Slashdot Mirror
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?"
This is retarded. Just like 99.99% of all the "news" on this site.
Expensive hardware has been dead for a while. That's why Apple had such disappointing preorders of the new iPhone and has been lagging behind Samsung in tablet sell-through.
Or, maybe not.
There will always be a market for premium hardware. This is just abjectly idiotic.
I got here through a series of tubes
There will always be lemmings willing to pay for shiny bragging rights.
Those pads have AllWinner A10/A13 SoC (ARM Cortex A8 @1.2GHz and GPU ARM Mali 400), 512MB of RAM, and 4GB of flash. I see no reason for not having mobile phones with similar technology (the AllWinner A10/A13 is a tiny SoC) for similar price (e.g. Broadcom or Qualcomm could add 3G easily and sell their own cost-killer SoC for smartphones). IMO, is going to change everything, as everyone will be able to have an smartphone.
I agree with that - there will always be a market for high-end electronics. Always. Someone will want it. Will it be as large as we've seen? Probably not. But, this article is about turning hardware (cheap tablets actually) into a commodity instead of a luxury.
What will happen, instead of death, is that we'll see a bottom-floor cheap ass price structure for cheaply made items, and a high-end, expensive price structure for people with expensive tastes, or expensive requirements. Look at the PC - I can get one for $300. Does it do what I want? Nope. So, I spend $2000, and build one that will.
I can get a tablet for $45, great - I will, and I'll use it for super simple projects - like household automation. But I will also look for the $500 top of the line model that does every-freaking-thing I want it to, to use as my go-to device.
because somewhere, some poor bastard always pays the difference in terms of lowered wages, slavelike labour, oh and of course there are dollars to save by screwing up the environment by improper mining and waste disposal.
Gourmet food must also be dead because you can feed yourself off of cheap multivitamins and cheap microwaveable burritos and tap water.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
As a high profit business
Lots of businesses survive on thin margins
This guy is a little behind with his prediction, since it's already happening. I remember seeing those predatory lenders outside college campuses with their "Sign up for our credit card, get a free mp3 player" booths *at least* ten years ago. Car dealers have been giving out iPhones and such as promo deals for years. Some banks have advertised free stuff like that to my snail mail. Sign up for a 2-year phone contract, you get a ~$450 subsidy towards a phone. Right now in September 2012, you can get an iPhone 4 or lower-end Android / WinMo free. It's a giveaway to entice you into purchasing a service.
Things aren't expensive because (shocker) MORE PEOPLE USE THEM.
It has nothing to do with people making stuff expensive for expensive sake, it has everything to do with the fact that when a new iPhone came out two million people ordered one in 24 hours.
hell five years ago if a device that did computery stuff did anything close to that people would have freaked out. Now? iPhone 5 is SUCH a disappointment.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
I was an IC design engineer until recently, having gone through a top-3 EECS university, and a top-10 EECS university for Ph.D. I chose the wrong part of EECS to study (the EE); it doesn't matter when you know how to design transistors, design a low-power unique/new memory, or ADC, or whatever. Hardware engineers get paid sh*t, compared to CS. Why are my colleagues and I (PhD EE) getting paid 100-110K, whereas CS majors with Masters get paid 100K easily? Yes yes, margins are higher in CS. This just goes to show that the proper path to success in EECS is CS, not EE.
I'd love to do a startup in EE, but the costs are prohibitively high. It costs 100's of K to even get CAD software licenses (HSPICE, Mentor Calibre, Cadence ICFB, Synopyis Design Compiler, etc); tapeout costs are 10's to 100's of K for prototype chips to be made at TSMC, UMC, etc fabs; whereas it costs me nothing to get the resources needed to design in Django (Python), Ruby on Rails (Ruby), Zend (PHP), etc etc. Why should we (the same smart ones in HW) spend all our hard effort in HW when our brains could easily compete in SW?
