Vizio Plans To Undercut The Market For All-In-One PCs

TV maker Vizio is famous for undercutting competitors' prices on LCD TVs; now, the company has released word that it will introduce a new line of budget computers, and next week will be showing them off at CES. Bloomberg reports that the company won't yet disclose actual prices (the kind with numbers), but says instead only that they will be at a "price that just doesn’t seem possible." As the article mentions, the all-in-one desktop machines shown look a lot like Apple products; BetaNews has pictures, and ominously mentions Apple's tendency to sue over similar-looking products.

Comments

The Curse of the Rounded Rectangle

[betterunixthanunix]

Aside from rounded rectangles, is there anything else that looks similar to an Apple product in the picture? Has Apple been marketing truncated-pyramid shaped computers lately?

Re:The Curse of the Rounded Rectangle

[Anonymous Coward]

There is that minimal keyboard that looks like it would be hell to type on if you have any sort of speed. That's very Apple.

Re:The Curse of the Rounded Rectangle

[bonch]

If you really think that the only thing that makes it similar-looking to Apple products is "rounded rectangles," then you're intentionally being obtuse for whatever reason. There comes a point where it's obvious that other companies are liberally borrowing from Jonathan Ive's design shop at Apple.

Vizio's PC concept looks like this. The keyboard looks just like Apple's flat keyboard introduced a few years ago, the trackpad is a clone of the Apple Trackpad, and though it's less of a copy than the others, the screen is certainly reminiscent of an iMac, especially taken as a whole with the rest of the components.

I'm not surprised at all that, with all the design work Apple puts into its products, it is going to try to protect that work from knockoffs. Not only is this taking advantage of design work done at Apple, but if the products turn out to be low-quality or problematic, their resemblance to existing Apple products ends up damaging Apple's brand as well. I realize Slashdot comments tend to have an Apple slant (to put it mildly), but come on, this is completely obvious "inspiration" from Apple.

I think what really goes on here is that some people just don't want to give Apple credit for anything, and they hate when people do credit them, so when comparisons between designs are pointed out, it pisses them off and they make snarky remarks about "rounded rectangles."

Re:The Curse of the Rounded Rectangle

[viperidaenz]

You mean that TV shaped thing in the picture from the company thats been making TVs since 2002?

Re:The Curse of the Rounded Rectangle

[AngryDeuce]

My question is, at what point does a particular design go from being something proprietary to something obvious for it's function? For instance, when does "rounded rectangles" go from being a style feature to a "of course the corners are rounded, what else are they going to do with them, make them pointed?" When does a particular size go from a "design style" to "duh, of course it's going to be about the same size, it is intended for the same function"?

Personally, I have no problem with design being proprietary, but when it requires competitors to actually produce inferior products and impede on their functionality to avoid just looking too much like another product that it is directly competing with, it doesn't seem right to me. Of course tablets are all going to be about the same size, people have about the same size hands, more or less. Every chiclet style keyboard looks basically the same, every trackpad is going to look basically the same, every tablet is going to look basically the same, every smartphone is going to look basically the same. A manufacturer shouldn't be forced to put physical buttons on a touchscreen device just because Apple's touchscreen devices don't have any, or point the corners of their tablet just because Apple's are rounded, or not bevel the edges (that would just be uncomfortable to hold for anyone, I mean, come on), or any of the other silly things that I've heard come out of these patent lawsuits...

Re:The Curse of the Rounded Rectangle

[Anonymous Coward]

uh, yeah. It is a well known FACT that TV is just an acronym for AppleTV. Also, surprised no one has mentioned this. Ever notice how the layout on most keyboards is the same as the layout on Apple Keyboards? Rip. Off. It is an ever more well known FACT that QWERTY is Martian for Apple. There are a billion ways to design a keyboard but they all come out rectangular just like Apple. Key sizes pretty much the same as Apple. Even the SAME LANGUAGE AS APPLE!!!!!! They all use the "keystroke" which is the term that high-energy physicists at the LHC have used for centuries to describe touching the brilliance that is Apple products. Most damning is this Vizio product is made from Aluminum. How many things in your house are made from Aluminum. One thing? Two? Most tech products not made by Apple are made from Lead and use molten lava for electrical wires.

It's gotten so bad even general appliance makers are ripping off Apple. Went in my kitchen and saw that my refrigerator was not only rectangular but also made from brushed stainless (like the iPod) and used the English language!!!! And the sink was made from the same exotic Apple exclusive materials as well. And obviously Kohler ripped off Apple's trademarked ease-of-use. All I do is lift the handle and it magically knows what temperature I want my water. Probably ripped of iOS for the sinksoftware as well. Where are the GPL whiners to defend Apple? Nowhere, that's where. And my sink also, not my favorite part honestly, has the same "walled-garden" type block as iOS. Try as hard as I can, but I still can't get the thing to give me soda or beer when I want it. That's really all Android based sinks have going for them. But in the end it's OK because I need Apple, er, Kohler to protect me from evil soda and beer. Don't want to cross the streams. (Copyright Apple).

