Not only is Wintel feeling the pressure in price/performance for ARMed tablets running FLOSS“Ex-factory pricing of a 7-inch white-box tablet is expected to drop to between US$30-40 in 2014 and every inch larger will add US$10 to the price range, indicating that a 10-inch white-box tablet’s ex-factory price will be about US$70-80.” The lowering of prices will continue for a year or more longer. Information will be $free, nearly, in the future with Wintel no longer able to tax the roads, rails and air-waves. Intel is giving away its processors to stem the tide but Google’s dream of exposure to every human on the planet is another year closer.
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My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. Now that I'm retired I still use GNU/Linux on every computer in my home except the smartphones which run Android/Linux.Lately, I've been giving lots of thought to the world I inherited and which I will leave to my descendants. I'm planting grass, trees, flowers and vegetables in my large lot and I've ordered a Solo EV. I plan to charge my Solo by means of a tracking solar array. Life is good if you have a purpose. I do.
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dougman wrote, “Next stop is $1.00 and that will occur in less than 15 years.”
I doubt the actual chips can be made for that. There are too many capital/operational costs involved. On top of that there’s packaging and shipping and selling all with additional cost. $50 is obviously doable now but I doubt I will live to see $20 except in the clearance bins or garage-sales. What we are seeing is IT selling for the cost of production/replacement, it’s true cost, not some random number developed by a monopolist. Have you ever wondered why M$ priced its licences ~$100 instead of ~$500 to maximize profits? They pushed the prices up as far as they could without risking the monopoly. At any higher prices, the OEMs could have gotten together and created their own OS from scratch and saved a ton of money. As it is, the OEMs can now see their way to adopt */Linux because they want to sell hardware, not M$’s software. Their business-interests do not align with M$ because M$ has entered the hardware field and M$ doesn’t charge itself the tax. It is cheaper for OEMs to use */Linux than to create their own OS.
“Information will be $free, nearly, in the future.”
First it was $100K,
then $10K,
$1000,
now $100.
Next stop is $1.00 and that will occur in less than 15 years.
Glad to see prices going down. Soon, you ‘ll be able to buy a 200$ Android with 32GB of storage, good camera and all the other goodies. The MotoG is pretty darn close, if it wasn’t for the 16GB of storage and poor camera.
PS: Yes, we live in an age when 16GB of storage on a smartphone aren’t enough. Android tends to misuse storage space (search for “dcim thumbdata3” and “dcim thumbdata3 huge”) and some games can require even 1.5GB of space.