is the average consumer clued up enough to understand the significant of a point release or what a new processor adds?
Haswell is significant because of the substantially lower power it requires which translates into significantly longer battery life. Consumers will notice that.
You might be unfamiliar with Intel's Tick-Tock strategy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Tick-Tock) but it does mean real world benefits to consumers that they will notice.
> Let's see how it is when Windows 8.1 is released generally and people have time to react to Haswell processors having been released.
I'll be interested if the consumers even notice - is the average consumer clued up enough to understand the significant of a point release or what a new processor adds? In my (somewhat pompous) view, Apple's success is its focus on selling the consumer things they can understand the need for, not numbers. I see MS is taking this approach with the new Win8 marketing but it'll be interesting to see if they can pull it off with 8.1