Yes yes, the barrier of entry in CS is low, so its quite competitive. Duh. However, take the best EE talent and provided they have CS passion, they can easily compete in the CS market.
Yes, I know, alot of HW people aren't suited for SW and vice versa. However, there are alot who are; most of my EE friends in EECS aced their CS classes, too, and were quite easily at the top of their CS classes.
Actually, pretty much since the start of personal computing, in my experience, anyway, the computer you want is always about $3000US
Not sure how that applies to tablets or phones or portable gamers.
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
Don't kill yourself, AC! Fight fire with fire and start your own hyperbole!
"The media is DEAD! Printed media, radio and television medias are all dead! People get their news from rumors websites, Facebook and Twitter, we don't need controlled media to tell us about anything! So long and thanks for all the fish!"
Article says. Shenzhen.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Virtually any tech event for a CIO or manager nowadays they throw in a free tablet as a door prize for most events.
May not have filtered down to the code monkeys yet, but it's already happening upstream.
Fwiw, both of my last two home computers were made from Cyber Tuesday parts orders for about $500, or $650 with OEM OS and sales tax. I'm just too lazy to build my own tablets. But if they sold kit parts, you could easily build them yourself. The markup on tablets for non-Apple ones is very very slim, it's only the Apple iPads that really make much money.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
A great area to look at it home audio. Time was, everything was pretty expensive. There wasn't really a cheap option. When cleaning out my grandfather's house my father found an old Allied Electronics catalogue from 1970. He and I had fun looking through it, and he found several items he used to have. They were around the lower end of what you could get from it, around $150 for a stereo receiver. That works out to about $900 today.
Well when you do some research you find that you can get $150, or even cheaper, receivers these days. However you can also get $900+ ones. I'm not even talking ultra expensive audiophile crap, I'm talking stuff you can get from Denon, Onkyo, Yamaha, and so on.
People buy these because in addition to more features you get better build quality and so on. A simple example is that cheaper Denons are built in China, the more expensive ones are built in Japan, because they can get tighter quality control.
While cheap devices are no doubt popular both because they allow people who could otherwise not afford them to have one and because many people look only at short term cost, that doesn't mean expensive devices go away. Some people want more than the cheap devices, or simply want something that will last longer.
Personally I'm quite a fan of buying better quality things to have them last longer. Not only do I like things being nice, but I find it actually costs me less in the long run since I end up replacing them less frequently.
Sometimes the submissions are OK and the editor makes them incoherent. I've only submitted a couple of stories - only one made the front page. However my text was changed and the link I submitted for the story was replaced with a different one. The editors are apparently there to screw things up like this or change the links to inferior stories on partner sites or something.
The part quality hasn't played significant role in tablet manufacturing. The part count itself is relatively low and what consumers really care is build quality. You really cannot expect $45 device to survive if you knock it to the floor from sofa but the build quality on more expensive devices give the device a fighting chance.
You have to remember that the iPhone is worth in parts only a sixth of its price, a little over twice the price of the device in question, and that's for an allegedly cutting edge product [sic]. Have a look at those cheaper Android phones, You will be shocked at how impressive they are.
Because i can't find one in either europe or i guess the usa as well. $45 in Shenzhen only i guess, $450+ for the rest of the world.
Where's the cheapness he's talking about?
Not sure about your locale, but I know the Big Lots' wholesale/closeout stores in this area keep a rotating stock of cheap, no-name Android tablets for around $45-65.
FYI, you get what you pay for.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
In the tablet market at least, there's little compelling reason to go for anything over $200. With the likes of the Boxchip A13 there's hardly any point going above $150 unless you need some premium feature like quad-core.
Seriously, how many people on /. haven't bought sub-$90 Android tablets from Chinese resellers in the past year or so?
I try to buy locally-made products where I can, but given the big name tablets and phones are made in the same province as the cheap stuff, there's no advantage there.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
"Allwinner"? That sounds like a real quality hardware company, there. Good luck with that.
