PCWorld Dec-13

AS APPLE VICE president Craig Federighi declared in late October that the just-released OS X Mavericks would be a free upgrade, he said: “Today we’re going to revolutionize pricing.” Although the low, low price of $0 for Mavericks is certainly a welcome change from the reasonable cost of previous OS X upgrades, it’s not quite as revolutionary as Apple claims. Mobile OSs have been free for years, and long before Apple’s Mavericks-release announcement, Microsoft made Windows 8.1 a free upgrade for Windows 8 users. But there’s more to Apple’s strategy than price alone, and Mavericks could very well offer a glimpse into the future of Windows now that Microsoft has reimagined itself as a devices and services company (go.pcworld.com/msftreorg). No more stragglers The OS X move to free makes a lot of sense. Apple’s…

1 The native Messaging app surrenders to Skype » In Windows 8, the Messaging app handled IM capabilities. No more: Microsoft has kicked Messaging to the curb, replacing it with Skype. As high-profile as the swap is, it’s no great loss. Messaging was lackluster and largely overlapped Skype’s core functionality. Meanwhile, Skype’s services are also being baked into the Xbox One and Outlook.com. One bummer: Messaging supported Facebook Chat, but Skype does not. 2 The Windows Experience Index fades away » Ever since Vista, Windows provided a “Windows Experience Index” score that was supposed to be an indicator of your PC’s brawn. Unfortunately, the scoring criteria weren’t well known, and the WEI placed odd caps on the highest possible scores. (Windows 7’s cap was 7.9; Vista’s was 5.9.) The WEI never caught on,…

WITH THE SURFACE Pro 2, Microsoft isn’t just trying to dominate the tablet market. It’s hoping to replace the PC market. The next-generation Surface by itself is just a tablet (see our review on page 73), but when you pair it with its new Power Cover, suddenly you have a notebook PC. And when it’s docked in the Surface 2 Docking Station, suddenly it could emerge as a replacement for a desktop PC. Microsoft executives say that the Surface Pro 2, equipped with Intel’s fourth-generation Core chip, aka Haswell, offers improved performance that puts the tablet on a par with today’s most powerful laptops. A series of ‘blades’ will transform the Surface 2 into a purpose-built tool. But it’s the Surface Pro 2’s peripherals where Microsoft seems to be setting the pace. In…

AFTER TEASING ITS Intel Bay Trail–powered, 8-inch Venue Pro Windows-based tablet at the Intel Developer Forum in September, Dell announced several 11-inch versions of the Venue Pro. The company is also releasing three new Ultrabooks bearing its XPS brand. Venue 8 Pro The Venue 8 Pro (go.pcworld.com/venue8pro) features an 8-inch IPS display with ten touch points and a resolution of 1280 by 800 pixels. It’s powered by Intel’s quad-core Atom Z3740D processor (Bay Trail family) and 2GB of single-channel DDR3/1600 memory. It has 32GB of flash storage, which you can expand up to 96GB by way of a MicroSD card reader (a model with 64GB of storage that you can expand to 128GB will also be available). A 5-megapixel camera resides in the back, and a 1.2-megapixel camera sits in front. The 0.35-inch-thick,…

THE FUTURE OF PC gaming is in the browser, and it’ll be here sooner than you expect. We’ll soon be playing AAA games that don’t require us to make pricey investments in new hardware. Even better, most of these games will be free to play. I recently sat down with Artillery Games (artillery.com) CEO and cofounder Ankur Pansari and StarCraft II community superstar Sean “Day[9]” Plott, who recently joined the company as head of games. Pansari and his team are developing a real-time strategy game, codenamed Project Atlas, that they promise will rival StarCraft in depth and quality. The game will run entirely in a modern browser through HTML5 and JavaScript, and it won’t require plug-ins or downloads. The demo I played loaded fast on a freshly booted, uncached MacBook Pro, and…

WITH BLACKBERRY ON life support (go.pcworld.com/bbend), it’s time to accept the likelihood that there won’t be a BlackBerry a year from now. You don’t need to abandon BlackBerry immediately and run for the lifeboats, but you do need to know what your options are. Here are five things you should think about now. 1. If not BlackBerry, what? If you or your business has built your entire mobile ecosystem around BlackBerry, the first issue you need to address is which mobile platform (or platforms) you should switch to if BlackBerry ceases to be an option. Take a step back and consider why you use a BlackBerry device. Which BlackBerry features or benefits are most important to you? With that in mind, you can compare Android, iOS, and Windows Phone to determine which platform…