This is what we call an epic blunder of epic proportions. The article that used to be here, was submitted to us in full, with Tom Krazit as the submitter. As it turns out, though, this article is already published at PaidContent.org, so it’s pretty clear someone kindly submitted it to us, but included the whole of that article. For some reason, I let it slip through without checking if it was actually an original – which I normally always do. Nobody contacted us so far, but I’m still incredibly sorry about this. Be sure to click this link and send traffic to PaidContent.org.
I believe Tim Cook said all 3 iOS device sales added up to 62 million, not 52 million.
> Tablets and smartphones aren’t replacing PCs, they’re just making it possible for people to wring extra years out of their older PCs by giving them lightweight access to just-enough computing power while on the move or while in the living room.
I don’t think this is really the case. What I think is happening is that we are seeing Wirth’s Law (the idea that software will bloat to make up for gains by Moore’s Law) becoming less relevent.
A good example is web browsing. 10 years ago, you could gain a large user experience improvement by buying a new computer. Web pages would get less laggy, and could afford to add more bells and whistles. The web browser itself would seem faster, and could add its own bells and whistles. This is no longer the case. Actually the opposite seems to be happening. Firefox and Chrome are getting more bells and whistles while being faster on the same hardware. This very common activity is no longer following Wirth’s Law, which means it is no longer pushing people to buy new hardware.
Computers aren’t only portals to the internet (as much as the tech-savvy will disagree with this). People listen to music with iTunes or WMP or whatever else, but neither of those are bloating up. Tax software inn’t getting any more demanding. My prefered mail client actually lost some fat recently.
The point I am trying to make is that the computing activies are no longer bound by hardware limitations. I remember 10 years ago closing all the applications in the system tray would make a huge, noticable speed difference. Doing so now would only help the weakest of netbooks. If software isn’t obsoleting your hardware, why replace it?
Postscript: I know there are a few places where software is still bloating (I don’t mean this in a negative way). Gaming is an example. Video playback is another. Apple’s push for retina displays on DesktopOS computers will probably kickoff a push for a new HD format which will require hardware updates for some people. My netbook cannot do 1080p in real time, but is still watchable. I imagine I would need to upgrade it when these new formats come out.
Edited 2012-01-27 00:22 UTC
We’re shifting into a performance per watt paradigm. Software must get faster and less bloated for a time. Pressure from ARM has forced Intel and AMD to make energy efficient processors like the AMD E series & A6 and the newer Intel ATOM and i7 gen 2 chips. Even server chips are getting more efficient.
My laptop uses about 32 watts to run and it’s a quad core AMD A6. That’s a little over half an old fashioned light bulb.
True. It might be part of the consolification of PC games as well. There are still hardcore gamers out there who want to play on triple 27″ monitors who want the latest and greatest HW, but even my then mid-range PC from 2009 (4 GB RAM, Radeon 5770) is still plenty fast enough for the games I want to play in full 1920×1080. Skyrim isn’t much more demanding than GTA4.
As for the post-PC era, Mobile (iOS + Android + Symbian + etc) still doesn’t grow as quickly as Windows 7 in actual use:
http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-ww-monthly-200812-2011…
Yeah, in times past, if you waited 4-5 years to upgrade your PC, you could see a huge speed gain. Now? My 1yo i5 quad core doesn’t feel any faster than my 5yo Athlon 64 dual core, except for really demanding apps that most people don’t run anyway.
Contrast this with phones and tablets, where the speed seems to be doubling every year. They won’t keep up with this pace forever, and then I think you’ll start to see sales level out, with people upgrading about as often as they do PCs. By that time, I’m sure there’ll be some hot new gadget that’s selling like mad, and people will be once again claiming it’s the death of the PC.
I swear, the predictions about the death of the PC have been about as overstated as the year of Linux on the desktop
I completely agree. The only reason I see right now to upgrade my couple of years old mbp is to get Thunderbolt. Also, in the Mac-case, the OS does not have the entropy a windows machines has.
Back in the 80s the surveying organisation my brother works for had a six monthly upgrade cycle on their PC workstations. At six months the PCs got a hardware upgrade (RAM + CPU). At 12 months they were completely replaced.
There is something else too, computers don’t really become faster anymore either.
The Ghz race is pretty much over. CPUs and other parts can not get any faster. Computers are getting more and more parallel instead.
And as someone else mentioned, power efficient is an important criteria for the servers and the mobile devices which means the desktop automatically benefits too.
(power) efficient is also the only way if you want to squeeze out as many instructions as possible for each and every Hz.
If software isn’t obsoleting your hardware, why replace it?
This.
For day to day tasks on the desktop, the base software is now mature. During the ’90’s and early ’00’s, software was going through a tremendous amount of progress. MS really set the pace of development with all the improvements in the OS and the Office suite.
From Windows 95, Windows 95 OSR2, Windows 98, Windows 98 SE, (forget Millenium, not an improvement), Windows 2000, Windows XP, there really was new compelling stuff to upgrade and the crop of hardware of the repective times was a tad anemic for these developments.Once AMD and Intel broke through the Ghz barrier, PC hardware has started to be more powerful than the software requires.
These days if you’ve got hardware from a dual to a quad core, humming along at aproximately 2 GHz, what difference does it really make if you run Windows XP SP3, Vista or Windows 7? (For all the alternative OS fans, fill in your favorite distribution. I did that with Linux).
The Western PC market is saturated and living off replacements and fashion choices (smaller casings, sleeker screens, etc.).
Except that you can never have too much power (and currently not enough) for fast video rendering or encoding.
Except that you can never have too much power (and currently not enough) for fast video rendering or encoding.
True. But how many average Joes render or transcode a video and how many object to a long(er) waiting time if they occasionally do?
I know I’m a freak with a hexa-core AMD Phenom II. Then again, I don’t want to wait (too long) on a transcode.
There seems to be a few variables missed in the comparison:
I think it was only ever the geeks how did upgrade at least once every 3 years.
Originally, PCs were something predominantly owned by geeks, but now it’s nearly a requirement for every house hold regardless of the owner interest in technology. So those people were always unlikely to do frequent upgrades, just as geeks are still likely to upgrade every 3 years.
Thus I do wonder if what we’re seeing with the PC market isn’t more of a natural plateau; where those who “need” PCs (ie non-geeks that felt it was necessary), all mostly now own one, and those who “want” PCs (ie geeks) are still buying them at an average rate.
Moving onto the tablets: most people don’t currently own one. Thus you’d expect the rate of sales to be above the average rate of hardware upgrades (which is about where the PC market is sitting).
Thus I wouldn’t say that the current sales trends of tablets are proof that we’re heading into a “post-PC era”. I think it’s just a predictable correlation between a brand new product being released and consumers wanting something they don’t have.
In fact, I’m pretty sure we saw the same trends with netbooks prior to the whole iPad launch, and many people had said that “PCs were dead” etc. Yet I bet now, netbooks sell less than PCs do (if anyone has any figures to confirm or deny this, I’d love to know )
As for smart phones, well they’re easily upgraded every 18 months (or so) due to the way how cell/mobile phone contracts are sold. So you’d always expect there to be more phone sales than PCs when many people get their phones for free*
* I know technically it’s not for free as you end up pay for it through your contractual term. But to most people, it’s free.
NB sorry for any spelling or grammar mistakes, it’s 2am here so I’m being lazy and opting to shutdown for bed rather than proof reading :p
I couldn’t agree more. Eventually tablet ownership will reach a saturation point, and then what?
I suspect we’ll all be looking back and commenting on the “tablet bubble.”
The real issue of course is, what legacy it leaves behind. The walled-garden approach which Apple (and now Microsoft) are taking does not leave me entirely optimistic thoughts on the future of computing.
Geeks… and businesses, although they’ve mostly shifted to 4/5 year replacement cycles since passing the awful Pentium 4 era.
Now the difference between old and new (in terms of user experience) is much smaller and far less necessary.