Re:The Curse of the Rounded Rectangle

[Nemyst]

Corners should have spikes on them... You know, just so you can run them through particularly annoying fanboys.

Re:The Curse of the Rounded Rectangle

[Joce640k]

Ohh, I don't think speed is an issue. These are Apple users. Hunt and Peck is plenty of speed.

I remember the iPad launch and Steve Jobs describing the iPad keyboard as "excellent".

I'll miss Steve ... he was one of the greatest stand up comics in history.

Good for them.

[Nyder]

Cheap computers are a good thing for the poor people. computers might suck, but at least it will allow some people to get online.

Not that you can't find a ton on craigslist or anything.

Re:Good for them.

[Osgeld]

a local thrift store had a compaq pentium I machine that booted up to a 98 bluescreen and wanted 100$, and some dumb shit bought it. Meanwhile across town at the habitat for humanity reuse center (and this like 5 min away, ... small town) they were selling 2ghz p4 pizza boxes for 5 bucks each, and they sat there for months.

poor people for some reason often have a skewed vision of a good buy, that 100$ computer HAD to be good, and those 5$ computers were useless shit, point being its often better to direct them away from ripoff list cause they will plop down 600 bucks for that mac G4 that some douche thinks is still the sweetest thing on the planet

Re:Good for them.

[mrclisdue]

Habitat for Humanity (dot org will resolve) often give stuff away, never mind just having $5 Pentium 4s.

They'll take donations, too.

cheers,

Re:Good for them.

[Baron_Yam]

While some people just can't catch a break, or have suffered from lack of opportunity... people who are poor long term often have related poor decision making skills. Whether that's genetic or due to poor parents teaching them the wrong things, I'll leave to the social scientists.

You'll see a surprising number of fairly wealthy people play the lottery - one ticket here and there. You'll see an equally surprising number of poor people play the lottery, dozens of tickets at a time. You'll also see them maxing out credit cards and going to paycheque cashing stores, seemingly without realizing that if they'd just hold off for ONE paycheque, they'd have 10-20% more money to spend. I know a guy with a bottom-end job who is very modest in his purchases, and keeps socking most of his money away. 20 years later, he's a freakin' LANDLORD to some of his former coworkers, and he built it all on a minimum wage job. It can be done.

Seeing a poor person get taking isn't surprising, but when they're fleecing themselves and the person profiting *isn't* trying to take advantage of them, what do you do? Give up on the adults and hope for the best for the kids.

I say this as someone whose extended family has both middle and lower income families in it.

Re:Good for them.

[hedwards]

I find that hard to believe an economic system like that is called communism. In order for a capitalist society to exist, at least in the type that the US is, you have winners and you have losers. Most of the winners had quite a bit to start with and most of the losers didn't have much to start with.

This whole notion of upward mobility hasn't been true in at least 40 years. Sure you get some people that manage it, but the money that would have gone to making that work out is now being siphoned directly to the richest Americans.

Re:Good for them.

[Solandri]

In order for a capitalist society to exist, at least in the type that the US is, you have winners and you have losers.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of capitalism. Economics is not a zero-sum game. In a capitalist society, you have big winners and you have small winners. Every transaction is made because both participants feel it is advantageous for them to make it. If either party feels a transaction will make them a "loser", they simply will not make the transaction. Failing to be a big winner is not losing.

If you're consistently generating losers, that points to a problem either in your implementation of capitalism (e.g. overly broad patents prevent competition from introducing and lowering prices for flat, rectangular computing devices), or in the people (lack of education/information, or irrational decision making).

Re:Good for them.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you understand what a zero-sum game is. Zero-sum games occur when winners win exactly what losers lose. If economics was zero-sum no growth would EVER be possible, by definition. Anything gained by expanding producers would necessarily be lost by someone else (other producers, probably).

And capitalism has no requirement that there be any losers at all. It doesn't preclude losing situations, but in a strict market capitalist system, any transaction that is KNOWN to be a losing proposition will never go forward. Every transaction that does go foward in such a system.. has no known losers. Both sides expect (and generally do) to come out in better positions than when they went in. Which is why they went into the transaction in the first place.

it has rounded corners

[amoeba1911]

I sense Apple lawsuit coming, Apple owns the copyright on rounded rectangles.

Re:it has rounded corners

[getto man d]

FTA

...will go on sale by June at a “a price that just doesn’t seem possible,” he said, declining to provide specifics.

They're stealing one from Apple's pricing scheme too!

