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PC Makers In Desperate Need of a Reboot
nmpost writes in with a story about how hard it is to be a successful PC company in today's world. "Hewlett-Packard Co. used to be known as a place where innovative thinkers flocked to work on great ideas that opened new frontiers in technology. These days, HP is looking behind the times. Coming off a five-year stretch of miscalculations, HP is in such desperate need of a reboot that many investors have written off its chances of a comeback. Consider this: Since Apple Inc. shifted the direction of computing with the release of the iPhone in June 2007, HP's market value has plunged by 60 percent to $35 billion. During that time, HP has spent more than $40 billion on dozens of acquisitions that have largely turned out to be duds so far. HP might have been unchallenged for the ignominious title as technology's most troubled company if not for one its biggest rivals, Dell Inc. Like HP, Dell missed the trends that have turned selling PCs into one of technology's least profitable and slowest growing niches. As a result, Dell's market value has also plummeted by 60 percent, to about $20 billion, since the iPhone's release."
And when HP wanted to purge itself o the 'PC Maker' part of their business to do a reboot the shareholders revolted.
A large portion of the reasons for Dell to lie about their accounting was that they didn't want anyone to figure that they were collapsing.
Feed all the MBAs to the paper shredder.
That was before they sold off much of the good stuff, and spun the last of it off as Agilent. Today's HP is HP only in name.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Face it, folks, the gig's up:
Coming: 1. Then end of general purpose computing. 2. "Secure" computing (Palladium-style) 3. Only approved programs via "app stores"
Apple has been too successful. They've got $100bil in the bank, and growing. All the other computer makers are in the doldrums, and are could come to the verge of bankruptcy just by making some more bad decisions.
It just won a billion dollar settlement which is the beginning of their campaign to obliterate choice in tech.
"Normal" people have been completely brainwashed, and it's doubtful we could explain anything in a way that would make them desire tech freedom. When there was just a chance that Saint Apple's holy iDevices might have to pay for the use of some Google patents, US Senators actually held hearings for poor old Apple.
Buy a couple extra laptops. You'll look on them like you do your C64 now.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Fewer MBAs, more engineers.
You're supposed to be a tech company. Where are the tech advances? Where's the engineering? Why are your products almost indistinguishable from Dell's?
Commodity PCs might be boring, but they are still needed and there is still a big market for them. The real problem is here:
HP, like too many other companies, has reduced its R&D to almost nothing and tried to get new products and ideas by just going out and buying other companies.
Remember when Carli Fiorina was in charge at HP? She seemed to have a good vision
I'm sorry, what? I had to re-read that a few times... Really? Carli Fiorina had a good vision for HP? Wow. Simply wow...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Of course they did this, they outsourced their soul when they thought their companies were nothing but machines with parts that could be replaced with parts from the cheapest provider. Once they did that they lost their soul and they lost their innovation. Nobody had a desire to take pride in their company anymore knowing that they could well be the next to replaced with someone in India next.
It was the rank and file of the old HP, Dell, Compaq etc that were so damn innovative that built the industry. Upper management came along and thought they could outsource them and still get the same results, failing to see how people would no longer /care/. People who are focused on surviving simply don't give a damn and the next thing you know companies like Acer and Samsung rise from being providers to the giants to the next giants themselves.
Here's the thing, if they do the same thing the American companies did, they too will fall and someone else will take their place. Seriously, can anyone ever give me a single example of where outsourcing actually worked out in the long term for someone other than the vendor?
Both Dell and HP are making billions. They mostly cater to the business sector. I mean sure Apple has a 25% profit margin, which is insanely high for a hardware company. Most of that is from iPhone and iPad, and those items come and go based on the whims of consumer taste. 10 years, 20 years is a long time in the computer industry; companies rise and fall during those times. Anything can happen. 15 years ago, Apple was nearly bankrupt, and now they're the most valuable company by market cap. IBM was taking massive losses nearly 20 years ago, now they're the 3rd largest tech company. In the meantime, Compaq is gone, DEC is gone, Wang is gone, etc. HP and Dell have been reinventing themselves, and they're closer to what IBM looks like rather than Apple.
It's only dying as a consumer appliance. Professionals and power users will always need a powerful general-purpose computer with a real input device (a.k.a. keyboard) and a screen bigger than 10 inches.
