1641

Does anyone activate sleep? The computer just goes to sleep. It happens (hopefully) when you’re not using it. That’s why they call it sleep.

1642

Actually, sleep mode is usually activated by an extremely discoverable action-- closing the laptop lid. For desktops, it just kinda happens on its own, yeah.

@Don: “Undiscoverable the first time” is kind of the point. The second time around, you don’t need to discover anything, right?

1643

The PC power button involves bending down and pressing something near the floor. Screw that when I don’t need to.

TimElhajj - So you don’t mind the PC being on for another 15+ mins after you’re finished with it? When I’m done, I want it to go into (hybrid) sleep immediately.

1644

Yeah, that’s why I said ‘slightly’, and went on to say why discoverability in this case really doesn’t matter. I mean, you know your computer has a sleep mode, right? But the only people who care about finding the software button are desktop users (minority), and they don’t do it very often. They know they can do it, might have to spend an extra 30 seconds the first time to find one of the several ways to do it, and then problem solved. Why prioritize it in the UI at that point?

1645

If you can figure out how to do something on your own, it is discoverable. That is the definition of discoverable.

If you need to run a google search or ask for help, it’s not.

1646

Well, we can all agree Windows 8 is a worse disaster than Vista, negatively affecting both MS and the overall PC industry.

1647

I dunno, difficult to say. Windows 8 ships with every PC, and the number of people opting to get a new windows7 PC (or to install linux afterwards) is so low as to be insignificant. Tablets were already on the rise before win8, and it’s impossible to tell if win8’s frosty reception impacted that.

1648

My wife has not touched her ultrabook hardly at all since iPad 3 and especially 4. I think we actually lost the power adapter for it.

As I see it, for average folks, laptops are already dead. People are more likely to get a keyboard add-on for their tablet than a laptop these days, and even then most people just do not write enough on a daily basis to justify anything more than the “free” on-screen tablet keyboard.

1649

I’m average folk and i disagree, with a family jumping all around the place we don’t have nice neat coffee tables that are safe to keep delicate things like pad computers just lying around waiting to be useful. A small child or excited dog will mess one of those up in short order.

1650

Yeah, we have twins that are 16 months old and a 4 year old. I’m just sayin’.

Tablets all-in-one designs are way more resistant to toddlers than laptops with their thin screens and smashable keyboards.

1651

You get a case for 'em and they are pretty safe. And if you have a spot where a laptop can rest undisturbed then a tablet is pretty safe too.

I do think people are getting away from laptops and desktops in a non-work setting. I have barely used my laptop since I got my iPad Mini. We just got rid of another laptop and replaced it with a tablet. My friend is taking her daughter on a trip and decided she’d rather travel with a tablet so she sold the laptop and bought one.

1652

My wife bought an HP touchscreen laptop last weekend for work. Win7 was not an option at Costco, it’s all Win8. After spending some time with it, it makes a terrible first impresson. The start screen is cluttered with irrelevant crap like stock quotes and a sports RSS feed, and horizontally bloated as a result. This is not an improvement over folders, this is pre-folder iOS junk. Worse, links that usually get buried in some nested start menu folder end up rows of space-chewing yet useless icons. Moving icons is completely unintuitive – press and hold for a while, only then will it allow movement, and only then if the movement is up or down, not right or left. This took me at least 5 minutes to learn, and I have been using iOS and Android touch interfaces for years. While the screen will allow a sigle half-width icon to hang, auto-arrange won’t permit a stack of half-width icons – they must be paired. Not to mention the full-screen-or-fuck-off nature of most Win8 native applications. I know it’s been said before, but Windows is a plural word. This feels (and in a lot of ways looks) more like 2.x than a natural evolution from 3.1 to Win95 to Win7.

What a terrible transition from Win7.

1653

Yeah, it sucks in a lot of ways, but you didn’t replace it with win7 so MS counts you as a happy customer.

Edit: Even if you did replace it, they would still count you as a happy customer. +1 win8 license sold.

1654

I recently had to teach a sound-minded but otherwise computer illiterate (never used one, what is power button type) senior how to use Win7 to do very basic things on a laptop. So explaining things like double click, move your finger on a touch pad to move cursor… None of it was intuitive. While I tried and hated Win8 myself, I wonder if brand new user on a touchscreen would respond to it better than me?

Idiosyncrasies of Win7 environment are largely defined by its predecessors that had to deal with hardware limitations during earlier eras. As far as UIs go, Win7 is very polished version of Win95. Some of that baggage might not make sense today, but we are trained to expect it. You will have to pry that UI (and Win7) from my cold dead hands, and I will keep using it until the bitter end, but does it make sense for a new user, especially one that just transferred from a smartphone?

Thing is, current generation of teenagers and younger who grew up on smartphones does not appear to have any interest in learning about PCs. Plus they have a) instant on b) just work c) always connected expectations for any smart device. I wonder if this is what driving Microsoft to push these changes.

1655

They might be driving at it but Windows 8.0 didn’t do that. You have to learn two different UIs, the silly new smartphone UI and also the old desktop UI, because metro functionality is so limited in every respect. The upcoming Windows 8.1 supposedly improves things a bit but I reckon more iterations are needed before Windows actually has a cohesive new UI for computer newbies.

1656

My understanding is that you can live entirely in the modern UI with win8.1. You don’t need to go to the desktop for settings, file management, etc.

I’m not making a value judgment on the quality of that experience; I haven’t used win8.1. But it is supposed to be consistent now.

1657

That’s what they claim but I believe it when I see it! And then there’s the issue of doing useful things with your computer, i.e. running applications which are still overwhelmingly desktop-based.

1658

Err yeah, you can’t run desktop programs in the modern UI, but I can hardly fault MS for that.

The modern UI is a capable touch UI. It doesn’t have a photoshop, autoCAD, etc, but it could.

1659

Oh, there’s no QUESTION that touchscreen apps are simpler and easier by design. They have to be big enough touch targets for fat fingers, and you can’t fill the screen with tiny 8pt lists of crap any more.

The pricing and form factor advantage is just icing on the cake. Forcing better UI is yet another reason tablets are going to win, and win decisively, over the next decade. It’s only begun.

And you thought shitty PC laptop trackpads would fix themselves? Heh. No. When hell freezes over, maybe. Tablets will replace them.

1660

Christ, this hippy dippy futurist arm-flailing again? Mobile UI design is not inherently “better”. What it is, is simpler, almost always at the cost of being less expressive than equivalent mouse-driven widgets, as I am painfully reminded every time I have to flick-flick-flick-flick through any document of non-trivial length. Mobile UI is computing with oven mitts on. There’s a place for it, but it’s a very casual place.

(It is, for example, a place where Google’s flagship mobile browser doesn’t even allow you to alphabetize your bookmarks. Thanks Google!)