ARM Exec Says 90% of PC Market Could Be Netbooks

Barence writes "ARM chief executive Warren East has claimed that netbooks could dominate the PC market, in an exclusive interview with PC Pro. 'Although netbooks are small today – maybe 10% of the PC market at most – we believe over the next several years that could completely change around and that could be 90% of the PC market,' he said. East also said ARM isn't pressuring Microsoft to include support for its processors in Windows, claiming progress in the Linux world is 'very, very impressive.' 'There's not really a huge amount of point in us knocking on Microsoft's door,' he said. 'It's really an operational decision for Microsoft to make. I don't think there's any major technical barriers.'"

Comments

you can say whatever you want

[Anonymous Coward]

whether it's true or not is another thing

Re:you can say whatever you want

[MrNaz]

Given that, as far as I can tell, the only difference between a laptop and a netbook is size, what he's really saying is that laptops are going to get smaller.

Could this man, perhaps, be a captain of some sort?

Re:you can say whatever you want

[ozmanjusri]

whether it's true or not is another thing

One thing that's absolutely true is that Microsoft reputation managers will be all over this article.

Cheap, ARM and Linux is the one combination they absolutely MUST discredit. Even if they can get Windows to run on it, the whole application stack that locks people onto the Wintel platform will be missing. Likewise, a $200 OS and $300 office suite simply aren't value propositions on sub $200 computers.

Expect an unprecedented level of FUD here.

Re:you can say whatever you want

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Do you think MS isn't already on this? They have WinCE which is slowly but surely focusing on ARM as the primary platform. They have Windows Mobile which is designed to run *only* on the ARM platform.

They will stress interoperability between device and PC. The ecosystem works (they say) because the two systems are designed to work well with each other. Even things like Vista/Win7 are designed to work with CE-based projector devices. Their strategy extends far beyond Netbooks/Smartbooks and reaches into every single high-function embedded market.

Linux doesn't have the same ability to say something and have it taken as gospel truth. If Linux wants to claim seamless interoperability, the vendors need to put up or shut up.

Re:you can say whatever you want

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to fundamentally miss the point. The fundamental point of business operations is to get stuff done, not to run computers. A $200 pc with $500 of microsoft office software on it is a $700 box that requires minimal training of its users, has been engineered by an army of UI specialists to be relatively easy and quick to use (scoff at that as you will, but you only need to spend a few minutes with openoffice to see how unpolished it is), and which is pretty well guaranteed to pose no compatibility problems. A $200 pc with a "free" operating system an office suite is a $200 box with severely higher user training and technical support costs and with not unsubstantial potential compatibility issues and an unclear future. Amortize that $500 over 3 years and youcome up with $167 per seat per year. Given that technical support internally bills (for accounting purposes) at $100+ per hour, this is fly spittle. This is why companies such my software company use MS Office.

but no, i must be a reputation manager here to spread 'fud', right? or just put your fingers in your ears and scream lalalalalala.

Re:you can say whatever you want

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you please be ever so kind as to tell us why you think Linux can't run GUI apps?
I'm sure your adoring public will be waiting on your every word.
Meanwhile, I will go back to editing a 136Mb Panorama with GIMP.
Oh, by the way, GIMP is a GUI app that runs on Linux.

Re:you can say whatever you want

[LWATCDR]

True but WinCE sucks as WinMo is in deep trouble.
Windows Mobile is really at the "also" ran level in the Cell Phone market.
Do you see any ads for WinMo phones? Not really. IPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and Palm are all way ahead of Microsoft in mind share.
If Microsoft is going to be anything else but a footnote in the Phone market WinMo7 better be out tomorrow and be mind blowing.
Frankly I think Microsoft is loosing it's halo. Xbox360 has had a huge struggle with hardware failures. WinMo is old and clunky, Vista left a really bad taste in peoples mouth, Office is facing competition from Google Docs and OpenOffice, and Play For Sure failed publicly.
Microsoft does have a hit with Windows7 and Sync is very good but the list of fails and disasters from Microsoft is actually pretty dang large now.

I would say that Microsoft in every market except the desktop is now in a put up or shut up situation. The problem is that I don't think Microsoft knows it. I wonder if they feel that Android and iPhone are just passing fads.

Re:you can say whatever you want

[etymxris]

MS software for such things is mostly a waste of money. You'd have to be using fairly advanced features of Office software to notice any differences between open office and MS office.

Using open source applications in their current form is really not that hard, especially for people coming from a Windows world. If an employee can't handle that, then they probably aren't clever enough to handle most office work.

I also don't buy that admins are more expensive for Linux than Windows, though I'd consider evidence to the contrary. I agree that the cost of employees eclipses all other business expenses. I just can't see that Windows ability is really any cheaper than Linux ability.

For all that, however, MS license costs are nowhere near as ridiculous as stuff like SAP, AIX, DB2, Weblogic, Websphere, and Oracle.

Re:you can say whatever you want

[BadAnalogyGuy]

I'm only trying to clarify how MS will approach this problem. On the embedded side of the market, they put CE and WinMo up against Linux. It's not Win7 vs Linux there because the processor power is too low to run either OS at a useful speed. Win7 doesn't run at all (easily remedied, I'm sure) and Linux needs to be as barebones as possible (which puts it up against WinCE/Mobile). And the "advantages" of CE vs Linux are well understood by Microsoft's sales and marketing teams.

MS considers iPhone a serious threat. They only recently began considering Android a threat.

But the embedded market is much larger than netbooks. Cellphones are a huge market that MS is trying not to lose its minimal marketshare in. However there are other embedded markets (like projectors and automobile navigation) where it is unmatched.

CE as an OS isn't terrible, despite WinMo. It is Microsoft's embedded OS and it is well designed to compete in that market.

What is being glossed over by many here is that Microsoft doesn't see Netbooks as a standard embedded device but rather a smaller form factor of a laptop PC. Intel's Atom has really opened up this market for Microsoft, and Asus did a lot to get Microsoft involved here. So the difference between Microsoft's vision and ARM's (and Apple's) vision of this market comes down to a difference in device applicability. If ARM CPUs were comparable performance-wise to Intel's offerings, this would be a different story, but the difference is still too great for ARM to compete on that point.

Re:you can say whatever you want

[miknix]

Do you think MS isn't already on this? They have WinCE which is slowly but surely focusing on ARM as the primary platform.
(...)
Linux doesn't have the same ability to say something and have it taken as gospel truth.

Put any WinCE handheld side to side to n900. The WinCE looks like a kids-play fisher-price laptop, it is a joke.

You can't just compare it with Linux like you did. Linux on ARM is exactly the same thing as Linux on anything else (x86_64, PowerPC, ...), we are not talking about a crippled kernel here.
You can't also compare the software available for ARM-Linux with WinCE software. WinCE is a very reduced Win32 API (so we are not considering the huge collection of Win32 apps here) while GNU/Linux on ARM runs everything designed to be cross-platform. Given a powerful ARM machine with plenty of RAM, you can literally compile all your GNU/Linux desktop software for ARM.

The fundamental problem here is not what is already available or supported for ARM-Linux but the fact that ARM devices are mostly associated with new Human Interface paradigms which current software can't answer. But this is changing fast with the increasing interest of the community and companies like Nokia pushing Maemo.

Re:you can say whatever you want

[LWATCDR]

Actually I did some work with Linux on an XScale CPU a while back. It actually ran X pretty well and didn't need to be all that stripped down to work. I wouldn't run Gnome on it or KDE but the code I wrote using GTK performed well. On the new A8 and A9 cores I think Linux will preform very close to what you see on the desktop.
I wouldn't run OO.org on it but as a whole I think the Linux stack will do just fine.
The truth is that a lot of Linux software will just take a recompile to run just fine on an ARM. I think that Linux will have a real advantage in software applications over WinCE on a Netbook.
WinMo right now is just about where the old PalmOS was two years ago. In deep trouble.
I wouldn't say that Microsoft is unmatched in automobile navigation. QNX and others have a big users base. Linux has really lagged there because no big company has pushed it. It is a shame and I hope that maybe TomTom will start pushing it and start making deals with the car makers.

Re:you can say whatever you want

[iamhassi]

"Xbox360 has had a huge struggle with hardware failures. WinMo is old and clunky, Vista left a really bad taste in peoples mouth, Office is facing competition from Google Docs and OpenOffice, and Play For Sure failed publicly."

Not exactly. Xbox 360 is far ahead in the media center game, which is what people want, the days of a $300 gaming only system are over. Only thing PS3 still has going for it is the built-in blu-ray drive, but to do something as simple as stream Netflix requires a Netflix disc that the Xbox 360 does not. Microsoft designed the Xbox 360 to be a media center, while the PS3 seems to be focused on being a blu-ray player, probably so Sony can protect and encourage movie sales.

We're still waiting for our all-in-one solution, the company that will provide us with all our devices. Apple has surprisingly made some great strides in the last ten years with the iPhone, Apple TV and being a major media content provider with iTunes. They appear to be the front runner in this game, all they need now is to add gaming to the Apple TV and they'd be hard to beat. Only thing they keep missing on is Flash support: iPhone/Touch only does Youtube streaming, no other sites. If they removed that limitation it'd be a far more attractive form factor.

Re:you can say whatever you want

[BadAnalogyGuy]

I agree on all counts (except the navigation one, but I digress). There is a distinct advantage to using Linux to build Linux-like devices for all the reasons you mentioned. If building an Ubuntu system is your goal (like it is with Sharp's Netwalker), then having those tools and environment working for free in a cross platform way is unbeatable.

I'm looking forward to seeing the performance on the A9 CPUs. WinCE is in a bad way right now without any multi-core support. It's coming soon, and has been for a year or so. In fact, this is Microsoft's Achilles heel in the navigation space.

There are multiple tiers of navigation devices ranging from low-end PNDs to mid to high-end navigation systems from makers like Clarion, Pioneer, and Kenwood all the way to full-fledged Navigation Systems like Ford's Sync. On the low end you'll not find much CE, but in the high end you'll find that CE (Windows Auto/Microsoft Auto) dominates. There isn't any particular reason why this market couldn't swing towards Linux (or QNX, but c'mon) except for inertia, but the market is what it is.

Microsoft is going to have to pull a rabbit out of its hat with WinMo 7 if the platform is to survive. But CE isn't going anywhere, and as long as ARM performance is subpar compared to the equivalent x86 CPU, we won't be seeing Windows Desktop (XP, Vista, Win7) coming to ARM.

Re:you can say whatever you want

[wvmarle]

And that while we all see laptops tend to grow in size.

A year or so ago I looked for a replacement for my 12" iBook. I bought that one partly for it's size: the smallest laptop with full-sized keyboard.

No 12" laptop available at the time from Apple. Only 14" and bigger. And heavier of course, bigger is heavier. But then I was really looking for a portable laptop, not a desktop replacement. Later I got an EEEPC instead.

Re:you can say whatever you want

[phy_si_kal]

Would you please be ever so kind to read grand-parent and parent (aka the thread). Do you need a (gimp) picture?

Re:you can say whatever you want

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The fundamental point of business operations is to get stuff done, not to run computers.

This is why companies such my software company use MS Office.

First point is well taken. Businesses just want to get stuff done. 90% of the users do not use more than a core 10% of the feature set of MsOffice. But the business model of forcing every one to pay some 150$ to 200$ a year purely for the sake of compatibility with the 10% that uses more advanced users is not flying anymore. The days when the companies confused IBM/Microsoft compatibility with true interoperability are gone. That is why businesses, such as my company, are moving to Google Apps for all and MsOffice is available for people who can demonstrate they need it.

This turns on its head, the most successful strategy MsOffice has used in the past

The successful strategy was to sell MsOffice in bulk to the HQ, and anyone wanting others pay for it from their budget. Now the manager thinks, do I want the bean counters to charge me 200$ a seat for WordPerfect? Or just use the free license I can get from the HQ? Now the very same weapon is being trained on Microsoft itself. In our company, if I user Google Apps, it does not count towards my budget. If anyone who reports to me wants MsOffice, I have to buy it from my budget.

Google is playing the card wisely. If it tries to define itself as an internet ad selling company and competes in that sphere alone, Microsoft will use its 25 billion dollar a year profit stream from the MsOffice and keep eating losses till the other side runs out of resources. The only way to fight back is to attack that revenue stream. Now Microsoft has to circle the wagon and protect MsOffice. Google too has its own profit stream to keep fighting. The track record is not good when the adversary has other revenue sources to fight back.

For a while it looked like Intuit will go under the assault of highly subsidized MicrosoftMoney. But Intuit found a rich source of revenue in TurboTax and it continued to fight back. MicrosoftMoney has been pulled.

Re:you can say whatever you want

[interval1066]

Cheap, ARM and Linux is the one combination they absolutely MUST discredit.

Yep. Note how much Jobs HATES netbooks:
http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/22/apple-steve-jobs-technology-enterprise-tech-apple.html
There's only one reason for this: they're too cheap. Apple can't make any money off them. If Apple had invented the netbook, then maybe. Of course we'd be paying up over a grand for 'em...

Re:you can say whatever you want

[BitZtream]

Put any WinCE handheld side to side to n900. The WinCE looks like a kids-play fisher-price laptop, it is a joke.

I've seen several WinCE devices in the wild, never seen an n900 outside of a store. CE may look childish, but its still a hell of a lot more popular, theres a reason.

WinCE is a very reduced Win32 API (so we are not considering the huge collection of Win32 apps here) while GNU/Linux on ARM runs everything designed to be cross-platform.

The API isn't THAT much smaller, and a full API isn't needed on a compact device. In case you haven't noticed, the devices that are owning the market right now are reduced versions of their desktop brothers. Doesn't seem that the majority of people prefer the full thing over the reduced version

Given a powerful ARM machine with plenty of RAM, you can literally compile all your GNU/Linux desktop software for ARM.

Because thats what makes a hardware/software package useful ... that you can compile a bunch of desktop software for a device that isn't a desktop. Just recompiling an app isn't all there is to it, regardless of what you think. A desktop app running on a small device, even a netbook, starts to get shitty since the screen real estate isn't the same.

The fundamental problem here is not what is already available or supported for ARM-Linux but the fact that ARM devices are mostly associated with new Human Interface paradigms which current software can't answer. But this is changing fast with the increasing interest of the community and companies like Nokia pushing Maemo.

The fundamental problem here is that the people using Linux in their smaller offerings are using it because they are cheaping out. Its not Linux's fault, but its a side effect of being free. They are trying to piggy back on everyone elses work to increase their profit margin, which in general is fine. The problem is that they are cheaping out everywhere. Half ass hacks or recompiles of full desktop applications aren't that good on tiny displays like a netbook or phone, yet thats what they keep trying to do. Most Linux based devices on the market are 'we put in as absolutely little investment of money and time into the product as possible and expect it to rule the world, even beating out other devices where have much more energy and thought put into them. /me waits for the troll mod since I didn't paint Linux as the end all solution to everything.

Re:you can say whatever you want

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen several WinCE devices in the wild, never seen an n900 outside of a store. CE may look childish, but its still a hell of a lot more popular, theres a reason.

It probably has something to do with WinCE's 10+ year market lead on the N900.

Re:you can say whatever you want

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> whether it's true or not is another thing

Here's what the market wants to know, "But does it run WoW?"

Every other person and commentator, thx4playing bai.

Re:you can say whatever you want

[LWATCDR]

I mentioned QNX because Harman Kardon bought them and use them in their systems.
You see I could see Tom Tom making deals to provide software for Cars instead of selling standalone devices. That being said I don't see a lot wrong with Sync from what I hear.

Where we disagree is in ARM performance. I don't see it as subpar. I would love to see a Tegra 2 or OMAP 4 compared to an Atom. I think they could actually outperform the Atom. I don't see Windows XP going ARM because it would loose it's software base. You would have less software available than Linux does.

Re:you can say whatever you want

[miknix]

WinCE is a very reduced Win32 API (so we are not considering the huge collection of Win32 apps here) while GNU/Linux on ARM runs everything designed to be cross-platform.

The API isn't THAT much smaller, and a full API isn't needed on a compact device.

Even Windows Vista/7 had a massive API change from Windows XP that required adding proper "emulation" for XP mode. So are you trying to convince me that the "WinCE API isn't THAT smaller" than Windows Vista/7? Wait.. Are we still talking about the same WinCE where Windows Mobile is based on?

In case you haven't noticed, the devices that are owning the market right now are reduced versions of their desktop brothers. Doesn't seem that the majority of people prefer the full thing over the reduced version

Are you referring to the iPhone? That doesn't look like a netbook to me. Actually, on netbooks, people are using the "full thing" - Windows 7, Windows XP, OSX, GNU/Linux.. I never saw WinCE on a netbook.

Given a powerful ARM machine with plenty of RAM, you can literally compile all your GNU/Linux desktop software for ARM.

Because thats what makes a hardware/software package useful ... that you can compile a bunch of desktop software for a device that isn't a desktop. Just recompiling an app isn't all there is to it, regardless of what you think. A desktop app running on a small device, even a netbook, starts to get shitty since the screen real estate isn't the same.

Ok, I think you got confused by my words. My point is that GNU/Linux is VERY powerful for netbooks due to the reasons I mentioned before. On netbooks you don't have a ultra-tiny screen that need different UIs. Gnome, XFCE, KDE fit just fine on netbooks, hence my point about the importance of being able to "just" compile all of this to ARM.

Then I talked about the fact that the reason above doesn't hold true for handheld devices (netbooks excluded) because they have different Human Interaction paradigms which current and extensive GNU/Linux software isn't prepared to address.

The fundamental problem here is that the people using Linux in their smaller offerings are using it because they are cheaping out. Its not Linux's fault, but its a side effect of being free. They are trying to piggy back on everyone elses work to increase their profit margin, which in general is fine.

Why is this a problem? Even if they don't contribute back, IMHO, they are increasing Linux popularity which in turn will grab more attention of other manufacturers which in turn will give us more Linux device drivers and support.

Half ass hacks or recompiles of full desktop applications aren't that good on tiny displays like a netbook or phone, yet thats what they keep trying to do.

If XFCE (or Gnome) doesn't fit in the screen of your netbook, then I doubt any browser will, without permanent scrolling and resizing operations (using fingers or not). And that, IMHO, will beat down the reason of using a "netbook" in the first place.

Most Linux based devices on the market are 'we put in as absolutely little investment of money and time into the product as possible and expect it to rule the world, even beating out other devices where have much more energy and thought put into them.

GNU/Linux was already a good product, it just needed some sane marketing :)

Re:you can say whatever you want

[Wdomburg]

I've seen several WinCE devices in the wild, never seen an n900 outside of a store. CE may look childish, but its still a hell of a lot more popular, theres a reason.

Erm, ever hear of Android? Palm's WebOS? Linux. And moving a hell of a lot more units than Windows Mobile.

Re:you can say whatever you want

[Blakey Rat]

Cheap, ARM and Linux is the one combination they absolutely MUST discredit.

First of all, Microsoft has OSes that run on ARM.

Secondly, Microsoft doesn't have to discredit this because the fact that netbooks have been big for two solid years now and there *still* are no ARM netbooks in stores... well, they've already discredited themselves. This mythical world of dirt cheap ARM-powered Linux netbooks exists only in Slashdot submissions and pie-in-the-sky blog postings.

Likewise, a $200 OS and $300 office suite simply aren't value propositions on sub $200 computers.

Well obviously. But Microsoft's already solved the first one-- whatever they're selling XP and Win7 to netbook makers for, it's cheap enough that you can still buy a netbook for $300. And the second one it just a matter of licensing... if Microsoft felt they needed to address it, they could do it in a week max.

(Oh, and your desktop copy of Office already has a free laptop/mobile license included with it... so if you already have Office on your desktop, the incremental cost of adding it to your netbook is $0.)

Re:you can say whatever you want

[Areyoukiddingme]

Tried using Office 2007? That army of UI specialists performed a lemming march right off a cliff. Usability? HA! After the decade that began with Word 6, I knew Microsoft Word. I could find exactly what I wanted, quickly and easily, even in a version I hadn't used much. Then the company got me a new machine and insisted on Office 2007. Not only can I not find anything anymore, but extremely commonly used functions are on two different ribbons! Like switching between documents (and MS broke the hell out of Ctrl-Tab, so the old easy way is gone) and formatting text. If I want to select some text, change the font, switch documents, select some text, and change it to the same font, I have to click an absolutely ridiculously large number of times, interspersed with some HUGE mouse movements. The old keyboard shortcuts are broken or redefined to something I don't know. This is usability?