1080p h.264 playback is probably the only thing I can see making the masses upgrade their ageing machines at the moment and most probably aren’t that bothered about the higher res.
Why do so many make this distinction …netbooks (also laptops, similarly excluded sometimes) very much are PCs.
Oh, and I’d say, originally, Amigas or C64s (and such) were something largely (predominantly? Quite possible) owned by geeks; PCs were mostly expensive machines kept for “professional” usages…
…curiously, with initially similarly long – or even longer than now – usage times. The difference is just how now the “stable state” is about the web, IM, video, music, ~office (more more OOo), etc.
While in the past it seemed mostly about some fairly long-lasting set of ~DOS apps – which just waited for input most of the time, too (I keep a decade-old machine around, and when I use it for “current typical stuff” the idle thread still takes 95+%)
Curiously, vs. the home computers I mentioned: the open architecture of PCs was probably largely responsible for their rapid progress & overtaking the home computers of old times …but now, when they seem to be more and more into “good enough”, there’s more and more integration – back towards the “style” of home computers, sort of)
BTW, there are only a little over 1 billion PCs in the world, for close to 2 billion people using them – there’s probably quite a lot future users among the remaining 5 billion (though, undoubtedly, many of them will settle on tablets – or, I suspect, on “large phones” but without the silly price premiums such modems command in ~western markets); though those PCs might be a bit different than what we’re used to.
BTW2, most of 5+ billion mobile subscribers own their phones (without contract), and are on prepaid.
Edited 2012-02-04 00:19 UTC
On the idea of you need to update every 3 years, I have no intention of updating my laptop any time soon and it’s pretty close to the 3 year point. Why? It runs just as well right now as it did when I first got it. I have no need for a faster laptop. When all I do on it is the internet, email, messaging, and the occasional virtualization; and my OS of choice is Debian, so I don’t need to upgrade when Debian upgrades.
On the other hand, I upgraded my phone because a) my phone seems to like to break every year, b) if I want a new OS (like getting ICS), I had to get a new phone. Now if my new phone lasts as well as my laptop does and it can still run the newest software well, then I won’t upgrade my phone.
…And before you even think about dumping the whole system for a new one, put in a SSD and you’re set for at least another 3 years. 😉
I would like to see some unambiguous SSD reliability data to check if cheap Flash SSDs do really survive 3 years, but it seems that the technology is still too young for that kind of data to be available.
Edited 2012-01-27 06:10 UTC
SSDs aren’t reliable, but they are soo fast it makes up for the fact.
Does it really make that much of a difference? My laptop and desktop both have HDDs, and they have been fast enough for me not to bother looking at SSDs.
Always depends on workload of course. But in my experience makes a big difference when used as cache. In a ZFS pool, you can set up the ARC on the SSD and you will notice a huge improvement. Best of both worlds. I can’t bring myself to trust a SSD alone for data either.
I have heard good things about the newest release of the OCZ Synapse SSD cache on Windows but I haven’t used it myself.
The difference between an SSD speed and a traditional drive is staggering. It is the best hardware upgrade you can do. Just make you either backup the data on your SSD, or keep it on another disk.
I don’t think if you are watching YouTube vids and browsing the net it is worth it.
However between the Ram upgrade and the SSD upgrade the SSD upgrade for my current rig was the one IMHO was more effective.
Fortunately empty marketing buzzwords does not confuse me.
As Laurence said, this might just be because a large amount of people who wanted a PC now have a PC that is good enough. No one but geeks upgraded their PC every 2-3 years.
We should also remember that it’s not uncommon for sales of a certain type of product to go in waves.
Also, a tablet is a PC.
It is? They had a lead? Previously we’ve been told that Apple was always in the lead but now Apple is catching up? Guess it all depends on who you ask and what their agenda is, eh?
We live in a post-landline (or “traditional” telephone) era. Many of us may still have them, many may even say they are a necessity. But we are definitely in a post-landline era — the mobile telephone era (if not wholly in the “smartphone” era). A landline is a telephone. A mobile phone is a telephone.
Our conception of telephony is fundamental different (even if we use a landline at work more often per day than we use a mobile on the road or during personal time). We don’t think of being home for a call, or 911 responding to a listed address in a phone book, or that we can’t reach out to anyone wherever, whenever we want, or that there will be a public phone that you can feed coins into at a nearby, convenient location. Many will never own a landline today. But… we still use landlines.
Anyone can choose to get pedantic about how they individually define “PC” if they’d like, but I think the above analogy does very well at getting at what is INTENDED by the phrase “post-PC era.”
Edited 2012-01-27 04:53 UTC
Er Um?
Just how are you going to get a half decent network experience without a landline when there is no cable within miles of you?
Mobile Data is expensive and where I’m moving to, crap.
Cable? Forget it. The nearest ‘Cable’ is 25 miles away.
So, I’m left with a landline.
Thankfully, there is an ADSL2+ equipped exchange on the other side of the Valley (800m away). Part of my decision to buy the new house was the broadband speed.
I can get 16-20Mbits so that will keep me going for a while.
What so many commentators forget is that not everyone lives in a frigging city with everything only a few blocks away and cable running past every home.
I’m moving away from all that as I’m looking at retiring next year. No more commuting for me. Standing 90 mins of the train is not joke anymore.
I can sit in my new office looking out to sea.
I didn’t forget that not everyone lives in a city. I didn’t presume everyone has access to high speed cellular service. I even said that post-landline users can still spend the majority of their telephony time on landlines (i.e. people still use PCs, a PC may be required to fully utilize a post-PC device, etc..)
I said we are in a post-landline era in that everyone’s thinking about telephony has changed. Even for someone like you who can’t participate in the post-landline era — you do understand that most people have and will expect cellular phone access (whether or not you, individually, do not).
Likewise, you can be stuck using a landline or you can choose to or someone may refuse to buy a tablet and keep using their custom-built rig — that doesn’t change the fact that the majority of the people, and even non-participants, have changed the way they think about the medium.
Edited 2012-01-27 07:20 UTC
Just because you have ADSL doesn’t mean you have to have a land-line. Most DSL providers no longer require the land-line to have the DSL. If yours still does, I apologize. I have 24Mbps DSL through AT&T, but I do not have a land-line.
You might not have landline telephony, but you certainly do have the landline
Exactly! Up until a few years ago, everyone was upgrading their PCs quite regularly, whether they were geeks or not. This was because after a few years they had become very slow and everyone just knows that newer computers are faster. And I still see it today with laptops – non-techy people sometimes replace a perfectly good laptop because it’s become to slow (a good formatting and dumping of Vista would probably solve it, but that’s another story…)
By and large though, PCs now are powerful enough for most tasks and most people, and as was mentioned, it’s no longer fashionable to release more and more bloated software just to squeeze more eye candy in or because you can, so a PC is capable of running up-to-date software for longer. My washing machine’s working fine for me, why do I need a new one?
Tablets and smartphones have been covered in plenty of posts here, so I won’t go into it too much, but it is a case that most households still don’t have tablets, and I dare say there’s a larger potential market than there is for traditional PCs since tablets are more like the sort of thing an individual has, not a household. I wouldn’t be surprised to see households with tablets for every family member in a few years…
I don’t think it’s really about numbers, but about possibilities.
Most people still have a PC at home and still use it, but a lot have of some kind of mobile device (phone, laptop, tablet). They don’t NEED to be at home, behind a PC. Nor do they need to be in a certain room at home, tablets make it easy to sit anywhere.
Certainly at places where people sit idle you see mobile phones pop up, people checking news, mail, Twitter, Facebook. Whenever a question comes up someone pulls a google from his pocket. When something happens people pull their phones to take a picture of shoot a video and share the event.
When I’m on holiday hotel lobbies now almost always provide WiFi and each year I see more and more people in the lobby with phones, laptops and last year a number of tablets while I was the only tablet user a year before that. No more queues in the “Internet corner” to sit behind a PC.
