On a message board where we discuss English grammar in our native language (which is Japanese), there is a discussion about how to interpret this sentence:
You'll be frustrated with anything less than a desktop operating system and as much processing power as you can get.
This is obviously originally coming from Engadget.
My read is that "in order not to be frustrated with a tablet computer the following two have to be satisfied:
- It has a desktop OS, and
- It has as much processing power as you can get
Do you think there are any other ways to read the sentence?
Some people there are trying to make other interpretations through a (to me weirdly) complicated analysis of the grammatical structure of the sentence. The issue is whether the latter part "as much as ..." can be connected with "anything less than" and say "anything less than as much as ...".
Probably the writing style of this online magazine article is a bit too casual to deserve such serious discussion, but I'd appreciate any thoughts and comments.