Contrast that to OpenOffice Writer 3. Well shit, would you look at that. That decade of MS Office experience is still mostly applicable. I can find stuff again. Keyboard shortcuts are back and familiar. And some of the things that never really did make sense in Word have been moved or reworked into something that is so much easier to remember now.

So uuh, yeah, you're a reputation manager trying and failing to spread FUD.

Re:you can say whatever you want

[Anonymous Coward]

Time is money in case you haven't figured it out and right now Windows and MAC provides the best bang for buck. So take your money argument and try to shove that in Apples face, they have proved otherwise that people are willing to pay big money for a good product. Free is not going to be able to provide you customer support.

Linux missed the opportunity to introduce their desktop to them, so they need to get over that and move on. In fact what they need to do is copy Windows, until than they need to stop bashing the desktop users and playing both sides of the argument/agenda.

FUD? Who pays $200 for the OS on their laptop and $300 office suite, only a moron on Slashdot would quote that price as if it reflects the entire market.
The reality is the OS cost more around $25 and the office suite is only about $30 as it is all included in the package price. Hmmmm lets see how much a decent sized laptop is going for at FRY's going for $499 that will walk all over a netbook all day long.

The Netbook is just a short term fad, not only are they competing against general laptops but they are also cometing against all the new tablets that will be coming out. Smart phones are getting dirt cheap now also and the netbook fad is beginning to die.
What ever happened to all the articles claiming Microsoft not being able to put out something on the netbook besides old XP, well Windows 7 came and there seemed to be a lot of silence after the FUD campaign around here against Vista.

To say the least, credibility is shot around here about predicting the market and technology.

Re:you can say whatever you want

[Narishma]

The Netflix CD for the PS3 is just a temporary solution until they integrate it into the PS3's XMB.

Re:you can say whatever you want

[Anonymous Coward]

"what he's really saying is that laptops are going to get smaller."

Provided those laptops are not Intel/x86-based, as to avoid wasting space, weight and power consumption on ancient technology.

Re:you can say whatever you want

[ckaminski]

The reason XBox has netflix built in and the PS3 doesn't is the same reason the iPhone is only available to AT&T customers - predatory anti-consumer contracts.

Fact is, the only reason I have a PS3 is because it plays Blu-ray, and it use it far more for Netflix than Bluray, but the only gaming console I actually wanted to BUY was the Wii.

The XBox doesn't interest me. I drooled over Halo, but then realized if I waited a short period of time, I could get it for the PC, which is where I do all my FPS gaming anyway.

Re:you can say whatever you want

[d34dluk3]

Frankly I think Microsoft is loosing it's halo.

I always thought their halo was too tight anyway.

Re:you can say whatever you want

[Seeteufel]

Something cool he didn't spearhead... haha

Re:you can say whatever you want

[BikeHelmet]

The XBox360 has won because of their broken DRM that lets pirates play whatever they want.

Pirates are vocal. Pirates play the best games, and tell their friends to play them. Whatever format pirates endorse ends up winning. All my pirate friends also like porn, so there may be some crossover. :P

But that's why I'm impressed the PS3 is doing so well.

Re:you can say whatever you want

[AngryDill]

True but WinCE sucks as WinMo is in deep trouble. Windows Mobile is really at the "also" ran level in the Cell Phone market. Do you see any ads for WinMo phones? Not really. IPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and Palm are all way ahead of Microsoft in mind share..

It all depends on who your provider is. I have AT&T. I recently shopped them for an upgrade, and looked over their smartphone selection. They had a couple Blackberries, and some obscure phone from Apple <grin>, but the rest of their selection was (what seemed like) dozens of WinMo phones. Not a single linux-derived phone in the set.
I have no desire for a Crackberry, nor the budget for an iPhone, and I sure as hell am not going to hold a Steve Ballmer product up to my face; so I ended up settling for fairly nice "feature phone".

-a.d.-

Re:you can say whatever you want

[ajlisows]

Supply and Demand. There are a lot of people out there who can (or claim to) admin a Windows network. Many of those people, usually the barely able but sometimes really good Windows Sysadmins, have never even booted Linux a single time on their home machine. If you are just a guy who plays with his Windows machine a lot you can probably fake it enough to be a passable Windows Sysadmin. You probably couldn't figure out how to install a program in Linux without doing some research.

Now granted, there are fewer Linux Sysadmin jobs out there than Windows Sysadmin jobs, but the Windows market is flooded with Sysadmins. Those who aren't very good the company can pay peanuts for because they likely can't get a job elsewhere. Linux Sysadmins still have a pretty decent job market. They can't be paid $9 an hour because they'd be able to leave and fine a better paying job.

But Steve Jobs said...

[jeffmeden]

Netbooks are supposed to be those things too small to work like a real computer but too big to be really portable! How could Steve Jobs be wrong? Is it true that they are small enough to be more portable than a laptop but big enough to be more useful than a cellphone/PDA?

I wonder how long I will go on musing for, before I break down and buy one...

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[MrNaz]

Steve Jobs said that because he'd rather we all bought netbook like devices that had no keyboard, and an OS so crippled that users don't even like it when it's on a *phone*.

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[jgagnon]

I have one and I have to say I'm very happy with it (Asus 1000HA, Atom based). It came with XP and now dual-boots Linux (Ubuntu Netbook Remix). I'm happy with the performance in both operating systems as far as the basics go, but there are times I wish it had a bit more power to it. It runs Open Office just fine as well as Firefox, Python, and a few other apps I use regularly. I even tried putting Lord of the Rings Online on it and it worked... with about 3 FPS.

UNR: http://www.canonical.com/projects/ubuntu/unr

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[tjwhaynes]

I wonder how long I will go on musing for, before I break down and buy one...

For myself, I'd give it another 6-12 months to see what shakes out of the market. The Cortex-A9 quad core looks like it is the perfect chip for high performance, low power consumption tasks, and the Tegra 2 SoC looks like it will provide a moderate-performance GPU on top of that. There are a number of different form factors that look like they will hit the shelves over the next year, from single screen netbooks, dual-screen touchscreen folding books, a mix of tablets and tablets with removable keyboards. Hey - even Google is supposedly building a tablet based on this sort of tech.

The iPad is likely to find its niche suddenly becomes a crowded space by the end of 2010.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[obarthelemy]

I'm really a bit puzzled about what the extra cores are good for, except for very specific, parallelized tasks (video processing, file encoding...). All other tests I see seem to favor fewer cores at higher speeds ? For general use (office/internet, media consumption as opposed to creation, even games), my take is that 2 cores are plenty ?

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[LWATCDR]

"and an OS so crippled that users don't even like it when it's on a *phone*."
Many million people disagree with you on that statment.

If the iPad doesn't offer some kind of multitasking I think it struggle. But frankly the iPhone OS is actually really well liked by the vast majority of it's users.

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[theJML]

or you could just get a used laptop... I have an x40. it's 12.1" and because of this is the same or smaller than the new ASUS netbooks. It's plenty powerful doing about everything but playing HD Video (which is fine because I don't really see much point in that), runs for hours, has built in wireless, 2GB of RAM and a fairly powerful Pentium M. And I paid $100 for it a year or so ago.

I don't really see the point to Netbooks. They're in an awkward position in size and power. Esp now that they keep making them bigger. Back when they were in 7" and 8" varieties it made a bit more sense, much smaller and it'd be a palm top. But really now it's just a laptop with a slower proc. And it's getting to be about the same price as a laptop anyway.

Either they need to go back to 7" $200 netbooks, or just get rid of the darn class already, it's truely pointless IMHO. Though sadly enough, I'd even pass then as I can do 80% of what I'd do on one of those with my iPhone (seriously, SSH, VNC, RDP, E-mail, Web, facebook, IM, IRC). And for the other 80%, I just bust out the x40.

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[Ogi_UnixNut]

One form factor I'm hoping for is just a plain Motherboard, perhaps something Mini-ITX sized. Most of my personal servers are using old CPU's (Best is a PIII 500MHz), and I would not mind replacing them with some low power ARM systems.

Problem is almost all the cheap computers are in netbook format. If I just want the motherboard, or a box without a screen, they assume you're in the embedded/industrial market, with prices to match (Assuming they are even willing to sell them to you individually).

Is there somewhere that would be selling this form-factor for less than £100?

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[Anonymous Coward]

and an OS so crippled that users don't even like it when it's on a *phone*.

So that's why they've sold almost 43 million combined units? I think instead of "users" you actually mean to say "irrelevant slashdot neckbeards".

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[Hurricane78]

He also said there is no point in Java. So the iPhone is the only one without Java.
Which means, Java apps/games, which are so dominant that they are sometimes not even labeled as Java anymore, will work on every single mobile phone out there... except the iPhone.
I’d call that a FAIL. ^

(Of course the real reason was lock-in.)

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[dmacleod808]

I run OSX on my MSI U100... it works great... and i can play video and light gaming...

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[jeffmeden]

The benefit to more cores is you can completely turn off the cores that are unneeded, instead of simply slowing the clock speed of one big honking core that may not be nearly as efficient at that lower clock rate. It appears (although I am no expert) that this scales well in low power applications, since many chipmakers are favoring higher core counts for their performance lineup. As far as making use of them, it's up to the OS and application authors to code things that behave well (i.e. are properly multithreaded) on many cores. This is a field that is improving constantly.

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[Hurricane78]

Many million also think that Obama is black Hitler. What’s your point? (Protip: Ad populum.)

I had a task manager, and a mark-button (like shift on the computer) on my phone, back in 2003. How is Apple unable to do it in 2010??
Next you tell me they got no keyboard. Or no camera. Or no removable battery. Or no ability to install whatever you want. Or no real GPS but WiFi triangulation.
Oh wait... ;)

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[Simon Brooke]

Netbooks are supposed to be those things too small to work like a real computer but too big to be really portable! How could Steve Jobs be wrong? Is it true that they are small enough to be more portable than a laptop but big enough to be more useful than a cellphone/PDA?

I wonder how long I will go on musing for, before I break down and buy one...

I bought one a year ago - a Dell Mini 9 with a 1.6GHz dual core Atom processor, 2Gb RAM, and a solid state device in place of disk. My desktop machine which I use for development is a dual processor Athlon 1.6GHz with 2.5Gb or RAM and a SCSI raid array. Both run Ubuntu 9.10. Which is faster? Well, for jobs like compiling, the netbook tends to be, because the SSD is a lot faster than physical disk. For everything else except 3d graphics, they're about equal. The ATI graphics card on the desktop does 3d better and faster than the Intel on board graphics chip on the netbook.

But the only places the desktop really has it over the netbook are graphics and disk capacity. The netbook has it over the desktop in terms of noise, size, weight, power consumption, portability.

Now, OK, mine's an Atom, not an ARM. But there really isn't that big a difference in performance between a dual core 1.6Ghz Atom and a dual core 1.2GHz ARM, and a four core 1.2GHz ARM will scare the pants off it. These days, a netbook really can give you all the compute power you need, and five plus hours battery life.

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[Ihmhi]

Jokes aside, a co-worker of mine recently received a Dell netbook for his at-work duties. Small form factor but it had a full-size laptop keyboard.

Great for him, but too bad for me. Laptop keyboards are a nightmare for my giantfolk hands.

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[LWATCDR]

Very simple you stated that users don't like the iPhone OS.
Well some people do not but a huge numbers of people do and it has changed the mobile phone market.
I can tell you that a lot more people don't like WinMO than iPhoneOS. Frankly a lot more WinMo users hate WinMo. Most are stuck because of some app they must have and are hopping that WinMO7 doesn't suck.
Taskmanager? I have not needed on on my iPod Touch. Now on my Android phone I do. I will not get an iPhone because of AT&T. But a phone shouldn't need a task manager.
The Cut and past is now and yes it dumb to leave it out.
All you other complaints have nothing to do with the OS.
No keyboard, removable battery, or camera are or where all hardware choices.
They do have a camera and a real GPS now BTW.
Not being able to install whatever you want is more a cultural issue. Apple offers a walled garden of apps. You have one place to look for them and only one place you have to market if your a developer.
It is a choice that frankly really seems to have worked well for the users and the developers for the most part.
But again that has nothing to do with the OS.
Just about the only problem I have with the iPhone OS is the lack of multitasking. Which I do find really frustrating.
The Palm OS does a great card with multitasking the the UI is every bit as good as the iPhone OS.
WinMo reminds me of Linux back before Gnome and KDE. Yes it works and you can do anything you want with it but it is just an ugly mess. The difference is that Linux was more stable.

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[iapetus]

Hannah Montana outsells Mozart, you know. Like the man said, ad populum arguments really don't work.

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[LinuxAndLube]

What are you trying to say? That Mozart is better than Hannah Montana?

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[ClosedSource]

The extra cores are the result of chip makers using essentially the same technologies they have used for the last 20 years.

Their ability to improve performance on single cores has greatly diminished so they are trying to convince people that multiple cores are the answer.

It reminds me a bit of the early 60s when portable radio makers would advertise how many transistors their units had (even though only 3 were actually used).

The current situation isn't as bad, but multicores haven't yet proven themselves as more efficient in common applications.

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[ClosedSource]

I know the standard programming language for Android is Java, but it's not fully compatible with Java ME. Are you certain that all these Java games will run on Android?

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[iapetus]

Yes, but if you don't agree, replace Mozart with something that you believe is better than Hannah Montana and still sells less.

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well Mozart's been dead for about 200 years.

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[proslack]

My 9" netbook fits in a cargo pocket. Anything larger wouldn't. That's the point of a Netbook (to me at least). Also, the keyboard is essential. I touch type about 50 wpm; no way I could replicate that on a tablet screen. That said, I use a laptop with a 16" screen for routine work.

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[whisper_jeff]

...an OS so crippled that users don't even like it when it's on a *phone*.

Back up your claim with fact.

Sorry, what's that? You can't? Thought so.

Important lesson all slashdot readers should learn - we are not the norm. We do not represent the majority of users. Not by a long shot. What we like/dislike often has absolutely zero bearing on what the vast majority of people like/dislike.

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[Anonymous Coward]

Google for "OpenRD." $150 for a Marvell Cortex-A8 SoC with USB, GigE, SATA, PCIE, etc all brought out to connectors. The Kirkwood chip is the same one used in the Sheevaplug, but with OpenRD you get access to all the ports.

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[Corporate Troll]

Problem is almost all the cheap computers are in netbook format.

Huh? What are you talking about? My favourite hardware online store has an Atom-based motherboard for a whopping 58.90€. Add in a 1GB stick (if you don't already have some lying around, like I do... from dumpster diven machines) for a 23.99€. You can most likely reuse your cases and power supplies (I have an Atom ION 330 motherboard living of a 300W powersupply and that overkill). That's your base system for less than 85€! Matches your "below £100" no?

If I just want the motherboard, or a box without a screen, they assume you're in the embedded/industrial market, with prices to match

Ever heard of Soekris? Sure, they are not *that* cheap and not that high-performance but you were talking "home servers". I have a net5501-70 and it handles pretty much anything I throw at it for home server usage. Of course, that's not in your given budget range...

Now, I admit that these are all x86 machines but currently your machines are too.

Perhaps you can base something on this. Based on XScale processors, but they seem to be out-of-budget too.

Perhaps you might start reavaluate your £100 requirement. I haven't seen any netbook at that price either. £100 ~= 115€. Cheapest netbook I have seen was 199€ and was Linux based. So, I ask you the reverse question; Where can I find a £100 netbook?

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[Locutus]

FYI, the platform is currently restricted to a maximum of a 10.1" display as per Microsoft and vendors tied in any way to Microsoft must abide by that. Did you not read about the ASUS executive apologizing for showing a non Windows netbook last year with Microsoft on stage?

If Microsoft can't continue to threaten the manufacturers of these devices and they finally start hitting the market, you will start seeing 12", 15" and larger devices running multi-core ARM processors. That is a big _if_ because Microsoft will do everything they can to stop this. As someone mentioned, even if Microsoft ported Windows XP or 7 to ARM, they will not have the application base GNU/Linux already has and the more productive attack for them is limiting the market. They did that with the original netbook market by signing them up with amazing marketing kickback deals which cost Microsoft millions but kicked GNU/Linux off most products if not off the retail shelves. They don't have a technology answer and their first answer has always been blocking so that will continue.

If you've seen GNU/Linux running on a 256MB Cortex-a8 system you would be thinking, 'wow, there's potential here'. If you see GNU/Linux running on an a9 system, you'd be saying 'OMG that is amazing - I want one'. Microsoft will be fighting this one with all guns firing. I saw a video recently of an a9 platform doing 1080p video and they said it was only using 5 watts. That's less than 500mA at 12V and for battery based products, that's a big deal.

LoB

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[Anonymous Coward]

Except this isn't an ad populum fallacy. He didn't say "'x' is better than the iPhone", he said (paraphrase) 'users don't like the iPhone OS', the counter argument was '43 million people bought iPhones, they don't seem to care'.

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[Al Dimond]

Steve Jobs said that... about Netbooks? I would have guessed he was talking about the iPad.

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have a cell- or smart phone and have no plans to buy one.. but my netbook sits tucked under my arm, like a favourite book, nearly everywhere I go. It's light enough not to be tiring to carry and is a great thin-client for accessing my main servers at home (both Win and Linux). It's also just fine for doing PCB design and embedded development, if you use lean IDEs that don't take up too much screen (Eclipse kinda sucks at 1024x600).

At under $400 I'm seriously considering buying another one and making this one a semi-tethered desktop replacement once the wife's PC at home dies, as it can handle everything she needs to do (some word processing, graphics editing, web-surfing) as plugged into an external monitor it can do a comfy 1600x1200.

I can't resist making the obvious comment that a certain newly-announced product starting with 'i' would NOT be nearly as useful to me.

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[Anonymous Coward]

They do exist, and aren't that expensive. This has a 1.2 GHz ARM, SATA, gigabit, etc., and is US $150:

http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-20-openrd-base.aspx

It would be nice if there were even more boards like this, though

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[tjwhaynes]

I'm really a bit puzzled about what the extra cores are good for

The big win for increasing the number of cores compared to raising the core speed is power consumption (i.e. Watts). A 1GHz four-core chip consumes the same power as a single core 2GHz chip.

Now that is no use if all your apps are single-threaded. The PS3 has forced many game developers to address parallel processing for games and PC developers are routinely targeting dual core systems.

A large fraction of CPU-intensive tasks can be spread over multiple cores easily enough. The most obvious of these is web browsing as epitomised by Google Chrome. Add in music playback with visualization and a OpenGL driven display interface and it's easy enough to keep three or four cores busy.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[ckaminski]

Got a hard link to where I can actually BUY one of these?

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[drinkypoo]

The PS3 has forced many game developers to address parallel processing for games

Sega Saturn, Playstation 2, Xbox 360... heard of 'em?

and PC developers are routinely targeting dual core systems.

I don't know about 'routinely'. However, threading is common on NT, so some games will automatically benefit from multi-core. Games need more parallelization to really take advantage of today's three- and four-core processors.

The most obvious of these is web browsing as epitomised by Google Chrome. Add in music playback with visualization and a OpenGL driven display interface and it's easy enough to keep three or four cores busy.

Using an OpenGL driven display interface keeps your GPU busy, unless you're using last decade's technology, and doing OpenGL in software. And visualization usually doesn't happen at the same time as web browsing, though I know that some people feel the need to make their computer look busy even when it isn't.

The most obvious use of multiple cores is everything. More parallelization is needed in the operating system, to permit all applications to take advantage of multiple cores, ala BeOS. No operating system of today is as responsive as BeOS was on ye olde 66MHz 2x603e BeBox.

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[ckaminski]

I've been looking at the Lenovo IdeaPad as much next utility computer. It's right in that sweet-spot of price, too.

I like the iPhone OS (I have a Touch 3G), but not on a tablet. Okay, so tablet based software needs to be built differently, great - but that doesn't mean I'm going to cripple myself. And portrait display typing layout? Wow, someone really thinks the iPhone is all that and a cup of tea, don't they?

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[AK Marc]

There are enough people like my wife. 90% of the time, a netbook or iPad would be sufficient. But then, there's Sims3 or WoW she wants to play. So she has to have a full laptop to play the handful of games she wants. So she'd never consider one, and if one is capable of playing the newer games, it's no longer a netbook and is a notebook. So she'll stick to her iPhone instead of the iPad, and her Macbook Pro instead of an iPad. The iPhone stays with her, small and more portable than the iPad, and the laptop stays home, but roams around the house depending on what the family is doing. The Apple netbook is too large to fit in a pocket and too weak to play Sim3, so it isn't the best of both worlds, it's the worst. And it would be the same with any netbook.

