I think this statement from Amazon’s UnBox website tells the whole story:
If your device is Plays for Sure compliant it may work…
May work…the mind boggles at the way Microsoft gives their products names which embody the exact opposite of what the thing does. Play for Sure, Windows Genuine Advantage, Windows Defender…doesn’t it make you feel all warm and fuzzy.
PS
Unbox looks to me to be another ill-conceived and half-hearted effort by the big studios to get people to pay higher prices for lower quality and less flexibility. Oh ya, give me some of that please.
It is amazing how these products ever see light of day. They seldome live up to the promises of their hype yet a number of people will choose to buy them over a proven product with much more to offer in terms of quality. I suppose it’s human nature to want to get as many features-per-dollar in an item but what we are really after is better quality. We have all been disappointed with a purchase that ‘promised’ to do this and that only to find it is so poorly executed that using it is an exercise in frustration. Case in point: I bought a Motorola SLVR L7 which has iTunes built in, in hopes of being able to use it in place of my full size iPod for just quick walks or those times when carrying one device was appropriate. Well, after using it for a few days and navigating with what may be the worst control pad in the industry, i simply bought an iPod nano to use. The buttons on the L7 are so small that you have to pay closer attention to making selections and navigating the screens whereas the iPod interface is tremendously more intuitive. I won’t even start on the poor reception quality and the fact that I have had multiple batteries fail in the few months that I have owned it.
My point is, the promises made by manufacturers need to be taken with a grain of salt until you are able to actually investigate and if possible, test a particular device to be sure it meets all of your standards. After all, this is your hard earned money and you should be well pleased with every dollar that you spend.
You forgot the most important one: Plug and Pray!
Will it work? Hey, plug it in and find out! Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t! Maybe it just has a conflicting IRQ!
That’s the (generally) nice thing about Macs. It is either going to work or it isn’t. There rarely is a gray area in between.
You left out “Microsoft Works”