Odd Laptop-Tablet Hybrids Show PC Makers' Panic

jfruh writes "Taipei's Computex trade show has seen an array of strange devices on sale that are somewhere between PCs and tablets: laptops with screens you can twist in every direction, tablets with detachable keyboards, all-in-one PCs with detachable monitors. Some have Intel chips, some ARM chips; some run Windows 8, some Android. They all exist because of the cheap components now available, and because Windows 8 will make touch interfaces possible — but mostly they exist because PC makes are starting to freak out about being left behind by the tablet revolution."

Comments

WTF?

[Jaysyn]

My cousin has had an HP that did this before the iPad was a thing. It runs WinXP for Tablets.

Re:WTF?

[bigstrat2003]

Yeah, seriously. This is a) nothing new, and b) an example of newer technology making the idea more feasible. It has nothing to do with "freaking out".

Re:WTF?

[Guspaz]

Yes, it was from the "Tablet PC" era, and devices lack that were a terrible failure. People already complain that the iPad is too heavy at a pound and a half, nobody wants a six pound tablet. Admittedly, one of the major failings of the Tablet PC is being addressed with the Win8 touch interface and app ecosystem.

Re:WTF?

[Colonel Korn]

My cousin has had an HP that did this before the iPad was a thing. It runs WinXP for Tablets.

Dozens or hundreds of laptops have done this for the better part of a decade.

Also, this post is one of the worst pieces of crap I've ever seen make it onto Slashdot. TFA is a garbage bloglike post with virtually no content. The paltry information it has includes major mistakes, such as "Yet another Acer laptop, the aptly named Yoga, has a screen that folds..." The Yoga is, of course, a Lenovo product. We've talked about it before.

Bluntly, James Niccolai and Michael Kan are both idiots who shouldn't have jobs. Soulskill was lax in posting a story that only linked to their garbage "article."

Re:WTF?

[cpu6502]

Well to set the record straight:
- Apple wasn't the first to develop a multimedia computer (music-quality sound and full-screen video).
- Apple wasn't the first to develop preemptive multitasking for home computers.
- Apple wasn't the first to develop MP3 players.
- Or tablets.
- Or smartphones.
- Though they were the first with laptops (I'll give them credit for that).

Re:WTF?

[Runaway1956]

But - I quote: "Windows 8 will make touch interfaces possible"

To summarize, the world has been waiting on Windows to enable us to have touch interfaces. So, what is this "Apple" to which you refer?

Re:WTF?

[bipbop]

Is the laptop bit some sort of humor I don't understand? As far as I can tell, they weren't especially early on the laptop front.

Re:WTF?

[Missing.Matter]

Sorry to self reply, but I think I missed the most obvious shortcoming (given the topic of this article) of the current tablet market: hardware variety. If I want a tablet today, I can have any I want as long as it's a 7-10" black ARM slab. What if I want a 14" tablet for drawing? What if I want one with a quad core processor. What if I want discrete graphics? What if I want an 50" tablet I can hang on my wall? And yeah, what if I want one that flips or twists or slides? These aren't available today, and with Window 8 and an variety of manufacturers in the game these will be available in the next 1-2 years.

Re:WTF?

[sfhock]

BYOD is getting big in the corporate word. It means Bring Your Own Device, and its a way to let your employees use their favorite tablet, laptop, etc to access corporate systems and info. The security must be such that a non company owned asset can safely access company resources while still maintaining access to the outside world ( say through VPN or virtual desktop technology)

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

They were the first company with the latop as you know it. (Apple is responsible for a whole lot of 'as you know it's, not technical firsts)

There were lots of portable computers but nothing like the old 100. It was the first computer that was a true analog to it's desktop counterpart in the now familiar truely portable clamshell formfactor. It had the same performance as a destkop mac. Used the same media. Used the same software. Same operating system. You could even plug in the same ADB and SCSI peripherals. Macs at the time were already impressive, and to have a no-compromise portable was downright mindblowing.

All of the other portables at the time were significant compromises in one area or another. Many had no nonvolital storage. Many used a paired down OS or software implementation. Many were just plain big and heavy. The first mac laptop had everything, and it shook up the industry. That debut presentation where he simply pulled it out of a laser printer paper tray set the audience on fire for a reason.

Re:WTF?

[UnknowingFool]

From the manufacturer's standpoint they want to make these things like appliances. If you mess with the internal workings and it stops working correctly why should they have to fix it? B If you modify your brand new Ford by installing a new fuel injection system or tweaking the onboard computer, do you expect Ford to support it? You have a right to make changes as you see fit, but I don't think you should expect the manufacturer to be liable for anything that you did. And you don't expect to use the excuse "but it was a small modification". The manufacturer can't know that.

Re:WTF?

[idontgno]

There were lots of portable computers but nothing like the old 100. It was the first computer that was a true analog to it's desktop counterpart in the now familiar truely portable clamshell formfactor.

Data General One. 1984 (predating Macintosh Portable by 5 years and Powerbook 100 by 7). Precisely equivalent to many desktop systems of the time (IBM PC/XT standard: MS-DOS, Intel 8088 processor, floppy boot) except portable, battery-powered, and clamshell laptop format.

Sorry. The Powerbook 100 represents an incremental evolution of the laptop idea, but it's not really ground-breaking by any unbiased standard.

Re:WTF?

[Solandri]

They were the first company with the latop as you know it. (Apple is responsible for a whole lot of 'as you know it's, not technical firsts)

There were lots of portable computers but nothing like the old 100. It was the first computer that was a true analog to it's desktop counterpart in the now familiar truely portable clamshell formfactor.

