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HP Kills ARM-based Windows Tablet, Likely Thanks To Microsoft Surface

Posted by Soulskill on from the children-who-never-learned-to-share dept.

MojoKid writes "That didn't take long. HP has publicly confirmed that it has cancelled plans to bring a Windows RT (aka Windows on ARM) tablet to market in time for the Windows 8 debut. The company has decided to focus on its x86 customer base instead. HP spokesperson Marlene Somsak has said, 'The decision was influenced by input from our customers. The robust and established ecosystem of x86 applications provides the best customer experience at this time and in the immediate future.' Sources at HP have confirmed that Microsoft's Surface unveil last week was a huge factor in this decision. HP isn't willing to go head to head with Microsoft when it comes to launching new, unproven products. Abandoning x86 is impossible, but dropping Windows ARM is a way for the computer manufacturer to signal its supreme displeasure without unduly risking market share. It also increases the burden on Surface itself. If other OEMs follow suit, MS could find itself as the only vendor selling ARM-based W8 tablets."

11 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. Why is this a problem for Microsoft? by mbkennel · · Score: 1, Insightful

    "If other OEMs follow suit, MS could find itself as the only vendor selling ARM-based W8 tablets."

    Everybody else's tablets/notebooks: $1000
    Microsoft's + Apple's: $600

    Ballmer knows he can't outfox Apple, but HP? All too easy.

    1. Re:Why is this a problem for Microsoft? by asliarun · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Apple's: $600

      iPad 2 is 400$ and iPad 3 is 500$.

      You fail to mention that this is the base-bottom price. The high-end iPad (64GB storage, 3G connectivity) costs $830 - and this is without any accessories, not even a cover. Here's the way I see it, and I say this without any bias: The iPad is going to face very stiff competition at two ends of the spectrum.

      At the low end, it will start facing serious competition from $200-$300 Android 4.0 and 4.1 tablets, many of which have extremely good screens, construction quality, and an equally good number of apps in the Android app store. Look at the recently announced Nexus 7. It has an IPS display, similar pixel density as the iPad3, 8hr battery life, Tegra3 CPU, and is priced at an extremely competitive $200. And it runs Android 4.1 Jellybean which is quite slick based on initial reviews.

      At the high end, it will start facing competition from ultrabooks and x86 based Win8 Pro tablets. If you are already paying $900 for a media consumption device that lacks the capability of running heavy-weight apps, you might as well pay a hundred bucks more and get an ultrabook or an x86 tablet that can do everything and will give you a viable laptop replacement alternative. What would be a very interesting would be a dual core Intel Medfield (Clover Trail?) Surface tablet or even a non-Surface tablet. It would run all your x86 and Windows apps, give you the same battery life and standby life as an ARM chip, and would outperform the best ARM chip in the market. Core for core, the 1.6Ghz single core Medfield that is shipping with the Lava phone is head to head with the much touted Tegra 3 or Exynos or Snapdragon, and has very similar power consumption and standby numbers. The only place they will lag is in the graphics horsepower, which is probably why you will mostly see 1366x768 screen res. i3/i5 tablets would not be very viable as their power consumption is still too high - although I'm sure this won't stop big vendors from coming out with ridiculously heavy Win8 Pro i3/i5 tablets with cooling vents and what-not.

      Anyway, just my thoughts. I do think that HP is correct in not supporting Win8 RT - it cannot carve our a niche for itself when it is getting hammered by Win8/x86 on one end, and Android/iOS/ARM on the other.

    2. Re:Why is this a problem for Microsoft? by Gr8Apes · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This will be in what, 1 year? 2 years? And you'll still be comparing it to this years iPad3 because, as we all know, Apple never updates its hardware, software, nor innovates or anything in a 1+ year timeframe. Here's a more reasonable prediction: Win 8 tablets will come out and will perform reasonably, have little to no software, and be essentially useless for the first year or two. Their battery life will be much less than advertised and generally fall/fail quickly after that. The screens will compare nicely with that of the iPad 2, now at least 3 years old and 2 generations back and no longer sold. Their market penetration will be under 5% across the first 2 years.