I don't respond to AC's.
56 dollars
For the price I paid for my iPad,I could load up my backpack with 10 of these. Imagine a beowulf of tablets!
Ever since Apple went bankrupt after it tried to sell that disastrous mp3 "pod" player thing in the early 2000s (not as much space as my Nomad but more expensive? no thanks!), we've known that the market for high-end, "premium" products had finally closed up. And it's a good thing too, since the last thing we need are more sheeple with a superiority complex getting suckered into bad deals. The Dells my family use have been running rock solid (well, aside from the swollen/leaking capacitor issue, but everyone gets those, even Compaq), and my netbook is a great experience compared to those high-end UMPC devices that ended up sinking the tablet market once and for all. [Ed. note: not everything is a loss in this alternate universe ;)]
I mean, in some other industries, such as cars, high-end products tend to have features that find their way into the more commodity lines after a few years, but we never saw that happening with computers or those weird "smartphone" things that Handspring and Palm used to make before they went belly-up (why would you want to pay hundreds of dollars to have your e-mail with you?). And now that we've been away from premium computers and electronics for awhile, I can't imagine what we're possibly missing out on, to be honest. I mean, my top-of-the-line RAZR V15 can display thousands of colors with the best of them and is easy to use for texting, came free with a two-year contract, and they even added "multiphonic" ringtones with the latest model.
Personally, I feel that we're better off for being rid of the high-end electronics market. It added nothing of value, no one was buying into it, and it's allowed us to refocus on the products that are actually selling, which are all going for free or close to it. Speaking of which, has anyone seen that the V16 will only have 128MB of space for songs? What the hell? That's so 2010, but at least it beats the crap out of the stuff the Sony Ericsson fanboys are still using.
You know, I just can't stand hyperbole! I will have to kill myself over this. Why, every single hardware article is about how the PC is DEAD! How hardware is dying! And on and on a million times a day! Can't the media stop it?! No they can't. This will go on FOREVER and EVER!
Because the massive growth in mobile dedicated computing [smartphones, Tablets] , is undeniable. Putting your head in the sand, and pretending its will not change the fact.
There are many aspects to low cost hardware, from boutique graphics cards and expensive cooling rigs, to other parts of the system. One aspect is low cost peripherals, like mice and keyboards. I worry that in the race to a $1 mouse, mice became cheap and disposable. I see a lot of un-recycled computer and electronic hardware at the transfer station (aka, a dump) I go to once a month. If cheap hardware was more reliable and a little more expensive, there wouldn't be tons of it going into the landfills.
So this aspect is a double edged sword: yay cheap mice! boo, mice that break easy and are thrown into pits in the ground too frequently.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
... and make back the money on all that expensive FOSS software. Oh... wait....
Yes, hardware is super cheap. That's because we make it all in China. China has a huge labor base that has no say whatsoever in the political system. Labor and environmental laws, lax as they are, are not enforced.
However, the Chinese economy is beginning to falter and labor unrest is on the rise. I used to think that Chinese pay would normalize with the West and that manufacturing would move to cheaper markets. Now I'm beginning to think differently. There will be major political unrest in China, supply chains will be severely disrupted, and hardware will move back to expensive labor markets, not cheap ones. Cheaper markets just don't have the infrastructure to match China and the West. Observe what happened in Thailand last year because they couldn't deal with a simple flood.
So this period of super-cheap hardware fueled by the greed of CEO's will come to an end, factories will move back to the West, and things won't just be a bit more expensive, they will be considerably more expensive because of technical expertise lost to a Chinese state in chaos or decline.
"Allwinner"? That sounds like a real quality hardware company, there. Good luck with that.
Then your buying a brand, but lets be fair ZTE and Huawei Offer excellent low to mid range products, and they are very well known. I suspect your Carrier builds everything on these companies hardware.