It's people like that, and people like me who use my laptop for too many things and like my 18" laptop screen and don't mind 20 lbs (in a bag with accessories). Netbooks will never be 90% of the market. There are too many people like that. Those that don't "need" a laptop will still buy one for what I call the SUV syndrome. It's bigger, so it must be better...

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[Anonymous Coward]

A Java ME interpreter/compiler/whatever-you-want-to-call-it is being created for Android. Take your pick. Or write your own -- nobody's stopping you. Apple faggotry prevents this from being done for the iFail, thus none exists.

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[LinuxAndLube]

There are things that I like better than Hannah Montana, but who am I to say that they are better?

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[ChunderDownunder]

If you've seen GNU/Linux running on a 256MB Cortex-a8 system you would be thinking, 'wow, there's potential here'. If you see GNU/Linux running on an a9 system, you'd be saying 'OMG that is amazing - I want one'.

How much RAM exactly with that a9? :) I realise ARM Linux mightn't be as bloated as Wintel but some of us see potential for these tuxPad devices to be something more than just a tablet for the rest of us.

So I'm concerned about Google undercutting Apple with Android/ChromeOS, if that means 256-512MB is all one would ever need in a locked down Googly-embedded tablet. Good for smartphones but sucky for those of us who just want a regular portable machine.

I'd personally like a fanless mobile development platform that can morph into a regular 'desktop' class machine when docked. Quad core A9 promise a decent level of performance but running an IDE, web server, virtualization and database all on the same tuxPad will require more considerably RAM than your gPad cloud device. Hopefully at least one manufacturer looks beyond 'iPad killer' and serves the high-end niche of Slashdotters! I fully expect the Atom platform to stagnate, performance wise, without strong competition.

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[Locutus]

the only version of Windows which can run on ARM is limited to 512MB and believe it or not, one CPU. This puts yet another restriction on what we'll probably see in some of these ARM devices from vendors with relationships with Microsoft.

But I agree, stick 1GB or 2GB of RAM on any a8 or a9 and you've got fanless platform with serious multitasking abilities.

I too hope we see some of these larger memory devices around very soon.

LoB

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[Ogi_UnixNut]

Thanks for the tips. That Atom motherboard sounds good, but what is it's power draw like? I heard that it's chipset draws loads of power. Would it really provide a benefit to a PIII motherboard? How does it compare?

I picked £100 because that is 3 times the cost of the current motherboard (were I to buy a PIII board+CPU new from storage stock) at my local.

Likewise I don't think your "reverse question" is valid. I expect a netbook to be more expensive than a bare motherboard+CPU, there are batteries,PSU, screen, disk/ssd, ram, charging circuit etc...., all built in, and all of which cost extra. I don't expect to find a netbook that cheap, but it felt reasonable for just the bare motherboard+CPU.

Thanks for your help though! Those Atom boards sounds interesting.

Re:But Steve Jobs said...

[Corporate Troll]

I expect a netbook to be more expensive than a bare motherboard+CPU, there are batteries,PSU, screen, disk/ssd, ram, charging circuit etc...., all built in, and all of which cost extra. I don't expect to find a netbook that cheap

I grant you that. I just thought you implied you could get netbooks that cheap, but not the bare hardware.

That Atom motherboard sounds good, but what is it's power draw like? I heard that it's chipset draws loads of power. Would it really provide a benefit to a PIII motherboard? How does it compare?

To be frank. I do not know. I still have one P-III server running at my parents and we never measured the power draw. A quick Google gave me a review for the linked Atom board reporting 45W for the whole system. Most likely the Atom will be more powerful than a P-III system, but I won't really vouch for it. As said, I have an Atom 330 ION board, but under Ubuntu it performed horribly. I still need to try Windows XP to see if it's due to the software (drivers) or the hardware. Power draw seems better too.

Anyway, you might want to look around on this site a bit. I've never bought anything on it because the shipping cost are not in my favour. Since you're talking about pounds, it might be interesting for you.

I picked £100 because that is 3 times the cost of the current motherboard (were I to buy a PIII board+CPU new from storage stock) at my local.

Why would anyone do that? Take any cheap chip/motherboard combo and underclock the hell out of it. I did that with an AMD64 chip taken from a dumpster. Underclocked it to the lowest I could and the fan could be removed. Instant fanless system.

Key message, "No operational barrier"

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

What it means is, "If Microsoft is willing to buy, we are ready to sell out."

Re:Key message, "No operational barrier"

[TheRaven64]

Sell out? Not sure what you mean by this. ARM sells (designs for) chips that can run Darwin, Linux, *BSD, RiscOS, Wince, Symbian, NewtonOS, and a host of others. If Microsoft chose to port Windows 7 to ARM, why would you regard this as ARM selling out?

Re:Key message, "No operational barrier"

[pete-wilko]

um.... how? microsoft may get their act together and support the arm architecture. how does that involve arm selling out?

Re:Key message, "No operational barrier"

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

"Sell out"? I'm no Microsoft enthusiast; but last I checked, it was pretty standard for chipmakers(or, in this case, ISA designers who licence to chipmakers) to cheer on pretty much any attempt, by any party, to run more software on their hardware. In this case, though, I think that Mr. ARM executive can just keep dreaming.

Microsoft's overwhelming strength, and considerable burden, is backwards compatibility. The market, especially the business market, is rotten with gross little bespoke applications(as well as big serious expensive applications, shrinkwrap and bespoke) that are win32 only and likely to remain so for years to decades. Microsoft's customers scream at them every time some change breaks something(and not just the little home users, whose whining is of limited consequence, the big thousands-of-seats guys). Even their move to 64 bit X86, once both AMD and intel had given it their stamp of approval and its future was basically assured, but with full 32bit compatibility, was slow and arduous. It isn't even past tense, really, the move is still happening.

If it were just a matter of porting the NT kernel and Windows components to ARM, I suspect that that would be in the realm of doable. It'd have to be worth their while; but doable. Dragging the third party ecosystem, which is a huge percentage of the value of Windows as a package, though would be an epic nightmare. Especially since, unlike 64 bit X86, this wouldn't be a one-way move. They'd have to be pushing for parallel offerings, ARM and X86 from all relevant vendors, for the indefinite future. Welcome to hell.

Re:Key message, "No operational barrier"

[Phics]

What it means is, "If Microsoft is willing to buy, we are ready to sell out."

Of course. It's their job to 'sell', and if Microsoft stepped in and said, 'Hey, let's get this OS working on ARM chips,' why would any manufacturer in their right mind say no? It's only a betrayal if your mission in life was to promote the Linux platform. And whilst on that topic, this is actually BETTER for Linux than simply a company trying to flog Linux because of some mission to hurt Microsoft or make Linux the new desktop. It's someone saying about Linux what most manufacturers have been saying all along about Windows. "It's good enough for us, why worry about the competition?" That is REALLY the place that Linux fanboys want Linux to be in.

Re:Key message, "No operational barrier"

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck are you talking about?

Even if Microsoft ports Windows 7 to ARM, there are still going to be many thousands of existing native x86-32 and x86-64 applications that just won't work on it. Even if they get .NET ported and adequately support those apps, many of Microsoft's own existing applications wouldn't work since they're native apps.

Sure, they could try to emulate an x86 or x86-64 CPU on ARM, but it won't go well. Performance is shitty enough on modern x86-64 systems, even when using the various features they offer to ease virtualization.

It'd take at least 2 to 5 years before a useful ARM-compatible base of Windows software built up. That's an awfully long time to wait. By that time, people will just use whatever Apple is offering, and maybe even Google's Chrome OS, for fuck's sake.

Re:Key message, "No operational barrier"

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Sell out? Not sure what you mean by this. ARM sells (designs for) chips that can run Darwin, Linux, *BSD, RiscOS, Wince, Symbian, NewtonOS, and a host of others. If Microsoft chose to port Windows 7 to ARM, why would you regard this as ARM selling out?

Microsoft wont just agree to support ARM as is. It will have conditions attached to it. It won't be something so explicit as a requirement to stop supporting the other systems. It will be more insidious. One tack will be to nullify the advantage of other OSes. By requiring a cache large enough for Windows or memory requirement that will nullify cost advantage of Linux. Another tack would be to create a small variant of ARM that is incompatible with the others. Then due to the market dominance and/or shady undisclosed deals and pay backs, the window only version of ARM chips will be subsidized from the monopoly windfall in the MSOffice franchise.

Eventually everyone will be able to say, "we tried, but the market wants Microsoft. It is all free market you see!", while conveniently forgetting the backroom deals and tilting of the playing field done in smoke filled back rooms. The MsOffice franchise that is churning up some 25 billion dollars a year in profit, flowing through secret contracts wrapped inside non disclosure agreements, distorts the free-market continuum just like a black hole warps the space-time fabric.

Remember the original 150$ Linux netbook. How Microsoft suddenly extended the WinXP life by 10 years and strong armed Asus. How the one lap top per child project suddenly decided to add a 2GB memory chip, raised the price and foundered completely. Microsoft is not a 800 lb gorilla in the jungle clearing. It is a supermassive blackhole that influences everything in the galaxy.

Re:Key message, "No operational barrier"

[Shrike82]

conveniently forgetting the backroom deals and tilting of the playing field done in smoke filled back rooms.

That is the usual place to carry out backroom deals though, so it's hardly surprising that people forget about it. What would be memorable is if they carried out these backroom deals through the medium of skywriting. Or perhaps interpretative dance...

Re:Key message, "No operational barrier"

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this how MS worked with Intel?

I don't think so, seeing as there is no Windows only version of Intel chips.

ARM has already proven it can be successful without MS, even if only at a small market share in the netbook market.

Re:Key message, "No operational barrier"

[LWATCDR]

Wow...
I don't think that expanding the Cache and ram on the ARM would hurt Linux or OS/X at all.
ARM doesn't make chips. So yes Microsoft could buy the right to make ARM CPUs and make their own flavor of ARM just like Apple, nVidia, TI, and Marvell have.
I think your fears are a bit miss placed at this point. Also since Microsoft has been floundering in the Mobile market for years I don't their is all that much to fear from them.

Re:Key message, "No operational barrier"

[tixxit]

I think you are confusing chip manufacturers with computer makers. MS got Asus, not Intel, to sell Windows XP on their netbooks. Intel, OTOH, designed a chip (the Atom) that could not support the current MS offering (the exact opposite of what your post would suggest they'd do). Now, MS has supported XP long beyond its life expectancy. I can assure you, it is not easy or cheap for them to do this; software development costs typically follow a bathtub curve and XP got out of the tub long ago. All this whole XP on netbooks deal proved was that people didn't mind paying an extra $50 for the same ol' familiar OS. And, as much as I'd hate to say it, people didn't want netbooks. They wanted a small laptop. Also, Intel have been fantastic contributors to Linux.

Re:Key message, "No operational barrier"

[wvmarle]

Linux applications (usually open-source) are considered highly portable and just a recompile away from running on ARM or whatever.

After porting the Windows OS and relevant libraries to ARM, what is stopping the software makers from doing "just a recompile" and have it run on ARM as well?

OS-X supports generic binaries: compiled to run on both PPC and X86. I don't see why Windows would be so different as to not allow that.

WinNT existed for more than just Intel, and has evolved to what is now Win7. MS has all the source code, they have thousands upon thousands of programmers in their ranks including many of the world's best I'm sure, and plenty of cash to throw against it.

There is no reason MS can NOT bring Windows to ARM, including compilers to help their developers to easily and relatively painlessly go multi-platform. Linux can do it, BSD can do it, Solaris can do it, Apple's OS-X can do it, Microsoft's Windows can not?!

Re:Key message, "No operational barrier"

[LinuxAndLube]

Man, they are so evil!

Re:Key message, "No operational barrier"

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

There is nothing(other than economic calculation) stopping them from making ARM a future option. And, given MS's general style, if they did have an ARM option, they'd roll in the necessary updates to visual studio, and otherwise try to encourage the developers.

The problem is the past. Vendors who are out of business, or have EOLed given products, or who would(not unreasonably) want more money to deliver ARM versions of their existing X86 products. Horrible internal apps hacked together in VB6 by somebody who has since retired, or shoddily built by contract outfits. Even with Vista, a tiny compatibility break compared to an ISA change, caused much weeping and gnashing of teeth about this stuff. Heck, they had to build a fully, virtualized "XP Mode" into corporate editions of 7 just to get the legacy customers to shut up.

Linux went multi-platform comparatively easily because(while it is in many respects deeply conservative) the linux community doesn't really care about binary compatibility. If the source isn't there, available for update as long as interest persists, it is considered dead. If you want binary compatibility, you can go cry, or pay somebody to build it for you. Mac went sort-of multi platform comparatively easily because Steve doesn't much care about the past(one of the things that makes him interesting to watch is his willingness to murder products and technologies that he considers to be outdated, even if they are popular and successful. Look at the imac and the floppy drive, or his termination of the iPod mini, a hugely successful product, in favor of the nano) and because its platform moves have always been from less powerful to more powerful platforms. Rosetta and the classic environment were a (mostly) viable option for legacy PPC stuff because the new intel chips were a whole lot faster than the old PPC ones. An X86 emulator on an ARM netbook would be ugly.

In the long term, Microsoft could indeed make ARM an option(and, it seems, that their real long term plan is for everybody to be targeting the CLR in any case); but to actually sell a "Windows on ARM" product, they'd have to beat their legacy market, a tough task.

Re:Key message, "No operational barrier"

[BitZtream]

Uhm, to you and the GP ... you do realize MS already has software that runs on ARM processors ... RIGHT?

Win7 isn't running on ARM because THAT WOULD BE FREAKING RETARDED. They have a compact/embedded OS for this, just like all the other people who are successful at using ARM processors for end users.

Only an idiot would want their desktop OS ported to a device that is clearly NOT a desktop device.

Re:Key message, "No operational barrier"

[BitZtream]

Yea, its not like anyone else recently has moved their entire OS and application set to another processor architecture and provided backwards compatibility ...

If only there was a reference model of someone else doing it ...

It can be done, Apple did it, without recompiling 3rd party software. They weren't the first. NT ran on other architectures before, and there was a time when running x86 on an Alpha was as simply as starting the software and letting the system software handle porting it to the new processor architecture.

In short, your reason for it not happening is bogus and there are examples to show its bogus. Some old examples and some recent.

Re:Key message, "No operational barrier"

[0123456]

It can be done, Apple did it, without recompiling 3rd party software.

Apple were moving from slower RISC CPUs to faster x86 CPUs: RISC emulation/dynamic recompilation is easy compared to emulating x86 CISC software on a slower RISC chip.

NT ran on other architectures before, and there was a time when running x86 on an Alpha was as simply as starting the software and letting the system software handle porting it to the new processor architecture.

And it sucked unless your application spent most of its time inside Windows rather than doing anything at all CPU-intensive.

Getting decent performance out of emulation typically requires about 10x the CPU performance you're trying to emulate, so only a maniac would try to emulate a modern x86 CPU on an ARM.

Re:Key message, "No operational barrier"

[Anonymous Coward]

How is extending WinXP life by 10 years a dirty business move.
You guys sat around here and squirmed when they said they were gonna stop it, that there was too many people reliant on it and we needed it because Vista couldn't do it.
Well Windows 7 came and shit all over that argument, also over the argument that XP was never a good OS the last 10+ years.

Way to spin the 'one laptop per child' disaster, that thing was a disaster from the beginning and mainly because it was run by that one fool guy Nepalatano and the fact it was trying to be run like an open-source project. It failed to provide practical education and would have been sold off by these kids to get money, how naive and foolish were these people in all their good intentions.
The 'One laptop per child' became successful because of XP and its massive application/education library of stuff. The original fools let their egos get ahead of them instead of actually thinking to provide children with education, they turned it into an agenda to beat MS.

It's Time To Call One Laptop Per Child A Failure
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/NussbaumOnDesign/archives/2007/09/its_time_to_cal.html

"that übertechnology visionary Nicholas Negroponte, ex-MIT Media Lab, broke the most important design rule from the very beginning of the project. Design from the bottom up, not top down. This was, almost in every way, a traditional top down product development, that involved the rural children in India, Africa and China only in the late stages."
"Despite all the handshakes, the Indian and Chinese governments didn’t order any XOs. Again, classic design mistakes of not getting buy-in from groups needed to launch a new product."
Yes.... lets all damn MS for the incompetence and egos in the open source developers.
This entire article is filled with scapegoat comments about MS and how corrupt they are.

Re:Key message, "No operational barrier"

[someSnarkyBastard]

Only an idiot would want their desktop OS ported to a device that is clearly NOT a desktop device.

You mean like most people looking to buy netbooks these days?

Re:Key message, "No operational barrier"

[Carnildo]

Microsoft wont just agree to support ARM as is. It will have conditions attached to it. It won't be something so explicit as a requirement to stop supporting the other systems. It will be more insidious.

I don't think you realize how big ARM is. Hint: they're bigger than Intel -- almost every embedded CPU out there is an ARM design. For every x86-compatible CPU shipped, hundreds of ARM CPUs are. They've got a sufficiently large install base that if anything, they will be the ones dictating terms to Microsoft.

Re:Key message, "No operational barrier"

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

In 1997 DEC's own guys said that the FX!32 system could run an x86 NT4 application on a 500MHz Alpha about as fast as that application would run on a 200MHz Pentium Pro. Given that they were DEC guys; but not DEC marketing guys, I'd assume that the (unnamed) application chosen was flattering but not an outright lie.

Given that ARM cores are generally weaker, even the nice ones; but cheaper and lower power than X86s, I shudder to think how such a system would work for a situation where legacy X86 code was being run on some weedy smartbook.

Re:Key message, "No operational barrier"

[dcam]

Microsoft's great 'screw you' to the internet is being unable to run multiple versions of IE, even if one of the versions requires a VMish type environment. This means that people who require IE6 for some app that has suffered bitrot for years cannot run another IE browser. That is important because many places would not support an non MS shipped browser. Which means websites cannot drop support for IE6.

Re:Key message, "No operational barrier"

[Anonymous Coward]

Mac went sort-of multi platform comparatively easily because Steve doesn't much care about the past(one of the things that makes him interesting to watch is his willingness to murder products and technologies that he considers to be outdated, even if they are popular and successful. Look at the imac and the floppy drive

The floppy drive may have been "successful" and "popular" in that all computers up until that point used them, but that doesn't mean they were any longer the best for what they do, or even that they were ever any good. While it's true that the floppy drive got Steved a couple of years before most people were really ready to make the change to thumbdrives, you can't seriously tell me that it wasn't a change for the better. I can remember everything that sucked about using floppies, and I'm certainly glad that someone led the charge in getting rid of them.

We don't need Microsoft

[Foske]

Ouch... that's a statement I wouldn't be happy about if I were a Microsoft engineer: We don't need you guys anymore to grow in this market. "They can jump in if they like, but hey, we got Linux, so we don't care." If I were Steve Ballmer, this would feel as a punch on the nose (Oh, and I wouldn't waste my time posting on Slashdot)

Re:We don't need Microsoft

[Sir_Lewk]

(Oh, and I wouldn't waste my time posting on Slashdot)

No, you would be too busy responding with a well-aimed chair.

Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[JSBiff]

Does anyone seriously think that 90% of the PC market will ditch MS Windows, and all the applications it has, in 3 years? I don't have any reason to doubt the Arm-Linux netbook space will grow (although, even that isn't necessarily a given, but it seems reasonable, anyhow), but 90% sounds like a bunch of marketing BS from a guy who can't possibly deliver the goods.

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[Phics]

Does anyone seriously think that 90% of the PC market will ditch MS Windows, and all the applications it has, in 3 years? I don't have any reason to doubt the Arm-Linux netbook space will grow (although, even that isn't necessarily a given, but it seems reasonable, anyhow), but 90% sounds like a bunch of marketing BS from a guy who can't possibly deliver the goods.

Erm, he's talking about netbooks in general, not ARM netbooks specifically. But E for effort.

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[godrik]

Well, I guess it depends how you count. 90% of the PC market certainly not. 90% of the laptop market seems a little bit too much. But 90% of the netbook definitively seems reasonnable. If each teenager get one of those because they are cheap, the arm netbook will be arm or nothing.

After that point, the question will be, will arm conquer the desktop market. I don't think it will be done in the next 3 years.

