This is an interesting piece of news, that Microsoft will be selling Windows 10 on pendrives. The official listing has already been put up on Amazon.com and the Windows 10 flash drive will retail for about 199.99$. Amazon Prime shipping is available as well. Also pre-orders are being accepted, but I do not think it will be only Amazon which will sell them. Microsoft will definitely sell it via other retailers and via its in house stores as well.
This seems to have marked a paradigm shift from using DVDs and now them being an obsolete standard, well not completely but almost. Nowadays most new desktops are not shipping with DVD writers and frankly speaking we have not seen any drastic improvement or any improvement at all on the capacity of DVDs etc, although it is a very cheap and versatile storage medium. This retail flash drive version is costlier than the normal boxed version which will just have the key. The pendrive definitely will be 4GB+, but it is yet to be seen if it will be of a larger capacity for user files as well or not.
Microsoft told VentureBeat:-
“Windows 10 will be available on USB drives for purchase in retail channels shortly after launch. The suggested retail prices for Windows 10 in the U.S. are the same as Windows 8.1.”
Also the expected shipping date at Amazon is 30th August which is a whole month after the launch date. It may be preponed, so that users can start buying and receiving as soon as possible, else it does not make sense as users maybe will just purchase it online and go through an hour of download. Internet and computing time are cheap nowadays.