      As for Android, if they can't straighten out some of their ecosystem issues, I don't see their growth rate continuing at the current rate or higher, but falling rather significantly. The Nexus 7? It's got about 1/3 the screen real estate, by pixel count and size with a single front facing 1.2 MP camera only good for skype etc. And it's 2/3s the price. Hmmm, iPad Killer? Nope. Nice toy? Definitely.

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
    3. Re:Why is this a problem for Microsoft? by steelfood · · Score: 4, Insightful

      RT's inability to run x86 apps is a huge drawback. That alone makes it compete with Android and the iOS on Google and Apple's terms. In an established market, where there already are two dominant players, any competitor would have to offer significant improvements over the existing products to even be able to play ball, much less succeed (in this day and age where patents are granted to anybody who files, actual success is a crapshoot). I was pretty surprised to hear companies had even signed on to Windows RT. There may have been a market for HP's Windows RT offering. I honestly doubt it. I think HP was working on a Windows RT product only because it was present, not because there was any potential for sales. And I suspect many of the other vendors thought and will react the same way.

      On the other hand, being able to run legacy and new x86 apps is a huge selling point for an x86 tablet (with a proper touch interface no less). Notice that the announcement doesn't mention canning any products based on the x86 version of Windows 8. That's because so long as enterprises are stuck on x86, there will always be a market for x86 laptops, even ultra-thin laptops disguised as tablets. HP knows this. They'd be blind to not see that the market potential for x86 Windows tablets is even today much higher than any potential for Windows RT tablets.

      I think this may be good for Microsoft with respect to Windows RT. Too many form factors has always been Android's bane. If Windows RT needs only to support one piece of hardware or even only the standard configuration Surface set, the software will probably work better. Of course, whether Windows RT can actually compete with Android and the iOS is up for debate (and I honestly don't really see any compelling reason why it would). But it stands a better chance if Surface was the only piece of hardware it needs to run on and support.

      I suspect based on the ridiculous license pricing and their release of their own hardware that Microsoft is intentionally moving itself into position to be the only hardware provider for Windows RT. If they do successfully break into the ARM tablet market with it, they'd have their cake and eat it too. I don't know whether this will work out in the long run, and I think they think the same way too, because it seems they're hedging their bets with the x86 version of Surface. But they stand to gain a lot more than they'll lose.

      But Microsoft's goal may not be not to break into the tablet market so much as it is to maintain their dominant position in the enterprise market with a tablet offering. By having an answer to Android and iOS tablets, companies have an option that integrates well with their existing infrastructure. So perhaps in this regard, they will succeed.

      --
      "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
    4. Re:Why is this a problem for Microsoft? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You know what I find funny? You mention that the ipads will face stiff competition because of CPU, memory ....

      And I zoned out. CPU and specs aren't nearly as important any longer. Apps are king, and Win8 doesn't have any.

      I don't expect a lot from HP or MS. They don't 'get' pads, and once they do, they still must compete with the Apple app ecosystem.

  2. Re:Not that HP was ever very good at Tablets But.. by NeutronCowboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Well... I'm actually more surprised that HP refuses to take the lead on ANY consumer-related goods. Or enterprise products/services, for that matter.

    Man, I thought for a while that HP might be able to turn it around and get back to its roots of being a kick-ass engineering company, but it's pretty obvious that those days are now gone. I'm pretty sure that even the old engineering fogeys who might have been able to tell the yung'uns about what HP culture was like before have left the ship. At this point, it's just a large computer manufacturing company like Dell and Acer, with some enterprise big iron and consulting thrown in.

    Sad to see them go.

    --
    Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
  3. Naturally by sjames · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Even HP is smart enough to know that if they do just a little too well competing with Surface, there will be an update to RT that "mysteriously" tanks the performance of the HP product.

    Not to worry, anxious to prove they're not up to their old tricks, MS will fix the issue just in time for the post-Christmas sales slump.