Obviously the author is a Consumer Electronics analyst, and he's referring to Consumer Electronic Computing Devices, not your mid-range server. In the Grand Tradition of Slashdot Car Analogies, your statement is like the following:
Early 20th Century Auto Industry Analyst: Steam Power is Dead.
Early 20th Century Smug Slashdotter!: But my gigantic power generation plant runs on steam!
I'll stick with Westinghouse, thanks.
People pay 100s, 1,000s or more times for clothes than the actual manufacturing cost. Because clothes also have a social value, by making you look good, advertising that you know how to dress well and fashionably, and, above all, conveying that you have money to throw away on overpriced bits of cloths.
Same for computing devices really. There's one company I'm thinking of... ^^
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
I dont know about $45 but this is one place that has lots of cheap tablets and phones. It gives you a good idea of where the bottom of commodity pricing is. Everything here probably violates someones design patents and has no royalties priced in, so I figure this is what hardware costs with almost no R&D, no carrier markup, no branding costs, no sales/marketing/distributor costs, etc. I did buy a 7" tablet from someone similar a few years ago, for $79... it worked OK (Android 1.5) but nothing to brag about.
Cheap hardware and software waste my time.
Quality tools let me get my work done.
Beware of false savings.
If you never configure your wifi access, how exactly is the tablet going to phone home?
The guy's clearly out of the loop. The process began a while ago. CVS, Big Lots, and the like have been selling low-end Android tablets for $75-100 (depending on whether they're on sale that week) for about a year. The only new part is having ICS on them. And that you can get a 1920x1080 tablet in the $160 range. I'm thinking of picking up one of those to hold me over until the 2560x1600 tablets come out next year.
You can get apps that use maps stored on the phone. If your phone doesn't have a GPS chip you can sync with a bluetooth GPS receiver as well.
I was going to buy the thing until you gave us that insight. So now I've decided to not to get it and that poor bastard can just starve. See, that's better.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Oh horseshit, I'm sure people use more TP than they do cloth napkins, do we see "Napkins are dead! Wipe your face with TP!" articles?
As someone who has been in the trenches since the 386DX here are the FACTS: 1.-Cell phones are disposable and given away or are at so low cost when they come with plan nobody takes care of them, ergo they get trashed often. 2.-On the opposite side you have the PC, which people actually DO pay for out of pocket instead of hidden by a plan and therefor take care of it, 3.-PCs are now insanely overpowered so like washers and dryers they aren't replaced until they die.
Now those are the facts. Now if you'll excuse me I have a customer bringing over a laptop that needs an OS reinstall, its 5 years old but no point in replacing a Core Duo with 3Gb of RAM over something as trivial as his GF hosed the OS. that is one other thing about PCs, they can actually be worked on whereas cell phones are so cheap and disposable they simply aren't worth the effort, they're designed for the dump.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I work for people that will pay $23,000 for a TV set. They paid $19,000 for their 12 room whole house audio amp. I am guessing that the author of the article is some young kid that knows nothing at all about electronics in general and is far too young to realize there is a HUGE market for very high end anything. Look up the price for a Sub-Zero fridge or a Viking Range some time to find out what rich people are buying. One of my clients has a $6500 gas grill on his deck.
a $900 64gig 3G iPad is nothing to them. The Crestron Remote I just sold them for their living room AV gear was $1100.00
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Conveys a level of quality similar to "Lucky Goldstar," or "High Tech Computer," doesn't it? Not as bad as naming a company after a fruit, though!
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
TFA's warcry "Hardware Is Dead" is itself braindead.
Just because the price-point of hardware falls does not mean the mechanics of dealings in hardware is dead.
There are many more items in our daily lives carry price-point well below of $45.
Are people dealing in porcelain cup dying of hunger?
Are businesses dealing in cheap plastic toys closing up shop?
No, of course not !
