I believe Steam also takes a hard 30%.  As far as I know its a common number across the industry.

Personally I'd rather have a Win8 x86 tablet, but the Win7 ones are not cheap so I expect I'll end up with an ARM one.  We'll see.

I will argue yes, it matters to mainstream developers now.   But I'll admit it hasn't hit the marketplace en masse yet.  The wave hits the developers before it hits the end consumers.

Market research studies have shown that 100% of all applications not developed yet have no customer base.

Linux is already in the ARM market.  Which is a contradiction of terms, really, when you consider that at Linux's inception it was, by definition, Unix on x86.  No matter...Linux is in the ARM market with or without Microsoft, and if I'm Microsoft I don't want that to just go unchecked.  Just like they have been trying to put Intel in check for quite some time now.  Intel did it to them first--it is Intel who invested so many millions in their own Intel Developers' Network to promote Linux.

Without a doubt, though, the best hardware engineering is in the ARM.  It's a technological step forward if the consumer market can move to it.  I'm sure Windows will still be the same rubbish on ARM that it was before, but at least the ancient x86 instruction architecture is finally gone.

I was just skiming the forums when i came across this topic and could not stop laughing what i saw.

First anyone who thinks that an IPOD is an adequate replacement for a workstation is ether retarded or has absolutely no knowlage on the subject matter.

Streaming two and from a mobile device is very limited, there is always lag, while this can be decreased with enhanced wireless tech, this will always exist, wireless signals, unlike wired connections work via, bluetooth / wifi and other forms of wave based technology, waves do not travel at the speed of light, unlike wired systems, while this isent a requirement for input devices it defiantly helps.

As a digital artist and trained programmer / web developer i can tell you while some programs / websites are designed for use on portable devices they are never created using them, the only times the mobile device would be used in development would be for testing purposes. Creating 3d art and correctly synthesizing/ editing sound and music can only be done via a traditional desktop work-space.

The majority of artists / programmers / sound engineers and other developers require multiple screens to work on their project some have 6 monitor rigs for this purpose, while theoretically a wireless device could be used as the desktop unit, with wireless connections linking all other devices to it could exist it will never be able to keep up with the power of the traditional unit, technology is miniaturized over time, the power of the processors, ram ect within an ipod if compared to a PC would be about 10 years out dated, hell many mobile devices to this day still cannot do what they are designed for correctly, many phones with internet browsers for example are very  limited IPODS / IPADS cannot run flash / shockwave, and a variety of required browser plugins to correctly view pages online.

Mobile devices have come a very long way in a short about of time, but considering the raw power available in the modern pc, and that fact that it is doubled every 3-5 years will make it so the PC will always exist.

On another note PC gaming is not dead by a long shot, if you could correctly play Galactic Civ or Sins on an Xbox or Ipod using there imput devices maybe some uses would leave but the PC/MAC user-base is by far higher than any other, no matter what the owner uses it for.

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In my opinion METRO is MS way of trying ti "simplify" the PC experience for the younger and dumber people in out society, i dont expect windows 8 to last very long, just like vista its a flawed concept, expanding on an established interface has proven to work in the past, but replacing an interface that works and has been proven to, simply to try to attract the people that dont really know what they’re doing when using a PC will only alienate those that already do, and there are more PC users in the world than there are not.

Metro is not a flawed idea, its actually very cleaver, however forcing people to use it over existing interfaces is, i still see no reason why MS force Xbox Live customers to update to new and radically redesigned interfaces just to be able to use a service that there paying for, i still prefer the blades dashboard over the new Metro styled interface, there no reason new features cannot be implemented upon the old design MS simply keep trying to fix what isent broken, and ignore what is.