People can now do computing where and when they want. They couldn’t do this before, therefor we are already living in the post-PC era even though on a whole we probably spend most time using a desktop (certainly work wise).
Tablet market is rising faster than housing market. Are we in the “post-House” era?
There is no evidence that tablets and PC sales are correlated.
BTW, I expect 2012 will be a very tough year for Apple and smartphones in general in France. Indeed, the new carrier doesn’t subsidize the devices and I expect it to grab 50% of the market by the end of 2012.
Who said rate of growth defines what an era is? I don’t get your point.
For those that have embraced, tablets and mobile touch devices, it is easy to understand how their computing lives have changed. And as a result, every developer, software platform provider, and device manufacturer has to pay attention to that change.
The point is that the fact that the tablet market is growing fast does not mean we are in a post PC era anymore than we are in the post House era. And when I look around me, people have smartphones because they are subsidized and they still have a PC. So where is the correlation.
Computer Market != Housing Market
How I see things are like that:
1. Private Server Market – dominated by Linux and big companies like Oracle, IBM, SAP. Includes governments and companies databases, some private web services, datawarehousing.
2. Web Server Market – again dominated by Linux, HTML5, NoSQL, open source web servers. Includes news sites, companies sites and some social sites, some public web services.
3. Public Cloud Market – dominated by Linux and web cloud services providers like Google, Amazon, DropBox and others. Includes some public web services, some social sites, some content selling and sharing sites.
4. Private Cloud Market – dominated by Linux. Includes closed companies and families clouds, where you could share info with coworkers and family members.
5. Workstation Market – dominated by Windows, but there has attempt for changing in Europe, Latin America and Asia. There we have CAD systems, IDEs, Photoshop and other work specific applications, web browsers. I suppose most people will use private clouds and web browsers for simple document editing and big office applications like MS Office would be a niche applications. That’s the second biggest market by number of customers with a few big players and a few strong, but niche players.
6. Personal Market – iPhones and other phones, iPads and other tablets, ultrabooks and notebooks, low and mid range laptops, TVs and game consoles. They will be space and energy saving. Anyone of this gadgets would give us access to public and private clouds, web services, web sites, video watching, music listening, reading, social contacts, gaming. That is the biggest market with many players and Apple are successful one.
It’s just shape shifting – ours PC wouldn’t look a like our workstation, and our workstation wouldn’t look a like our servers.
NoSQL doesn’t dominate anything. Its Linux Apache *MySQL* and PHP (LAMP) all the way. Actually Windows is also quite popular in the hosting market although not as popular as Linux (because of the licensing costs). FreeBSD also holds its own.
I’ve had a tablet, and it was of no use to me whatsoever. It was indeed a waste of money so I sold it and made my money back thankfully.
At the moment it’s all hype, pure and simple hype. People jump on bandwagons like theres no tomorrow, and thats why you’re seeing a huge increase in sheep, erm sorry, people buying these things.
Give me a good keyboard any day. I predict laptops will bounce back within the next couple years after everyone realises that tablets aren’t much use other than glorified kindles.
I guess it depends what you want to do with it and what you expect from it.
My wife and I find our iPad very useful, even though we both use it in different ways. If I include my son we all three use it in different ways even.
Some people can type very able on it. I can too, if I really want to, but most of the time I don’t. It just doesn’t feel right and it’s not as convenient as a real keyboard. Then again what I do with it doesn’t involve much typing.
Huh, is 50% of a market domination?
Case in point, your next paragraph:
Wait, Android is leading already but it soon wont be? Doesn’t that make Android the dominant in your hyperbole?
This article requires link and less bullshit.
The impact of the new post PC computer devices has been up until now a largely consumer driven phenomena but there is plenty of evidence that it is now effecting enterprise IT strongly. Apple made a lot of efforts to make iOS secure and friendly from a corporate IT perspective. I expect the iPhone and in particular the iPad to flood into the business world in the coming year and PC enterprise sales will tumble.
I expect Apple to retain the iPad 2 but at a lower price when they introduce the iPad 3 this spring, in the same way they retained the iPhone 3GS, and this will will significantly extend the reach and sales of the iPad, particularly in sectors like education. The iBook initiative will impact big in education.
Expect aggressive price/spec competition from Apple devices. The Anobit purchase is great for Apple, but horrible for high-end flash suppliers including SanDisk, Samsung, etc. Anobit is a design and engineering house of flash controllers and does not manufacture flash. The purchase allows Apple to buy low-end, generic flash at dirt cheap prices and incorporate its advanced controllers to produce its own high-end flash which blows high-end flash made by others out of the water.
iPhone sales have grown in an oddly predictable fashion. Since it’s introduction the iPhone has sold each year the same amount as all previous years added together. Based on that if the pattern continues it would mean iPhone sales of 180+ million in 2012.
The latests quarters iPhone sales did not include any from China. The recent launch of the iPhone 4 in China caused such excitement that riot police were required to control the queues. 180 million iPhones in 2012 may prove conservative.
Apple have sold 55 million iPads since it’s launch in January 2010. If the iPad follows a similar growth pattern to the iPhone that means over 100 million iPads sold in 2012. That would mean nearly 300 million iOS devices sold in 2012. I wonder if Apple could do that?
Do you factor penetration into your figures? For example, if US is just passing 55% smartphone market share, adoption trends will slow because the market is full of Android, iPhone, or dontâ€wantâ€smartphone users.
I expect enterprises to soon realise that tablets are practically useless for any serious work.
I’m pretty sure conventional textbooks will be the norm for at least a decade.
Like the $90 7″ capacitative screen Android tablets now coming out of China?
Quad core 10″ ICS Android tablets will be available for as little as $200 within a few months.
Anobit is a small research startup not an established hardware manufacturer.
The riots were due to scalpers and paid queue sitters trying to buy before the Chinese New Year.
The Chinese people tend to be incredibly status conscious and have little brand loyalty. If another model becomes higher status they will dump their iPhones in a nanosecond. [/q]
Don’t count your chickens before they have hatched.
The market is about to get flooded with tens of millions of extremely cheap no-name Chinese Android tablets. You can already get a tablet running Android 4.0, a 7″ capacitative screen, 512MB RAM and 4GB of memory for only $90 in China. Considerably more powerful machines will hit the shelves in a few weeks for not much over $100.
IMHO Apple is becoming extremely arrogant and far too over-confident (like MS in the late 90s).
Apple derives 2/3 of it’s revenue from just two products. A single major error of judgement could be catastrophic.
That depends, it could be that a large portion of the users will get tablet devices with a docking station like setup.
I think this is what Microsoft wants to be possible with Windows 8.
The touchdevice can be used as the oversized start menu when working on the keyboard.
PC docks were widely available in the early days of laptops but never gained traction. Unless a cheap universal industry standard dock for all smartphones/tablets is developed I can’t see it succeeding.
It just seems to me they made sure the interface fits the use case.
You are responding to a point I did not make. iPads are already selling in quantity in education and the iBook and iBook Author initiative was obviously intended to speed up and entrench adoption of iPads in education. A cheaper entry point iPad would also help educational take up. I expect iPads to sell in increasing quantities in education in coming years.
You are responding to a point I did not make. Anobit makes very powerful controllers for Flash, hence it’s $500 million plus price, and this means Apple will be able to buy cheap flash and upgrade with their own controllers thus reducing it’s costs and supplier dependencies. At least that seems to be the reason they did it, Apple as usual are saying very little. In the past Apple’s rare acquisitions have always proved very strategic and feed into products a couple of cycles down the line.
Why were the scalpers there if not as a reflection of the popularity of the Apple brand in China. Saying that a brand can collapse says nothing. Currently the reality is that there is massive pent up demand for Apple products in China and the recent record breaking quarter Apple had did not include any iPhone 4 sales in China so there is room for more big growth for Apple in the Chinese market.
