win9? It will be 20 years soon and I am still waiting for bug fix.
- ygra 12y ago
  You're not waiting for a bug fix but for a feature to be implemented. A feature that might have compatibility constraints, some cost attached to it and might lead to another feature being cut because there's only finite time. How many average users see and use a console window regularly?
- AjithAntony 12y ago
  You have probably already researched this matter, but I recently learned about conemu http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ConEmuTheWindowsTerminalConsolePromptWeveBeenWaitingFor.aspx http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ConEmuTheWindowsTerminalConsol...
lectrick 12y ago
I said goodbye to Windows XP, clearly I was ahead of the game ;)
chatmasta 12y ago
Ugh, yet another version of windows I need to help my dad transition to. He was happily using Windows XP until a month ago, when his computer stopped working and I finally convinced him to switch to the new Windows 8 laptop I got him for Christmas last year. He's a very smart guy, and yet switching from Windows XP to Windows 8 was incredibly unintuitive for him. Now just when he's getting used to it, he needs to switch to another version? Microsoft is doing a great job of alienating its users by forcing them into new releases with constantly changing, unintuitive "features." Most people I've talked to who use windows were perfectly happy with Windows XP, and the subsequent releases have been definite downgrades in terms of usability. How long before non-Enterprise/government Windows users just start switching to Mac? If Apple released a $500 laptop, I imagine they would capture a massive percentage of the non-Enterprise Windows market. It's only a matter of time before Apple opens its doors to budget consumers. Personally, I can't wait.

41 points by samaysharma 12y ago

Best productivity shortcuts (even when on 2 screens) {Windows Key} + {Arrow Left} {Windows Key} + {Arrow Right} (hit multiple times, to transfer a screen from left to right) {Windows Key} + {Arrow Down} {Windows Key} + {Arrow Up} I seriously don't care about any of the other windows tools as i don't use it.

TobbenTM 12y ago
{Windows Key} + {Shift} + {Arrow *} to move windows between screens. Can only move "sideways" though, so even if you have screen on top of each other, one have to move windows sideways.
ygra 12y ago
Win+Shift+←/→ to move windows between monitors without first docking them to a side.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Hey! It works! I wonder how many other keyboard gems are hidden away...
willhinsa 12y ago
Those shortcuts are also valid on Windows 7.
Vaanir 12y ago
Like the others have mentioned, use <Shift> to add extra awesome. Also, I would love it if Microsoft implemented a way of having multiple desktops, so I could switch between them with a shortcut like those. I am sure there is a possible 3rd party solution though?
- yulaow 12y ago
  There are already strong rumors that multiple desktops will be a feature in the new windows9. In an interview on the /build/ 2014 some MS devs said that now that they have made a dumb-ui for the common consumer they can finally improve the desktop to the needs of power-users
jim_h 12y ago
It works great for the Win8 'Apps', but not regular windows applications (Firefox, Adobe, etc) for my setup. Probably something taking over my shortcuts.
- mattlutze 12y ago
  That's an interesting issue... I've never had an issue on Windows 7 or 8 using the [Start} + arrow key to set a normal window to half-screen. Do you use any productivity enhancing system tools?
SippinLean 12y ago
Now if only Windows would "remember" these snapped window positions after you close and re-open a window/app. It remembers windows that you manually size, but not ones that you snap. Sigh.

higherpurpose 12y ago

I think the 8 in the title is unnecessary.

josephyu0305 12y ago

Hmm, for me it is ok if windows 8 will say good bye, because windows 7 for me is best stable OS and User friendly than other OS

george_srs 12y ago

The article currently mentions this in the "Update": > Update: Your author is a moron. Microsoft did in fact promise this [running Metro apps in windowed-fashion] in the future. I had my wires crossed.

castell 12y ago
It is still there. I wonder if it's a joke from an editor?

TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago

Real or not, that screenshot looks awfully nice. I wouldn't mind having live tiles on the Start Menu.

anonymfus 12y ago
This screenshot, also as "promise" mentioned in update, was taken from Microsoft's Build 2014 Day 1 keynote from April. Relevant fragment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4S5F0Ckrc8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4S5F0Ckrc8
Cakez0r 12y ago
I love the start menu too. Though I don't understand how it fits in if they're keeping the start screen too...
- supergauntlet 12y ago
  Perhaps they’ll allow the use of both through some settings option.

jpalomaki 12y ago

I would have preferred them to work on these new ideas to make them work better. The idea of modern UI was good. The traditional freely movable windows are usually not using the desktop space very efficiently unless you spend a lot of time positioning them or use some third party utilities and configure them properly. I have a feeling that especially "normal users" very seldom use for example two windows side-by-side - even though this might be good for productivity. The modern UI style was more like a tiling window manager. 8.1 made it possible to split the screen vertically among n applications. It would have been nice to see them explore this further to allow other kind of configurations as well. The main problem with modern UI from my perspective was the lack of application. There was only few modern UI apps available and most of them pretty useless, tiny utilities. Now Office (even Outlook), no Visual Studio etc. A "simple" fix would have been to allow users to run the old applications the same way as modern UI apps.