As long as there is a demand, there will be a supply, and as long as there is a price-point difference between the supply side and the amount demand side is willing to pay, there is profit to be made.
The author doesn't even know shit about doing business. He acts as if he's the re-incarnation of Chicken Little and keep yelling "The Sky Is Falling ! The Sky Is Falling !!"
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
"Allwinner"? That sounds like a real quality hardware company,
Sounds no worse than "Lucky GoldStar", and they are making billions.
Are we so close to given-away tablets?
Hmm, this should be easy to determine: how close are we to given-away cheeseburgers?
Since we're playing Anecdote Trading, when I finally had some cash to avoid scraping together beyond-cheap boxes, I didn't go for any of the major vendors. I had a buddy custom build it from scratch and every step of the way I tossed in an extra $20-40 for "nothing but quality upgrades". I haven't had to replace a thing. It's called Twilight (in the Asimovian sense of Nightfall), because I vaguely saw parts of this OS mess looming, and it has to hold together for the context of getting past what we now know as Windows 8. So right about when Windows 9 shows up, XP goes off security updates, if they "recanted from the mistakes of Windows 8" and didn't put too many evil DRM-RIAA tricks into it, then off I go with the latest and greatest to start all over. If MS implodes by then and does a "double Vista" in a row, then maybe I'll limp along on Windows 7 for a while. Either way 10 years isn't bad for a comp.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
This reminds of the people that come to my custom build/repair shop and say they saw an ad in the paper for a $300 computer so why should any cost more than that. Then they complain that my answers are lies. I hope that eMachine's Deer power supply burns their house down. In the last infoworld study, they found that 1 of their deer power supplies exploded and the other caught on fire during testing so it's a 50/50 shot. I've seen so many broken AOC tablets and I'm still shocked that AOC makes tablets. Let's say for a given product there's price X and prize Z and Y is the exact median price. I don't think I've ever seen anything prices below Y work worth a damn. I guess maybe Realtek-based Rosewill wireless adapters for $11 and that's about it.
Just remember, the inverse is not true. Paying $30 for a keyboard and mouse at Best Buy doesn't make it good. It's a $15 set with a Best Buy price on it.
Jay Goldberg should update his article in a couple of months' time when:
Yes, $45 tablets are around and have been for a while. Their called throw-away devices.
There will always be a need for expensive highend hardware Because there will always be people who want the fastest thing out there. Not only that but it's that highend hardware that gets refined in to the cheaper hardware later.
Get one that can be rotated to portrait mode.
http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-SyncMaster-204B-20-1-Inch-Monitor/dp/B000E1CB1Q
There's this strange illusion in the US that tablets are supposed to cost a few hundred dollars. Go look at tablets on Alibaba. ("Tablet pc: 474,433 products found.") 7-inch devices are mostly in the $50-$100 range. Over $100, you get a 10-inch screen. Most of them use an Allwinner $7 part, which has most of the electronics other than the display.
Look on Amazon. There's a good selection of tablets in the $60 range. Around $70, you start to get all the bells and whistles. And that's retail.
You're right, but what's the pixel resolution of a "720p class" TV, and how big is its "19 inch class" screen?
The situation I'm complaining about is what it would be like if that 2x4 piece of wood were a "2x4 class board product" whose actual dimensions could be anywhere between 1 x 2.5 to 1.4 x 3.5, and endless racks of 70-cent "board products" at Home Depot made a real, honest to god 2x4 cost $15 and have to be special-ordered.
But these days, things are a lot easier. If you wanted to start up a semiconductor company, why go for things like CAD tools that have you work directly w/ the fab? Start working w/ the FPGA tools from Altera, Xilinx, or anyone else. I'm not sure whether you are considering HDL programming 'software', but instead of designing chips starting @ transistor levels, start @ logic levels. Yeah, they'll be nowhere near as optimized, but it reduces your time to market, and enables you to get a start. Once you've attained a certain critical volume, then you can do ASIC spins of that FPGA to run down your costs in response to your customer demands for price cuts.