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[MonsterTrimble]

I agree 90% is pie in the sky, but I think netbooks will become even more huge as time progresses. Computers have become a commodity item, and with so many people on the move they want their stuff with them. City wide wifi, huge storage capabilities, the cloud, Chromium, iPad (although I think it won't really be crazy good) and smart phones are all pointing to one thing. The end of the desktop is nigh, and once you leave the desktop the game gets *REALLY* wide open.

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[Frosty Piss]

Does anyone seriously think that 90% of the PC market will ditch MS Windows, and all the applications it has, in 3 years?

And this is the issue. The hassle with application installation management has largely been solved with things like Apt-Get and Yum. But there are still very few professional grade apps for the average user. OpenOffice is marginally acceptable, but with very few games, no Photoshop (sorry, Gimp doesn't cut it), very few consumer toys... Not going to happen in 3 years.

I believe that if Adobe jumped in with their image suite, others would follow suit.

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[Mashdar]

I took a step back the other day to consider the progress of Linux as a user-friendly OS. Comparing a 2002 copy of Mandrake to modern Ubuntu (argued the most user friendly mainstream distros/flavors of their day), the rapid improvement is marked. Looking at Windows 7 compared to Windows XP, the progress has not been anywhere near as impressive. Granted part of the difference is that Linux is still maturing as a non-tech-person OS, but I doubt that Microsoft will be able to keep up. I don't know about 3 years, but 20 years I might give you.

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

What I find curious is the notion that netbooks will ever reach 90%. Netbooks are great, I have one. Quite useful, cheap, light. However, I have good eyes, slim fingers, and a desktop with a good-sized screen for when I want to get big things done.

Especially with the recent flood of CULV based "thin-and-light" notebooks, which are netbookesque in that they ditch the optical drive and some of the power in exchange for cheapness and portability, I just don't see a compelling case for 90% of the PC market being devices with little tiny screens and keyboards.

If he means "netbook" in the very general sense of "Yeah, the performance wars are over, the vast bulk of machines shipped are bottom of the barrel specs, increasingly they are cheap laptops, and they are increasingly used for internet-related stuff" He is completely right; but only in the trivial sense of being able to observe what has already happened. I could even see a plausible near-future scenario where many of those machines aren't wintels. If he means "netbook" in the specific sense of "cheap, light, 8-12 inch laptop, typically without optical drive" though, that seems absurd. If you can make a netbook for $X, you can always make a thin-and-light with a larger keyboard and screen that will appeal to people with poorer eyes, larger hands, or an enthusiasm for movies for just a bit more than $X. For corporate use, you'll always be able to take the mainboard from your netbook and put it in a box without a screen or battery, and sell it as a cheap desktop for ~ $.5X. For home users, you'll be able to take the same mainboard and slap a 20+ inch panel and a 3.5inch HDD into it and have yourself a cheap and friendly consumer all-in-one for not that much more.

I would be wholly unsurprised to see an ever increasing proportion of PCs being built around what are basically netbook motherboards(either quite literally, to save on design costs, or merely similar in size, power, and spec); but the netbook form-factor itself is intrinsically niche.

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[Enderandrew]

I think industry-specific proprietary apps are missing, but you can do image editing, audio mixing, video editing, etc. all on Linux just fine.

Gimp approximates 90% of Photoshop's features, and most users only use that subset of features.

Apps like Skrooge and KMyMoney are making great progress on finance software for Linux these days.

I do keep Windows for gaming. But I probably could spend all of my free time playing Linux games and never play them all.

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[jedidiah]

Photoshop?

Are you kidding? What consumer wants to spend $300 on Photoshop?

Photoshop is irrelevant here. There are far cheaper and better "workalikes" for the vast majority of consumers.

The fixation with "being DOS compatable" in terms of office documents will be what stymies the growth of any alternate platform. (Macs suffer equally from this)

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[xactuary]

M$ being strong arm-ed? Payback is a bitch!

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[LWATCDR]

Maybe. Honestly the only software that I have to boot into Windows for is FSX, Left4Dead, and SolidWorks.
For the stuff I do at home the vast majority of it is done on Linux or my Cell.
I think the resistance to moving to a new platform is going down day by day. There will probably always be people that must have Windows but that number can drop very fast.
For my wife the only programs she must have Windows for are Photoshop Elements and Lightroom. She does use GIMP and she loves it but there are somethings that Elements does better. If Adobe ported Elements and Lightroom the only time she would need Windows is for Tax time.

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[Steve Max]

I say 100%. 100% of netbook market will be netbooks.

In other words, he never said that 90% of any market would be ARM; he said that 90% of the PCmarket would be netbooks, no matter if they run on ARM, x86, x86-64, or whatever processors; and that he hoped that ARM could be a real player on that market, not an "also-ran" in a virtual Intel monopoly.

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[Frosty Piss]

Gimp approximates 90% of Photoshop's features, and most users only use that subset of features.

I'm sorry, but this simply isn't true. As well, the "work flow" is certainly not as polished.

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[Frosty Piss]

Photoshop is irrelevant here. There are far cheaper and better "workalikes" for the vast majority of consumers.

This is exactly the attitude that will ultimatly keep Linux from serving the needs of most consumers.

Gimp *is not* an acceptable substitute for Photoshop. But seeting that app aside, people - consumers - *DON'T WANT* substitutes. They want the application they know to work on the platform they use. Thus, if the major commercial Windows apps do not port to Linux, neither will the average consumer.

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone seriously think that 90% of the PC market will ditch MS Windows, and all the applications it has, in 3 years?

Actually, yes, I think it could happen.

- Apple will succeed in selling lots of iPads. This will get people used to the idea of a non-windows platform with its own applications.
- Nokia / SonyEricsson / HTC / whoeverelse will want some of that market share. Competing pads will be released running Android (and maybe other OSes too). These will also have their own applications.
- Users will snap up these gadgets in large numbers, but for a lot of uses there is still a need for a keyboard, so some of them will be released with a keyboard, which in effect makes them into a netbook. (maybe a slide-out keyboard like some phones now, but it'll still be the same effect).
- Virtually all of these devices will run on ARM chips.

If Microsoft gets its act together it can have a piece of this action, but the reality is that the app-store model is a killer feature for end user convenience (even if it is closed and makes /. users angry). Windows doesn't have an app store model, and isn't likely to get one because it's just too much of a leap for most existing windows software suppliers to make.

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[JSBiff]

A couple quotes from TFA:

"Although netbooks are small today - maybe 10% of the PC market at most - we believe over the next several years that could completely change around and that could be 90% of the PC market," said East. "We see those products as an area for a lot of innovation and we want that innovation to be happening around the ARM architecture."

I think it's only a matter of time for ARM to gain market share with or without Microsoft.

While you are technically correct that these are two seperate statements, they definitely form a unified logical thesis for the article: the ARM guy is claiming that he thinks netbooks will be 90% of the PC market AND a very large portion of that market will be running ARM CPUs *even without Windows* (although he does concede that having Windows, he thinks, would make that easier/faster).

Don't get me wrong - I'd love to have an ARM-based cheap, small, long-battery life, netbook or laptop, running some flavor of Linux or maybe even one of the BSD spinoffs. But I think claiming 90%, even with Windows on Atom or AMD, seems like complete nonsense. Making the jump to say 90% of PC market as netbooks, large percentage as ARM running Linux, just doesn't sound remotely plausible. But hey, I hope the guy proves me wrong.

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[hitmark]

i think the question is, how many people have copied photoshop from somewhere, just to remove red eyes from photos of their kids or pets?

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[pinkj]

I think industry-specific proprietary apps are missing, but you can do image editing, audio mixing, video editing, etc. all on Linux just fine. Gimp approximates 90% of Photoshop's features, and most users only use that subset of features.

But how many graphic design classes teach with Gimp? How many audio recording schools teach with Ardour, PureData, etc? Is there really a Linux alternative to Avid or Final Cut with working OMF/AAF/EDL export that will work with a Linux based DAW that has timecode and all its FPS types? Heck, even Adobe Premier has a very hard time getting OMF exports to work properly in ProTools.

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[Lunix Nutcase]

Are you kidding? What consumer wants to spend $300 on Photoshop?

They wouldn't. They'd be paying for the much discounted Photoshop Elements. It's always funny to hear people compare Duh Gimp to the highest end version of Photoshop when making the comparison and completely ignoring the consumer-oriented version of Photoshop that's been around for 9 years.

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[Dare nMc]

Steve Jobs also seams to think a significant portion are willing to be without Microsoft. My Asus EEE net-book running Ebuntu runs a significant number of windows apps under wine, and has so many other free apps that cover 99% of what you would want to do with a small laptop. (of course any pripriority apps are questionable under wine.)
Of course 90% e-books does not = 90% ARM. I am sure he would be happy with 90% netbooks, 20% ARM+LINUX. Thus 18% of laptop sales would be arm; 72% would then be x86; leaving 10% as full laptops.

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[digitalhermit]

On my desk, right now, I have a Windows XP, a Win7, a MacOSX 10.6 and a Linux workstation. The "apps" I'm using on them right now are browsers running Google Mail and Yahoo, VMWare consoles, and some other client applications. The binary apps I'm using are Putty, Lotus Notes, Acrobat Reader, an MP3 player, and some editors (gvim, JEdit, vi).

My point? 95% of the apps I use are not tied to a particular OS. I can easily switch from one system to another without affecting my ability to do work. If I had to choose one system I'd likely go with Linux because I'm just more comfortable with it, but any of them will do the job. So yeah, I could see a 3 year timeframe when Windows has to change or lose lots of market share.

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[jedidiah]

Well then... don't contribute to the drivel.

OTOH, if most people can't manage to mention Photoshop Elements by name then it can't be terribly pervasive now can it?

If you can't even name it properly, then it's irrelevant as club to whip alternate platforms with.

The fact that people can't even be bothered to name it probably means they use something else, probably a gratis something else.

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[jedidiah]

...a vanishingly small number most likely.

There are simpler and free tools to do that. There's no need to buy into the Adobe hype machine.

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[marsu_k]

Where did the parent mention Gimp? In my experience, the professionals always use Photoshop, but many casual users (at least those who don't know to use Bittorrent) seem to use Paint.NET - for those people Krita is worthy alternative. It even supports CMYK, something that Gimp still (AFAIK) doesn't. Yes, it might take some relearning, but let's face it, most people simply crop images or do some light retouching, one will learn to do that in minutes with any program.

So I guess the question remains, why would the average consumer choose a Linux netbook, given that they will need to learn to do things slightly differently? Currently the consumer will most likely go with Windows, but when comparing a 300 netbook on x86 running Windows 7 + the price of applications (let's face it, the average consumer is either law-abiding or oblivious to file sharing) to a 100 netbook on ARM, which includes all sorts of applications with many more downloadable for free, the latter may be very tempting. Most people are not gamers, they couldn't give a flying fuck about running $LATEST_AND_GREATEST_FPS.

(Yes, I'm aware the 100 ARM netbook doesn't exist yet. It's only a matter of time IMHO)

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[marsu_k]

(slashdot ate my euro symbol, insert currency symbol of choice before/after the prices in the above comment)

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[Locutus]

no, 90% of the PC space is rather aggressive and not likely. The point he's trying to make is that GNU/Linux could replace a very large portion of the PC segment already but on x86, it's like moving a stubborn jackass up a hill. With the ARM price/performance blowing x86 out of the water, the portable device space(handhelds, netbooks, notebooks) opportunities you get via ARM you just can't get on x86. And I don't believe he is holding to the netbook restrictions Microsoft put on the market, ie 10.1" screens and single core CPUs.

If you notice all the buzz about Android, the iPhone, and tablets then you should know that they are all running ARM. Also know that he has inside info on what people are doing with their ARM design and is probably rather giddy about it. That tends to lead one to visions of grandeur. But reality is not too far off from what he said if you were not trying to move a stubborn mule up a very large hill. Most Windows users hardly know how to use Windows so getting a large portion of them to learn something new is a very tough task. Especially if the device looks like something they think they know. The phone and the tablet have the advantage of being acceptably different enough to not think they must be running Windows.

And I'm sure there are enough ARM manufacturers out there who would love to have a chance at delivering the goods. ARM LLC is not a manufacturer, just the design house for the CPU. If Microsoft can't kill off this market, you will start seeing Windows ISVs porting to ARM and that will probably mean GNU/Linux in one form or another. IMO

LoB

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

What ever you say, RMS.

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[Blakey Rat]

In 2002, copy and paste didn't even work right in Linux.

The reason it's maturing faster is due to necessity: it started out a *full decade* behind the competition. (Copy and paste in every other OSes was a completely solved problem by 1992 or so, for example.) Which is fine, I mean catching up is still progress, so I'm not peeing on that parade.

The real problem, however, is going to come with Linux is fully caught-up with the proprietary solutions and to stay ahead is forced to innovate new concepts-- that's a capability that I've never really seen the open source community to have any competence at. (Oh, sure, they can innovate a faster web server or something, but nothing in the UI field.)

Can you imagine a Linux project creating something like, say, Office 2007's ribbon interface? Or OS X's Time Machine interface?

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[Mashdar]

I'm not sure what the Time Machine is, but GOD I hope they cannot come up with something like the ribbon.

And people make good UIs, not companies. If you want a nice interface you put someone well equiped in charge of it. This is typically not a priority when copy+paste doesn't work :) BTW I'm not sure what you mean, I never noticed problems with the clipboard in Mandrake circa 2002. Do you mean between programs?

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[Blakey Rat]

BTW I'm not sure what you mean, I never noticed problems with the clipboard in Mandrake circa 2002. Do you mean between programs?

Usually when people say this, it turns out they only tried copying-and-pasting text. Yes, text works.

What didn't work in 2002 is copying something like a set of cells from a spreadsheet program, closing the spreadsheet program, then pasting them into a bitmap paint program. This worked in every other OS in 2002, but not in Linux... you'd either end up with nothing, or gibberish.

IIRC, the problem was that the Linux clip wasn't able to store more than one type of data at once-- so, for example, in Windows or Mac, when you copy the spreadsheet cells, you put the following in the clipboard:
1) Your native spreadsheet format
2) CSV text
3) HTML table
4) Vector image
5) Bitmap image

Each of those containing the same data, but in a different format. Then the pasting program simply goes down the list, rejecting any of the formats it doesn't understand, and pastes in the first format it understands completely.

Again, IIRC, Linux had the capability for this, but it *only* worked if the copying program was still running-- it was an interactive process where the pasting program would say "do you have this?" "no" "how about this?" "no" "how about this?" "oh, I have that one!". I have no clue what benefit the designers of Linux's copy-and-paste thought this would provide, especially since the Windows and Mac versions of same were already old-hat.

To add to all that, back in 2002 there was still a lot of grief over whether Linux programs should put selected data into a clipboard or not. I think they resolved that by just making two clipboards, one for the current selection, and one for the purposefully copied item.

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[91degrees]

I run firefox, thunderbird an MSN app and a twitter app on my netbook.

It would make no difference at all to me if I had Linux rather than Windows. I also have a desktop PC which I occasionally use. That has Windows and would require an alternative for a lot of applications if I were to change to Linux. But the netbook doesn't replace the PC. It supplements it and has no need to be compatible with the desktop in any way.

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[godrik]

Oh! my mystake I misread it.

I don't believe in 90% of the PC market being netbooks. I don't see companies buying netbook instead of desktop computer soon to begin with.

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[Lunix Nutcase]

OTOH, if most people can't manage to mention Photoshop Elements by name then it can't be terribly pervasive now can it?

Yeah, it's only listed #19 on Amazon's software list. That clearly shows that it's some obscure product. Oh wait...

Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone?

[ChunderDownunder]

Companies mightn't embrace the netbook form factor but businesses might be swayed to run 'nettop' computers based on the Atom platform. After all, what percentage of business users actually *need* a flagship Core i7? They cost more and use more electricity, which for companies of several thousand employees is a contributing factor.

Dual core Atoms running Windows 7 might feel just as sluggish as the ageing P4 machines they replace, of course. :)

ARM based machines could fill a niche in those mythical 'progressive' companies without a substantial investment in windows-only software (Outlook) who were considering going Wintel-free. The organisation I work at had a recent outbreak of a well known worm yet refuses to budge...

Could be but I think it won't be

[GhigoRenzulli]

People still need processor power, big storage, large monitors, confortable keyboards and mice. Netbooks may be great for some users, but many other users just find them almost useless. I can't think of myself watching/recompressing/editing full hd video on a netbook. Programming of mostly any kind would also be a pain. One point: they're usually cute, and people buy them. In these cases, "buy" doesn't mean "use".

Re:Could be but I think it won't be

[TheRaven64]

Processor speed? Possibly, but I know a lot of non-geeks that stopped bothering to upgrade when processors hit around 1GHz. If they got new computers after that it was because they wanted a laptop or because someone else had a spare computer that they didn't need. Big storage? Maybe, but do they need to carry it with them or would they be better off with a consumer-grade NAS box in their house somewhere? Large monitors? Modern HDTVs support HDMI. Just plug your little computer into your TV when you're at home and use it with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse.

Re:Could be but I think it won't be

[rickb928]

90% of PC users don't write code, compile, edit or recompress HD or any other video, render 3D anything, nor compose pages for publishing.

90% of PC users surf the Web, read and compose mail as text, watch video and tolerate sub-HD quality, and occasionally flip through their digital photographs. Rarely they use some Web service to make albums, remove red-eye, order Christmas cards and replacement checks every two years, and play Flash games. Web services rule. Banking, social interaction, news, pr0n, it's all in the Web. Microsoft has already lost this battle. Bing is their last gasp to be relevant in Webspace. Microsoft buying Yahoo! would just kill two birds with one stone.

Flash is the most demanding application most users bother to use, and many don't even realize it. Their browser is second, and they complain about how slow their machine is when their IE instance grows to >300MB and they can't get from one corner of their plot to another instantly in Farmville. They think it's their computer being slow when Facebook takes a moment to show them something cool.

Put Flash on their netbook, and any OS out there is adequate. YouTube has its own deal. If you can put Netflix on it, you're home free. Microsoft Works would be overkill. GMail is all the editor they need.

Microsoft has to fight netbooks, and especially ARM-based netbooks, since they lose any hope of selling Office 2007+ to these users. Unless they make Windows 7 Mobile on ARM a subscription model, and you need a credit card to activate. The billing starts in a year and continues until your bank fails or you upgrade, and maybe even past that.

Ubuntu or any Linux on ARM looks better and better. I suspect ASUS and others could do some nice work with Linux distros for a fraction of the cost of licensing Windows, deliver their customers some serious value, and be free of Microsoft. That last benefit may be the most powerful of all.

But the Empire will strike back. Even Adobe has a huge stake in this. If HTML5 succeeds in replacing Flash, it will be Acrobat that saves Adobe. Oh, wait...

And if they succeed, and Microsoft loses netbook share, expect Linux to suffer security exploits as never before. We haven't seen corporate espionage yet. The Microsoft v. Novell/Lotus/WordPerfect battles were nothing compared to this war. If^H^Hwhen it starts, the carnage will be worldwide, and both sides will suffer. I'm not sure any of the Chinese^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hbot farmers have really exerted all their ability to own Windows. We ain't see nothing yet.

Me? I bailed on the netbokk thing and bought a 12" Thinkpad. I just needed the screen space. A Pentium M anything is fast enough for my portable machine. Those were too good.

Re:Could be but I think it won't be

[u38cg]

Personally, I would adore to have something just big enough for an optical drive, decent battery, and solid state storage that was powerful enough to run a effects-light Ubuntu so I could cart it round uni all day and do stats with R,use LyX during lectures, and not worry too much about it. Bigger than the stupidly small ones, but still small enough to go in the backpack with books, notebooks, stats tables, and the Yellow Book of actuarial maths.

Re:Could be but I think it won't be

[Zerth]

Lately, I drag a netbook around with me and plug into the monitor/keyboard at my desks. When I need oomph, I remote into a quadcore Xeon left over after the last server refresh.

The mouse can be a tad laggy if I'm not at the same office, but otherwise it is indistinguishable from having that thing sitting on my desk. Well, except for the lack of jet-engine cooling fans blowing papers around.

I wouldn't want to compress video on the netbook directly, although playback wouldn't be a problem, but I can easily farm out the task to the Xeon and go do something else locally without slowing it down.

Re:Could be but I think it won't be

[Overzeetop]

That's why you'll have a workstation at your desk, and you, you're wife, and all three kids will have netbooks. That's only a 5:1 ratio, but I'm going to guess that at least half the folks out there don't need big iron on their desk to do their jobs. That'll put us a 90%.

