Will Windows 12 become the last Windows 10?
Have seen all sorts of balmerish promos and claims by Microsoft over the years and it's just as impressive as always. The point with these claims isn't to present facts, the point is to plant the illusion into people's heads.
Microsoft managed to get "the backends" a.o. within public sectors and successfully used that to get the end users. There's been 2 cases where I had to use Windows the last decade, and both were due to being locked up by public sector organisations.
Now, Microsoft had 2 great products with excellent potential, Windows Phone and tablets with "tiles", and there are 2 reasons for that epic failure.
1: Windows is incredibly messy under the surface (not clean and tidy as "*nix")
2: They released the same UX on desktop/laptops where the UX was more or less a laugh.
You HAVE to adapt the UX to the form factor. Most people got their "Tile" introduction on laptops/desktops where it didn't work, and as a consequence they (we) wrote it off for the form factors it actually did work excellently without every having used the UX on those form factors. Epic mistake by Microsoft. Epic.
I did follow the launch and marketing of the phones closely, and I frequently read success stories from various places. When I checked the digits, it was all bull. What they did was running strategic campaigns (great discounts) in an area, got some nice stats, and presented it as an universal success. For instance, they used carriers, and they got #1 for a specific month or 3. But at that time, people didn't buy their phones from that carrier. The carriers in total had perhaps 10-15% of the market, and the carrier in question had perhaps 4-5% of the total. They could get that #1 slot dirt cheap and the figs wasn't representative at all. Then the promoted the "great results" from one minor retailer/carrier in a minor market internationally and presented it as a HUGE success. Eventually the reality caught up with the lies, and they shut it down. But the product was actually great and had even better potential.
One can always discuss iPad OS and how great or not it is, but the minute Apple listens to a few loud voices and shifts to MacOS (UX) for iPads it will turn obsolete.
When I read these success stories - hardware performance this time around - I wait. And more often than not, it turns out to be intel figs. Twisted and massaged that is.
And if they aren't (this time), I couldn't care less. The last "thing" I purchased was a Samsung tablet for a kid one month ago. Being well aware that the better option would be an entry point iPad. A while since I purchased Android, and boy, isn't that a massacre of privacy nothing is. I'll never purchase Android again. No illusions about digital privacy whatsoever, but Apple is less bad than the others. Not good. Less bad.
I don't purchase Macs, iPhones or iPads as part of a competition, I purchase it because I had solid experience with all sorts of *NIX, Linux, Microsoft and Android products since MsDOS. I couldn't care less about what Google or Microsoft do with their hardware or software solutions. Linux? I'd be happy to revisit (still got Arch on a Thinkpad) when desktop distributions decides to clean up their act and stick to 1 desktop environment, (e.g. pure Gnome with GTK or pure KDE/Qt) and starts optimising the kernel and subsystems for desktop specific hardware only. The huge kitchen sink mistake. Can't be bothered.
Costs? My annual ownership costs for Apple hardware are low. If it is a factor, it's a positive one. I save money by it.
