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HP TouchPad To Be Liquidated At Fire Sale Prices
Hugh Pickens writes "According to an article by Tony Bradley, news is spreading quickly online that HP is going to clear out its vast TouchPad inventory by dropping the price to an offer you can't refuse. Rumor has it that beginning Saturday the 16Gb TouchPad will be $99, and the 32Gb TouchPad will be a measly $149. 'It is actually a fairly capable tablet. It's just not an iPad 2,' writes Bradley. 'For $500 it was a joke. For $300 it was still a shady deal. For $99 it's a steal.' HP has learned the hard way, and quickly pulled the plug on its tablet, proving that HP never had a solid tablet or mobile strategy and that it was really just looking for an excuse to get out. 'The reality is that my Best Buy is swimming in unsold HP TouchPad inventory,' adds Bradley. 'I went out tonight and picked mine up at the regular $400 price to beat the rush. Situations like this are why they invented price matching. I can just go back with my receipt once the fire sale starts and get the price adjusted and the difference refunded.'"
Android is an OS. Apple the phone maker is in the top 4 phone companies in the world, iirc. In that mix there is only 1 Android branded company, Samsung. Apple is ahead of Samsung.
There is no Android Corp. The Android Corp does not make money to keep going. Samsung, HTC, LG, etc need to make money selling a product to stay in business.
Google just bought Motorola Mobility (upon government approval, legal boilerplate here) for the patents and such. But soon then will look at Moto as a way to make the hardware they want to innovate with faster. That whole vertical stack thing that has become very sexy of late. Then all the asian companies are going to be looking for a new OS, perhaps they will consortium up and grab WebOS at fire sale. If that happens, Android is left with Moto gear and then you will see a different picture.
If you want facts, use facts. Is you are comparing OS's then compare OS's.
So Android (runs on phones and tablets) vs. IOS (runs on iphones,iPod touches and iPads)
If you are comparing phones, then compare phones. ( check out graphs at asymco.com for that)
You want to lump a bunch of wildly different phones into one big group, but then exlude a bunch a
products in the other group. pick one or the other.
These are just regular consumers, not geeks, they go with what works.
Having just set up a boatload of both macs and pcs (owned by individuals, not companies), with macs being as-if-not-more problematic, I have a theory about this. See, there is a myth that Macs just work, when in fact they are a gigantic pain-- things that work on 10.5 (cisco VPN client) and 10.6 dont work on 10.7; and with Lions new "restart my apps" feature that everyone seems to use, the Macs now boot up as slow as can be and are often slower than Vista laptops with 1gb of ram. I could go on and on about the issues they have that seem to be brain-dead UI etc decisions, but its not the point.
My theory is that someone has a bogged down, virus-laden laptop, and theyre considering getting a new one when their friend, who has a Mac, says "go apple-- theyre SO much better". So they go and get a new SandyBridge Macbook Air, and it IS better-- its lighter, faster, and the screen is nicer. THeir belief is reinforced, and they go and tell their friends to buy mac.
But the thing is, for much less they could have gotten a very nice HP Envy, or a high end Sony, or a solid Lenovo, and been just as happy, for less-- but because of the stigma of "PCs are slow", they dont consider it if its price start to approach the Mac. So they make the purchase that costs considerably more, and of course that comes with some nice perks, and of course OSX IS a good OS (though I have scores of issues with it and think Win7 is better in the corporate world by far).
So I basically break it down for my friends like this: You can get a MacBook pro with Thunderbolt, 4gb of ram, and an i3 processor for $1600; or you can get the EXACT same laptop from HP (probook 4530s) sans the thunderbolt port and with a different case (and slightly worse multitouch) for about $450. That is, every year for the next 4 years, you can buy a new probook, and throw the old one in the trash, and youll still come out about where you would have been if youd bought the mac.
That's a myth. Apple users are some of the most critical around.
Petty might be a better word. I havent seen any complaints about how awful their UI automation is compared with, say, AutoIt, or how trying to enforce system settings with "defaults" is a bear compared with working with the registry (look up "how do i do XX on windows registry", and then compare with a similar search for apple's defaults), or how it seems to be more UI centric than even windows (with a number of System preferences being simply un-administratable from the shell). Instead, I see a number of people talk about how its enterprise ready when it very clearly is not.