The evidence seems to be that cheap, and inferior, non-iPad tablets have not sold well and no one seems to be making any money on such things. The big non-iPad success story, the Amazon Fire, still only sells a fraction of the iPad sales and demonstrates that the key to tablet success is attached ecosystems.
Overall what you seem to be arguing is that Apple shouldn’t be as hugely successful as it obviously is and that it’s success will somehow stop very shortly (the tired old ‘Apple is Doomed’ meme). I can see no reasons why the circumstances that led to massive growth for Apple over the past few years won’t continue for the next fe years. By which time Apple might be several times bigger than it is now.
You are getting way ahead of reality. Anobit is little more than an R&D startup with some interesting ideas. It’s controllers aren’t even in mass production – let alone taking over the market.
SSDs have a very high cost, very low capacity and a limited lifetime compared with existing hard drives. These problems will take many years to solve.
There have been many very promising technologies that have never been successful in the market such as RDRAM. Time will tell whether Anobit actually has a useful product.
Sheep are totally predictable. The pent up demand is simply because Apple hasn’t sold the iPhone previously in China.
The sale occurred just before the Chinese New year (“Xmas on steroids”).
It doesn’t mean that Apple will have large long term sales. The major growth market in China is for very low cost Android phones and cheap tablets.
Rubbish. (tens of) Millions of cheap generic Chinese Android tablets (ePad, Apad, Ainol etc) have been sold. They just don’t register on the official sales figures.
Apple was first to market that is why they currently dominate the tablet market. This is normal in any business sector. It is also impossible to sustain.
You obviously have no idea what the Chinese are now showing at trade shows:
– cheap ICS tables are readily available in China. So are WP7 tablets.
– a much better 7″ tablet than the Kindle for ~$100 retail.
– high end Chinese Android phones (8MP camera, 4″, 16GB memory, capacitative screen etc) that wholesale for a mere $130.
I an assure you that the only direction that Apple is going over the next few years is downwards. Being the (second) biggest corporation is a curse not a blessing.
The reason that Apple will go down is that it will be impossible to maintain high margins as their markets become mostly saturated and hardware becomes a mere commodity. This will occur over the next two years. In fact it will be very noticeable within a year.
Any successful new Apple business plan will simply be copied by competitors. Amazon, Google and even Ubuntu already do so.
The Apple product release strategy is now far too slow to keep up with a rapidly evolving market. The iPhone 4s hardware is already well behind the leading competitors less than three months after it’s release. It doesn’t even have 4G capability.
You can’t make $300 profit on a $200 tablet or $100 phone. These will be the standard prices within two years at most.
Don’t bother arguing that iPhones only cost $0-200 (or whatever). The full price is simply included in the phone contract.
You seem to think Apple is unique. Many corporations have had greater market dominance and been more profitable than Apple (eg Standard Oil, Ford, IBM, GE, Bell, Microsoft). This dominance never lasts for more than 2-3 years before a major setback. They always make a series of mistakes or are penalised by antitrust laws.
How is it then that you’ve come to your ‘tens of millions’ sales figure? I know somebody who travels to China typically once a month on business and his observations don’t agree with your claims.
I have many Indian friends. None of them has ever visited a slum. Does that mean that there are no slums in India?
The most likely explanation is that your friend has never been to where these tablets are sold. The vast majority are sold via mail order or from back alley businesses in Guandong and Hong Kong. You are not going to find them sold in any big stores in the major cities because the margins are too low.
I think you be beginning to appear a trifle absurd. Cleary you are desperate to come up with reasons why Apple will hit the wall, why it won’t grow more, why it might fail.
You could be right though you don’t seem to be basing your position of what might be called evidence and I doubt any amount of discussion will change your mind.
However, luckily, the whole thing will be proved or disproved empirically. Either Apple will grow substantially over the next year or it won’t. Lets see what happens. Let’s reopen this discussion in a year based on what has actually happened and how well Apple has actually done.
PS Loved the comment about Ubuntu copying Apple’s business plan – biggest laugh of the week so far
Maybe you should visit the real world for a change. In case you haven’t read the news lately:
Apple iOS marketshare is plummeting globally.
Apple has lost all the lawsuits against Samsung. This will set a legal precedent and weaken Apple’s case in any similar lawsuit in future.
Apple is rapidly losing marketshare in China and is now the fifth largest vendor. China was Apple’s great hope for market expansion
Here’s what Forbes has to say about Apple:
Apple Inc. is currently rated as having Very Aggressive Accounting & Governance Risk (AGR). This places them in the 3rd percentile among all companies, indicating higher Accounting & Governance Risk (AGR) than 97% of companies.
http://finapps.forbes.com/finapps/AccountingRisk.do?tkr=AAPL
Translation: Apple is a ticking time bomb that may explode at any minute.
The market has set a price/earnings ratio of less than 13/1 on AAPL. That means the market thinks AAPL has very little prospect of substantially increasing growth or earnings in the next 12-24 months.
Don’t believe Tim Cook’s hype either. Apple is getting slaughtered in China
In the third quarter, Huawei overtook Apple as the No.3 smartphone vendor in China. Apple now trails Nokia Oyj, Samsung and Huawei, which all have a wider range of products targeting various segments of customers. In fact, Apple’s smartphone market share shrank to 10.4 percent in the third quarter from 13.3 percent in the previous quarter. Samsung’s shot up to 19.2 percent from 14.6 percent and Huawei to 11 percent from 7.3 percent. Nokia, the market leader, is fast-losing traction. It holds top slot with 26.8 percent share but that has dropped from 36.2 percent in the previous quarter and 71.4 percent a year earlier.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/16/us-apple-china-idUSTRE7BF…
Jan. 20 (Bloomberg) — China Unicom Hong Kong Ltd., the nation’s No. 2 carrier, is adding a record number of high-speed wireless subscribers and gaining market share by pushing smartphones that cost 80 percent less than Apple Inc.’s iPhone.
China Unicom started winning customers from market leader China Mobile Ltd. after it switched focus from high-end users of the iPhone to those who can’t afford the device. China Unicom started selling handsets from local manufacturers Huawei Technologies Co. and ZTE Corp. that cost less than 1,000 yuan ($158), or about half a month’s salary for an urban worker.
The strategy helped make China Unicom the best-performing stock on the benchmark Hang Seng Index last year with a 47 percent increase. It also accelerated the shift to high-speed networks in China, putting the nation on course to surpass the U.S. in smartphone users and enabling Huawei and ZTE to compete against Apple in their home market.
People aspire to own an iPhone, but they can’t afford it,†said Teck Zhung Wong, a Beijing-based analyst at IDC China. “If a vendor offers a phone that can do most of the things a high-end device can do, there’s no reason people won’t bite.â€
IPhones continue to be popular among those who have the money. China Unicom, the only carrier offering the device with a service contract, is down 11 percent this year after customers frustrated by not being able to buy the new iPhone 4S pelted Apple’s main Beijing store with eggs, prompting the handset maker to pull all phones from its store shelves.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-19/iphone-scarcity-during-chi…
Apple are doomed!
Really!!
Apple is on the point of collapse
Really!!
Apple is ‘a ticking time bomb that may explode at any minute‘
Really (even though Apple has just shy of $100 billion in cash in the bank)
I stopped taking my meds last week and feel just fine
Really!!
What’s that strange buzzing noise?
Really!!
Wow I just saw Elvis walk past outside my house
Really!!
Why is everyone staring at me?
That made me laugh even more than the “Ubuntu could adopt Apple’s business model” joke.
Given the scale of your delusions I fear it is not worth trying to dissuade you from your delusional views. Suffice to point out that the silly rating that you link to is nearly a year old and that since then Apple has grown it’s business by over 100% and it’s cash mountain has now grown to nearly $100 billion.
…which Apple conveniently stores outside of the US so they don’t have to pay taxes. So, not only does the company employ slave labour and refuses to do anything serious about it, they then take their profits and store them away in such a way that the US has little to no benefit from it.
