Absolutely, are you kidding me? My jaw was on the floor the whole time during that segment wondering how the hell did that stay secret. I mean the moment the headset was introduced you could see that years of development work had to have taken place before hand. So yeah that was one of the most awesome parts of the event, along with much of the Xbox stuff.
Afraid that everyone will seize the opportunity maybe Microsoft may try to trick us with the forced updates and hardware dependencies.
It's pretty clear: upgrading means switching from a static retail license to a bound-to-your-hardware restricted license modell. No upgrade without accepting ToS. At this point we should read carefully.
Being able to have TVs on walls without actually owning a physical TV? Now that sounds fun I wonder how it'll actually react in real-world scenarios though. It definitely looks really neat. Hopefully it's affordable though. Could see myself immediately buying one if it had a $200 price tag on it (which I doubt highly); and possibly plan-to-buy around $500. But it doesn't seem like it'd be cheap.
a very interesting approach, I thought about buying a macpro lately, love os x a lot! you can see designers created it and developers thought very well about usability although not everything is perfect with a mac
For gaming I don't see any competition for windows and directx. Before we don't know the final product and pricings, we don't know a lot. The only thing we know today is that the new licence modell is a death strike for retail licenses. "lifetime updates" is the same as it ever was, but now bound to one machine. At the moment I have 3 rather new dead mainboards at my lab including 3 windows 8 licenses that died with the hardware. Okay, the key is there inside UEFI but as it's bound to the hardware hash unusable. Right?
From the Q&A after the show (no video, source liveblog from windowscentral): I think they are trying to sell the same story that retail activation is for one machine, but we all know that was not true.
Obviously there's a more annoying thing with the new license modell: a need for a microsoft account where your hardware hash will be stored. That means more cloud inclusions and most likely more telemetry.
This is not the first time that the license is bound to the hardware....how quickly people seem to forget or want to make a mountain out of a mole hill. Previously with this model all it too was a call for phone activation. I could be wrong but I do think that a unique hardware string is still generated based on your hardware and as long as x number of hardware pieces do not change with in x days windows remains activated. Once upon a time it did not take much of a change at all to trigger the need for a new activation. HOnestly I have not kept up on the activation processes with windows 8 and 8.1 and what might have changes. I could be totally misunderstanding. IF this still remains true then I see no reason why it would change. ( yes some versions required slic tables as well.)