[testbro]

Do you think your experiences are typical? I get that MS does have some good offerings but at the same time I think the average consumer's perception isn't as good as it could be.

> Let's see how it is when Windows 8.1 is released generally and people have time to react to Haswell processors having been released.

I'll be interested if the consumers even notice - is the average consumer clued up enough to understand the significant of a point release or what a new processor adds? In my (somewhat pompous) view, Apple's success is its focus on selling the consumer things they can understand the need for, not numbers. I see MS is taking this approach with the new Win8 marketing but it'll be interesting to see if they can pull it off with 8.1

[300bps]

is the average consumer clued up enough to understand the significant of a point release or what a new processor adds?

Haswell is significant because of the substantially lower power it requires which translates into significantly longer battery life. Consumers will notice that.

You might be unfamiliar with Intel's Tick-Tock strategy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Tick-Tock) but it does mean real world benefits to consumers that they will notice.

[yuhong]

To be honest, it does only change the start screen a little and add the start button, though even that helps especially in RDP/VMs.