Classy company.
It seems most large tech companies follow the same tax minimisation policy as Apple does, Google certainly seems to – hence
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-29/google-joins-apple-mobiliz…
Are the conditions of the Chinese workers in Apple’s supply chain any worse than the conditions of the workers in the Chinese supply chain of the other large global tech hardware companies? I don’t know, evidence is hard to come by given the lack of democracy and transparency in China, but I suspect the ruthless exploitation of labour is a generic feature of Chinese industrial production at the moment. Do you have any evidence that the workers in Apple’s supply chain are worse off than those in the supply chain of other companies?
What China and the Chinese people need is democracy, free trade unions, a free press and the right of NGOs and campaigning bodies to campaign free of state harassment.
I don’t defend companies that exploit loop holes to avoid tax or the conditions of workers in China but let’s criticise the practice rather than artificially singling out Apple and using the issue as another way to vent a little iPhobia.
Apple is raking in record profits and has a massive cash hoard – far beyond any other company as you so delightfully want to point out. Being number one comes with responsibilities, and Apple is clearly skirting them. The NYT article is clear in that other, less successful companies are doing more to curb this issue than Apple does – despite the far smaller resources.
Pointing out “others do it too” is a stupid excuse, and it always has been. Google gets blasted because they include Google+ results for Google+ users, yet the complete lack of effort to curb slave labour practices by Apple, despite having the means to do so, is brushed aside.
Very, very telling.
I never used ‘others do it’ as a excuse. I never brushed aside the issue of labour abuses in China. Before I retired my full time job for many years was working on transnational antipoverty and anti-descrmination projects so I don’t need any lectures about that from you. Have you changed your purchase activity specifically in response to labour abuses in China? If you have I would love to know where your gadgets are being made.
My point was that the practices are bad and should be stopped and that such practices are widespread and not restricted to just Apple. By all means use the high media interest in Apple to try to highlight the issue but pretending that Apple are in some way especially bad or that Apple single handed could some how change the nature of social and economic development in China or that all this exposes Apple as being somehow worse than any other large tech hardware company is just hi-jacking a serious issue to try to get some cheap iPhobic mileage out of it.
The points I made about Google were in response to an article about Google changing its privacy setup which sought to present Google’s actions in the best possible light so I pointed out some aspects of Googles business practices that might not be considered so good.
My comments here about Apple’s cash pile was in reply to a nitwit posting that Apple was about to explode into business failure.
Meanwhile there is this
https://www.bsr.org/en/our-insights/blog-view/letter-to-the-new-york…
Concerning the complaint from BRS the campaigning body on labour abuses which were (inaccurately) quoted in the New York Times article. here is an excerpt from what BRS says about the NYT’s article
They don’t store it abroad, they make this money abroad and then keep it there.
Why would they move it to the US, lose a large sum to taxes and when they want to build a new Apple store in a non-US country move the money back?
Don’t forget they already pay taxes abroad. Moving the money back home (for what reason?) they pay taxes twice.
Very interesting. Just so we’re clear.. You actually believe that ‘tens of millions’ of tablets are sold via mail order and back alley stores in China — correct? And there’s no record of any of these sales anywhere. Not from point-of-sale, not from distributors, or even manufacturers.
Btw, you still haven’t answered how you came up with your ‘tens of millions’ of sales claim.
According to Google over 700,000 Android devices are activated each day (over 200 million in total). Google admits that less than half are sold through official channels. Android activation is optional so this understates the actual number of devices.
So you have well over 100+ million “unofficial” Android devices sold.
In case you aren’t aware China is a cash economy where paying tax is considered to be optional. There are no public records because companies and individuals aren’t going to declare their income.
First, there is a difference between “tablets” and “Android devices”. Now why would a person try to include cell phone sales into a discussion about tablets? Hmm….
Second, you claim sales are not tracked, yet somehow Google has no problem coming up with numbers. The same holds true for distributors and manufacturers. It’s not as if these items appear out of thin air.
Third, … Yeah, the bootleg theory. This reminds me of recording artists who sell 100,000 units and believe the ‘true’ number would be closer to 1,000,000 were it not for piracy. Funny stuff.
It’s true that China is still in large part a cash economy but you’re making horrible assumptions about accounting & taxation. You also seem to ignore the differences between doing ‘business’ in a small countryside village, and a modern city there.
Basically I’ve learned one thing here… To sum it up, you just read whatever shows up on google, interpret it in whatever way serves your ideas on the issue, and serve it up here like it’s written in stone. In other words, if I want to discuss facts actual standings, I need to look elsewhere.
No doubt you are right and we are in the “post PC era” and tablets and mobile phones took over our hearts and wallets.
Please wake me up when I can use Adobe Photoshop, 3DS Max and Microsoft Visual Studio on iPhone. Also, I want to be able to play flawlessly World of Warcraft on iPhone.
Until then, I consider this yet another try to write an article about how PC is dead and how mobile took over.
I’ll tell you, dear Sir, that if PC will die at some point in time, that will be long after mobile platforms and game consoles will be dead.
onlive.com
desktop.onlive.com
So, how nice is it to use these content creation interfaces with a big finger on a small capacitive touchscreen ? All that while depending on the well-being of a third party server for your everyday work ?
I don’t think that OnLive-like services are the answer. If tablets want to be more than big PMPs with video games, they need to adapt themselves a bit to more serious tasks, in both hardware and software.
Edited 2012-01-28 09:51 UTC
If someone will succeed to take the PC away from me, they’ll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands.
The post-PC era does not mean the PC is going away.
It would just mean the PC users will be niche users/workers.
If this will happen I don’t know.
What I am certain of some amount of time by the average PC users which was previously spend on a PC is now spend on other devices.
I don’t believe that tablets and smartphones are going to replace PCs any time soon.
IMHO, they are little more than a fashion, but “serious” work still needs to be done on a PC.
Or, if you prefer, tablets and smartphones cater for different needs.
“Some Apple-friendly commentators want market research companies to consider the iPad equivalent to a PC as they count boxes,”
That is the way they were counted when Wintel held the tablet market so this is not just Apple-Friendly commentators desire but industry practice… at least until the Wintel-friendly analysts removed them so Wintel-PC manufactures would not look like they were being left in the dust.
These are troubled waters, but in my opinion, old Wintel tablets were still roughly similar to traditional PCs in purpose due to their versatile nature (precise input device, general-purpose OS).
On the other hand, most of current Android and iOS tablets are only good for entertainment due to a mix of hardware and OS limitations, so they can hardly be compared to a laptop or a desktop anymore as far as functionality.
But then this asks the question of what defines a PC. Is it the functionality, as I personally believe ? Or is it the form factor ? Or something else ?
What is the distinctive functionality of a PC versus, say, a tablet in your opinion?
Simple. If I can run my own code on it – without restrictions, without having to pay for the privilege – it’s a personal computer. If I can’t, it’s not.
Simple. If I can run my own code on it – without restrictions, without having to pay for the privilege – it’s a personal computer. If I can’t, it’s not. [/q]
An unusual definition but if we accept that definition then would you agree that it is also true that only a tiny minority of current users of PCs are actually using them in that way ( i.e running their own code on them) and that therefore the vast majority of PC user could migrate to what are (using your definition) non-PC computing devices and that therefore PCs could become a very small niche product?
Own code refers to whatever code I can find – not necessarily that I wrote it. It means the stuff I can run on my machine isn’t artificially limited by a third party who will abuse this power for financial gains and anti-competitive practices. I should have been clearer.
I think that the ability to run code of my own choosing, without artificial restrictions by third parties, is a pretty straightforward characteristic of what makes a personal computer a personal computer.
It’s basically the difference between a taxi and your own car.
Edited 2012-01-28 20:56 UTC
So really for you what makes the iPad not a PC is the App Store model of curated software and presumably that makes Android tablets PCs?
