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