Nope. The Powerbook 100 was introduced in late 1991. PC notebooks in the modern clamshell design were showing up as early as 1988. The one I remember best was a Sager 286 model. I noticed they were local to me, so I dropped by their offices and requested to see one (it retailed for over $5k, I certainly couldn't afford to buy one at the time). They brought one out and I got to touch and play with it - a glimpse of what the future held. They were so proud of it, giving me a little spiel about how they were going to upgrade it with a 16 MHz 386SX processor in a few months. They insisted on calling it a notebook, to distinguish it from the clunky laptop computers like the old Compaq Portable and Osborne.

By 1990, the notebook form factor had gained enough traction that Intel announced the 386SL - a low power version of the 80386 made specifically for laptops. They weren't able to churn them out until the following year, but that should demonstrate that the notebook market was thriving long before Apple ever showed up to the game.

I'm starting to wear this phrase out, but: Just because the first time you saw something was on an Apple product, doesn't mean that they invented it. (To be fair, Apple's big contribution to the form factor was the trackball, then the trackpad. Before then, you had to plug in a mouse if you were going to use it outside of DOS. One laptop had a marble trackball off by the side. The Powerbook was the first with a huge trackball smack dab in the middle.)

Re:WTF?

[Voyager529]

Um, no, I'm talking about the Tablet PC initiative

No idea what "The Tablet PC Initiative" is -- sounds like prog rock band or something.

I'm going to assume this was an attempt by Microsoft to innovate the future with a product they couldn't figure out how to sell to anybody? Like the Smart House or all the features in Longhorn which never happened?

If all they were trying to do was jam XP onto a touch screen, no wonder nobody bought them.

That sounds all well and good, until you consider a few extra things. The first person I knew with a tablet had one in 2003; it was a Fujitsu Lifebook. As a result, "no wonder no one bought them" sounds right in 2012, but requires a bit of perspective...

In 2003, Wi-Fi was still relatively new at the consumer level. If you wanted cellular data, you would likely end up with a GPRS connection, or EDGE if you were lucky; it complimented Windows Pocket PC Edition, Palm Treos, and early Blackberry units pretty nicely. Capacitive touch wasn't practical at the consumer level; it was either resistive or the Wacom-on-glass system that they ended up using. iOS didn't exist yet (the second-gen iPod was just getting out of the gate; Apple was looking like they could afford to keep the lights on), broadband had only recently hit critical mass. ARM processors lived in devices running embedded operating systems; they were nowhere near powerful enough to run a general purpose OS. Atom didn't exist.

In *that* world, the primary market for tablets were people taking notes with a pen. For all its faults, Windows Tablet PC Edition did a pretty impressive job of recognizing handwriting, which was good because it was the primary reason to be a tablet. Meanwhile, text entry was still king, and 5 hours of battery life was a pretty reasonable amount of time to be using your tablet.

No one is claiming that the first generation of tablet PCs running Windows XP struck a chord with the general populous; they clearly did not. Their target demographic were students, medical professionals, and other people for whom OneNote was the killer app. There was no iOS, there was no Android, and desktop Linux was still getting its pants on regarding getting a decent desktop distribution out the door. Windows XP was just about the only thing that *could* work on the systems at hand, because Apple was just about the only company who was able to write an OS specifically for tablets and have people look at what they *could* do as opposed to what they *couldn't* do, and even that was highly based upon the fact that there were a few years' worth of iPhone OS builds behind it, during which people had built up some level of software library for that platform.

I might not be the biggest iOS fan in existence, but you'd be hard pressed to find me a company besides Apple that would have been capable of generating demand for a new computing form factor and a new OS for the paradigm at the same time. If Microsoft released WindowsRT back in 2004 and had capacitive touch and 802.11g and an App Store and an unlocked EDGE cellular modem and sold it at $499...it would have bombed then too because the immediate reaction would be "running Office 2003/Quickbooks/AutoCAD/$WINDOWS_SOFTWARE doesn't work!" or similar complaints regarding hitting 16x16 pixel toolbar icons with a finger and being productive.

It's not that people overlooked swivel tablets running XP because iOS was that much better, it's that the target demographic of people who would benefit from handwriting into their laptop was a very small market, and there was no Facebook, Angry Birds, or Netflix streaming to justify a tablet as a consumption device.

I get it. Pc makers != Tablet makers

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

So, let me understand it right. There is a set of PC makers. And there is a different and distinct set of entities called tablet makers. And there is no commonality between them. And any member of one set can not join the other set. The only thing to do when pc sales fall and tablet sales zoom is to freak out and put together strange chimeras.

PC makers show chimeras in tradeshows because that is what the trade shows are meant for.

Re:I get it. Pc makers != Tablet makers

[gsslay]

To be be fair, this is pretty much what TFA says, but the slashdot headline and summary sucks and totally misses the point.

Being concerned about not being left behind in new developments and new markets is what drives innovation and competition. It's not "freaking out".

Some will fail, some will be successful. Today's chimeras may be tomorrow's standard kit.

Old news

[nine-times]

Here's the thing: this has been going on for laptop and cell phone manufacturers since... forever. These people don't know where the technology is going, they don't have a plan, and they arguably don't know how to make a good product. Given the technical capabilities of computers these days, it's amazing how poor a job manufacturers are doing of actually solving problems or giving people what they want.

Re:Here's what I want as a technical user

[jedidiah]

The beauty of capitalism and the free market is the fact that you can have your pony and the other guy can have his tablet.