I understand your distinction and I understand why it is important to you, I just don’t think it matters much to most people. I think the notion that your computing device is a big stationary box or that it has a hardware keyboard or that you have to manage files systems, or have any concerns about the safety of third party software, etc may be a fading paradigm.
Some may be uncomfortable with that, I for one do love my file system, but given that the dominant experience for most ordinary people of PCs has been almost hellish I think it is easy to understand the attraction of a simple, safer and perhaps for most people, ultimately a more productive computing paradigm.
I think we can probably both agree that times seem to be changing and changing very fast.
Current PCs are distinctively better suited than current tablets for the creation of content, as opposed to its mere visualisation and consumption. The content creation software available on tablets today is crude and primitive in comparison to what has been available on PCs for the last decade.
In this respect, the most extreme example of PC-specific task would probably be software programming, for which there is no tablet software I know of. In other realms, such as multimedia and DTP, there is generally a limited amount of software, but it is miles below what one can get on a PC.
As I have said before, there is no good reason why this is the case, in sense that there is nothing intrinsically incapable in tablet hardware. People wrote full books and made such movies as Toy Story or Star Wars with computers that were less powerful than a modern tablet in almost every respect. The exception is touchscreens, but as the HTC Flyer and the Eee Pad Transformer have shown, there is no reason why tablets could not accept more powerful optional input peripherals.
Maybe, in the future, we will see tablets with more powerful input peripherals, OSs and software that are suitable for real work. What I am saying is that we’re not there yet, and that neither Apple nor Google seem to want to take their stuff in that direction. Probably, in the case of Apple, because they would lose too much control in the process.
Edited 2012-01-29 15:17 UTC
That must be why Apple discontinued the Mac
Seriously – the iPad is a touch screen device to which a wide variety of peripheral and input devices can be attaché but not a mouse, it does not have a traditional file system like PCs do. The iPad cannot do some stuff as well as a mouse driven traditional PC.
A traditional PC cannot do some stuff as well as an iPad.
The future will have space for both types of device, it’s just that the world of personal computing will no longer be shaped by personal computers, increasingly it will be shaped by other types of computing devices. That’s because what devices like the iPad can do, and mostly do better, accounts for most of what most people traditionally have done on a PC.
Just like what happened when the PC was introduced those used to working with older technologies (back then it was mini computers and mainframes) will argue that the new fangled devices (back then it was PCs) are too limiting and will only ever be any good for light weight and limited types of functions. What happened back then will happen now, it will turn out that the new devices such as the iPad are much more powerful and versatile than the conservatives thought and that the new devices will unlock functions and ways of using computing technology which are new and were mostly unforeseen.
in five years time the number of non-PC computing devices sold and used will vastly outnumber PCs sold and in use. PCs will almost disappear from some environments (many homes, most schools, many workplace but not all workplaces). Life will get better but still contain some disappointments
I look to the future because that’s where I’m going to spend the rest of my life.
– George Burns
I can’t really use a tablet for serious work without some haptic/tactile input mechanism to rival keyboard typing speeds because we still mostly go about recording and documenting our intents and motivations to machines and other humans via code, texts/emails, etc via literary works.
It’s either going to take a revolutionary change towards visual thinking/paradigms or some really great new touchscreen technology to make that happen. I think our brains/education system make the probability of the former rather low but I think they are making progress on the latter.
Edited 2012-01-29 18:29 UTC
I use a keyboard with an iPad all the time, sometimes it’s a touchscreen keyboard, sometimes its a real hardware keyboard. I bought one of these to use with a bluetooth keyboard I had and works really well and cost almost nothing. Looks great as well.
http://wingstand.com/
Doesn’t bluetooth for keyboard use drain battery pretty quickly? I know Apple added in support for low energy bluetooth (BLE) devices in iOS5 but I know of very few if any vendors that support it yet.
“The iPad cannot do some stuff as well as a mouse driven traditional PC. ”
Actually I occasionally use my iPad as a second display for my PC when I just want a small dedicated window and the mouse works just fine with it.
I agree with the gist of your argument, but am just saying that the iPads are not dumbed down from a PC as some people suggest. Putting the accelerometers in them, for example, has opened up a host of new applications.
Well, they did discontinue the Macbook, essentially killing what remained of the financially accessible Apple-branded laptop market. And as of Lion, they seem to be moving towards an increasing “iOS-ification” of Mac OS X, particularly in the realm of software management. But they obviously cannot fully discontinue Mac OS X the way it exists today as long as they mandate using it for iOS development.
My problem is that most of the iPad limitations which you mention are artificial. They make no sense from a computer hardware point of view, and little sense from an OS point of view.
iOS is a UNIX variant with a WIMP GUI paradigm. It does have a filesystem, but doesn’t make it easily user-accessible, thus making communication between applications and data transfers between users needlessly difficult. Given a little bit of work, it could probably be used with a keyboard/mouse combination, and could certainly be used with a stylus. You noticed yourself the usefulness of a hardware keyboard on this device, will you notice also what more precise pointing devices could be useful for ?
Well, that is a given. And if you break down the “traditional PC” family, a 16″ laptop is more practical than a 23″ desktop in some cases and less practical in others. This is why we have multiple computer form factors.
I deeply dislike the idea that we could waste vast amounts of natural and human resources making computers artificially distinct from each other instead of aiming at a more unified computing paradigm.
Did Windows on netbooks teach us so little that we are going to re-do the same mistakes over and over again, making user interfaces that are needlessly tied to a specific pointing hardware or set of use cases ?
Except that the situation is quite a bit different, in sense that in many way, the current generation of smartphones and tablets could be considered as an attempt to resurrect the mainframe age.
In the mainframe days, people had to rent their computing time, use a computer that is not theirs and on which they could only perform a limited range of functions, and request permission for tasks which would seem trivial nowadays.
On current smartphones and tablets, we may legally own the device, but we are artificially prevented to do much stuff which it is technically capable of on the inside. The OS manufacturer can remotely kill any device at will, just like sysadmins could ban random users in the old days. The most trivial computing tasks, such as developing and distributing a “Hello world !” software, require his almighty approval. He owns our data, our software, our computing time, and our credit card number. And we cannot escape his almighty will by switching to another OS, for his OEM minions have made sure that we cannot access our device’s bootloaders…
Isn’t this a step backwards ?
Non-PC… Yes, this appellation makes some sense. When the OS manufacturer and OEMs own everything useful in your device in practice, it is not quite appropriate to call it personal anymore.
Myself, I do not wish for such a future, and will try my best to let a merrier one rise.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. (…and are going to lose both)
– Benjamin Franklin
Neolander,
“Except that the situation is quite a bit different, in sense that in many way, the current generation of smartphones and tablets could be considered as an attempt to resurrect the mainframe age.”
Hopefully everyone here would awknowledge that these limitations are artificially imposed jail wrappers on top of hardware which does not intrinsically have such limitations, since that’s obviously true, but the comparison to mainframe limitations is an interesting idea. Although I have to wonder, on those older systems, could users run whatever they wanted within their jail? Or could they only run software which was provisioned for them?
“Isn’t this a step backwards ?”
They keep saying ordinary users don’t care, but then ordinary users and even some professionals don’t realize how open computers benefit them indirectly. Alot of software innovation could not have taken place if computers had been closed for the past several decades. I wonder if anyone has attempted to study the long term effects of closed vs open computing on innovation.
Edited 2012-01-30 18:11 UTC
I’ve not lived long enough to have a direct answer, but from what I’ve heard secondhand, the experience of the punchcard days was very much church-like : one first went in a small room with low ceiling in order to meditate (code and debug punchcards by hand) for an extended period of time, then got to see the priest (sysadmin) who first introduced some mysterious cards of his own in the machine before taking the user’s heap of cards with a look of disdain and closing the door, leaving the user in wait of the revelation (printed output).