  4. Who cares, IMO..... by King_TJ · · Score: 4, Insightful

    HP already utterly and completely blew it with tablet computing when they made the boneheaded move of cancelling the TouchPad. I bought a new 32GB model on sale for $149 as part of a closeout promotion Micro Center was running. (Basically, if you bought some other HP computer, you qualified for the $149 TouchPad too, and I had to get an HP desktop for my work.)

    Despite being an Apple iPad user since day 1, I gained a lot of respect for the product HP had. They copied off a lot of the little things that made Apple successful, while managing to retain their own uniqueness. The TouchStone wireless charging dock was brilliant, for example, and was FAR more elegant than any of Apple's iPad dock solutions. The integrated login of webOS was a great concept as well. (Just create an HP user account and configure all of the online services you want to use with the TouchPad through that master account. Then you're signed in to all of them, or can select the ones you want on and off at any time with virtual switches to slide on or off. Go to the email client and all of your configured mailboxes are pulled up right there. Same for the calendars.) Even their online store had what I thought was an excellent layout -- where you browsed it like a magazine. The home page of the store would welcome you with suggestions of relevant apps you might wish to look at, based on the next holiday coming up or time of year, and there were pages of several featured apps described in more detail as you turned the pages and browsed.

    If HP had any sense, they should have realized that the rush to grab up all of these discontinued tablets at blowout prices gave them a window of opportunity. All of a sudden, they had a decent-sized market out there of active users interested in the product! They needed to strike while that iron was still hot, rushing back to look at ways to improve the tablet and re-release a version 2 (hopefully at a reduced price that would keep it competitive -- but one still high enough so the sales would be profitable). From what I heard, there was actually a second TouchPad product almost completed when HP canned the project anyway.

    The Palm guys who did webOS were really talented people ... just the type HP needed to actually do something innovative. But in the musical CEO madness, they got thrown under the bus.

    HP can spin this any way they like, pretending they're sending Microsoft a message by cancelling support for a new ARM based Win 8 tablet. But come on! I see right through that B.S. Reality is, such a product would lack any real appeal compared to what Microsoft themselves announced. It'd be yet another boring wanna-be tablet in a black plastic case, with too high of a sticker price. Honestly, I can't see why any talented engineers or designers would even make more than a minimal effort working on anything new for HP these days? They just crap all over most of it and cancel project after project without giving them enough time to mature and gain popularity.

  5. Re:Not that HP was ever very good at Tablets But.. by Sir_Sri · · Score: 4, Insightful

    HP's track record with tablets is not all that impressive, but this is a big blow to Windows 8

    Quite the opposite. Window RT is a monumentally stupid idea. HP not supporting it is nothing but good. The level of consumer confusion it will create is disastrous. "Why does this work on your tablet and not mine" why does my tablet not have an arm, or need an arm?

    If microsoft wants to gradually trend the market towards having split arm and x86 business at the same time they can do it themselves, no one in their right mind should be producing windows arm anything.

    Now microsoft doing it might shame intel into competing better and so on, that's good. But theoretical competition that drives innovation being good isn't the same as confusing users who, for the last 30 years have never understood system requirements and adding a new completely completely unresolvable compatibility problem is really bad for the windows market and stands in opposition to the one thing they're trying to do, which is make a simplified experience for users.

  6. Agilent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The company you are remembering is now called Agilent, and doing quite well.

    HP is the demon-spawn of the Carly.

  7. Re:Not that HP was ever very good at Tablets But.. by Astronomerguy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Well... I'm actually more surprised that HP refuses to take the lead on ANY consumer-related goods. Or enterprise products/services, for that matter.

    Man, I thought for a while that HP might be able to turn it around and get back to its roots of being a kick-ass engineering company, but it's pretty obvious that those days are now gone. I'm pretty sure that even the old engineering fogeys who might have been able to tell the yung'uns about what HP culture was like before have left the ship. At this point, it's just a large computer manufacturing company like Dell and Acer, with some enterprise big iron and consulting thrown in.

    Sad to see them go.

    All the engineers left when HP split into 2 companies a few years ago. They're still going strong at Agilent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agilent_Technologies