7952 12y ago
As a tiling window manager it could have been very good. You could have had slots that matched the Windows Phone aspect ratios instead of dividing the screen vertically. The slots could feel like a mobile app whilst the rest of the screen would feel like a normal windows desktop.
Touche 12y ago
They should have gone full-on tiling WM. Make it completely dynamic, as many tiles as you want, vertically or horizontally split.
ASneakyFox 12y ago
I make use of unnaximized Windows all the time. You don't need to see the whole window to use it. For instance when debugging a prism I only need to see the "output" panel portion of my ide window. Some people only use one program at a time. But the win7 system already works well for that. If they want to change how windows work it should be after some testing and exprimentation. Don't just change it to be different.

baconstrp 12y ago

Sold my beloved SurfacePro on eBay last week. It is a great piece of hardware, but .. in one word: Windoze8, alas As a grown up PC fanboy, I found myself work/dev more efficient with less frustration on mac nowadays. Operating system is a productivity tool, and Windows has turn into this emo teen girl I can not recognize or share an easy conversation with anymore. Picked up a refurbished MBA to keep me coding on the move.

guardian5x 12y ago
What were you productivity issues? What made coding so difficult? I use a Surface Pro 2 daily. Its like a Netbook replacement for me as it is very mobile and still capable and with the docking station at home i have a full keyboard and big screen.
- allegory 12y ago
  Just a note from me, as I tried one for a week. Not enough RAM! My 2011 MBP has 16Gb of RAM and my 2014 HP Z420 has 32Gb of RAM. I can barely spin up our product on a machine with 8Gb of RAM without killing everything else I'm doing on first. Then SQL Server doesn't give the RAM back inevitably leading to the service being restarted to release it. Granted this is a big product but in this day and age, 8Gb shouldn't be the cap for anything. Also both the keyboards were shitty and the thing crashed occasionally (blue screen) when I tried plugging it into my desktop monitor - an old 22" Dell TFT. The big thing for me, is that I actually had a better experience using my Android tablet with a keyboard/mouse plugged in and remote desktop to my workstation in the office. That kills the massively powerful portable computer use case dead for me. Was perfectly usable over a 3G connection as well.
  - GFischer 12y ago
    I wonder what the heck are you developing :) . Maybe a solution would be to have SQL Server on a virtual machine, or use an Azure SQL instance (in my very limited trial latency was a bit annoying though).

vanderZwan 12y ago

EDIT: Guys, just because typing "Visual Studio" works for you doesn't mean I'm lying - I just made the mistake of saying "Visual Studio" instead of "Visual Studio Express", I really do need to type "VS" to find it. Typing "Visual Studio" nets me one shortcut: "Try Other Visual Studio 2012 products". I can share a screenshot as proof if you want. My biggest (actually, only real) issue with my Windows 8.1 installation is with the type-to-search feature not being good enough. Let's say I want to start visual studio. You'd expect Windows Key + "Vis" + autocomplete to work. Nope. Visual Studio uses "VS 2012" as the shortcut name. Visual Studio is the name of the start menu folder, but the shortcuts themselves have names that are very unclear and unsearchable on their own. This is not limited to Visual Studio, lots of software (old and new) does this. Similarly, a lot of older software seems to simply have "uninstall" as a shortcut, without the name of the program. So typing "uninstall" will give me dozens of icons without any context about what program it belongs to. If I want to uninstall a program (without going through "Add or Remove Programs") I have to manually look up the start menu folder and click on the uninstall icon. The fix is easy enough: include start menu folders in the searching. First as labels giving context to search results. Second as search queries that can be done directly, or (ideally but more difficult to implement) as contextual information aiding the search. So something like "[program name] uninstall" resulting in the program name folder, the contents of which are then filtered to the shortcut with "uninstall" in the name.

hudo 12y ago
I never noticed this. When I type "vis", I always get VS 2013, 2012, etc ... shortcuts. In win 8 you have to explicitly search for files vs control panel items, and in 8.1 they removed that annoying feature, so you can just use win key + s for everything. It just works.
- dhimes 12y ago
  Yeah, this is a pain in Linux too. The menu item "Document Viewer" was actually "evince." Say what? You could hunt the menu to see the command to be able to call it. Until Ubuntu did away with the menu.