I happen to use an i920 machine at my desk, with a 24" monitor. Come to think of it, I have one at home for the theater and personal stuff, too, though for how we use it, a netbook or appliance with hardware video playback acceleration would do the job. Then again, I've got two old P4 machines that would be fine as netbooks, plus I have a big netbook, as does my daughter, and my wife has a laptop which is so close to a netbook it should count).

Re:Could be but I think it won't be

[amorsen]

Netbooks come with 160GB or 250GB hard drives. To me that's big storage; I have an 80GB SSD in my laptop which tends to be enough.

Re:Could be but I think it won't be

[ChunderDownunder]

Agreed - anyway, who needs massive *internal* storage for portables? My last laptop died leaving an orphaned disk. One USB cable and an enclosure smaller than a paperback novel - hey presto I have 160MB of external storage!

I see the appeal

[Rog-Mahal]

90% seems a bit optimistic, but with the dropping prices and improving performance of SSD technology and more energy efficient batteries/hardware, I could see the netbook become a small, rugged moderately disposable form of computing. I will definitely get one once my current computer dies because I love the Linux-friendly hardware and low cost.

Re:I see the appeal

[Lord Ender]

A netbook is not a replacement for a fully-powered computer. It is a supplement to such a computer. Netbook processors can't do games, rich media (like full-screen flash video) or a lot of other things many people do with their computers these days. When you're not at your computer, they're great. But if your only computer were a netbook, you would go mad with frustration.

Re:I see the appeal

[Fred IV]

I think it depends entirely on the user. For most /. readers, a netbook compliments a PC instead of replacing it. On the other hand, the overall population plays video games on a console, sticks with lightweight web games like Farmville, or doesn't play video games at all. Video is popular, but netbook processors are capable of supporting HD playback in combination with a GPU to offload work to.

Under one condition

[Pojut]

Excluding gamers on the go (or anyone else that needs a lot of computing power on the go), I could foresee netbooks replacing conventional laptops over the next decade or so. It would be nice if more of them were designed as convertible tablets, but meh...can't have everything.

Alienware's new m11x will help bridge the gap between full size notebooks and netbooks, but the price will have to come down while keeping the upgraded power for netbooks to really take over.

Re:Under one condition

[hitmark]

unreal 3 engine running on tegra2?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYtLBh4lPMk

Microsoft could jump in with Windows 7 Mobile

[tepples]

Does anyone seriously think that 90% of the PC market will ditch MS Windows, and all the applications it has, in 3 years?

When Linux netbooks based on x86 were gaining market share, Microsoft embraced the netbook by first keeping Windows XP Home Edition available throughout the Vista era and then optimizing Windows 7 for such ultra-low-cost PCs. Likewise, Microsoft could decide at any time to embrace ARM by porting Windows 7 to the architecture and making a thunk layer for existing CE apps, just like NT for x86 has a "WOWExec" thunk layer for 16-bit Windows apps and NT for x86-64 (XP 64, Vista 64, 7 64) has a "WOW64" thunk layer for Win32 apps.

Re:Microsoft could jump in with Windows 7 Mobile

[0123456]

Likewise, Microsoft could decide at any time to embrace ARM by porting Windows 7 to the architecture and making a thunk layer for existing CE apps, just like NT for x86 has a "WOWExec" thunk layer for 16-bit Windows apps and NT for x86-64 (XP 64, Vista 64, 7 64) has a "WOW64" thunk layer for Win32 apps.

But what would be the point when there are no applications for ARM Windows 7?

The only reason I use Windows on any of my computers is to run closed-source applications that only run on Windows; and they won't run on ARM Windows. Eventually companies might start selling ARM versions of their software, but that will take a long time unless Microsoft force them to.

Sure, Microsoft could release ARM versions of Word, etc, but if all you can run on your netbook is IE, Word and Powerpoint, why not run Linux instead?

Re:Microsoft could jump in with Windows 7 Mobile

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft could decide at any time to embrace ARM by porting Windows 7 to the architecture and making a thunk layer for existing CE apps

Except you are forgetting the part that you CANNOT through all the crap into a ARM processor and expect it to run. Look at latest Windows Mobile for instance, how can such tiny operating system lag so much on the CPU? I tell you why, because Windows Mobile is compiled for the (very old) ARMv4 instruction set. If Microsoft is not even able to do this on Windows Mobile, forget Windows 7.

Don't believe me? Dump the Windows Mobile kernel from any recent HTC phone and check the instructions.

Re:Microsoft could jump in with Windows 7 Mobile

[TheRaven64]

If Microsoft ships an ARM emulator and cross-build tools with Visual Studio, you can expect that a lot of those closed-source apps will be ported. Sure, you'll probably have to buy them again for the new architecture, but that's what you expect when you go with proprietary software.

Re:Microsoft could jump in with Windows 7 Mobile

[timeOday]

Why would Microsoft want or need to embrace ARM anyways? If the netbook market becomes large enough, Intel will simply make whatever investment is necessary to outcompete ARM in the netbook sector.

In other words, ARM is better off for netbooks to remain a small niche, one that doesn't attract too much attention from the big boys.

Re:Microsoft could jump in with Windows 7 Mobile

[julesh]

Sure, Microsoft could release ARM versions of Word, etc, but if all you can run on your netbook is IE, Word and Powerpoint, why not run Linux instead?

Well, IE and Word are the killer apps for many people. Lets face it: you're not going to get a netbook to run photoshop on, so what else would most people want to run?

Also note that there would be plenty of third party apps available in the situation described by the OP: he would have a WinCE thunk layer and therefore you would be able to execute WinCE (aka Windows Mobile) apps, and as a large proportion of the devices running this OS are already based on ARM chips, you'd have little trouble getting hold of the apps.

Re:Microsoft could jump in with Windows 7 Mobile

[tepples]

But what would be the point when there are no applications for ARM Windows 7?

Windows 7 ARM Edition would run existing third-party apps designed for early CE netbooks, Windows Mobile PDAs, and Windows Mobile smartphones, as I thought I explained in grandparent.

The only reason I use Windows on any of my computers is to run closed-source applications that only run on Windows

I'm in a different situation. Much of my workflow is based on free software, but I stuck with Windows so long because of closed-source drivers without a counterpart in the Linux world. Fortunately, those won't be as necessary on an ARM netbook, as OEM Windows distributions include drivers for all included hardware and anything that works with the standard class drivers. I would guess that other kinds of hardware (such as a non-PostScript printer or a flatbed scanner without a memory card slot) are rarely used with a netbook.

if all you can run on your netbook is IE, Word and Powerpoint, why not run Linux instead?

Because one or more of Firefox/Chromium, OpenOffice.org Writer, and OpenOffice.org Impress aren't completely compatible with your employer's workflow.

Re:Microsoft could jump in with Windows 7 Mobile

[Dan Ost]

No, that's exactly wrong. The more mainstream netbooks become, the broader the netbook market becomes. Even if ARM's market share doesn't increase, if the market as a whole increases, ARM comes out ahead.

Basically, as long as there are people who value battery life over running windows apps, ARM stands to gain from an increased netbook market. It remains to be seen if Intel can really compete with ARM in terms of performance per watt.

Re:Microsoft could jump in with Windows 7 Mobile

[Zerth]

Sure, Microsoft could release ARM versions of Word, etc, but if all you can run on your netbook is IE, Word and Powerpoint, why not run Linux instead?

My company doesn't even need IE, Word or Powerpoint. All they need is a good terminal client and(unfortunately) a spreadsheet bug-compatible with Excel.

If it weren't for that second requirement, we'd have gone linux whole hog already. If Microsoft ported Office to ARM, I'd toss every non-server X86 box that didn't belong to accounting out in a second.

Re:Microsoft could jump in with Windows 7 Mobile

[shutdown -p now]

But what would be the point when there are no applications for ARM Windows 7?

If Windows applications can be recompiled from the existing architectures (x84/x64/IA64) to ARM with a single click, such state of affairs won't persist for long - you can be sure that all applications that are still actively mainatined will get an ARM version quickly (assuming that ARM netbooks become popular, anyway).

And it's entirely possible. Most pains that came with non-portable code were dealt with years ago, when x86->x64 transition was pushed through.
 

Re:Microsoft could jump in with Windows 7 Mobile

[TheThiefMaster]

And it's entirely possible. Most pains that came with non-portable code were dealt with years ago, when x86->x64 transition was pushed through.

You make it sound like anyone has bothered to port apps to x64.

Anything which had to be ported, like explorer extensions, antivirus, firewalls etc have been ported, but very little else is x64. Almost everything is still 32-bit x86, with all the traditional non-portable code that entails.
For example, the only game I've ever seen with an x64 executable is UT2004.

Very little software is ready to be ported to ARM.

Re:Microsoft could jump in with Windows 7 Mobile

[shutdown -p now]

Few have released x64, simply because x86 code happily runs on x64, so why bother?

However, from VC++2003 on, the compiler will nag you about any code that, even though it works on x86, is inherently unportable (such as casting a pointer to int) - even when compiling strictly on x86. In all places where I've worked so far, which all had a large amount of C++ code, those warnings were taken seriously - even though the products still ship as 32-bit.

Aside from that, I rarely see platform-specific hacks in code these days simply because mainstream C++ became more high-level. Typical hacks of old were: 1) casting between pointers and ints; 2) using unions and relying on specific size of members; 3) using unaligned pointers. All those things were usually done for the sake of optimization (either speed, or memory usage). And very few bother with that today - and those who can reasonably do so usually know better, anyway.

So, no, I'd say that most Windows software could in fact be readily ported to ARM.

Re:Microsoft could jump in with Windows 7 Mobile

[BitZtream]

NT ran on multiple architectures in the past, and I've personally ran old PowerPC software on x86 and x86 software on the Alpha processor without ever seeing the source. Thats just my experience, and certainly not the only examples.

Its not something new, its been done multiple times by multiple vendors over several different types of hardware. Apple and Microsoft have both done it. Saying that MS can't do it now is silly, they've already done it in the past.

Re:Microsoft could jump in with Windows 7 Mobile

[tbuskey]

Maybe even JIT?

Look at Windows NT for Alpha. DEC had an excellent JIT compiler that would convert x86 apps into native code Alpha as they were being used. Eventualy the whole app would be native. Not quite as well a real native, but close enough.

Apple did emulation with 68k to PPC, even running some of the OS in it. I think there was something for PPC to x86 too.

If something like that could be created, I can see a possible future for Windows on non x86. It didn't end well for the Alpha. Windows CE or Mobile does run on Arm. That could have a future on Arm, but it still make users switch from the familiar Windows.

Re:Microsoft could jump in with Windows 7 Mobile

[swillden]

Eventually companies might start selling ARM versions of their software, but that will take a long time unless Microsoft force them to.

Even more important: consumers may not care

The point of a netbook is that it's for people who don't need a lot of apps. In fact, mostly it runs one app, a web browser. As web apps get richer, it becomes less important to have anything other than a web browser. So, even if Microsoft does port Windows to ARM, and lots of applications get ported as well, they may still not achieve any sort of real platform lock-in because few people will care about any of those applications.

Windows may run beautifully on ARM, but if the users neither know nor care what operating system their netbook is running, the OS will become just another commodity component with netbook makers looking to squeeze out every penny. And in that world, Windows can only beat Linux by matching its price -- zero -- but Microsoft has to make a profit somewhere.

It's all speculation, of course. Time will tell.

Re:Microsoft could jump in with Windows 7 Mobile

[drinkypoo]

The point of a netbook is that it's for people who don't need a lot of apps.

False. The point of a netbook is that it's for people who need portability more than speed or a large screen. I am currently typing this from a hotel room in Panama, on my Asus Surf 4G (EEE 701). I'm traveling mostly via public transportation to keep costs down, so I can't manage a laptop bag at the same time as the rest of all this stuff. I can poke this netbook in between other items in my backpack and it weighs almost nothing; my bag was at about 42lb, near the 50lb limit; my old laptop and accessories might have been enough to push it over, if I could even get them in there, and I already had a carry-on. But this system is running Jolicloud Linux and I have Abiword and Gnumeric, audacity, the gimp, nethack, Wine to run DVDShrink, OGMrip, Nero for Linux (yes, I actually bought a license) and a bittorrent client, among other items. Or in other words, I have not had to skimp.

Re:Microsoft could jump in with Windows 7 Mobile

[ckaminski]

You could already do this, with Citrix.

Absolutely not.

[TrisexualPuppy]

What East is really saying is, "Behold. I shall inflate stock values by making false and pointless claims."

ARM already has a huge part of the embedded market in cellular phones. He is trying to make the claim that no one needs computing power, so everyone is going to switch to the cheaper ARM microcontrollers, and they will get a lot of licensing money as a result. But remember, netbooks are optimized for the net and only the net. If you want to do anything else mildly processor intensive like watching a HD video, good luck. (Even Intel's Atom processor is essentially an overclocked 486.) If you want to watch a DVD, good luck--your netbook is probably a little too small for that DVD drive!

Re:Absolutely not.

[duguk]

If you want to do anything else mildly processor intensive like watching a HD video, good luck. (Even Intel's Atom processor is essentially an overclocked 486.) If you want to watch a DVD, good luck--your netbook is probably a little too small for that DVD drive!

I know what you're trying to say, but I've got an Intel Atom and it plays DVD's fine (with USB external DVD drive) and can do Matroska with CoreAVC without any problems. (Without CPU scaling anyway. But surprisingly Youtube/iPlayer is fine at 800mhz for me). For most people, a Netbook is far more convenient.

Re:Absolutely not.

[dc29A]

My MSI Wind Touch (Atom 330) is playing 720p without any issues, however it can't play 1080p. Mind you, on a 19' screen, 720p is way more than enough. Also, it does YouTube, DVDs and video streaming off the web with no problems.

Re:Absolutely not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm.. he/she/it said it couldn't play dvd's because there isn't a drive. dvd's are hardly hd video.

Re:Absolutely not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the newer arm processors include video accelerators, which can play HD video, Tegra 2 for example but also many others.

Re:Absolutely not.

[jedidiah]

If it has a USB port, then it can "play" DVDs.

OTOH, if you've got anything but solid state storage then there's really no point in
bothering with DVDs. Just rip them and transcode them into what ever codec will play
nicely with your hardware. Or don't bother transcoding them at all if your player is
any good.

As others have noted... video decoding is moving into the video hardware. So the need
for beefy CPUs is wanning. You would be far better off worrying about core memory.

Re:Absolutely not.

[TheRaven64]

A current ARM CPU is about as fast as a desktop CPU from 2002ish (although the GPU is much better, it has more RAM, and it comes with DSPs for offloading the most processor-intensive workloads). He's not saying no one needs computing power, he's saying that, for most people, ARM CPUs are already fast enough and that convenience is worth more than raw speed. It's not like ARM chips aren't getting faster, either. The Cortex A9, which is just starting to appear, clocks from 1-2GHz, supports out-of-order execution (unlike Atom) and comes in 1-4 core versions.

If you want to do anything else mildly processor intensive like watching a HD video, good luck

All of the recent ARM SoCs that are targeted at this kind of thing can decode 720p H.264 in hardware, some can decode 1080p and some, like the i.MX515 have hardware for encoding H.264 as well.

Re:Absolutely not.

[stiggle]

Why watch a DVD when you can watch streaming media.

We're doing less and less directly on our PC these days - its all moving to the net.
Webmail, Google Docs, YouTube, Hulu, BBC iPlayer, etc. So for the majority of the general public they don't want a quad-core 32GB box which can play Crysis at 80fps. They want something they can read their funny online comics, watch some video & email granny on.

ARM chips have been running Linux well in consumer devices for over 10 years, so its not as if they need to do much.

Re:Absolutely not.

[CryptoKiller]

NVIDIA's Tegra 2 chipset provides hardware acceleration for video playback, allowing such devices to playback up to 1080p content. Clip here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSCAKO0gFxM

Re:Absolutely not.

[poetmatt]

well, netbooks do have DVD drives. However, they are not gaming suited at all. So no, there's no reasonable way that 90% of the pc market is going to be netbooks ever. A significant portion? Sure. Gaming? Never.

Also yes, wish you had a +10. People don't realize the atom is so crappy that it's pitiful. Small step forward in size/power usage, major step backwards in performance.

Re:Absolutely not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm.. he/she/it said it couldn't play dvd's because there isn't a drive. dvd's are hardly hd video.

Fail. GP said:

If you want to do anything else mildly processor intensive like watching a HD video, good luck.

As the parent said, that's wrong.

You misread this:

If you want to watch a DVD, good luck--your netbook is probably a little too small for that DVD drive!

Netbooks don't have DVD drives, like you said. But the GP is saying they don't have the CPU to watch them anyway. Parent was (correctly) disagreeing.

Re:Absolutely not.

[Albanach]

If you want to do anything else mildly processor intensive like watching a HD video, good luck. (Even Intel's Atom processor is essentially an overclocked 486.) If you want to watch a DVD, good luck--your netbook is probably a little too small for that DVD drive!

I'm not sure if you're trolling or not. Ten seconds on Google would show you thousands of folk using Atom chips for HTPC's. The Atom can easily play back DVD content and some 720p content too. We just saw the launch of the iPad which plays 720p content and appears to run an Arm chip.

My own HTPC uses a single core Atom and plays 1080p content perfectly. How does it manage this? Because of hardware accelerated video playback. The video is offloaded to an Nvidia Ion chipset. Even if your netbook didn't come with Ion graphics, you could add a Broadcom Crystal HD Mini PCI-e card for about $25 on ebay and get 1080p playback assuming you have a spare mini pci-e slot.

ARM can do this just as easily as Intel. sure, a low power general purpose cpu will struggle with HD video, but there are plenty of low power graphics chipsets available to manufacturers.

Re:Absolutely not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm.. he/she/it said it couldn't play dvd's because there isn't a drive. dvd's are hardly hd video.

My netbook doesn't play eight-tracks either!

Re:Absolutely not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mind you, on a 19' screen, 720p is way more than enough.

I don't know about you, but I'd rather have at least 2160p on my 19 foot screen...

Re:Absolutely not.

[iamhassi]

"What East is really saying is, "Behold. I shall inflate stock values by making false and pointless claims." ... He is trying to make the claim that no one needs computing power... If you want to watch a DVD, good luck--your netbook is probably a little too small for that DVD drive!"

Who watches DVDs anymore? I stream everything, my DVD collection was put on the network years ago, and while the latest ARM might not be a quad cpu today where do you think it'll be in 5 years? He did say "...we believe over the next several years that could completely change..."

Really 90% of the market will become a cheap internet device with a mainstream browser (IE, Firefox, Chrome, etc), full Flash support with full speed 1080p streaming. Whatever device offers "best bang for the buck" will take over. Right now it looks like netbooks fit the bill, but if somehow the price of screen only tablets similar to the iPad dropped to half that of netbooks then tablets would make up 90% of the market. Problem is it seems it's still cheaper to throw in a LCD, keyboard and touchpad than a single touchscreen, but that could change in the next few years.

Re:Absolutely not.

[TrisexualPuppy]

Nice try, but GP was right. It is inconvenient or even pointless to watch a DVD in a car with an external drive dangling off the side or sitting on the floorboard. I was watching DVDs on my 266MHz Pentium II, so that is obviously not what is in question. Just because someone puts two sentences side-by-side with a parenthetical aside between them does not mean that they are related.

Re:Absolutely not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Cortex started appearing, sure. But if they manage to ship multi-core models before Q3 I'll be surprised...

Re:Absolutely not.

[yacc143]

Yeah, a DVD drive is really a critical part of a computer.

E.g. I've noticed only after 6weeks - 2 months that I've forgot to connect the DVD drive in my desktop box to power.

Clearly a DVD drive in a laptop is critical. It has always been critical for me for installing my OS. Hmmm. Yeah right, ripping DVDs. But for that usually external DVDs are more reliable, shitty internal laptop drives are so hard to change.

Re:Absolutely not.

[Anonymous Coward]

I see what you're saying, but it's worth pointing out that over 70% of portable gaming today happens on ARM CPUs that are far, far weaker than what's available today. The much-despised "casual gamers" aren't necessarily best served by a liquid-cooled tower with the phattest available CPU/GPU.
Not to mention how vanishingly small a market the hard-core PC gamers could end up as if once small Facebook-capable computers become a commodity. The market isn't anywhere near saturation, their popularity could approach some fraction of the mobile phones'.

If people don't notice that "the Atom is so crappy that it's pitiful", isn't it as good at is needs to be?

Re:Absolutely not.

[sznupi]

You greatly overestimate the prevalence of "gaming PCs"; the proportions you suggest are pretty much reversed, compared to reality.

