[PaulHoule]

In the Win 8 I thought Microsoft was visionary in integrating the tablet with the PC and in particular had a better vision than either Apple or Google. On the other hand I had a lot of weird ideas that turned out to be wrong or irrelevant: like I thought that 2-in-1s and other hybrids were just insane, like a conspiracy to confuse flight attendants, that Synoptics must be lording over the industry using patents to force every device to have a (worse than useless in my mind) trackpad, that the laptop hinge only existed because of the airline industry, or that the trackpads and insanely expensive cases with special-purpose keyboards just existed because there is so much QRM [1] at the consumer electronics show (CES) that you couldn't expect to demo something that depends on a bluetooth keyboard and mouse.

Around that time my hackathon kit was a bottom-of-the-line Android tablet with a $5 plastic clip and a cheap bluetooth keyboard and cheap mouse and with $75 of client hardware I would connect to a $2 hour machine in AWS and have a machine that was so sleek it made macbooks look clunky in comparison and also vastly more powerful than the bulky desktop replacement laptops and the gaudy gaming laptops -- it turned heads.

People thought my kit was fashionable but that's all the agreement I got with my vision. Laptops still have hinges, there is no resistance against crap trackpads [2] and those expensive cases, people are still surprised you can use a keyboard and mouse with your iPad, etc. I believed in Win 8 and told people "just hit that damn windows key on your keyboard" but I think I was the only one.

[1] ham radio jargon for "radio interference"

[2] even mac-ers admit that Apple trackpads are at best tolerable