I don’t know how restricted user mode code was, if at all. There probably existed some form of privileged code in order to prevent buggy code from destroying the hardware by messing with it, considering the price of these computers, but I cannot tell for sure : protection hardware may have been too expensive for that.
Edited 2012-01-30 20:45 UTC
See, the thing is, those “Wintel tablets” are also perfectly normal PCs… to the point that, while in laptop mode, people tend to think they such machine is different from an average laptop.
Tablets are certainly not replacements for the pc. Not yet and not anytime soon. While tablets and pcs share a basic set of usability points, they ultimately serve different needs.
Tablets by and large are a novelty. They are the flavor of the month. Of all the people I know who own them, a very small number compared to pc owners, most do little more than play Angry Birds and waste time on Facebook. This includes people working in the tech field who you may think actually have a use for a portable device.
Speaking of use, how many Average Joe’s do you think really need mobile computing? To many people it’s just one more item to lug around — and that get’s old once the romance of a new device wears off.
I do believe there is a place for tablets. Clearly. But, I don’t believe replacing the pc is it — and the long-term affect of tablets has yet to be seen. I suspect it will be less revolutionary & shifting than some of you think.
Tablets are the new shiny. That’s all. Yes, for many a tablet is going to be a perfect replacement to a PC. But those are not people who make a living in computing. Tablets are still and may always be content viewing devices. They are NOT work devices. They absolutely suck when you want to do things like typing, image manipulation, just about anything. As long as that is the case, we will still need a PC.
The reality is most people who own an Ipad already own a PC (linux, windows or mac). Of course most Mac users only own a laptop since they can’t actually afford desktops anymore.
Ipads are OK for being mobile, not great just OK. Meanwhile if you really want to produce music, write code, play games, write a book, do research, produce video, manage data and reports, manage servers remotely you are 90% likely to use a PC.
To do anything most us really want to do is pointless on an Ipad or any mobile device. The screen alone is worth having a desktop. A 24inch or 27inch monitor with a dual screen setup is awesome! Mobile devices are like going into the dark ages. They are worse than a Commodore 64 and that was pretty mobile.
Ipad is the worst. It is expensive, locked down with DRM, poor wifi, a tiny tiny screen, one stupid port for everything (I know it gives the ipad a 10 hour battery life), one dumb button to try and manage a user interface, a million icons on a screen and for what?? Internet, tiny videos, e-books which suck compared to a real book, and poor games that pale in comparison to the Commodore 64. The reality is mobile devices are for children and that is exactly who spends all their time on it. It is the new baby sitter and while the parents are on their PC computers, the kids are on the Ipads.
Mobile devices are a scam, they are old PC hardware reduced in size and resold as new.
This doesn’t just go for tablets and smartphones. The role that home users used to give to desktop PCs is becoming more granular. My own approach to convenience and efficiency is this: I use a laptop for surfing. The iPad is an amazing device for making music – I use that too. I’ve had a desktop PC, but I actually only turn it on for development or occasional gaming. The things you might leave a PC on to do can go to these neat low-profile Linux boxes that you often find as home NAS devices, and out of the box they handle things like bittorrent. My old KuroBox was amazing for this.
This way, you only need to keep the things turned on that you’re actually using, and each device can be tailored to its role.
Edited 2012-01-27 17:35 UTC
I almost posted a comment yesterday, thanking Cnets Tom Krazit for gracing osnews. Now we know he was not the submitter.
Thom this is not a fail. This could and happen to any tech site that accepts submissions. The internet is just too big to be immune against such stuff.
Edited 2012-01-27 22:05 UTC
I don’t know about everyone else here, but I’ve gotten mostly bored with my PC. Sure Skyrim is cool, and some of the other games, but I’ve been getting more and more ‘retro’ lately in my computer usage.
I have an Amiga 4000, and play with that occasionally, and I just recently plugged my old Atari 130XE back in and it works perfectly. Now I’m going to invest in a SIO2SD and start playing games native! I may even pick up the 1MB RAM upgrade for it!
Do I own a tablet? Sure I bought a Chinese one. Do I like it? No, not really. Don’t like Android. Though I played a bit today with a friend’s Asus Transformer Prime, which is pretty sweet. I don’t own any Apple hardware, and never will. I do own a Nokia N9 and N900 though, and they rock!
PCs have gotten so fast that there really isn’t much need to upgrade them constantly. Games haven’t pushed my hardware in many years. Though honestly, the only reason I’ve really upgraded my PC the past few times was because I wanted better performance for Mame games. Yup that’s right, MAME. It doesn’t use any 3D acceleration, so it’s all CPU based. Some of the old Voodoo based games require a lot of CPU horse power to run.
But really, since I only ever load into Windows when I’m playing games, I don’t usually notice how slow and crappy it is. When I’m in Linux it’s so snappy and quick that I really do have no need to upgrade it.
So all this ‘post-PC’ era is bull crap, people still need their PCs. It’d only ever be a post-PC era if people started dumping their main PCs for embedded systems like Tablets, smartphones, etc. I don’t see that happening for a very long time. Probably will happen when we have fully computerized houses, like on 6th Day or Star Trek.
We’re not in a post-PC era. Yet. Smartphones haven’t replaced PCs. Nor have tablets replaced PCs. Yet. Many (if not most) people have *all* or *several* of these devices. Which means they are being used in complementary ways, depending on the usage context — location, mobility, connectivity, bandwidth, etc — but not replacing one another. You don’t do serious work on a smartphone or tablet. I’m sure that someone can provide an anecdotal example of someone who they claim is doing serious work on these devices, but I have to call bullshit. Smartphones and tablets are primarily oriented toward entertainment and information-grazing and light contribution (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, NY Times, email, etc). You don’t (for example) write a term paper or a research paper or other serious work on them. Which is why gazillions of PCs will continue to be sold for a long time. Furthermore, purchase rates of PCs in the enterprise are largely driven by multi-year upgrade cycles which have no correspondence to consumer purchases. And businesses are not going to replace all of their PCs with tablets and smartphones. Despite anyone’s delusional thinking.
The overwhelming use of tablets and phones as far as I can see is for entertainment not work. Smartphones and tablets are particularly useful for keeping young children quiet at restaurants. For general productivity they suck.
Why did you remove the stolen content? I thought copyright was a joke/sham not to be respected or whatevs.
It may or may not be in Thom’s opinion, but OSnews is hosted in the Democratic People’s Republic of America and has to abide by some rules that are in effect there.
Edited 2012-01-28 14:53 UTC
But someone has to stand up to these bullies!?!
I wonder how it would go if shoe was on the other foot wrt copyright infringement (eg, paidcontent.org steals some original osnews.com content without attribution)?
Think all the hyperbole would matter in the least? Probably once or twice they would let it go because they would love some wider exposure but if someone started pirating all the content on osnews for their own ad impressions I wonder how long it would just be “overlooked”?
First sign you’re making a difference, when someone starts to steal your work!
Our content is actually copied all the time. Especially popular articles are reposted and translated across the web – it’s not the exception, it’s the norm. As long as people attribute properly, we’re fine with it.
Uhh, so you’re ok with someone complying with the terms of your license. Great. That wasn’t the question which was written in pretty straightfoward terms. No points given for avoiding the question. Try to fail less.
Obvious troll is obvious.
Sticks and stones…
No troll, cuz tbh ur not worth effort. No lulz in trolling u.
Was a question, if you did not receive a takedown request, why did you remove the content? Moral obligation?
Pretty obvious, really. On submission, it was misrepresented as an original for OS News. Links to external news stories belong on Page 2, with a short blurb, or in a main article where Thom or someone has written an opinion piece or rebuttle to it. Since the thread already existed, here, depending on how it all works in the back end, moving it to Page 2 would have destroyed all the existing conversation here.
Doesn’t take a genius… Well, I guess I wouldn’t know… Glad to be of service.