Valve Steam is probably the most popular service of this kind. Now, current version of Steam Survey doesn't give absolute values anymore; but on the previous one (up to around year ago), it was clear from the numbers that there's not even 1.5 million participating subscribers. Out of those who do participate, hardly anyone has Intel GFX, which has biggest share of the general market. People usually simply don't play games on PCs; or at least not what you'd call "real" games, preferring Peggle, Solitaire or flashgames. Atom or fast ARM is fine for most of them.

Re:Absolutely not.

[zmollusc]

Give Windows and Flash a couple more iterations and the majority of the general public will need a quad-core 32GB box so they can read their funny online comics, watch some video & email granny.

Re:Absolutely not.

[drsmithy]

But remember, netbooks are optimized for the net and only the net.

They're not even particularly good at that, with today's flash-heavy internet.

(Even Intel's Atom processor is essentially an overclocked 486.)

It's more like an overclocked Pentium than 486.

I must admit I just don't "get" the whole Netbook class of machine. They're not really viable as an only computer, so I need either a bigger, faster laptop or some sort of desktop for "serious" usage. Why would I want to suffer the annoyance of multiple computers when I could just get something like a MacBook (or my 13" Latitude) and use it for everything (short of gaming) ?

Re:Absolutely not.

[Areyoukiddingme]

Not quite true. Steam is big, yes, but Steam is hardly the whole market. What are the 11 million WoW players using, for instance. What are EQ and UO players using? What are players of original non-Steam iD games using? How about those EA games? Maxis games? The runaway ridiculously best-selling The Sims runs on gaming PCs, not cell phones.

Are there a whole lot of so-called "casual" gamers? Yes. Are there a lot more "real" gamers than is represented by Steam? Definitely.

Re:Absolutely not.

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you want to do anything else mildly processor intensive like watching a HD video, good luck."

If you want to make a good impression on slashdot, better be sure to have your facts straight.

Re:Absolutely not.

[Anonymous Coward]

But remember, netbooks are optimized for the net and only the net. If you want to do anything else mildly processor intensive like watching a HD video, good luck. (Even Intel's Atom processor is essentially an overclocked 486.) If you want to watch a DVD, good luck--your netbook is probably a little too small for that DVD drive!

FUD

I recently purchased a netbook (Gateway LT3103u) and have been quite successful at programming, watching video (Netflix, Hulu, Crunchyroll, and H.264 MKV DVD rips), word processing, spreadsheets, and remote server management -in a 3lb machine that runs for days on a charge (it goes to standby pretty quickly when not in use to save power).

Its a bit more than just "for the net and only the net".

Re:Absolutely not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who watches DVDs anymore?

Me, you insensitive clod

Re:Absolutely not.

[GameboyRMH]

Actually, my sister's Inspiron 10v mini plays all kinds of video just fine with its Intel Atom CPU (can't remember the model, I remember it's 1.6GHz with hyperthreading). Any machine that can't play DVD-quality video doesn't have a chance in hell of running Flash content smoothly.

I'd take that CPU over the 1.9 single-core no-HT Pentium 4 in my current laptop any day.

Re:Absolutely not.

[hattig]

The ARM based SoCs that are used in Smartbooks all include video decode acceleration. NVIDIA's Tegra 2 can do 1080p.

Re:Absolutely not.

[Fred_A]

My MSI Wind Touch (Atom 330) is playing 720p without any issues, however it can't play 1080p. Mind you, on a 19' screen, 720p is way more than enough.

Screw portability, I've always wanted a netbook with a 19' screen. At least it would have a decent keyboard.

Re:Absolutely not.

[Narishma]

Because buying a netbook + desktop is still cheaper than a Macbook.

Re:Absolutely not.

[vtcodger]

My wife's eee PC plays DVDs from a USB drive just fine ... now.

The problem: Incredibly, #@&$*( Windows Media Player on the eee PC not only doesn't have a DVD codec installed, it's not dead easy to install one. After a couple of hours of fumbling, plan D or E -- I forget which -- came thru. I managed to get Media Player Classic downloaded, installed and working.

The difference between getting stuff to work on Windows and on Linux get smaller every day. That's not necessarily because Linux is improving (although it is, of course).

Re:Absolutely not.

[Sancho]

Here's another anecdote to add to the pile.

I'd been thinking about buying a netbook, but I was leaning against it because I've always been something of a resolution junkie. I never thought I'd be comfortable working with the resolutions on normal 13" screens, much less on the odd ones that most Netbooks have. For reference, I use mostly laptops and my minimum resolution had always been whichever one is around 1680x1050. But since I like portability, I wanted no larger than a 15" screen. My choices have always been quite limited.

Well I received a netbook as a gift. I played with it for a little while, and it was alright. Then I took it on a trip and used it as my sole computer for a week. I realized that I really could deal with it. The portability benefits significantly outweighed the screen size. I started configuring it to alert me in cases where I'd normally just have several windows open, and that's really the point where I fell in love.

Now it's my primary computer. I rarely boot up my not-so-old laptop anymore, and I certainly can't imagine lugging it around. The netbook does everything I need except gaming. Even flash games struggle a bit on it.

I'm intrigued by the Alienware m11x, which promises a similar form factor (a little larger, unfortunately) with a decent video card and a better processor. But for now, I'm quite happy.

Re:Absolutely not.

[phantomcircuit]

What are the 11 million WoW players using, for instance.

Something old probably old.

What are EQ and UO players using? What are players of original non-Steam iD games using? How about those EA games? Maxis games? The runaway ridiculously best-selling The Sims runs on gaming PCs, not cell phones.

My guess would be that the vast majority of games are played on seriously under powered desktops, gaming systems are almost certainly a tiny fraction of the market

Re:Absolutely not.

[SendBot]

If you want to watch a DVD, good luck--your netbook is probably a little too small for that DVD drive!

Yeah, but what really gets me is that none of these "fancy" new-fangled computers will let me play my LP records. If only there was some way for me to listen to my music using these digi-pad notbook things, THEN we could start worrying about spreading VD's with them.

Get off my lawn!

On a serious note, you could physcially embed many, many times more capacity from micro SD cards INTO a plastic dvd disc. Why the crap would you want to waste your netbook battery spinning around obsolete media?

Re:Absolutely not.

[Anonymous Coward]

"...in January 2010 Valve announced that it had surpassed 25 million active user accounts. It regularly services in excess of two million concurrent users."
http://store.steampowered.com/news/3390/
http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

I know you said those numbers are from a year ago, but your numbers still come up rather short.

Re:Absolutely not.

[RapmasterT]

Why watch a DVD when you can watch streaming media.

We're doing less and less directly on our PC these days - its all moving to the net. Webmail, Google Docs, YouTube, Hulu, BBC iPlayer, etc. So for the majority of the general public they don't want a quad-core 32GB box which can play Crysis at 80fps.

Well, the obvious answer is I might want to watch a DVD if I actually HAVE the DVD to watch and don't have other options for it. If you're sitting next to me on an airplane, you're going to be very jealous of my DVD while your Hulu fanboy laptop is playing yet another round of solitare.

Re:Absolutely not.

[cayenne8]

"Who watches DVDs anymore? "

I'd guess MOST people still do...at least in the US.

Re:Absolutely not.

[nurd68]

I have a slightly different take on this - I view them as two different applications.

A netbook is a light, portable computing device for doing email and web whilst on the road. I do very little else with it.

My laptop is so that I have enough screen resolution, disk space and CPU horsepower to run VMs and do development while sitting on the couch or on a client site.

My desktop is for when I need even more resolution, CPU horsepower, or memory than my laptop can provide. That said, I mainly use it for storage, and am actually going to be moving the services it provides to the household (CUPS, Trac) to a desktop atom board, and then it will spend most of its time asleep. I'll WOL it when I need it (either from the Trac server or my laptop), and possibly have the BIOS start it up at midnight to download podcasts, and then let it go back to sleep when idle for too long.

Re:Absolutely not.

[cayenne8]

"Why watch a DVD when you can watch streaming media."

Picture and sound quality maybe?

Some of us do have large tv/projectors, and good quality soundsystems we like to run our content through. I rarely watch media through a tiny computer screen, unless I'm on the road or something.

Re:Absolutely not.

[Sancho]

Definitely. I wouldn't want to imply that a Netbook will fill all possible roles. I think that for most people, though, it would.

Even for my job, I mostly connect to remote shells. SSH is fine, and I can pretty easily see 3-4 at one time on my screen.

I'm sure that if I were a developer, I'd use a larger screen, but even banging out simple shell scripts is just fine on this thing.

Re:Absolutely not.

[nurd68]

Because I've yet to see a 13" latitude w/ > 1600 horizontal resolution. I do, however, have a 1680x1050 screen in my thinkpad. However, it's more convenient to carry a netbook the random places which I visit.

Re:Absolutely not.

[socceroos]

Who cares about media, these little beauties are one of the best and most convenient tools for the active hacker. I love em. All my brothers and Dad have one too - very handy.

Re:Absolutely not.

[BikeHelmet]

The new ARM SoCs are pretty fast. 720p H.264 decoding through a DSP - next gen will be 1080p.

What ARM has going for it is... very low power consumption, performance that is rapidly catching up to the Atom, and very strong Linux support.

For handhelds and embedded devices, Linux is a better experience than Windows. Why settle for WinCE when you can have a customized Linux distro?

Whether they'll take over the market remains to be seen - but you're understating the cards that are in their favour.

Re:Absolutely not.

[BikeHelmet]

Don't forget that x86 software keeps getting less and less efficient. Anything from Adobe needs a quad-core to run. ;)

ARM is the reverse. Compilers are being improved - in the past year software destined for Android and Cortex-A8 platforms has gone up in performance. Also, I heard on the gp32x boards (OSS handheld console community) that replacing important sections in games with hand-coded assembly often has a 50% or more speedup, indicating compilers like GCC have a long way to go yet.

ARM has a lot of breathing room. I doubt they'll claim 90% of the market, but they will claim a large chunk.

Re:Absolutely not.

[Touvan]

I bet WoW could be made to run on a Tegra 2 - or UT3 for that matter. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYtLBh4lPMk :-)

Re:Absolutely not.

[Anonymous Coward]

WoW used to run on my Pentium 3 laptop, inside Wine onto Ubuntu without trouble,
(not within windows XP)
I'm sure it would run ok on atom
I'm sure if it was ARM compatible it would run ok

Re:Absolutely not.

[mdwh2]

It's pointless to watch a DVD on a portable media player too ... but that doesn't stop them selling millions.

Re:Absolutely not.

[mdwh2]

I don't see why multiple computers are annoying? The benefits outweight the disadvantages. Come on, this is Slashdot - doesn't everyone have at least three computers? ;)

I have a desktop and a laptop, and I may get a netbook for travel purposes, as they're so cheap. In fact the cost of my laptop and a netbook is less than the cheapest Mac laptop I could find.

Re:Absolutely not.

[drsmithy]

I don't see why multiple computers are annoying?

Data synchronisation is probably the biggest single reason.

The benefits outweight the disadvantages. Come on, this is Slashdot - doesn't everyone have at least three computers? ;)

Sure, but every time I sit down in front of one of them and it doesn't have a particular application installed, or doesn't have some data file I'm after, or anything similar, I get annoyed.

A single computer is the Holy Grail as far as I'm concerned. My E4300 with docking stations and dual screen setups at home and work comes pretty close, but it still bogs down sometimes so I'd like more performance.

Re:Absolutely not.

[sznupi]

...and I was talking about "participating subscribers" (in the Steam Survey), didn't expect them to be such a small portion of total subscriber base; which makes me wonder what Valve means by "active".

Re:Absolutely not.

[sznupi]

I'm not sure if mentioning WoW or The Sims was a good choice...those are games very much in "casual" realm (at least from my observations regarding who usually plays them) and which run on pretty much anything. EQ and UO also not a very good one. And don't forget there's a lot of overlap - yes, people play in games that are not coupled to Steam. But out of all my buddies who play "real" games, only one doesn't have Steam account.

Re:Absolutely not.

[mjwx]

Valve Steam is probably the most popular service of this kind.

Apart from Direct2Drive, Impulse and Gamers Gate. Those are just the ones I can name off the top of my head. Steam with it's massive head start only occupies 75% of the market, which means there's another 25% served by other companies.

People usually simply don't play games on PCs

Sales numbers tell a different story. with 11 million active WOW subscribers, games like Half Life 2 selling over 5 million copies and Civilisation IV topping 4 Million.

The simple fact is that ARM is not targeting this market, Intel and AMD do not worry about ARM in the high end market and this is where the gamer and a lot of business live. No developer would work on an Atom processor, the same goes for spatial analysts, engineers, drafters and so forth. What arm is talking about is the low end home market, competing with the $500 Dell special. I doubt they've even considered the thin client market outside of (already) selling ARM proc's to Wyse.

Re:Absolutely not.

[mjwx]

I'm not sure if mentioning WoW or The Sims was a good choice.

on the contrary, these are excellent examples. You simply don't understand the motivations of this market.

those are games very much in "casual" realm

Sims is kind of casual, but I've never heard a casual gamer talk about peeing into an empty bottle because they are too busy raiding to get up and go to the toilet so WoW is definitely not a casual game.

Now With the Sims, when the Sims starts to run a little too slow this becomes a motivation for the player (normally not computer literate) to purchase a new PC, off (s)he trundles down to Hardly Normal or any other box retailer and buys an OK PC for 30% markup. This will not be the A$500 special, even as illiterate as they are they do understand that A$500 is too cheap for their needs. If they are particularly gullible they will be talked into putting a A$2,200 (worth about A$1500) onto the credit card by the salesdroid.

With WoW players, they are the opposite. They know they need a beefy rig for those molten core runs. Most WoWer's I know will look for a proper gaming rig, even the non-technical ones (who flag me for advice, which I give freely, oh I give and I give, it's a tough life). All the WoWer's I know have a rig which is slightly lesser then mine (Phenom II 950, 4 GB RAM, Geforce 295 GTX) and will replace them whenever it's needed (normally giving the old rig to a girl/boyfriend or family member) which is usually every 3 or 4 years. What you forget about WoW is that Blizzard is continually improving the graphics and scope of gameplay, yes WoW can run on a 6 yr old gaming rig (Athlon 3800, 2 GB RAM, Geforce 6600) but most WoWers wouldn't as the game requires CPU power at many points, especially when there are a lot of players on screen.

About 70% of the WoWer's I know play other games (this is a group of about 80 people, I have a social life... mostly) and half of those started with other PC games because of WoW, it's a gateway drug it seems.

Re:Absolutely not.

[sznupi]

All the WoW players I know are student age, usually women, playing the game on their typical laptop and treating it more like a social networking world/service.

So there...

Re:Absolutely not.

[sznupi]

Yes, 75% is so far for representative of 100%, I see...plus why is it that you people always use WoW, HL2, Civ...the biggest franchises, generally.

But I digress; there's one little detail which you forget - compare those numbers to the total number of PCs (either present on the market or shipping in a year). Yes, people usually simply don't play games on a PC.

Re:Absolutely not.

[Anonymous Coward]

ur also a grandma

Re:Absolutely not.

[poetmatt]

I hear this "PC gaming is insignificant" yet I can state multiple pc games that easily dwarf console purchases. Lets see. Most recent? Mass effect 2? Modern Warfare 2? Further back, Bioshock/Bioshock 2?

Are you going to tell me these games run on an ARM? Short and long answer: no.

Steam is always cited because they can gather a lot of data on their customers. Games like MW2 and Mass effect 2 are just harder to quantify, but in no ways any less significant than console gaming.

Really, what do you think it takes to run MW2/Mass Effect 2? An Arm PC that's running facebook? An Atom running facebook? An Intel graphics running computer with a C2D Mobile?

Think again.

Re:Absolutely not.

[poetmatt]

you're making a statement with 0 fact. People usually don't play games on a PC?

What the hell else do you think people do with a PC other than gaming and porn? Porn takes up 20 minutes, so what is the other 1-4 hours a night of average usage?

Why do we mention big franchises? Well, what are you going to cite for PS3 or other consoles successes? Flower? Little big planet? Other games which are not console exclusive?

Re:Absolutely not.

[sznupi]

In case of consoles it's easy - most of them up to now were only consoles, so there's no ambiguity that they are primarily for games. There is still no ambiguity in the case of DS/DSi, Wii, until recently there was little in the case of X360. People who bought them did so for games, that's a fact.

Really, get over the myth that a typical PC user plays games (well, other than flash ones or Peggle-like), it's simply not true. Intel GMA wouldn't have half of GPU market otherwise. Integrated GFX wouldn't account for 90% of new machines. You really managed to ask on a webpage what people can do on a PC apart from pron and games?!

Re:Absolutely not.

[mk2mark]

Even Intel's Atom processor is essentially an overclocked 486.

How do you figure? 1m vs 45nm, 40 MIPS vs 3300 and vastly different instruction sets?

Re:Absolutely not.

[sznupi]

You misunderstood. It's not abut PC gaming being insignificant as "PC gaming", it's about it being only a small part of PC market.

Re:Absolutely not.

[poetmatt]

I'm confused, here. What are you talking about that most games up till now were consoles? People were playing games on computers before atari existed. Secondly, there are not many console exclusive titles. The only stuff that does that really is sports games. Of course people who bought consoles are supposedly only doing it for gaming, although that would be a lie, not a fact. Especially in comparison to that many people bought PS3 for bluray playback capability as well.

Intel GMA has the markethold because it is the cheapest bottom rung product (and the first) which is also tied into many laptops by default. Want the cheapest laptop? Intel GMA. Want one that even play video? Not Intel GMA. A typical PC user can play whatever they want, but to state that all they play is facebook or casual games is disingenuous to the entire gaming industry. Integrated graphics doesn't account for even remotely what you assume, either. From my first google result for "marketshare of intel graphics" I see: http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-features/43383-amd-eats-into-nvidia-intel-graphics-market-share . Suffice to say, if 90% was integrated graphics, not only PC but Console gaming would suffer too - as it's the same companies that make the graphics capability for both.

What does it say? Intel at best has 50%. Where does Nvidia's 30% come from, huh? So integrated graphics doesn't account for 90% of the machines. Hell, even netbooks come with discrete graphics cards.

Re:Absolutely not.

[poetmatt]

Actually I feel that you misunderstood. The terms are not separate. There's no way to discern that a PC, as it's purchased is destined for being a gaming PC, considering that computers are modular. The term itself doesn't even specify the type of gaming. If any pc can run games, are all pc's gaming pc's? I'm not trying to actually imply such a circular argument, but I mean that question rhetorically.

  If I buy one with integrated graphics but later put a HD5870 in it was it a gaming pc, or was it a non-gaming pc? This is why your logic is not correct.

Re:Absolutely not.

[sznupi]

Yeah, you are confused, indeed.

Did you miss that I specifically adressed that PS3 isn't as clear-cut anymore? Besides, this isn't about consoles per se, just how easily you can say in such case that vast majority of people indeed do the activity being discussed. PCs are used by everybody, in all kinds of ways.

Yes, you took a time to describe why Intel GFX is so prevalent...but that doesn't really change anything in how those machines are used, doesn't it? In most cases. I didn't say that nobody plays PC games at all, just that it's quite rare in the big picture.

BTW, Nvidia also does integrated GFX solutions...

Re:Absolutely not.

[sznupi]

Of course there is a way to discern. It involves...whether it is ever used for "real gaming" or not. (and BTW, we're talking here about this mystical world of "real, hardcore PC gaming" of course)

I's quite easy to determine that for a large part of the market. Intel has half of GFX sales and PCs are hardly modular as a group for some time now, considering that most of them sold are...laptops - those machines are out; can't run demanding games, are not upgraded. Or do you forget about millions and millions used very firmly in work scenarios? Rest of the machines could be all "in"...only if you assume they are used by demographic that universally plays "real" games, and that's far from true.

Re:Absolutely not.

[poetmatt]

Enterprise/business does not define, nor is it a part of or reflective of, the market for gaming or gaming pc's or any attribute of that. Consumers (at ground level) define that. If there was no such market for gaming, gaming pcs, etc, then no such products would be offered. Capitalism reflects on this. The market itself would beg to differ from that concept.

In the consumer market, the amount of pc's that are "gaming" or "hardcore" doesn't reflect at all on the market *for* gaming, hardcore included, as someone with a crappy pc but buys 200$ for games would be considered non-gaming under your model versus someone who has a $2300 gaming capable computer but spends 0$ on games. Neither market nor your definition of hardcore gaming is reasonably defined.

