Microsoft Dos based machines were cheaper. economic crisis or not same factors are at play. There is a market for cheap and their is a market for expensive number of units sold to the cheep is always larger.

History tells you economic crisis only speeds up the split not the root cause.

The problem is there is no middle ground between the two where Microsoft is ending up in the no mans land.

No, people simply don’t have enough money to buy small and expensive computers running iOS — economic crisis, don’t forget about it.

Most applications depend on background tasks being done timely. Also you need to go look at LCA 2012. Mixed matched arm cores in fact gave a speed boost a lot more than expected.

2 cores at 1 ghz and 2 cores at 200 mhz. Result was not quite excepect off loading OS background tasks to 200 mhz processes lifted the performance by almost 1/2 compare to 2 cores alone.

Up to 4 cores it not if the application is designed for multi core its if the OS is designed for multi core.

When you start talking 8 cores plus then you need application design to get a large advantage.

Face it, nowadays little workstations need more than 2 cores. The apps that would utilize more are so few. And writing for multiple cores is hard.

Multiple slower cores on tablets cannot compensate the sheer power of a couple of higher performing cores.