The big issue is shrinks. Theoretically, since you are getting more die per wafer, and at some points, bigger wafers, costs should be less. On the contrary, they are much higher - due to increased costs of new equipment, and also, the fact that test times - another factor - are not gonna get shorter, given the increased feature lists and quality testing that is required. Also, if you are a fabless company, you are fine when the market for hardware is bad in that you won't have intense competition for capacity, and neither will your suppliers try to gouge you. But when the market is in allocation, it's ugly, b'cos unless you are big enough, and good enough in providing reliable forecasts, you are more likely than not to be given a lower priority by your vendor. Even being multi-sourced @ such times doesn't help, since everyone would have the same issue. That's the time that having your own fab & capacity is useful.
So while it does depend on a combination of one's long term vision, as well as execution, I wouldn't say that h/w people should nix their dreams/plans and go into s/w. Instead, come up w/ good plans that would help one start w/ a modest investment, and then work up to where one has made enough money to take the business to the next level.
It's a "third shift" knock-off of the Ainol Novo with less RAM and cheaper parts. Ainol failed to control their supply chain (third shift is why Apple buys up all the possible parts suppliers for three or four of the components in any of their products: it makes a third shift non-viable for the factory). It's also using a cheaper screen, which is why the capacitive sensor is so bad - it's not tuned for the dielectric it's got. Finally it's actually got a reduced size battery, which is one of the big cost items for any tablet.
See the inset here: http://www.rmmagazine.com/Magazine/PrintTemplate.cfm?AID=3376 for how the "third shift" works to produce cheaper product at the expense of quality.
That's kind of a funny title to see this on the front page of /. on the same day that we have one of the biggest (robotics) hardware announcements of the decade: Rethink Robotics just announced their $22,000 humanoid robot. The visionary behind Rethink is Rod Brooks -- former MIT CSAIL director, co-founder of iRobot, etc etc. This new arm is a 10x drop in price compared to other comparable platforms (eg. Kuka, PR2, Barrett, Meka, ABB, etc). Hardware is definitely not dead... but perhaps "PC hardware" is...?
Great article, though the title is misleading. It's called "commoditization". Producing Apples becomes like producing corn. Eventually, we want technology to become cheap, like the light bulb. If Chinese labor brings it there faster, the commodity becomes more affordable. Hopefully, the production is environmentally sustainable. I'm happier owning a 45 dollar product which my pals in Africa can afford to chat back with me on, than I am with a $850 device which I play solitaire on.
Gently reply
Even with AMD/Intel and AMD/Nvidia competition, if you want power to do the high end stuff like running Battlefield 3/PS/etc you'll need to get a decent processor/GPU. It may change in the future but for now this is how it is.
He wasn't talking about specs. He was talking about build quality. Pointing out that there are cheaper Android phones than an iPhone actually helps to illustrate his point: the iPhone has better build quality than them.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
Basing your buying decisions in part on brand name is not a bad idea, so long as you have a reason for the evaluation. Is your brand of choice well-known for higher build quality, better support, better warranty, etc.? Those intangibles are important, even if they're not as immediately obvious.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
There are loads of 1920x1200 monitors available. Looking at my local hardware shop's page, there about 30 different models with both TN and IPS screens from the usual suspects (Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, NEC, Samsung, etc).
I prefer that extra bit of height and use a 2560x1440 27-inch Dell.
hardware == tablets.
what a stupid headline. i'm not even going to read the article after that.
besides, the word "consumer" means things are going to be shit. when i think of "hardware", i tend to thing of big expensive workhorse machines used in production that come with a service contract and a high build quality.
i wonder when people will clue in to the fact that you can buy good, reliable things for the price of a mid-level to high-end consumer thing of equivalent function if you approach a trade outlet? there's one for any product you could find use with.
send it back to china to melt down and make more things.