My personal experience is that HP and Dell are the preferred suppliers for this sort of thing. Who else are you going to buy? IBM/Lenovo, Acer, or Asus? None of them have the value that Dell or HP have these days for general purpose desktop computing.
Hell, Dell/HP are my preferred server vendors, as well. When it comes to servers, they tend to have less gongshow anachronism than IBM. UEFI actually boots quickly on their platform(s). While they use less Intel Ethernet, it's something I can work with, versus the craptastic RAID controllers shipping on IBMs (at least on Windows; with Linux, we have other options on IBMs, eg. LSI firmware and mdraid).
Do these vendors really have that much historically locked up financially in home user sales that the home PC market flatlining (or, at least, becoming commodity) is enough to sink their business? Servers and storage may not be 'interesting' but they're fairly high profit margin and low support (vs. home user desktops). Intuitively, their profits should be up. So why aren't they?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I think there is still quite a market for the general purpose PC...you know, getting real work done. The deal is, PC makers have had a one-two punch for long time that made people upgrade. Either a new version of Windows came out, or a really faster processor came out, and everyone upgraded. It's just to the point that even cheap PCs do what *most* people need, and on top of that Windows upgrades have sucked and made people not want to upgrade.
I think people have confused this funk with the release of the iPad. I guess there is only so much money to go around, but I highly doubt it is just the iPad that has done the industry in.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Using company money to buy a yacht is actually a really good idea. Definitely what I would do if I had that job.
I assumed he meant Carli's eyesight wasn't bad. Nothing else made sense.
Hewlett-Packard Co. used to be known as a place where innovative thinkers flocked to work on great ideas that opened new frontiers in technology...
That innovative part of HP was spun off into Agilent years ago. The part of HP that was left behind from the spin-off was just an ordinary PC and printer company.
Agreed. Compared to buying Palm, buying a Yacht is a really good idea. I assume the yacht still has some residual value....
Well, sure, but they won't be buying a new one every two years, and the margins for HP and Dell and such will be razor-thin.
Their profits are actually quite good. But then you subtract all the money they pay to incompetent executives, and all the money they waste on pointless mergers and acquisitions, and suddenly they are losing money.
There will always be someone to service the market. We use all sorts of weird PCs for data capture and analysis at work. The company that makes our sells a few hundred a year tops. Doctorow rants about civil wars aside, there will always be a nice for general purpose (or high end specialty) computing.
(Replying to Original Commenter's comment): Yeah, HP sucks, but so does Dell and Acer and Gateway and everyone else who makes PCs.
(Replying to both comments, but mostly AC's): I think you over estimate the demise of the PC and also don't understand what they are used for in Enterprise. I agree that, in general, the PC business is declining. I think that will result in a lot of consolidation, likely into segments where the consumer PC business will consist entirely of low end PCs and the enterprise business will consist mostly of high end servers. And HP's bread and butter is in the Enterprise, so I suspect that a company like Acer or Dell will end up "owning" that business and HP will "own" the Enterprise business. Everyone else will go out of business.
Speaking of enterprise, there are a LOT of applications running on PCs in the enterprise. Salespeople run client / contact management software, account managers run portfolio analysis software, HR runs tons of HR-related apps, there's a myriad of software running on desktops in the enterprise and upgrades are required all the time. I don't see PeopleSoft being replaced by an iPhone app anytime soon.
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
The PC market is in decline, but it is not dying and will not die in the near future. The main reason for sluggish PC sales is that the technology has reached a peak at the moment (or you might say it has finally matured) and consumers no longer need to buy a new system every couple of years just to keep up. Since the dawn of the PC era users have had to constantly upgrade their hardware to run that new OS, that new game, or that new multimedia application. That time has ended. A decent system bought 5 years ago will still run everything it needs to.
True, the rise of tablets and smartphones also gnaw at the PC market, because some people only want to check their email and log onto Facebook, but the power, flexibility and usability of the PC will remain indispensable for a large amount of users and professionals.