Underengineered

[Anonymous Coward]

Vizio products are terribly built. They're fine under perfect circumstances, but the insides are like a freshman EE student built them. Accidentally plug a USB drive into the firmware update port (which accepts a USB form factor)? New motherboard time. Live in a house built before 1978 and took an electrical surge? New motherboard time. And none of it is under warranty. All you can do is plead ignorance and hope for the best.

Re:Underengineered

[Anonymous Coward]

In my experience, Vizio's products are very robust. An angry ex-girlfriend threw my 37" vizio LED TV on the floor and stomped on the back. The front bezel cracked off, but it still works perfectly. Pretty amazing for something so thin (the tv, not the ex).

Apothecary is laughing now.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

So there is going to be brutal price war in the PC market. And Apothecary wanted HP to get out of that business and was excoriated for it. Now what? Fate of HP (and other manufacturers who threw in their lot with Microsoft) is doomed. Not that I shed any tears for them. Not that any of the PC maker big execs showed any kind of leadership or foresight.

They agreed to every non disclosure clause from Microsoft, accepted tainted money to keep Microsoft's competitors out, missed every opportunity to set themselves apart from their competition by something other than price. Did any of these geniuses think, "What is the major complaint about the PCs? Lack of security. Let me pitch a line of PCs with Firefox front and center, with NoScript pre loaded. Throw in some OpenOffice free too" when it would have mattered, may be five years ago? Nah, they obediently kow-towed every line drawn by Microsoft and reduced themselves to mere purveyors of commodity boxes. When there is no difference between the brands qualitatively what happens? Price war, gimmicky sales tactics, pre-loading of crapware and nagware. Good riddance. Go die in a price war somewhere clueless idiots.

Was hoping for a MUCH bigger screen

[unrtst]

This is just more of the same. I was really hoping that, with Vizio being a big flatscreen maker, they'd just be slapping a PC on the back of them.

Many big LCD TV's these days have built in network media stuff (netflix, hulu plus, pandora, and loads of more minor players), so they've got some computing guts in them already. I was hoping they'd just up the power a little and bring out an integrated webtv type thing on 55"+ screens, and include a keyboard. If it ran like a real PC, they could even skirt the hulu plus issues (and similar from other providers) since it could be considered a PC. Toss in external storage device support (USB3 + gigabit network) and it'd be a winner.

But no... it's just another all-in-one monitor and another (likely underpowered) laptop. I wonder if the 27" model will at least have more than 1920x1280 resolution (ie. 2560x1600)?

Re:Wondering about desktop sales ...

[mirix]

I think a big chunk of that is that even a 5 year old desktop is fast enough for most consumer tasks now, no?

The market is rather saturated with fast desktops, not like the leaps between 486 -> P1 > P2/3. There's less incentive to upgrade regularly.

Re:Wondering about desktop sales ...

[AngryDeuce]

Desktop's will never die, not as long as they have the capability of being 10 times more powerful than their portable brethren.

When did everyone get this huge blind spot when it comes to what people do with computers? There are still people out there that do more with their computer than surf the web and consume digital media. People that need as much raw power as they can get for what they're doing have no choice but to remain on the desktop. Although laptops are now beginning to fill that niche (and even then, cheapo ones struggle), tablets and smart phones aren't going to fill that niche for a long, long time.

When tablets, smart phones, and laptops come out that are able to directly compete with their desktop counterparts in terms of raw power, productivity and potential, then I'll say the desktop's days are numbered. Until then, desktops aren't going anywhere...

Trolling.. must try HARDER

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you even bother switching accounts to post in the same story?

The keyboard looks exactly like Apple's flat keyboard, and the trackpad is the Magic Trackpad that Apple started offering a year or so ago.

--it's not at all surprising that Apple is going to be proactive in protecting its design work.

But sites like Slashdot are full of Apple-haters who don't want to give the company credit for anything

bonch writes

The keyboard looks just like Apple's flat keyboard introduced a few years ago, the trackpad is a clone of the Apple Trackpad

I'm not surprised at all that, with all the design work Apple puts into its products, it is going to try to protect that work from knockoffs.

I realize Slashdot comments tend to have an Apple slant (to put it mildly), but come on, this is completely obvious "inspiration" from Apple.

I think what really goes on here is that some people just don't want to give Apple credit for anything,

Re:Trolling.. must try HARDER

[LoverOfJoy]

Looks like bonch needs to be more proactive in protecting his literary work. Overly Critical Guy is making a cheap knock off of his posts and selling it at a discount.

Either way, though, I'm not buying.

Re:Wondering about desktop sales ...

[Ayanami_R]

This is ultimitley why PC sales are down. Good enough old systems coupled with a broke populace = no new sales. Take it from someone who fixes computers for a living. My sales are way up as more people are getting older systems upgraded or repaired because they're still fast enough, and cheaper than a new machine. Ultrabooks aren't going to do dick to spur sales, as they are too expensive (even at price points like 649 usd) and most customers I talk to plan to spend less than 500 when they absolutely need a new machine. Apple is running out of people that can afford their product, and with food and fuel expected to surge next year I am fairly sure they have peaked. If people have to choose between an idevice or food and a non idevice I think we all know which one wins.

