Published by Robert Pogson January 16th, 2012
in technology.
With Vista, and “7″ we heard this refrain:
“benefiting by Intel’s launch of the Ivy Bridge platform, demand for notebook is expected to rise in the second quarter and with assistance from Windows 8 in the third quarter, a new wave of replacement trends are expected to start appearing in the quarter, helping notebook shipment to grow.”
Wintel, it’s getting tired. Vista flopped. “7″ did well but did not stimulate the desktop/notebook markets. They’re flat at best. How is “8″ going to be any different? The world is not waiting on “8″. The world is moving on with thin clients, Android and GNU/Linux, netbooks, tablets and smart phones. If there is any life left in desktop/notebook PCs, likely Linux on ARM will be involved. That’s what improves price/performance.
- Robert Pogson
Published by Robert Pogson January 16th, 2012
in technology.
Need a smartphone with 445 hours of standby endurance? HTC has a low-end smartphone with that spec and it costs only £160. It’s light on storage but that’s OK if you mainly want to talk and browse the web. It has 802.11 b/g/n wifi and 3G networking. The HTC Explorer is clearly not state of the art but it sure is the state of the small cheap computer with better performance than some desktop PCs of a decade ago. That was good enough then but it’s superb today in your pocket and having a mass of 108g and much lower price than a desktop PC.
see HTC Explorer review on RegHardware
Wintel offers nothing like this because Wintel is tied to legacy stuff: x86 and M$. Monopoly is dying and competition on price/performance clearly makes a loser of Wintel. What the HTC Explorer lacks in performance it clearly makes up in good enough performance and a low price. 2011 saw much of the world become interested and comfortable with FLOSS on ARM and 2012 looks to be even bigger for ARM while the installed base of x86 may even start to shrink. Every day, usage of Android/Linux on ARM increases by many hundreds of thousands of users, hundreds of millions more per year, while usage of Wintel is stagnant. Web stats show the installed base of mobile OS has reached 9% of web access and is growing by 5 percentage points per annum, while shipments of desktop/notebook PCs and their access stagnate (4 billion counts 2010-10, 3.788 billion 2011-10, while all accesses changed from 4.209 to 4.176 billion, more or less constant).
- Robert Pogson
Published by Robert Pogson January 16th, 2012
in technology.
There’s news from Taiwan that M$ and Intel are trying to jack up the price of “8″ on tablets. Manufacturers are concerned the devices won’t sell well.
They could be right. They know the world wants small cheap computers, not small expensive computers. The iPad sets the acceptable price-horizon and Wintel wants to exceed that.
Android/Linux on ARM is looking better all the time and there is still the option of GNU/Linux on everything if prices really do matter.
see also Wintel tablet PCs may be priced from US$599-899
Better luck next time M$. Oops! There will be no next time. This is M$’s last chance to remain at the top of monopoly pricing. It will be so embarrassing when they have to cut prices in order to compete on price/performance. The world has seen tablets before and knows what they can do thanks to 2011. 2012 cannot undo the global experience. No amount of advertising can put that back in the bottle. It was one thing to pay manufacturers to install that other OS but M$ will not be able to do it on ten times as many units without a serious hit to the bottom line. This week we will see last quarter’s numbers and it will not be pretty for fans of M$.
- Robert Pogson
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