I was at Lucent when Carly was there - I thought she was a waste of space then, and I was shocked when HP hired her. HP was "Bill and Dave's company" - by and for engineers making great products. It was obvious to this outsider Carly was the wrong choice - I had no idea how right I was. A friend in HP Sales confirmed there was dancing in the hallways the day the HP board finally canned Carly. The only good part of HP that is left isn't HP at all - Agilent Technologies is as close as we have to what Bill and Dave started.
Stop that. Please, I beg of you. Stop saying PC dying. I have yet to see a tablet that can handle the Autocad/Mastercam/Catia drawings that we work with. I don't want to be stuck having to build this shit from scratch, or purchase a server just so people can use the software they have to use every day.
Before you all go off on 'virtual server/blahblah' I'm telling you, we have tried, and nothing beats having each user have a PC at their desk using the software to do their work. Just because we can make the PC last 5 years before having to replace it, doesn't mean that the PC is dying.
Keep your stupid investor hands off the PC market. Seriously. - Love, Aerospace Manufacturing
PCs are no longer shiny and new. PCs aren't so immature that they need a major OS upgrade or a major hardware upgrade every year or every 3 years. They're a mature product.
You can use a 5 year old Compaq as an HTPC. You can use a $300 low profile bargain PC for everything but heavy gaming.
The market is saturated.
Fully amortized and discarded office PCs are more than adequate for the needs of most home users.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It's all in how you phrase your responses; I almost always have karma overload, and yet I do the odd bit of trolling, and tend to disagree with people when I actually disagree.
There's a difference between bowing to the popular view and alienating those who hold the view.
You make a lot of very good points, but waste them by making a lot of unsubstantiated accusations in the same posts. When you then make a few bad poitns and make unsubstantiated accusations in the same posts, people flag you as a troll, and will treat you as such even when you say something valid using the same tone.
People don't like being called idiots, and they don't like those they admire being called idiots. If you instead follow the socratic method, ask more questions, question people's logic instead of their humanity, you'll find you get +5 instead of -1.
Has someone written a "How to have karma without being a whore" FAQ? If not, they should.
No one is under the impression they can't be docked. The issue is performance. They can't even match low-end machines from 5 years ago, let alone any modern desktop machine from this century.
But thin clients are the future! Stop being old and crusty and resistant to change even if its change for change's sake and for the worse.
The problem is, I wish they would stick more to boring commodity PCs. Instead they pre-load it with utterly useless software.
The amount of sheer crap they install on PCs now is maddening. On both my wife's HP laptop, and her mom's Toshiba, I had to go in and disable/uninstall of those stupid *$^%!@ extra "assistant" pieces of crap. They don't do anything except hog up the CPU and memory, and mostly amount to something which says "I see you are using a computer, would you like us to optimize that for you".
I wouldn't buy a PC from any of the manufacturers which install any of this shit. Give me a vanilla install of Windows, and leave me the hell alone. I don't want your wizard, agent, helper, toolbar, or any other of this crap. It doesn't help, and it effectively downgrades my machines as it's using all of the memory and much of the CPU.
The problem with these companies is they think they can make something better to brand the OS, and they end up selling a shitty machine with a crappy user experience. Stay out of there, you're clearly not qualified for this.
And, from what I've seen of my wife's personal and work laptops ... well, HP sells low end hardware at a high-end price. I would personally not buy from them again. Give me a boring old beige box PC from a local system builder any day that has quality parts in it -- I can always put some "Type R" stickers on the case later if I feel it needs a little something extra. ;-)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Ah, yes, Carly "I never met a well compensated, high tax revenue generating engineering position I didn't want to ship overseas" Fiorina.
How is the old bat doing? That senate run didn't work out so well, did it? Wonder if she spent any of her $20 million severance package on it.
As bad as she was at HP, many any gods or goddesses that exist NEVER forgive her for the destruction of Bell Labs/Lucent. She was part of the team that brought about the end of pure research at Bell: research that once led to transistor, the silicon microprocessor, fiber optics, communication satellites, Unix and C++. Oh, and it was a Bell antenna allowed humanity first heard the echos of the Big Bang.. Bell Labs was a key component in the USA's post WWII tech boom.
So, basically, fuck that cunt.
Yet I continue to not need or want a tablet or smart phone. I am reading this on a dying platform. Sniff...
