A year ago on the first day of Windows 8 general availability, I toured some outlets of two big electronic retail chain stores, which I anonymised as ChainA and ChainB. They’re nearly always located beside each other so touring is easy.
ChainA typically had big 1.5 inch thick 17” screen laptops running Windows 7 and a bunch of no-name Android tablets. ChainB was mostly stocking Windows 8, but there was little in the way of touch and there were no Windows 8 tablets to be found on this island (or the UK) outside of online stores which were ripping people off.
I will revisit these outlets tomorrow on their first day of being able to sell Windows 8.1 machines. Here’s what I saw recently:
ChainA had a few Windows 8 devices but not much. ChainB had stocked some Windows 8 tablets and Surface. However, ChainB was recently running a sale to clear stock. They did that with their Windows 7 stock before Windows 8 GA. That makes me hope that they’ll have something interesting to sell tomorrow.
We’ll see! I’ll be interested to hear what people in other countries experience tomorrow and over the first weekend of Windows 8.1 GA in the retail outlets. Here’s what I saw in MediaMarkt Hamburg last year.