> a multi-touch iPad in the hands of every consumer with $500 in their pocket iPad starts at $399, not $500. The $399 model has a better display than Surface and exponentially more apps and will sell many more units. > Excellent, beautiful, "live tile" Metro multi-touch tablet optimized interface, > as honed from two prior Windows Phone releases. And one Zune release. Adding Metro to Zune reduced unit sales. Adding Metro to Windows phones reduced unit sales. > apps There are no apps. Microsoft has almost nothing to offer the ARM architecture user. You're excited about Windows 8, but you are the only one I know who is. > was actually considering … switching to OS X. I know you are trying to make a joke here, but it isn't funny to people who know both OS X and Windows and know how much time you lost over the past 10 years, and especially the last 5, when the high-end Wintel market died and Windows started shipping on cardboard only. I'm trying to imagine hiring someone who still uses Windows in 2012 — especially a coder. Nope. Can't imagine it. Maybe you are that one guy who can chain smoke and also run marathons, but everyone else on Windows right now is just doubled over, coughing all the time. Maybe in 5 years, Windows 8 will catch up to iPad today, but Microsoft is not even trying to match the Mac. Windows ASP is only $400, there are almost no high-end sales. MacBook Air and MacBook Pro are totally unopposed by any competition. There is not even a high-end Windows to go on a high-end Wintel apache if such a thing existed. So what is the appeal of using iPad and Surface but not Mac? What is the appeal of using a 17 year old system that has seen little improvement? Is it smoking? We're supposed to admire that you can use Windows in 2012 and still feed yourself because you are really that great of a coder? It just makes me think you are not focused enough on the quality of your work if you do not concern yourself with the quality of your tools. It doesn't impress me at all.

CD audio does not represent the quality of the studio master. You should definitely be prepared to buy that music again through iTunes, which has been storing 24/96 masters for a while now in preparation for sales to consumers. CD is 16/44 — it is less than half of the audio data in the studio master. You are listening to a shadow of the original music. Apple is collecting the masters so they can sell you the real thing — finally — and give you a reason to buy compared to streaming or YouTube. MP3 is obsolete for 10 years now, and was replaced with AAC, which always sounds better at the same bit rate, is better standardized across players, and has better licensing. MP3 is part of MPEG-2, while AAC is part of MPEG-4. MP3 will disappear from your players first also, because of the licensing and how rare the files are becoming. Most of the world's perceptually-encoded audio is AAC, not MP3. And MP3 has wicked distortion and will cut off your whole high-end. Both bugs were fixed in AAC. There is not really any reason to compare MP3 encoders because none sound good. If you care about audio quality, you use AAC. That is what it is for. If you are nostalgic and have to use MP3, 128 kbits is the smallest you should use, because below that is a different encoder — even more primitive, even less suitable for music. The best CD rip is a lossless PCM rip with error correction, and the CD should be cleaned first to reduce read errors, which in Red Book are not re-read, the player instead just makes data up to fill gaps. For a jukebox mix, do “iTunes Plus” (256 kbits AAC) because that sounds almost exactly the same as the lossless rip, but is small in file size and is the single most universally-playable audio file because no player ships that can't play what iTunes has been selling DRM-free for years now, and because AAC is ISO MPEG-4 the consumer audio playback standard for 10 years now, embedded in all mobile and PC hardware. If you also want a thumbnail rip, the smallest possible, AAC at 64 kbits will maintain the full 16/44 soundscape and sounds surprisingly good.