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
In the 90's & early 2000's HP (Carli specifically) was busy throwing 10's of thousands of professional jobs overseas, killing off American jobs in the process. The Corporate bean counters thought, ya, cheaper over there, we save dollars and make more profit... WIN! What the bean-o's miss is that every single job sent is one less customer, and more importantly, one less person who understands the process and can bring innovation into the company. We are now reaping the benefit of that short sighted greed. Ultimately, unless the US realizes the value of on premise intellectualism, this country will continue to devolve to 3rd world status - full of monkeys just smart enough to run the machines, but to dumb to complain or revolt.
Microsoft has a program for no crapware where they also tune the OS called Micosoft signature: http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msstore/html/pbPage.MicrosoftSignature
Also, are you under the impression that tablets/phones wont be able to dock up to a real 'workstation' with a screen that is > 10 inches???
Sure they will. And what you'll get is an expensive, absurdly underpowered, restrictive computer that specialises in running the kind of software you get if you spend $2 in an app store.
The current generation of mobile devices is doing very well because they serve a vast and previously bizarrely undersupported market: people who want a portable device for easy information consumption. If you're not doing any sort of content creation, significant computation, or catering to more than one user at once, you can get by with the kind of processing power you find in an iPad or a Galaxy S3. If you're not expecting much in the way of interaction, you can get by with a touchscreen and very simple user interface concepts. For the market where they are wildly successful, the current crop of smartphones and tablets are excellent devices, balancing low power consumption, ease of use, portability, and "wow factor" against a bunch of downsides that their users simply don't care about.
On the other hand, as soon as you do need to do anything creative, or do any real computation, or scale up to multiple users, or support non-trivial interactions, the current crop of mobile devices suck. All those downsides that didn't matter before are now dominant, and the high price, low power and almost zero flexibility are fatal liabilities. And no matter how much window dressing you lay out, they always will be, because it's not the job these devices were designed for.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
When you're looking back at Carli Fiorina as your salad days, you should fold up shop.
Fiorina is one of the most overblown, overrated CEOs of her time. Anything she touches turns to shit. She's about as smart as a paper bag.
I agree. Anyone who is a "PC enthusiast" has long been a builder of his/her own systems and was never a customer of Dell and HP anyway. Asus and Gigabyte, maybe, but not the mass-market junk fed to the ones who don't know any better. Shame about Dell though, they used to be really really good in the late 80's/early 90's. And shame about Compaq, being bought out by HP which should have stuck to making calculators and laser printers.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Bill and Dave's company became Agilent Technologies, a designer and manufacturer of first class scientific instrumentation and test equipment. They're making money: profit margin ~ 14%, return on equity ~ 22.5%, dividend ~ 1%. The dividend is not great, but the other figures look ok. They're not really dependent on consumer retail sales like HP, so they're part of a different part of the economy.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Coincidentally, right after HP peaked, they hired former Microsoft Windows boss Bill Veghte who is just recently made it to COO managing daily operations. He is in grand position to perform his Elop maneuver on HP when Windows 8 launches, announcing total commitment even unto death. How odd that after all these years the heads of BOTH of Microsoft's two largest and most successful divisions might jump ship almost simultaneously and wind up at the head of key companies just at the pivotal moment. Uncanny, eh?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The PC isn't dying. It is, however, going to undergo a dramatic shrinkage as a lot of people realize that they really only ever consume data. In that area, tablets and phones are going to replace PCs.
PCs will be the exclusive domain of the nerds and content creators. Just like it was in the beginning.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Dude I don't know what you have against shit and paper bags, but you're just being cruel comparing them to carli.
Nice idle cores you got there Mr. Power User. I'm so impressed.
I'd rate power based more on what you get done. If I can produce more with less then I am the higher powered user.
Also note: A real power user will understand when more cores will do him/her very little good and will keep his/her old system as there is no benefit in system churn.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Nope. Apple is still Lincoln. Same parts as Dell.
If you want to pretend to be like a BMW owner you will actually have to pay for an BMW and stop being a clueless poser.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Luddites obviously don't want a PC anymore, and I don't disagree with them. When a tablet or smartphone gives them all the functionality they required, such as the ability to tweet, change their Facebook status, and play Angry Birds, then there is no reason for the average consumer to require a PC today. So all those claiming the PC is dead, long live the phone/tablet, your voices have been heard a million-fold.
