Bill Gates Takes Part in Reddit AMA Using 80-inch Windows 8 Tablet

Remember that 60-inch tablet I was holding out for? Forget that. I want the 80-incher that Bill Gates is using.

Gates showed up on popular social news site Reddit today to take part in an AMA — “Ask Me Anything.” Most of his answers weren’t mind-blowing; he believes that Windows 8 is a “huge advance,” and he currently uses a Surface Pro. When asked if he has used Apple products, Gates replied that, yes, he had tried all of them. Probably the most interesting think about Gates’ session, though, was the device he was using to read and respond to questions from Redditors: an 80-inch Windows 8 tablet (a “Pervasive Pixel” display, as he called it).

In addition to answering technology-related questions, Gates also answered questions on government (“It would be nice if all governments were as rational as the Nordic governments – reaching compromise and providing services broadly.”) as well as the biggest achievement of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (“So far our biggest impact has been getting vaccines for things like diarrhea and pneumonia out which has saved millions of lives. Polio will be a great achievement along with key partners when that gets done.”)

Perhaps my favorite response had to do with a statement that Mr. Gates was only leaving his children $10 million, and how this caused other wealthy folks to shrink or completely kill off their children’s trust funds.

“I definitely think leaving kids massive amounts of money is not a favor to them. Warren Buffett was part of an article in Fortune talking about this in 1986 before I met him and it made me think about it and decide he was right. Some people disagree with this but Melinda and I feel good about it.”

Now, as far as potential use cases for an 80-inch touch screen go, I can’t imagine that there are very many outside of business or education. But the fact that something like this exists is kind of neat, even if it won’t be showing up in our living rooms anytime soon. I’d say this 80-inch device is actually less ridiculous than the 20-inch tablet Panasonic was pushing during CES — at least the 80-inch Pervasive Pixel device knows that it isn’t really a “tablet” you’ll be carrying around with you. I’m not sure Panasonic sees carrying around a device with a 20-inch screen as strange, but let me assure you, it is.

All in all, this was a pretty cool AMA. Maybe we can convince Tim Cook to do one?