Well, they lost me because of Windows 8.
I still have a Windows 7 on a new desktop and Windows XP on my Gateway laptop but was forced to do something different because my laptop hard drive was full.
Went to the IPAD and after one evening of sitting in the recliner, I am very satisfied. My wife is already complaining that her Windows 7 is slow. Works okay but just slower than XP.
I remember when Microsoft owned the market and the only people with Apple products were educators and newspapers. Microsoft was top dog and relaxed and when they did Apple came out with the IPOD, IPhone, and now the IPAD.
The programmers were able to freely write programs for PC's and Apple guarded their systems very tightly.
Anyway, now Apple is a force to be reckoned with.
Just a "old senior viewpoint."
Terry
What's ironic is that this time around, MS is poised to lose market share and boost Apple's fortunes in the process despite having produces a fundamentally good OS. In the past, they lost share, and deservedly so, because they released crap. This time around, it's because of their own stubbornness in making some simple (relatively speaking) UI changes to satisfy their customers' demands.
I personally think that Windows 7, all things considered, has been the best "new" Windows release. It fixed the things about Vista that made it slow, clunky, and unstable; fixed most of the UAC and backward-compatibility problems; and restored some familiar UI features that Vista users had complained about having been removed.
XP users who had skipped Vista usually found the transition from XP to Win7 to be relatively painless, and most actually preferred it once they got used to the changes.
Win 7 is also a fundamentally better OS than previous releases. Other than the occasional malware infection, the only ongoing source of annoyance I've encountered with Windows 7, both as a user and as a former consultant / support tech, have been registry problems. And even the registry problems tend toward the bloat variety, which merely make the system sluggish and can be easily cleaned up by a competent user and freely-available software (like CCleaner, for example); rather than the registry problems of old, which could make the system unbootable, and were beyond the ability of most users to fix by themselves.
In fact, subjectively, I have to say that Windows 7 is probably the Windows release that users are happiest with. I base this on almost never hearing complaints about it.
Win 98, Me, and Vista could provoke a nun to cussing (literally -- I never heard nuns use foul language until a convent called me after "upgrading" to Win Me). XP was loved immediately because it was so much better than what it replaced, but it didn't take long before its susceptibility to malware and its habit of rapidly outgrowing the hardware resources of computers it was installed on started raising grumbles.
The marriage between Windows 7 and users, on the other hand, has been almost idyllic. And why not? It's a stable, efficient, robust operating system that runs their programs nicely and preserves the interface that they're familiar with. What's there to complain about?
So what does MS do? They follow up what's probably their most popular operating system -- the one that has finally succeeded in keeping their user base happy, content, and quiet -- and they go ahead and scrap a big part of the reason why their users like it so much.
And why did they do this?
To make it look like a phone.
I have held off buying or building a Win 8 PC, despite recognizing the serious improvements in the fundamentals of the underlying system, because I don't like the UI. But more and more, I'm leaning toward switching to Mac just out of principle: I don't want to fork over money to Microsoft if they're going to ignore what their users so clearly have expressed that they want.
MS may control how their software looks and feels, but I still control whether or not they get my money; and unless they give me what I want, my money will go elsewhere or stay in my pocket.
That's really what it comes down to for me, so I guess I'm being as stubborn as MS is. But in this game, I have the advantage because the money is still mine to control, and there is an alternative that will run all the software I actually need at least as well as Windows does.
-Rich
