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Hardware Is Dead — At Least Most Expensive Hardware Is
First time accepted submitter ze_jua writes "In this article, Jay Goldberg, a financial analyst who travels to Shenzhen several times a year, analyses the potential consequences of the very low cost of hardware he found there on the consumer electronic industry worldwide.
He wrote this piece of text after he found a very nice $45 Android 4 tablet. Are we so close to given-away tablets?"
Yeah, maybe if they just ditch the first 3 words of the headline. Or even changed the whole headline. TFA is actually kind of interesting. How about "hardware getting ever cheaper" or "Bargain tablets in Chinese market". Hardware is becoming really cheap, therefore it is dead... yeah, right.
You didn't read the article, did you? The author's argument was that businesses that sell pure hardware will struggle. He specifically singled out Apple as an example of a company that also sells integrated software, and therefore does not have this problem.
Exactly, I got MS Office 2K7 for attending a tech event, been handed more flash sticks than I care to count (even had some given to me by the forestry dept, still haven't figured out how flash sticks and forestry connect) and that's not even counting Moore's law making it increasingly cheap to just make the good chips instead of the junk. Hell I hand out flash sticks along with wireless keyboards and mice with my new builds, the things are so cheap that it isn't really costing me anything and the customers love the idea of getting "free" stuff.
I could easily see $25 7 inch pads and $50 10 inchers, with a decent dual core and 4-8Gb of memory, it'll simply be cheaper to mass produce those chips in such volume that the price plummets while still letting them make a profit. I mean why do you think all the monitors now are 1600x900 or 1080p? Because they crank those out for TVs so they're cheap. We see the same thing with 1366x768 in netbooks, they crank the hell out of those 12 inch screens for mini-TV and tablets and any other place where a big screen won't fit so they are again dirt cheap.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
When you get a phone on subsidy, you don't own the phone, you are renting it.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
I own the new phone I got over the weekend for extending my contract for another 2 years in the same way that I own my home, the only difference being that Il be making payments on the former until 2015, and on the latter until 2041. In either case, I own the object, and I get to keep it indefinitely following the end of the contract, as long as I make the payments.
One interesting affect of this is that both objects are covered for full repair or replacement by my insurance, which I wouldn't have to carry on them if they weren't my property (and I were not thus responsible for them).
So, no, my subsidised phone is no more rented from my my telco than the home that's subsidised by my bank is rented from them.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.