anon4 12y ago

I don't know why you say goodbye, did I say hello? Here's hoping that Windows 9 will be good enough for me to move away from 7. I just want to dual-boot it for gaming, I have zero patience to deal with their new UI paradigms.

dagw 12y ago
I have zero patience to deal with their new UI paradigms. Me to, that's why I don't use it in Windows 8. Windows 8.1 can trivially work like a better windows 7, and the new UI is entirely optional.
rplnt 12y ago
What I do is I boot to windows for gaming (I use it for more than that, but as an example), on top of that I run VM with Fedora. No drawbacks as far as I can tell, yet multiple benefits like pausing the machine, snapshots (in theory), just alt-tabbing to select OS, ...
higherpurpose 12y ago
So Microsoft will get you to pay for something that's essentially Windows 7 SP3, and it's biggest feature is that "it looks like Windows 7 again"? Even if I liked Windows 9, I wouldn't buy it in principle.
- freehunter 12y ago
  OSX got people to pay for the same OS, slightly updated, for a decade and a half. Only recently did they make updates free. Windows is quite exclusive in making major changes between OS releases (and now quite exclusive in charging for them).
allegory 12y ago
Similar state of affairs here. I installed windows 8 the day it came out, found it to be a pile of tripe, swore at it and rolled the machine back to 7 and vowed never to touch it again. Then our hand was forced with an 8.1 upgrade at work (built in HyperV saves us a ton of VMware licenses) so I ended up knocking that back to 7's UI as best as possible. Occasionally it still pokes me with Metro so I tend not to use it much even though the machine is a beast. I tended to work on my laptop at the time, an old T400 ThinkPad running Windows 7. The keyboard failed on that so I switched to an i7 2011 MBP I had lying around as a test machine. Chucked 16Gb in it and an SSD and it's very nice even though it's got a 1280x800 screen. So I'm sitting here now on a 2011 MBP on 10.9 with a Windows 7 VM and am relatively happy, the only persistent problem being that the quote and at keys are the wrong way round. Nice move Microsoft. Even the most platform tied of us are easy to lose!

chrisan 12y ago

So is the "every other Windows is good" rule remaining true? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4415403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4415403 / http://i.imgur.com/hVhvEhr.jpg http://i.imgur.com/hVhvEhr.jpg I've held back on win8 initially. I was going to try 8.1 once I found free time but now I feel like waiting for the beta of 9

UnoriginalGuy 12y ago
Considering you didn't list Windows 98 SE (which was a stand-alone release) and called Windows 95 "shit" (which is laughable if you were around in 1995 when relatively speaking it was far from "shit," pretty groundbreaking frankly), no. There is no pattern, people just alter history because they want there to be a pattern. We also have to ignore NT4, 2000, and the servers also.
- chrisan 12y ago
  Not my graphic, however I agree with it as I used to be on the student helpdesk at college when we had to support 3.1, 95, and 98. Naturally our individual call center team's experience is an insignificant sample size. I don't think anyone believes it is actually every other exact release (hence the original quotes), but the feeling/humor is shared. Sorry you disagree.

al2o3cr 12y ago

Wow, talk about low expectations. "We're pretty sure the next version will remove the misfeatures the current version added!"

qwerta 12y ago

Obligatory question: can you maximize console window in Win9? It will be 20 years soon and I am still waiting for bug fix.

ygra 12y ago
You're not waiting for a bug fix but for a feature to be implemented. A feature that might have compatibility constraints, some cost attached to it and might lead to another feature being cut because there's only finite time. How many average users see and use a console window regularly?
AjithAntony 12y ago
You have probably already researched this matter, but I recently learned about conemu http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ConEmuTheWindowsTerminalConsolePromptWeveBeenWaitingFor.aspx http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ConEmuTheWindowsTerminalConsol...

lectrick 12y ago

I said goodbye to Windows XP, clearly I was ahead of the game ;)

chatmasta 12y ago

Ugh, yet another version of windows I need to help my dad transition to. He was happily using Windows XP until a month ago, when his computer stopped working and I finally convinced him to switch to the new Windows 8 laptop I got him for Christmas last year. He's a very smart guy, and yet switching from Windows XP to Windows 8 was incredibly unintuitive for him. Now just when he's getting used to it, he needs to switch to another version? Microsoft is doing a great job of alienating its users by forcing them into new releases with constantly changing, unintuitive "features." Most people I've talked to who use windows were perfectly happy with Windows XP, and the subsequent releases have been definite downgrades in terms of usability. How long before non-Enterprise/government Windows users just start switching to Mac? If Apple released a $500 laptop, I imagine they would capture a massive percentage of the non-Enterprise Windows market. It's only a matter of time before Apple opens its doors to budget consumers. Personally, I can't wait.