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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?"
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 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.
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.
Yup. Recently spent nearly $50k for a new machine (512GB ram, 64 CPU, etc.). Seems many people are using low end hardware at the client end and expecting the cloud (which for some applications is not easily distributed) to do the real work.
Rod Taylor
Yup. Recently spent nearly $50k for a new machine (512GB ram, 64 CPU, etc.).
...
Can I be your friend?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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.
There will always be a market for status. What form that status takes is another thing entirely.
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.
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.
That's not quite the same. A car is a giant cost, $10-50k. That's a big difference from a $50-500 tablet computer. So it's absolutely rational to try to make a safe purchase decision, even if it costs more. Honda and Toyota have built up excellent reputations for reliability over several decades now; cheaper brands haven't. The American brands have built themselves terrible reputations for reliability, by contrast.
The problem is, the real quality factors have been changing over time. The American brands have gotten a lot better. The Korean brands have improved to an amazing degree since the early 90s Hyundai Excel. And Honda and Toyota have been having problems (like the Prius pedal problem a few years ago), and have fallen behind in other places too. The Honda Civic, which has been on Consumer Reports' top choice list for decades, has actually fallen off of it now, mainly because there's so many other choices that have surpassed it in value.
But it takes time for reputations to change. For cheaper items, people are much more willing to take a chance, since if a $50 tablet computer turns out to be a POS, they're only out $50 and they can buy another one. But if a $35000 car turns out to be a POS, then not only is that a huge financial loss (even if you turn around and re-sell it on the used market, you'll lose thousands), but there's a potential to lose time too, in missing work because your car broke down in the morning commute, having to deal with repairs and loaner or rental cars, etc. Reliable transportation has huge benefits aside from the purchase price.
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.
The iPhone5 has no hdmi out, no usb ($30 adaptor), a battery that won't get through the day, a measly 4" screen, no swype style type keyboard, no sd card, no hd, and that's just off the top of my head. It's untested in regular use category, will it break as easily as the other iPhones? And not only is it and it's cables/adaptors overpriced,h, all my friends with iPhones tell me Siri doesn't work very well. So my question is, why WOULD you want an iPhone5?
There will always be a market for premium hardware. This is just abjectly idiotic.
Always is a long time. Try visiting your local hardware store and aking about the "premium" brand of nails, or copper wire.
My grandfather's blacksmith swore by Glasgow Metalworks nails, and would never buy that cheaper generic made-in-America crap.
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 !