I would expect this to be a way to pressure software providers to publish to the store. With opt-in model, even if it's free, you can assume that there will be a sizeable chunk of the market that will not opt-in to upgrade to Pro.
Either they get $50 from users and let them go buy/install off-market, or make the money in the long run from paid app developers who are pressured now to put their applications on the store.
> I would expect this to be a way to pressure software providers to publish to the store.
Holy backfiring shit, what a desperate bunch of clueless clowns! This is a nice machine, and there's a opening now that Apple has somewhat fallen out of favor, and they think they are in any position to play stupid games?
That is the negative explanation. I think they want to compete on safety and simplicity against Chromebook.
Store apps will not make the laptop slow, they won't have viruses, they will ask the user for permissions, can be uninstalled safely, they will scale well on hi-res screens, etc.
This type of safety is, imo, the most compelling feature of chromebook, and one that Windows Pro doesn't offer.
> Why don't they just ship it with W10 Pro already installed?
Are you sure they don't? In the past, many Windows edition upgrades (e.g., Home to Pro) were just a matter of enabling features that were already installed.
This is me being pedantic; when you upgrade from Home to Pro it does actually install several missing features. You'll see the this[0], takes about 30 minutes on an SSD.