PC (or Mac) is still a very much required product for content CREATORS, you know, those people that make Facebook, Twitter and Angry Birds. You can't make apps on the iPad or iPhone, you can't make apps on an Android phone or tablet, and can't create app on a Windows Phone.
I think the PC market IS being rebooted, in the form factor of a hybrid tablet. While Luddites will need nothing more then a Windows RT tablet, the rest of us that develop and create content could easily see the old PC shoebox form factor being replaced by a Windows Pro tablet. Honestly the spec's of the Surface Pro exceed what I use for work to develop on and I am sure that there will emerge a new generation of Pro tablets with i7's and all kinds of fast multi-core CPU's and gobs or RAM that will essentially replace shoebox and laptop computers. As much as Apple has laughed at a tablet/PC hybrid, I think Apple is very scared of a market of competitive devices where content can both be consumed AND generated. A device that allows "enterprise" to easily gravitate towards a new tablet form factor running Windows is Apple's biggest nightmare, and its about to come true in a few months.
So, I won't rule Dell and HP out of the game yet, but if those companies are not ready to release a Windows 8 Tablet (both Luddite loving and Geek loving variants). then you should rule them out for being willfully stupid to recognize and adapt to market trends.
For me, a PC is anything that can be used to develop content on. While the average consumer needs nothing more then a device that beeps when it receives a tweet and some sadistic joke of an on-screen keyboard, there is still a large and strong market of people needing a product that can MAKE content.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Since I use Povray for image rendering, I decided to install Debian 7 on the two ARM devices I have at my disposal (Samsumg Galaxy S II and Barnes & Noble Nook Color), compiled Povray 3.6 (3.7 is a bit difficult to compile even though it's multithreaded, but 3.6 is good enough to see what the processor can do) and see what the real results are:
Debian 7.0(armhf), gcc 4.6, -mhard-float -mcpu=cortex-a9 -march=armv7 -mthumb
-mfpu=neon -funsafe-math-optimizations
Parse Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 4 seconds (4 seconds)
Photon Time: 0 hours 1 minutes 30 seconds (90 seconds)
Render Time: 1 hours 20 minutes 38 seconds (4838 seconds)
Total Time: 1 hours 22 minutes 12 seconds (4932 seconds)
Debian 6.0 (armel), gcc 4.4, -mfloat-abi=softfp -mcpu=cortex-a9
Parse Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 4 seconds (4 seconds)
Photon Time: 0 hours 1 minutes 43 seconds (103 seconds)
Render Time: 1 hours 49 minutes 59 seconds (6599 seconds)
Total Time: 1 hours 51 minutes 46 seconds (6706 seconds)
OMAP 3621 @ 1.2 GHz (B&N Nook Color)
Debian 7.0 (armhf), gcc 4.6, -mhard-float -mcpu=cortex-a8
-mfpu=neon -funsafe-math-optimizations
Parse Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 9 seconds (9 seconds)
Photon Time: 0 hours 6 minutes 14 seconds (374 seconds)
Render Time: 5 hours 57 minutes 9 seconds (21429 seconds)
Total Time: 6 hours 3 minutes 32 seconds (21812 seconds)
Here are some results compared to other processors I have:
Ordered by pps:
Core i5 2400S (2.5 GHz): 235.177 pps ; 94.07 pps/GHz
Athlon II x4 (2.8 GHz): 179.82 pps ; 64.22 pps/GHz
Celeron 220 (1.2 GHz): 81.15 pps ; 67.62 pps/GHz
Pentium 4m (1.5 GHz): 36.24 pps ; 24.16 pps/GHz
Exynos 4210 (1.2 GHz): 29.90 pps ; 24.91 pps/GHz (-mfloat-abi=hard)
Atom N270 (1.6 GHz): 28.96 pps ; 18.10 pps/GHz
Exynos 4210 (1.2 GHz): 21.99 pps ; 18.32 pps/GHz (-mfloat-abi=softfp)
PowerPC 750 (700 MHz): 20.47 pps ; 29.25 pps/GHz
Pentium !!! (450 MHz): 12.43 pps ; 27.62 pps/GHz
OMAP 3621 (1.2 GHz): 6.76 pps ; 5.63 pps/GHz
Exynos is Cortex A9 and OMAP 3621 is Cortex A8. Cortex A9 is about on par with a Pentium 4. Cortex A8 can't even beat a a 14 year old Pentium !!! Currently there's only one Cortex A15 product that's available, but I don't have it.