PC's are super modular as well. You can drop in laptop graphics cards, ram, hard drives and processors. This was an unknown beast years ago, but now you can buy things like that. The same thing applies to regular desktops and even enterprise.

Re:Absolutely not.

[poetmatt]

intel graphics isn't prevalent. For a simple explanation: It *was* prevalent.

Gaming itself is a cultural pasttime of our generation. In the last 30 years, it has exploded. So to deny that as a concept is to deny that if you ask absolutely anyone anywhere in the world if they've heard of mario, or world of warcraft, to expect them to not know what those are.

Gaming isn't rare, or a mythical beast, or special, it's just dejected by many people as it is such a new concept. Not unlike rock music in the 50's or 60's, marijuana in the 70's, etc. You can easily throw in talking on a phone in an airplane (while in the air) of the new dejected concepts. There's actually no real base for it (it= things that people deject), people just don't like it.

Re:Absolutely not.

[sznupi]

You seem to treat as PCs only machines that have a chance of being played on often. You dismiss immense number of fully PC-compatible machines used in scenarios which essentially exclude gaming; to sweep aside the thing that great number of PCs will never see any "real" game. But allright, let us pass on this one, this place doesn't need strong words...

Have you lost what this is about? Majority of people (and hence their PCs also) don't play games (at least not "true games"). Just...look...around you. Ask your family. Whole part of family that uses PCs in any meanigful way.

(yes, laptops can be upgraded...not the cheap Intel ones, when it comes to GFX; and again hardly anybody does that)

Re:Absolutely not.

[sznupi]

Intel has 50% of new machines, that's not prevalent? Really? (I won't be surpised if it will be more, with Core i3 and i5)

And of course gaming is a huge cultural phenomena. But you seem to be still confused; big success of gaming doesn't translate to it being part of dominating usage pattern.

Low footprint netbooks

[jollyreaper]

Laptops are pretty crude these days. Spinning drives, spinning fans, bulky operating systems originally designed for desktops that were adapted for the laptop instead of purpose-built.

The Palm OS stuff years back really made me wonder, especially when I got an external keyboard for my palm -- could you upscale something like this into a computer? It has more horsepower than my first desktop, the fancier palms could get on the net with wifi. What if you made a bigger screen and stuck the palm guts in that? At the time I figured the problem was cost and performance. Screens are half the price of a laptop so why would anyone want to spend several hundred bucks for a gimped device when they could spend a few more and get a full-featured laptop? But the iPhone had the right idea. Stripped down, customized OS for the phone. Leave the whole desktop OS design behind.

The hardware really has come a long way and basic user needs haven't become that much crazier. Putting an mp3 player in a car used to involve putting a freakin' PC in the car, now you either have an mp3/cd player in the dashboard or a line in for your standalone player. You used to need a pretty beefy machine for the time just to get online and read your mail. Cell phones have enough power for that now. And storage capacity? It's crazy.

There will always be a need for as much crazy power as possible in a portable format but that will be a smaller niche of the market.

Re:Low footprint netbooks

[Pojut]

My favorite part about my Dell Mini 9 is that, excluding the keyboard, the lid hinge, and the trackpad buttons...it has zero moving parts.

No internal optical drive + SSD hard drive = made of win.

Re:Low footprint netbooks

[hitmark]

palm tried that, and got booed of the proverbial stage by engadget...

Re:Low footprint netbooks

[Geeky]

That'll be the iPad then...

Trouble is, the current price/performance cut off is such that it costs very little, if any, extra to have a device that does more - a full function netbook, rather than a lightweight browser type of device. Unless the cut down option offers seriously better battery life, is much lighter and has a better screen than a good netbook, I don't see the market - if you just might need a more capable device, you're better off with one that does both rather than get a cut down device and also have to own the full featured one for the rest of the time.

Something like the Samsung NC10 has as much power as the crappy four year old laptop I have to use at work - 1.6GHz, upgrade it to 2GB, 160GB HD - and I can do pretty much everthing I'd ever want to do on a laptop. Solid state small scale devices offer no major advantages.

Re:Low footprint netbooks

[Al Dimond]

The iPhone OS is right for a phone with a tiny screen. If you have a bigger screen and want to use it for more computer-like things you'll want an OS that gives you more power. The original Eee PC had a stripped-down UI; how many people kept it and how many replaced it with something more flexible (whether Windows or a normal Linux WM)?

Oh, yeah, you'll also want the freedom to install any software you want, including stuff that Apple, in arbitrary fashion, would deny you.

I want...

[Anonymous Coward]

...some of whatever he's smoking: ""ARM chief executive Warren East has claimed that netbooks could dominate the PC market..."

They're really too slow to be useful in a number of applications, and it's only a little more to the same price for a netbook with a more mainstream CPU arch in it, esp. if you're considering mobile AMD parts and mobile Intel parts aren't that much more. While the rest of the *book specs being similar (integrated or lowend dedicated GPU) that increase in CPU horsepower is worth it unless you ABSOLUTELY need more battery life over anything else. (Size looks to be about equal with current trends as netbooks are rapidly becoming the size of standard notebooks.)

That said, I can't see much benefit for ARM in all of this as the VAST majority of notebooks ship with an Intel CPU & AMD is attempting their own, and with an x86 CPU it makes life simpler, much simpler rather than dealing with an ARM CPU that likely won't be running Windows and wouldn't be able to run many of the apps that people would probably want unless they're the c. 1.5% that use linux. (I multi-boot between different OSes, and having spent years with ppc(even though I would liked to have seen it go somewhere beyond the embedded, consoles, & workstations) I now greatly appreciate having x86 CPUs if for nothing else than wine useability under linux for those apps that have no linux/*NIX/etc. equivalent or ones that just aren't good enough.

As to phones/PDAs/etc, yeah, any old CPU is fine as I really don't expect to do alot with them other than use their intended features. Sure it's nice to be able to do a few other things but given I/O and screen displays it's still not entirely desireable. Possibly if actually useful headmounted or other type of displays were available along with enhanced I/O that might change, but I can't really say that I see that any more today than I did 10y or so ago.

Ah, I love earnings seasons, when CEOs pull crap out of their bottom that may sound plausible on the surface is nothing more than shareholder cheerleading to make it appear as if they're REALLY doing something.

Re:I want...

[AdamHaun]

That said, I can't see much benefit for ARM in all of this as the VAST majority of notebooks ship with an Intel CPU & AMD is attempting their own, and with an x86 CPU it makes life simpler, much simpler rather than dealing with an ARM CPU that likely won't be running Windows and wouldn't be able to run many of the apps that people would probably want unless they're the c. 1.5% that use linux.

What he said in the article was that it doesn't really matter whether ARM is used for the application process because there are already several ARM-based microcontrollers running the wi-fi, hard drive, camera, etc. The application processor is an opportunity for more growth, but the overall growth of the netbook market benefits ARM no matter what.

I don't see how 90% of PCs are going to be replaced by netbooks with tiny portable screens, though. Those are totally unusable for stuff like sustained office work. Maybe we'll all just use docking stations, but wasn't a key feature of netbooks the lack of peripheral complexity?

It sort of already has for me...

[IANAAC]

I could foresee netbooks replacing conventional laptops over the next decade or so.

My main laptop died this last summer, and I've been using my Netbook as my only computer since then (well, at least for work and some entertainment purposes).

As someone else pointed out, there are times I wish it had a bit more power, usually only when I go to Hulu or some such place, but other than that, it does everything I need it to do.

Hell, I even run Virtualbox with a WinXP instance on it for the rare instance I need to use a Win program and have no trouble with it.

MOD PARENT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

My kingdom for a modpoint

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Dayze!Confused]

I have modpoints, could you point me to your *cough* my kingdom?

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

I have modpoints, could you point me to your *cough* my kingdom?

That sound vaguely metrosexual. Mac addict, by any chance?

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure...the guy is Sting from The Police. The rest is self-explanatory. :\

This time its for real...

[Anonymous Coward]

Year of the linux notebook, Seriously guys!

Computing Power?

[AtomicOrange]

What about the gamers, graphics designers, and other people who need higher power computers?

You're not going to get top performance from a netbook, you're not going to render, or edit high megapixel drawings/photos.

Don't get me wrong, I love my netbook, but there's not a remote chance that I'd ever only have a netbook. I always plan to have my high power comp, and then likely some sort of media PC for the living room. 90% seems lofty. A life with only one low-powered computer? Never!

Re:Computing Power?

[Anonymous Coward]

three words : ndvida cloud based rendering

Re:Computing Power?

[Pinky's Brain]

Ah yes, because watching graphics through a couple Mb/s video stream is just like the real thing.

No - 90% of the new and bigger market.

[thaig]

i.e. including all those people who don't have PCs yet in this world of 6 billion people.

Stop talking and start delivering

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been waiting for an ARM netbook that I can buy for about a year. Owning the Nokia N810 tablet has convinced me that I don't need x86 compatibility. But my current ultra-portable is getting old and I'm getting desperate for a replacement.

Come-on ARM, give me an excuse to give you my money. I'd love a sub-1kg ultraportable with great battery life. Bonus since I don't have to pay the Windows tax. Install whatever is needed to make it work commercially (eg Android, Moblin, Ubuntu Remix), just let me install the full Ubuntu desktop.

It's not about if it can do the job...

[east coast]

It's a question of if people want it.

Just look around you, my Subaru is more than what most people need but it's one of the smaller cars on the road on average. Most people should be able to get away with eating 2200 calories or less a day but look at our fat asses and tell me that it's happening. Most people should be able to get by on a handful of TV channels and a modest collection of DVDs but we have hundreds of channels, On Demand, more DVDs in our homes than books... etc etc etc.

Modern culture likes comfort, modern culture likes the big is better lifestyle. Most people aren't going to adapt well to the next step up from the Speak and Spell. Even those who do begrudgingly adopt to it aren't really going to want it and, if they can afford a little better, will reject it with whatever bullshit logic they need to use to justify something a little more luxurious.

People have this obsession with hording and with being able to show that their possessions are bigger, stronger and faster than anyone else on the block. Computers are part of this culture of possession and no amount of benchmarks and proof of concept are going to change that.

Re:It's not about if it can do the job...

[hitmark]

modern US culture perhaps, but then again, hollywood is doing a hell of a job exporting said culture to the rest of the world...

Re:It's not about if it can do the job...

[kitserve]

Most non-geeks don't tend to hoard old computers though. The thing that we technical types tend to forget is that a lot of people don't really think about the speed of their computer, they just use it and accept the fact that it's grindingly slow due to being a few years old, laden down with crapware and viruses as "the way computers are". I know a number of non-technical people who have bought a new computer because they were finding their existing one too slow after they've had it a few years. There's nothing actually wrong with the old computer hardware, once it's been formatted and reinstalled everything's fine again, but most people are going to be more tempted by the idea of buying a cute new netbook for a couple of hundred (fun shopping therapy) than they are by the idea of wiping their boring old current computer system and starting over (confusing techy work).

Tegra Performance

[thaig]

Try this on your atom:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5gYSgqka1A&feature=related

I think it just makes nonsense out of your performance argument.

Re:Tegra Performance

[FourthAge]

So? If you combine that GPU with an Atom CPU you'll get exactly the same result. The performance is all on the Nvidia side.

Re:Tegra Performance

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you should follow the link and watch the video. While Atom+Nvidia can do HD, they consume 20+ watts doing it (not counting the display power). Meanwhile, ARM+Tegra is doing this on 150 mW, or 1/100 the power compared to Atom. That's not "exactly the same result".

Re:Tegra Performance

[FourthAge]

Yeah. I watched it. The ARM CPU is doing one thing: shovelling video data into the video decoder. which is implemented in hardware.

Inside the Tegra SoC, if you swap out the ARM core for an Atom or a PowerPC, you'll get exactly the same result.

The 20W to 150mW comparison is apples to oranges. 150mW (Tegra) is a custom SoC with dedicated hardware to decode HD video. 20W (Intel) is a motherboard - multiple chips, a complete chipset - comprising a CPU, Northbridge, and GPU in separate packages, plus other peripherals.

This is the very definition of an unfair comparison.

Netbook?

[gmuslera]

Most could have a portable internet device in the next few years. But its shape could end not being the netbook one. Cellphones, and tablets also want a share in that space, and probably will be a mix of all. Cellphones are getting into shape to be good enough internet devices, and if you want larger screens,tablets with keyboards, hybrids (like Asus T91, cheaper, more powerful and with far more battery life), should be the most popular kind.

This will require fast, cheap and energy efficient cpus, and if well could not be netbooks, ARM and other non-intel (i.e. TI's OMAP4) cpus should have a good portion of the market in that scenario,and probably a lot will be somewhat linux based (android, moblin, maemo,etc)

Re:Netbook?

[Anonymous Coward]

ARM and other non-intel (i.e. TI's OMAP4

OMAP is ARM. ARM does not sell silicon, they sell designs which TI, Qualcomm etc. implement.

Re:Netbook?

[Anonymous Coward]

A schooner IS a sailboat, stupidhead!

Thank you for pointing that out so the rest of us don't have to. Someone mod that up!

Meh

[AP31R0N]

i didn't get into laptops because they are too small. My fiance has a netbook which was handy on vacation a few times, but it's still too small and underpowered for me use as anything but a browser. For that i have an iPhone which is much, much smaller.

Or *New* market

[DrYak]

Given that, as far as I can tell, the only difference between a laptop and a netbook is size, what he's really saying is that laptops are going to get smaller.

Or that, a lot of people who didn't buy laptops before, on such grounds such as price and size, would start buying the new /smaller/ devices.
The absolute number of classic PC and laptop won't change much. But a fucking big new propotion of the population would start buying the netbooks.

Don't think "Laptops are displacing desktops at the workplace".
Think the way PDA were a new market that didn't cannibalise laptop users, but made a whole new batch of people buy the devices.
Or think the way the Wii didn't lower the success of PS or Xbox, but got successful in reaching a whole new market of casual gamers who would never had bought hardcore-oriented machines.
(Or what Apple is hoping to achieve with the iPad : the device for the couch at home, missing in the line-up between Macs - at work - and iPhone/iPod - on the move)

There are a lot of young people, who don't really need a PC given their work or studies. But they would appreciate being able to go on-line for socializing.
Currently their smartphone's screen is a little bit smallish. Dead-cheap simple small netbooks would be the way to go
(and would enable them to do some small editing on the cloud / GoogleDocs while on the go).

Now, will ARM's hopes of finding a new market to exploit get realised ? Hard to tell but I suspect this might work.

how about an ARM moblin port?

[Anonymous Coward]

how about an ARM moblin port?

I think that headline should read...

[bluie-]

...ARM Exec Wishes 90% of PC Market Could Be Netbooks

... only if someone start to sell them

[tummetott]

... only if someone start to sell them

Marvell Commics

[tepples]

If the netbook market becomes large enough, Intel will simply make whatever investment is necessary to outcompete ARM in the netbook sector.

Intel already sold XScale to Marvell, and as I understand it, Atom already has much of its die area dedicated to x86 compatibility cruft.

Absolutely yes.

[elnyka]

What East is really saying is, "Behold. I shall inflate stock values by making false and pointless claims." ARM already has a huge part of the embedded market in cellular phones. He is trying to make the claim that no one needs computing power, so everyone is going to switch to the cheaper ARM microcontrollers, and they will get a lot of licensing money as a result. But remember, netbooks are optimized for the net and only the net. If you want to do anything else mildly processor intensive like watching a HD video, good luck. (Even Intel's Atom processor is essentially an overclocked 486.) If you want to watch a DVD, good luck--your netbook is probably a little too small for that DVD drive!

After spending a while in Japan (and observing their net/electronic pattern usages), combined with purely anecdotal observations on communication and usage patterns of people here in the US and in my beloved 3rd world country of origin, it is fair to say most people are fine with a device that lets them e-mail and twitter and upload pictures on facebook, google for stuff, read the news and job sites, maybe run MS Office or Google Apps, and for the savvyy video conference with skype (which is how my grandma who lives in a little town up in the mountains got to see my newborn baby for the first time after getting Internet over dial-up.) Shit, even some of the Xingu people up in the Amazon have internet access now!!!! Anyways, go back to the topic...

The average electronics consumer WILL NOT use that type of device to run DVDs (there are super-cheapo portable DVDs for that) or run gcc, Mathematica or a LAMP. They don't need a super-duper CPU and the latest and greatest graphics card.

We, what we call "powerusers") certainly want a mighty gadget that can run everything we want in one device. But we do not represent the average electronic consumer.

Typical people, the average electronics consumer of 2010, whether here or Japan or south of the border, on the other hand will be happy to have an iPhone/BlackBerry, the smallest possible laptop/netbook that can do the job without much jitters and a portable DVD player (comes handy for entertaining your kids while you are busy with your laptop/netbook while having breakfast at Panera or wherever they sell breakfast with free wifi).

Warren East is re-stating the obvious (and inflating stock values), but that's his job. What we are missing here, is our ability to objectively judge the merits of his claims, not from our point of view as l33t hax0rs, but from the shoes of the average consumer - they are the ones that constitute the market (and the opportunities therein), not us.

Yeah right

[C_Kode]

Yeah right. Two people in my office have Netbooks and both complain about how they aren't powerful enough to do what they need. To top that, the only time they use them is when they travel so they can get mail, access Google docs, read PDF documents, and use IM.

I purchased one for my 11 year old daughter for Christmas cause she wanted one. All she does is complain about how slow it is and how much trouble she has watching videos and voice chatting with her friends. I tried to install a Canon Pixima iP6600D printer. I had to try three different ways to install it and finally got it installed, yet it still won't print.

Re:Yeah right

[phillipsjk256]

Maybe that's because they all run windows now.

The Windows based netbooks require a spinning disk to keep costs down. The problem is that these spinning disks have less performance than desktop drives from 10 years ago.

Re:Yeah right

[sowth]

Maybe the problem is the software. 10 years ago a 1GHz machine was fairly good. 20 years ago, a 1GHz machine was something experimental the miltary worked on.

There is no reason someone can't do a lot of tasks with a 1GHz (or even 500MHz) netbook except if they are using poorly designed, bloated software.

With just modest hardware acceleration, a 500 MHz computer can play videos just fine. I had a 500MHz computer which would play dvds just fine. Maybe these "slow" computers couldn't play "high definition" (a moving target), but I think if there were more "slow" supercomputer netbooks on the market, more websites would offer lower resolution, faster codec non-Flash alternatives for "slow" supercomputers.

The problem is computers have been an economy of waste for the past decade or more. Companies try to make you waste more so you need to constantly upgrade. Even software companies benefit from this, because when people throw out their old computer and buy another, they often "upgrade" to the "latest and greatest" software as well.

Yes there are uses which need multigigahertz computers, but the vast majority of casual use? Not really.

There must be more than 10% of us in the market...

[castironpigeon]

...otherwise hardware vendors would fail. By us here I mean the folks who assemble computers from individual parts because the stuff sold pre-assembled is garbage hardware with garbage bloatware pre-installed. So I don't see how 90% of the PC market will ever be portable platforms, let alone netbooks.

OMAP and other SoC

[DrYak]

But remember, netbooks are optimized for the net and only the net. If you want to do anything else mildly processor intensive like watching a HD video, good luck.

Modern ARM processor, such as the hyper popular OMAP serires or the nVidia Tegra do have this luck !

The OMAP package comes packed with SIMD extensions, a DSP unit, and a GPU (from PowerVR) including a core supporting hardware video decoding.
The Tegra is a multi-core ARM Cortex A9 (like the OMAP-4 generation) which, among other stuff, packs a freaking GPU from freaking nVidia.

Thank to this, most netbooks (powered by OMAPs) can currently (or will once Tegra hit the market) play HD video.

If you want to watch a DVD, good luck--your netbook is probably a little too small for that DVD drive!

What's the point of using a small device if you have to lug around a big case full of discs ?
As pointed by other reader, the HD movies are most likely to be streamed from the web / stored on an USB key.

In most countries with proper legislation (say Switzerland), users will probably format-shift their library to something compatible (just the same way people encode their CD libraries for ther MP3 players).

In the USA, due to the broken DCMA laws, this might be harder to achieve legally - on the other hand, with the rise of "always-connected"-ness (pervasive WiFi and 3G), online rental/streaming solution might flourish. Then again, the USA is also a country with broken data plans, so hitting the monthly download limit might be a problem.

netbooks will not overtake notebooks

[CosaNostra Pizza Inc]

First of all, the price gap between netbooks and notebooks is narrowing. Second, having all your apps online, as is the case with netbooks, users are at a disadvantage when they have no internet access. Third, there are just some types of apps that there is no online equivalent for.