Re:Wondering about desktop sales ...

[AngryDeuce]

Yes, but the desktop computer itself is not a particular technology. Telegraph is defunct but people still communicate long distance electronically. Analog TV is defunct but TV's are everywhere, Celluloid movies are on their way out but people still go to the movies just the same as they did 80 years ago.

With "The Cloud" we may see more people move to tablets and smart phones that serve as little more than a terminal, but desktops aren't going anywhere. Honestly, it's funny, but the majority of people I know with laptops use them in exactly the same manner as a desktop: sitting at their desk, plugged in, often with a standard wired mouse plugged in for good measure since most people don't care for trackpads. For all the portability, they unplug their laptop like once a month, if that, so it's a wasted feature. And tablets, I honestly don't know how people can do anything with them that requires more than basic text input or coarse pointer control. I've heard the anecdotal "I wrote an entire novel on my iPad and it was as easy as a keyboard!!1!!1!1!" but I honestly don't see how people can stand software keyboards, it's just way too inefficient for my expectations, I guess.

Anyways, my point is, as long as people are sitting at a desk using a computer, there will be desktop computers. Not everyone needs portability or a particular form factor.

A price that doesn't seem possible

[Arancaytar]

Do they actually say anywhere that they mean a low price?

Re:Wondering about desktop sales ...

[jo_ham]

I'm not so sure - they have seen year-on-year growth for the past 6 years, in opposition to the general trend of the industry as a whole (this is exclusively talking about OS X machines). The number of people who use a computer is extremely high, and Apple have been welcoming switchers for more than half a decade and still have plenty of room for growth. Plenty more affluent/well enough off people to consider the switch to Mac when they look at upgrading/replacing the old computer - especially now that it's even easier than ever to run Windows in a VM or dual boot if you still have "that one program" that you really must keep that is Win only.

I'm not sure they're close to a plateau yet.

Marketing/PR Bulls***

[evilviper]

PCs are already rock-bottom pricing with tiny margins. Visio isn't going to be able to do anything significant. Maybe their first units will be loss-leaders to try and get into the market, but that's about it.

Visio is already in the business, remember? Their Android tablet is pretty expensive, at $320 USD on Amazon right now.

The only unique and cost-cutting thing they could do would be to introduce PCs with ARM (or MIPS) CPUs, instead of x86. I doubt it, but if so, good luck to them. That still won't bring prices down significantly.

Re:Bottom line

[Tharsman]

Not necessarily true, but I don't think they'll make much of a difference. They might affect Apple sales because some people will look at iMac (or, more likely, have one recommended) but then see this and think "hey, it looks similar enough, I don't care about that extra gloss -- I think I'll get this and save $500". Those people would have bought a Mac, but are either a bit too price sensitive or just not that in to Apple to care that it's not the same thing, and they're going to get a poorer experience as a result.

When a user has already the disposition to spend the extra amount of money on a mac, there are very little aesthetic replacements that will convince him to do otherwise. You are talking about someone that already decided to spend that money on an iMac. If he hasn't, he was never an Apple prospect to begin with, and was going to go to Best Buy to look at their all-in-one desktop offerings.

This is like saying that Toyota can introduce a cheap Ferrari knockoff tomorrow, and prospect Ferrari buyers forego the Ferrari in favor of the cheap knock off. Again: thinking about buying a pretty mac is not the same as having ever accepted to pay the price, meaning you were never a potential customer.

That in itself is fine, but it kind of tarnishes the Apple brand by association. That's why Apple are suing Samsung -- not because of rounded corners and whatnot, but because if you look at it superficially, it appears to be 'a cheaper version of the same thing'. Apple don't want to get lumped in with everyone else, that's way they create individual products and so carefully build and protect their brand.

Apple is going after Samsung not for just one copy. They are going after them because Samsung is overdoing it. They make some of their products not only look like Apple products, but they make the friging box and even the frigging charging cable look like the Apple equivalent!
I'm sure you must have seen this image before:
http://cdn.iphonehacks.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/applesamsungsimilar.jpg

Mind you, I think Apple is taking the case too far into too many product lines. Not all Samsung products are Apple knockoffs, but it does seem they have a department dedicated to produce just knockoffs.

This is typical Samsung behavior and they have done it over the years to any dominant force in the market. Apple is not the first one to sue them over it. The Samsung BlackJack was just a copy of a Blackberry (and got sued by RIM over it's name) and same goes for the Samsung SYNC vz Motorola RAZR. It's Samsung's DNA to just copy design. I am not too familiar with Android Phones (too many of them) but I'm sure you will find an EVO ripoff somewhere in the Samsung lineup.