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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?"
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.
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
It's not retarded... well, not entirely.
Hardware will always represent a non-zero cost. However, much of that cost can (eventually?) be absorbed or at least amortized by other budgets. Marketing stands out as a ferinstance (at least on a limited scale), since we already see VARs doing that with higher-priced items to IT managers and other decision-makers ("attend a sales pitch for 500Mbit fiber from Acme Telecom Business Services, and get a free iPad!" - Seriously, once we scored a free IBM ThinkPad for the department that way.)
I bought the same $45 Android tablet for the missus' birthday off of AliExpress; it came with Android 4.0, and shipping cost $20 more. It has (almost) everything the original Kindle Fire had, but with better battery life, and minus the DRM or spamvertising.
I wouldn't expect to get a free tablet for showing up at the local power company's booth at the county fair, but given the increasingly cheap prices? It's not too much of a stretch to see, in a couple of year, a fully functional (and decent!) tablet sitting in the toy section of the local stores, priced about the same as a Barbie Doll, model airplane, or suchlike.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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.
Caviar is dead! I can get baked beans for 59c a can!