You’re right about one thing doesn’t take a genius. It was removed because it was a verbatim copy of orginal copyrighted content owned by paidcontent.org being passed off as orginal content of osnews.com. That’s what was removed and moving it to Page 2 or whatever doesn’t change that fact.
My question was what was the motivation for its removal? Did OSNews.com receive a takedown notice/request or did they notice that they were stealing content and take it down voluntarily because they know That’s A Bad Thing(tm)? That copyright infringement is theft not censorship, which is what all the posturing and pandering about SOPA/ACTA has (not) been about.
If you’d bothered to read any of Thom’s earler pieces, you’d know it’s not all “all copyright is bad! Steal steal steal!”. That’s the oversimplified explanation. What he’s actually posted before is that there’s nothing wrong with getting payment and recognition for your work, but the current abuse of global copyright laws by the large industry machines, to eek every last cent out of people for doing basically nothing of value, and locking down modern distribution methods to remain relavent.
No what he actually recently posted was a typically adolescent “translation” of comments made by sitting members of the US Congress impugning their motivations as corporate shills (one of which is probably the most independently liberal member of the US Senate in recent history btw) and he included a link to a painfully obtuse graphic [http://www.loleg.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/piracy.jpg] which explains that piracy != theft.
And so not a week later here we have a perfect example of someone at OSNews.com copying intellectual property verbatim in violation of the owner’s copyright and then taking it down voluntarily, and I’m left wondering why oh why would anyone who believes that piracy of intellectual property != theft would bother (besides the obvious hit to the ego involved in having someone else point out the plagiarism). And I asked the very obvious question of whether given OSNews.com position and hyperbole on SOPA if someone decided to pirate all of its content without attribution in violation of OSNews terms of use what would be the response.
Thanks for following along but sorry, piracy of intellectual property is always theft.
PS: You can’t decide to respect only the copyrights of people or corporations that you think are worthy based on personal preference regarding the terms of use of the products they offer. The only intellectually honest choices are buy, use and comply or boycott; simply stealing “a little bit” is not an option.
Not2Sure,
“Thanks for following along but sorry, piracy of intellectual property is always theft.”
s/theft/copyright infringement/
“Theft” would involve stealing the original work such that the owner no longer posses it. Although I suppose it’s possible that’s precisely what you meant when you said “piracy of intellectual property” and I merely *assumed* you were talking about copyright infringement, in which case I take it back.
I’m getting sick of this false dichotomy. Stuff like the Asus Transformer is blurring the line between netbook and tablet – they’re just classified as tablets because they come with Android. If they came with a more traditional Linux preinstalled, like that new Plasma Active tablet, they’d be functionally identical to a small, touchscreen all in one PC, with the ability to add an external keyboard and mouse. The only reason that tablets aren’t suitable for real work in their current form is that they’re running iOS or Honeycomb, which suck.
I would suggest there’s a lot more to it than that… For example, speed, ram, storage, security, support, cost, bla bla bla…
In some specific areas, tablets may do fine for work purposes. In many cases their limitations eliminate them from consideration.
Tablets, in my view, are largely a novelty device. Their primary design & function is providing the user with media/entertainment.
> speed, ram, storage
Any decent tablet beats the shit out of the PC I used during high school, in all three of those categories. Most of them have HDMI output, so if they were running a real OS it’d be like connecting a netbook to an external monitor, which I have also done.
A few problems here… First of all a tablet and a netbook are far from the same thing. Or even similar for that matter. Next, whatever type of pc you used in high school has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that tablets are largely neither designed, nor suited as a work platform.
I mean this in the nicest possible way but basically all you’ve said is that you don’t understand the differences and limitations of these devices.
You’re right, I don’t understand the difference. I see a dual-core system with over a gig of RAM running a Linux kernel, with support for USB input peripherals and external monitors. That seems like plenty for getting work done, with the proper applications.
What world do you live in where such a pc is plenty? Are you honestly oblivious to anything where the needs and/or requirements exceed that of what you’ve listed? If so, …..wow!
ilovebeer,
tidux merely said those specs with the right software are enough to get work done, which is true. Most employees use the web or email or some thin data entry app who’s demands don’t increase over time. Therefor many businesses keep computers until they die. Believe it or not I still work with a client who’s employees are using single core/1 gig systems that might be less powerful than today’s tablets. They upgrade servers far more regularly.
On the other hand, the boss has a quad core laptop with 8gigs of ram and does nothing but email. Maybe there’s a trickle down theory at play, haha.
No, such a blanket statement is certainly not true. You seem to make the same fatal mistake he does — completely ignoring anything where the needs/requirements exceed the specs he’s listed. I’ll clue you into something… There are _a lot_ of areas where such a box is completely unacceptable.
Most employees? It may come as a shock to you but there are millions of employees out there who do a lot more than use the web and send email. If you’re that naive to think most people just google things, send/receive email, and perform data entry, then I makes sense why you think what you do. However, you’re still sadly mistaken.
That’s very easy to believe. There are plenty of jobs which don’t require much in terms of computing power or capability. But, you and your buddy don’t seem to understand there are plenty of jobs which do in fact require (a lot) more.
In the most simple terms, computers keep getting faster, storage keeps getting bigger, etc etc for a reason. It’s not just wasteful gluttony. There’s a need. Are you actually going to try to deny this is true? I’ll forewarn you to be prepared if so, because I am.
For some that may be overkill. For others it might be a requirement. Surely you have enough sense to realize that fact.
ilovebeer,
Woa man, I’m not up for your contrary-isms tonight, certainly not on such a non-consequential topic, go ahead and say what you will.
Don’t be an asshole. For 90% of what most people do, which is web, email, music, video, light games, and an office suite, those specs are fine. I regularly used my Athlon XP with 512MB RAM running Linux up through last summer for that, and I only got rid of it because it was a huge tower that took up too much space, not because it was broken or insufficient. Before you jump down my throat about the video bit, remember that these tablets have decent GPUs as part of their ARM SoC, and many of them can decode 1080p without missing a step.
First, save your childish name-calling for another forum…or the playground.
Second, for email, web browsing, and office apps you are correct. On every other point you’re easily wrong.
Third, if such a box suits _your_ needs, fine. But you will concede that _your_ needs don’t dictate the needs of everybody…or even the majority.
Fourth, decoding 1080P on-chip is not impressive what-so-ever. Aside of that, it doesn’t help you prove what you think is a good point anyway.
Anyone who deals with large amounts of data knows everything I’ve said to be common sense. Especially when the data needs to be manipulate in real-time or within time constraints. This includes work in fields such as design & engineering, audio/video production, bio-medical, banking, and real-time analysis to name a few. The fact that you don’t understand this only shows how ignorant you are to present & future computing demands in the real world.
Whether you like it or not there is legitimate need in for much more than the toy Linux box you’ve described. If Linux + a 1ghz cpu + and 512MB of ram was all anyone needed then that’s where technology would have stopped. And that didn’t happen now did it? Open your eyes.
You do realize you’re agreeing with me, right? I never said that tablets were suitable for heavy-duty computation or big data. That’s what workstations, compute servers, clusters, and “clouds” are for. Most people don’t use computers for anything more than that – those that do won’t use a tablet as their primary system. It’s that simple.
Here, let me refresh your memory on what you said:
“You’re right, I don’t understand the difference. I see a dual-core system with over a gig of RAM running a Linux kernel, with support for USB input peripherals and external monitors. That seems like plenty for getting work done, with the proper applications.”
No, I don’t agree with you. You made some terribly sloppy assumptions and are now backtracking. Though you still have yet to acknowledge your own personal needs and opinions don’t determine what ‘most’ people do/want/need.
I’ve seen a few Android netbooks for sale on Chinese sites. They are less than $100 and look interesting.
Hit you right in the PageRank. =(
It’s easy to fantasize about an ‘everything is free’ utopia.. But, we live in a society that revolves around trade, economics, control, and manipulation.
The grass is always greener, especially when all the rules and outcomes are the product of your imagination.