Actually it was because they were using Intel kickbacks to win the price wars.
The problem they found once the price wars were over was that both Intel and AMD in their race to outdo each other went right past "good enough" and straight into "insanely overpowered" for everyone except the top 6% or so of heavy PC power users and there just aren't enough of them to sustain a market.
The OEMs and MSFT got spoiled by the crazy turnover rate of the MHz wars, simple as that. Until the rise of multicores it was practically pointless to even try to upgrade your PC as changes were coming so fast and speeds were jumping so quickly that a 2 year old PC would be struggling badly to run the latest software, much less play games or do any other heavy lifting. In one 5 year period I went from a 300MHz to a 2200MHz and my RAM went from 64Mb to 2Gb...those are pretty damned big jumps folks. There wouldn't have even been a point in trying to stretch the life of those machines a little longer because they were so quickly outclassed.
Now compare that to the PCs I was selling 5 years ago, which were Phenom I X3s and X4s along with Intel Core Duos...is there anything your average office worker or home user does that wouldn't run just fine on a Phenom X3? Hell I have an engineer friend running Solidworks on a Phenom X3 and is quite happy with it. The machines I built 4 and 5 years ago can be easily and simply upgraded with just a RAM stick and the multicores will happily do any job they have with cycles left over. Hell if you wanted to game you were looking at a full PC changeout every 2 years, now I'm happily playing on a Phenom II X6 and the only reason i bothered upgrading from the quad was it was on sale and let me give the quad to my youngest who is happily gaming on it this very minute according to Steam.
The bullshit the press is spewing of "Tablets are gonna replace the desktop ZOMFG! Look at the numbers ZOMFG!" is a classic example of "correlation doesn't equal causation" because as someone in the trenches I can tell you PCs aren't going away, in fact most folks have never owned so many PCs...and that is the problem the OEMs have. There hasn't been a "killer app" to require a major upgrade, hell even gaming works great on a 4 year old C2D or Phenom II X3, so people are simply keeping what they got because they are so overpowered. Hell my EEE netbook cost like $350 over a year ago and the thing plays L4D and many other mainstream games just fine...on a $350 netbook!
So the OEMs are either gonna have to accept its a mature market, where like dishwashers people don't replace until they fail, or they are gonna have to make new markets to sell to. I personally have been making good money selling Mini-HTPCs. People like being able to have a box that has all their music and movies, can stream it to anywhere they are in the house, or they can watch them hassle free on their widescreen TV with one of those Lenovo keyboard mini remotes.
But as long as they think they can just slap the latest chip in a box or laptop and it'll magically sell of the shelves they are gonna be hurting, because the average user is not gonna see the websites load any faster on the latest monster than they are that first gen Core Duo, nor are their office programs, their video games, or anything else they use gonna run with enough of a difference in speed to justify spending all that money and going through all the hassle of transferring their stuff. The tablet? They use that as an eBook reader and to look up on IMDB what the name of the actor is in the show they are watching, different use case.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It's called outsourcing, contracting out all the work to cheap off shore manufacturers called, ODMs, Other Device Manufacturers. These euphemistically defined companies actually made the computers right down to the badges of other companies names on those computers. The greed of psychopathic corporate executives to earn greater bonuses by reducing current cost regardless of the inevitably consequences. Those consequences being the creation of a whole series of new companies with the skill set of the actual manufacturing and distribution of computers for whom the 'Name Brands" other nothing other than a profit consuming overhead. Companies like ASUS and ACER and even Samsung.
Basically the ODM's ahve matured and are actively working to cut out the profit consuming middle man. Things are only going to get much worse for the 'Name Brands' as a bunch of companies out of China start looking to go direct. Why should they take pennies when companies like Apple cream the dollars, it is inevitable the price squeeze will happen and the badge companies will all die unless the start buying up the the future competing direct selling manufacturers they created.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen