Microsoft To Follow Apple’s Lion Lead With Digital Delivery Of Windows 8; Intel Pinning Hopes On Win 8 Ultrabooks

Appleinsider’s Neil Hughes reports that much like Apple did with the release of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion in July, Microsoft plans to make the simplest and easiest method of installing Windows 8 a download over the Internet. However, the report also notes that happily, unlike Apple, Microsoft will continue to offer Windows 8 on boxed DVDs, which are far and away my personal preference.

Apple grudgingly and belatedly made an OS X 10.7 Lion installer available on a USB thumb drive, but only at a hefty $40 price premium, that more than doubles the Lion download version’s $29.99 price on the Mac App Store.

Intel’s Otellini: Windows 8, Touch-Based Ultrabooks To Be A Major Focus In 2012

CNET’s Brooke Crothers reports that Intel CEO Paul Otellini told the Intel Capital Global Summit conference at Huntington Beach, California, that touch-based ultrabooks running Windows 8 are to be a major focus for the chipmaker in 2012, saying that to lure mainstream laptop buyers, Intel and its partners need to get the cost of touch technology under control, which Otellini pegs as entry levelprice points starting at $699 to $799, noting that the iPad and the iPhone have made touch a paradigm,” he said.

“Starting with Windows 8, you have a mainstream operating system incorporating touch,” Crothers quotes Mr. Otellini noting. “Our view is that in the ultrabook lines, touch is a pretty critical enabler. When users see that new Windows interface, they’re going to want to touch it. If the screen does nothing, you have disappointed [the] consumer.”

Ivy Bridge and Windows 8 And The Early 2012 Next Generation Multi-display PC

Meanwhile, VR-Zone’s Nebojsa Novakovic says that Intel’s Ivy Bridge and Windows 8 will likely share the same launch window, and it it appears that their graphics capabilities will match too – from Stereo 3-D to multi-display support and an updated DirectX.

Novakovic notes that while there were complaints that the integrated graphics in the Sandy Bridge mainstream processor family didn’t match up to its powerful CPU cores, Intel is committed to radically improving the situation with the Ivy Bridge family coming in spring, 2012, predicting that the Ivy Bridge GPU core will not just offer more than twice the performance of Sandy Bridge, but also support many other new features, like 4K display resolution and native triple-display resolution.