Re:netbooks will not overtake notebooks

[sowth]

What netbook has all its apps online? I have an Asus EEE, and even though the preinstalled software is crappy, it works fine without the internet. Open Office, the media player, file/photo browser, the games, even firefox for viewing html files work just fine without it. You can also access a shell prompt and do things there.

I know because my internet access isn't exactly reliable.

33% is the upper bound

[Sloppy]

At work: need a real display and a real keyboard. So: no netbook.

At home: need a real display and a real keyboard. So: no netbook.

Elsewhere: Ok, yeah, I can see it. But within this niche, I think quite a few people are going to see netbooks as too large; it needs to fit in their pocket.

It ain't about CPU power; it's about the physical size of the case it's inside of and ergonomics. Things that are designed to be portable always be make compromises that make then less desirable when portability isn't needed.

But even though I don't see netbooks taking over, I don't see why ARM couldn't have a fighting chance. I think "lame" CPUs really are usually enough (and they just keep getting better) for most day-to-day stuff; at least Intel's previous-generation Atoms are, in my experience. If ARM can get into the netbook market and make that a viable platform for the software to run on (and that mainly just means getting ahold of driver sources, so that they can be recompiled) then at that point, there's no real reason you can't have an ARM CPU on your desktop. Sure, some people won't want it, saying that they need their Phenoms and Core i7s, but most people will be ok with it.

Re:33% is the upper bound

[Sloppy]

always be make compromises

Me be speak English.

Netbooks have a purpose

[proslack]

I've used an XP netbook (ASUS EEE) on several research cruises; the thing is a tank. I turn it on Sunday night, plug in the GPS, start the apparatus, plug in the data logger, and start the data monitoring and analysis software. It runs flawlessly non-stop for five days (typically until Friday night); while on the cruise (with seas ranging from calm to 10' waves) I can perform preliminary processing with R and SciPy routines, format the data, and save it to a built-in SD card as a back-up without having to leave the apparatus. When docked, I can link up to the marina's WiFi and check email etc. What I can't do is perform high-end GIS analysis, watch Blue-ray movies, or comfortably type the next great American novel; then again, that's what the desktop at the office and the laptop in my ruck are for. Netbooks are great if you need one, superfluous if you don't.

Re:Netbooks have a purpose

[CompMD]

I'm an engineer who finds himself on the road a lot. I have a netbook (MSI Wind U120, 1.6GHz Atom, 1GB RAM, 160GB HD) and a real laptop (Dell Latitude D630, 2.2GHz C2D, 8GB RAM, 120GB 7200rpm HD, Quadro graphics) for the hardcore work. Both go with me everywhere, and I'll use the netbook unless I absolutely need more power, but that's not too often unless I need to build software or something. I can do anything I'd normally do at my desk on my big workstations on the road.

Hammer

[avandesande]

...hammer manufacturer claims everything is a nail....

Arm does not make chips, repeat this

[Kupfernigk]

Arm is a chip designer that licences their designs. They do not specify cache or on board peripherals. Microsoft would have to strong-ARM (pun intended) rather a lot of manufacturers to get what they wanted. Including a small manufacturer called Samsung whose mobile phone strategy is now based around Linux.

One attraction of ARM is that if you can find a fab you can get what you want. This is precisely its advantage over X86. Everybody makes "small variants" for their special purposes. And everybody wants out from under MS/Intel.

The disadvantage of being US-centric is that a lot of people on Slashdot don't realise that outside the US there is a whole different ball game and it is bigger than the US market. The Nokia N900 is a Euro-computer descended ultimately from the Acorn Risc machine. South Korea has cultural and linguistic affinities to Finland. The weight piling up against Microsoft outside the US is increasing every day, and European computing is starting to take a different direction.

Re:There must be more than 10% of us in the market

[SpinyNorman]

I don't believe 90% either, but who knows.. maybe desktop PC's will seem quaint and ridiculously large before too long.

PC's in general are mass market. They outsold TV sets in the US in recent years!

I don't know how large the assemble-it-yourself crowd is, but note for example that there are only 1 milllion programmers in the USA compared to a (TV buying) population of 250-300 times that, so the hard core gees crowd probably really is a very small percentage of the whole PC market.

He's probably right

[Anonymous Coward]

What he's saying is that 90% of computers are used casually only. An ARM or Atom based netbook or nettop has more than enough resources for email, web browsing, office document creation and so forth, with ARM holding a large advantage over Atom in energy efficiency.

I want an ARM laptop

[lucian1900]

There's almost nothing that I do that requires an x86 CPU, and for the little that does, I can live with an older laptop/desktop. I would absolutely love an ARM laptop with a 15" screen and a battery to last 10h+.

Only 10% are primary machines?

[Braedley]

Netbooks are not primary machines. They're not meant to be primary machines. Netbooks are for people who have a desktop or very able bodied laptop and want something (more) portable, but don't necessarily need something very powerful. I will exclude MIDs, UMPCs, and the new tablets coming out from the PC segment, since they aren't netbooks and would only hurt those numbers. What we end up with is desktops, laptops, and netbooks. Desktops will always hang around, albeit in ever decreasing numbers, simply because of enthusiasts. Laptops, AFAIK, are currently the dominant primary computer being sold. This is because people want something that is portable, powerful enough to run apps that used to be dominated by the desktop, and don't care as much about upgrade-ability. That leaves netbooks only as secondary machines, or for people who need a computer only for the sake of needing a computer. The former group, by nature of it's definition, cannot occupy more market share than that of desktops and laptops combined (10% by Mr. East's estimates). That leaves more than 80% of all netbooks in households without a laptop or desktop. The later group are better served by crappy laptops anyways, as much as I hate to admit it. Even if we presume that the maximum number of netbooks are in households with a desktop or laptop, and that households only have 1 desktop xor 1 laptop (ha) in addition to 1 netbook, and for the sake of easy math, any house that only has netbooks (or the disqualified MIDs and tablets) has exactly 2 of them, you're looking at 80% of households without a primary computer. That number rises sharply when households only own 1 netbook.

Maybe what Mr. East meant to say is that 90% of the computing market (ie anything as capable as a smart phone and above) will be non desktops. That I can believe, and probably wouldn't even question it if I were told that today. That segment includes smart phones, MIDs, UMPCs, tablets, netbooks, and laptops. Even if we exclude laptops, the former 5 combined make up a respectable portion of the market. But smart phones and MIDs are not PCs, and UMPCs and tablets only make up a tiny portion of the market. That essentially leaves netbooks by themselves.

The Future is just around the corner. . .

[Fantastic Lad]

Damn.

At 3:30 on that video. . , I think I just saw the future.

The laptop and the netbook I picked up last Summer, and even the PC's I've been running over the past few years are all about to fall into the same category as my Dad's old stereo system. -Where the shape and weight of a given device will no longer be determined by space requirements of the technology packed inside. Every square inch inside my Dad's old amplifier was strategically taken up with vacuum tube electronics whereas the modern gear I could buy as a teenager was mostly empty space inside sleek plastic boxes with big shiny knobs. Empty calories.

Which probably means that it won't be long before netbooks and laptops are craptastic princess-pink or G.I. Joe themed items complete with dirty finger prints available at garage sales or brand new clattering around in the calculator section at the local Office Depot. The laptop you are using right now, while it is (most likely) a humming, energy hungry heat monster, will nonetheless ooze solid-state build quality and a healthy heft when compared to the next generation of light-as-air junk tech.

And when I think about it. . .

A lot of super-popular electronic media technology has come and gone over the last thirty years. Tape decks? Gone. Portable CD players? Gone. VCR's? Gone. The humble telephone? Changed beyond recognition. Here's a quiz: What's the one piece of technology which has stayed the same throughout that whole period?

That's right! Headphones and the 1/8" audio jack. Apparently we've arrived at perfection with audio gear. Everything else has changed.

I wonder what the final expression of the video display will end up being. . .

-FL

Debian working on an ARM port

[mrflash818]

...so I will be happy to load Debian on any ARM netbook.

http://www.debian.org/ports/arm/

For me the challenge is that there are not any mainstream manufacturers that have one available yet here in the US for me to try.

I plan on using it as a fun web surfing and email system. Maybe open office,evince for the ocassional attachment. ...Hopefully soon?

That's not at all what he said

[SuperKendall]

Netbooks are supposed to be those things too small to work like a real computer but too big to be really portable!

Like a game of telephone, it's pretty funny to see how the mind of the Apple Hater morphs actual statements made by Apple into absurd statements that are more a reflection of your own thoughts than Apple's.

In the presentation, Jobs said that for a device to fit in-between smartphones and laptops (as in, have a reason to buy in addition to a smartphone and/or laptop) it has to be better at doing some key things. Apple defined those things as: browsing, email, sharing photographs, videos, music, games, and reading ebooks.

Jobs didn't say anything about size or portability (in relation to Netbooks). In fact pretty much what he did say was summarized at the start: "Netbooks aren't better at anything".

Traditional netbook attributes he listed to support that statement were:

* Slow
* Have low quality displays
* "Clunky PC Software"
* They are just Cheap Laptops

I would argue he's generally correct on all those points. Yes Netbooks are more portable, but are they really better at doing anything than a laptop? I can't think of anything. They do have portability going for them, but is that enough for most people? The software often really feels shoe-horned into the devices, and web pages don't like fitting into the pixel count such devices usually have.

Now from that list, I think Linux netbooks actually have a decent chance because they address two of those points - tailoring Linix to a netbook can make it feel fast, and also can feel less clunky to use since it can be optimized to work in a small display space.

The downside of Linux netbooks is software, but if as Jobs said the key things you need to get right is the list above - well then if a Linux netbook can ship with software that does all of those well, it could be very usable for a lot of people. It still would trail far behind in custom software for the average user, compared to Windows laptops or the iPad. But perhaps it's close enough.

It would be nice to see a really well-made Linux netbook though with really heavily customized UI...

Re:That's not at all what he said

[drinkypoo]

Yes Netbooks are more portable, but are they really better at doing anything than a laptop?

They're better at being affordable, they get better battery life, they are more portable. Which brings us to...

They do have portability going for them, but is that enough for most people?

I have a Phenom II X3 720 desktop with 4GB RAM and a GTS 240 card. Before that my big machine was a Compaq laptop with a Core 2 Duo and a Quadro chip. I sold it and bought three netbooks for the same amount of money. That sounds kind of egregious, but they fill different needs and do different jobs.

The software often really feels shoe-horned into the devices,

Right now I'm typing this message on the cheapest and smallest of the three, an Asus 4G Surf (EEE 701 with 4GB SSD.) It runs Jolicloud, AKA Ubuntu Netbook Remix plus some doodads. I've been able to stuff every bit of software I would like onto the machine. It does everything it needs to do without compromise, albeit not always at the best speed. Boot time is pretty great for running Jaunty, as you might expect. It uses a GNOME-based desktop.

and web pages don't like fitting into the pixel count such devices usually have.

That part is very true. On the other hand, my other netbooks have better displays; the largest one is an 11" gateway with an LED-backlit 720p display. No problems fitting webpages onto that one. It's basically a subnotebook, though. However, you'll have far more problems fitting webpages onto an iPhone, which is the next step down, and even my EEE 701SD at least provides a [barely] touch-typeable keyboard.

Right now I'm in Panama, so the portability is an absolute must. I think the real question is whether current netbooks have enough portability. I'm hoping for something only twice as thick as a Kindle, and even more importantly, something fanless. Keeping the vents on the bottom of a netbook clear while sitting on a bed in a hotel room is impractical at best. Where is my fanless ARM-based system?

Re:That's not at all what he said

[Anonymous Coward]

They are just Cheap Laptops

He says that like it's a bad thing. But this is EXACTLY what we want and what the world needs. I'm sure it doesn't fit Apple's grand vision of everyone in the world spending a fuck load of money on a computer and keeping Apple's stock price up, but we damn sure need computers that are more affordable. Make these computers as fast as they can possibly be, drive manufacturing costs down and continue to pass the savings on to the consumer. Anyone should be able to purchase a disposable "web browsing machine" for under $100 from any supermarket, and make computing truly accessible to the masses. Maybe this is part of Google's vision of Chrome OS. I sure hope so, otherwise Chrome OS is going to be pretty damned useless.

Re:That's not at all what he said

[sznupi]

"Fit to width" function of Opera deals with the problem of webpages no fitting quite nicely, usually (plus this browser is generally very snappy, Opera Turbo proxy also helps a lot)

So I'd say netbooks don't even really have the problem of "not the best speed". For every sensible thing one wants to do on a netbook, there's still modern software that will be light enough.

64-bit? (Otherwise have fun with 4GB limits)

[adrianmsmith]

Is ARM 64-bit? By which I mean, can an OS create a process of larger than 4GB in size? (Or can it even use more than 4GB of memory in total?)

I was on public transport the other day, there was a leaflet advertisement from a consumer electronics high-street shop, selling TVs, DVD players, PCs etc, and there was a €500 PC (US$ 700) with 8GB of memory. So assuming in 2 years, every (Intel) PC you buy off the high street has say 8-16 GB of memory, ARM computers (90% of PCs according to the guy) are going to look pretty stupid with a 4GB limit.

But maybe I'm wrong, maybe it's totally 64-bit? But Wikipedia doesn't seem to think so, and I can't find much evidence one way or the other.

And it's not the case that "nobody needs more than 4GB" either, a) every PC will just have that much memory, and b) Because of that, programs will start to use that much memory. i.e. there is often a speed vs memory trade-off, and if everyone has GBs of memory, there's no point making your program run slower to fit in 100MB of memory.

And further, "nobody needs more than 4GB", well I mean in a way nobody needs more than 100MB I would say (10 years ago my desktop machine had 128MB, could do word-processing, internet browsing, etc.) But have fun running modern software on a 128MB computer! The same will happen to 4GB computers.

Anyone know?

Re:64-bit? (Otherwise have fun with 4GB limits)

[thaig]

ARM is 32-bit but then Intel Atoms are 32-bit also.

It has a very compact instruction set so it's quite lean on memory usage.

32-bit machines aren't in any way limited to 4GB of ram. It's usually individual processes that are limited and even then most systems have a way around it.

Re:64-bit? (Otherwise have fun with 4GB limits)

[TeknoHog]

One alternative for a 64-bit system with low power consumption is MIPS. For example the Lemote netbook that RMS uses has an 800 MHz MIPS64 called Loongson that consumes just a couple of watts maximum. I don't know much details, but apparently the CPU has proper floating point performance, unlike most ARM processors. While ARM systems do come with DSPs for media processing, MIPS could be more interesting for general computing.

Re:64-bit? (Otherwise have fun with 4GB limits)

[adrianmsmith]

I suppose so, but if the process is "Firefox" then that's still a problem.

And ways around it, I mean I reckon that could be OK if you have maybe RAM being 2x or 4x the address space (although for sure not fun for developers; but OK fun for developers is irrelevant for the users..) ... but I mean imagine a 16-bit 64KB address-space with a few MB of RAM, you'd spend all your time switching pages in and out of address space .. I mean the same would be true if you have a 32-bit 4GB address-space with e.g. 128GB of RAM..

Yeah I dunno, maybe memory availability will not expand as fast as I imagine it will, or maybe ARM will address the issue (as x86 and others have), but if ARM doesn't address the issue, it's going to be a problem one day, the only question is when.

Absolutely.

[Anonymous Coward]

H264 decoding in hardware is not cpu intensive, and does not use a significant amount of power. I look forward to having a low power netbook with an embedded gpu capable of hd content decoding, as long as the netbook display has hd resolutions.

Excuse me?

[KillShill]

No one has mentioned the other "800lb monopolist" in this story...

Inte£.

Do you think they seriously want ANY competition to their x86 hegemony/monopoly?

They brought out that POS Atom to try and compete in the embedded market and extend the x86 lock-in.

They ruined the OLPC's original plans because they were scared shitless that AMD would gain marketshare and mindshare.

Inte£ got M$ in major trouble with the "Vista capable" fiasco...

Don't forget there is room for more than 1 evil empire...

So why aren't desktops selling more?

[mdwh2]

But remember, netbooks are optimized for the net and only the net.

Completely false.

You seem to forget that computers get faster with time, exponentially. Today's netbooks are more powerful than laptops of a few years ago.

The same claims could be made of desktops - they're more powerful than laptops, at a cheaper price. But the fact remains is that laptops now outsell desktops, because today's laptops are more than enough for most people.

And how long do you think people are going to still be using DVDs for? You might as well sneer at laptops not including a floppy drive... Given the popularity of video mp3 players, it seems people are already preferring DVD-less solutions.

He's not pressuring Microsoft

[scdeimos]

East won't be pressuring Microsoft to build (desktop) Windows for ARM in any way with his statements.

Anyone with enough Windows experience will remember that Microsoft used to have SPARC and Itanium builds of Windows but decided to dump them and stay in the x86 camp. I'm not saying that was a good or bad decision on their part, but it will make them less-inclined to start supporting other platforms again.

I doubt that there's enough processing power, market interest or other incentives to make Microsoft consider porting (desktop) Windows to ARM - they've already got Windows CE/Pocket PC for that platform in any case (crap, though it is).

I "could" have a million dollars!

[danielsfca2]

I "could" also have a beach house in malibu. Too bad I don't. What a dumb statement. Netbooks kinda fail for a lot of tasks.

Offline support

[tepples]

As web apps get richer, it becomes less important to have anything other than a web browser.

That depends on to what extent "richer" includes offline support to cover the time between when you're at one Wi-Fi hotspot and when you're at the next. As of right now, native apps tend to have better offline support than web apps. Otherwise, at some point, you have to add the data plan for 720 USD per year. I'm just glad I can do most of what I need to do in Ubuntu Karmic on my Eee PC 900.

Re:Offline support

[swillden]

I think cellular data plans will end up being cheap and ubiquitous. Look at the Kindle model, and I think the iPad is going to do the same.

PS.

[sznupi]

And that's the ONLY game they ever play. Not because it takes them so much time, no (though it often runs in the background when they are doing other stuff in the room/etc.); they're just not much of a "gamer".

You're far from typical. Get over it.

Alpha, PowerPC, Itanium, MIPS, etc...

[LostMyBeaver]

Microsoft supported many different platforms with their Windows NT versions in the past. Early incarnations of the XBox360 SDK shipped with a PowerPC based Mac running a modified Windows XP.

Microsoft has produced compilers for x86, MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, Itanium and others. They have ported NT based operating systems to different platforms as well. The issue that the ARM guy is forgetting is that Microsoft produces Windows CE for ARM because they choose to. The other platforms we supported through other agreements. I remember reading some outrageous figure on a shareholder report from DEC in the old days which had them paying over $100 million to simply continue development and maintain the Alpha AXP port of Windows NT, Visual Studio and Office.

I have ported major applications to different platforms including most of these processors and often simply on X Windows. The fact is, even when the instruction sets and operating systems are almost identical, there are ALWAYS issues.

ARM would not be the hardest port that Microsoft will have performed of Windows. The systems are technically very similar, however it would require Microsoft to maintain and support a second high-volume platform. They had huge problems with Pocket PC across multiple chip platforms in the past and eventually everything ended up on ARM.

Imagine the millions of e-mails they'd receive "WinZip doesn't work on my Windows 7 based netbook" or "When I try to play this YouTube based video on my netbook, it tells me I need Flash, but Adobe says they don't have a version which runs on it."

Let's also point out that there are NOOOO powerhouse ARM systems which can be used for running Visual Studio with a debugger and tools. Even now, my little machine for compiling a tiny 500,000 line project is a Core i7. If I had to do the same work on an ARM, I'd kill myself. Sure, I can remote debug, but that SUCKS!!!! when developing desktop apps. So, no, I wouldn't bother porting my code to ARM based Windows, not until there was an ARM on par with my Core i7 or my 8-core Xeon to work on.

Microsoft could employ some technology similar to Apple's Rosetta, but Microsoft spent YEARS in the past trying to do that on the Itanium and the Alpha platforms and it proved to be a waste of time. Besides, you end up having to ship "fat binaries" supporting the host machine AND the emulated machine making Windows twice the size.

Let's not forget that Microsoft's compilers for x86 are EXCELLENT. If they're not good enough, Intel's and Portland Groups are FANTASTIC. GCC for x86 is Wonderful. ARM compilers still suck and Intel doesn't even bother making them anymore now that they sold XScale to Marvell.

Tell you want ARM guys... enjoy your "NetBook OS"'s. I'll keep waiting for my pocket sized x86 2Ghz machine.