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Nexus 7 and Android Convertibles Drive Massive Asus Profit
rtfa-troll writes "The collapse of the PC market has had much discussion on Slashdot with a common opinion that, now that Apple is the largest personal computer manufacturer, a loss of sales combined with Apple's iPad will completely eliminate most of them. Now Asustek's most recent results show that there may be a way out for those that can move away from their standard markets. Concentrating on Android tablet devices, the Google Nexus 7, with a help from ASUS transformer tablets has driven the company to massive $230 million profits. Asus gross revenue also climbed 9 percent to around $3.8 billion. We have discussed related issues recently: Where companies like HTC have lost their focus on open Android devices and suffered from devastating collapses, ASUS has managed to differentiate it's tablets by providing the most open tablet experience possible via with Google's Nexus program and branding."
Build stuff people want to buy, make a profit
Desktop Android would steal 30% of the market for new laptop installations from MS within just a few years. If Asus wants to make monster profits, it would push for Desktop Android to get to market on its devices sooner rather than later.
a 'great' era to get all excited about.. or not.
1. they're all locked down in some way compared with the existing x86 desktop.
2. they're simplified to the point of uselessness for anyone who knows what they're doing (the vendors' competition).
3. the result of 1 and 2 is that they're consumer-hostile devices disguised as 'convenience' network-dependent platforms rather than empowering tools one can own and retain control over (ie trust). I see little of interest here for the same reasons I don't care about my cable box.
So far I've seen little innovation other than rehashes/dumbed down versions of existing software, just with ads or with 'subscription' hooks and simplified interfaces. The closest thing we have to open is android and even that's riddled with binary only drivers and userland. bleh..
oh and spare me the 'all users want is convenience so you should just learn to deal with it' posts.. just don't bother. I've heard it all before. There's no reason why they can't have their convenience along with the power to tinker if they choose to. It's just too bad that today's users don't understand that gaining advantage with powerful tools requires a learning curve. It's also too bad that I along with tomorrow's crop of 8 to 14yos won't have the opportunity to really learn to command tomorrow's computer technology without a licensed sandbox.
I adore my TF101. It was killer gear when I bought it last summer and it still is. It gets used by somebody in the house every single day without fail, usually for hours. My grandson (4) takes pictures and videos with it when he's done playing Minecraft and I watch some of them when I have time. My youngest (6) uses it to video chat me up on oovoo. I take it on trips to watch mpeg4's on the plane and Netflix in the hotel. I use it for documentation on the fly, training materials and reference works. I've used it to elevator pitch and present 1080p slideshows in conference rooms. With it and Citrix, various remote desktop apps and the like I can use it to do anything a PC or server can do.
I'm in the biz so I have a house full of IT gear. 4 tablets, 6 servers, a dozen PCs, and more "smart" devices than anybody needs. These outnumber the humans at least 5 to one. The only tech thing that sees more use in my house than this ASUS tablet is the Comcast router that delivers the Internet to all the rest.
The only problem I have with this device is fighting for control of it. Money well spent.
At $200 for the 16GB Nexus 7 tablet from ASUS, there is a good chance there will be more than one of these under my tree on Christmas morning.
Don't call me an Apple hater. My review of the iPads I received on launch day is right there in my /. journal and none could call it anything but "effusive". But Apple's cathedral isn't for me when I can get stuff like this and the Nexus 10 instead.
Recommended.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Apple reported an $8.2 billion net profit for the quarter, not $15 billion. It was up 24% from $6.6 billion in the same quarter last year. http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2012/10/25Apple-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-Results.html
A lot of that has to do with legal liabilities that need to be sorted out. For example, what are the consequences of providing secure content delivery? In some countries, encryption is illegal, so they may have to make massive re-designs, and do other R&D, which may cost a lot. Along with that, they'll have to figure out if they'll even get a return on investment. Also they may face a public relations backlash for conforming to what the west considers to be oppressive laws.
I imagine that in many cases, they'll simply eat a loss, which is why they'll never market it there. I don't know about India in particular, but I imagine that if there was money to be made there, they would do so.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
I have to question the original post statement,
now that Apple is the largest personal computer manufacturer
I can only assume you are referring to market capitalization, and not actual computers sold.
As far as computers sold, it would be (third quarter 2012):
Worldwide:
Lenovo Group Ltd., 13.8 million shipped worldwide, 15.7 percent share
Hewlett-Packard Co., 13.6 million shipped, 15.5 percent
Dell Inc., 9.2 million, 10.5 percent
Acer Group, 8.6 million, 9.9 percent
AsusTek Computer Inc., 6.4 million, 7.3 percent
Others, 36.0 million, 41.1 percent.
Total: 87.5 million
United States:
Hewlett-Packard Co., 4.1 million shipped in U.S., 27.0 percent share
Dell Inc., 3.3 million, 21.4 percent
Apple Inc., 2.1 million, 13.6 percent
Lenovo Group Ltd., 1.4 million, 8.9 percent
Acer Group, 989,725, 6.5 percent.
Toshiba, 989,600, 6.5 percent
Others, 2.5 million, 16.2 percent.
Total: 15.3 million
Source: Gartner
The collapse of the PC market has had much discussion on Slashdot with a common opinion that, now that Apple is the largest personal computer manufacturer, a loss of sales combined with Apple's iPad will completely eliminate most of them.
The PC Market was collapsing? Apple is now the biggest PC manufacturer? We will all now use iPads instead a Desktop-PC? ... ... ... WHAT THE...
All aboard the hyperbole bus!
Still 87.5 million PCs ( desktops and laptops ) shipped worldwide in Q3 2012. Yes, MILLIONS.
Some vendors saw a decline of 10% year-on-year. Painful, but that's not a collapse.
In comparison in Q3 2012 Apple shipped 17 million iPads.
So can we please stop saying that tablets have destroyed the PC market?
Or your know, just buy two devices. These things are getting pretty cheap now. Get a Nexus 7 tablet for $200, use it for all your media consumption and facebooking. Get a $400 laptop, or a $600 desktop with gobs of memory and ample processing power, and use it for tinkering and programming whatever else. It's nice that we can tinker with computers without spending a fortune. I like tinkering as much as the next guy, but I also have a computer that I don't tinker with because I like to have it working and free of clutter when I actually want to get stuff done. At $400-$500, tablets are way too expensive for me. But at $200, it's more like buying an MP3 player, or a dvd/blueray player. Nobody cares that they can't hack their dvd player. They just want it to work and play movies
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Many people do have similar concerns about their DVD players, as region locking renders most of them useless. Ones that have configuration options exposed can play multiple regions. In this case it's the manufacturers telling you how you can use your media rather than your device, but the concept is similar.
"...a common opinion that, now that Apple is the largest personal computer manufacturer, a loss of sales combined with Apple's iPad will completely eliminate most of them."
How on earth can someone describe the opinion that Apple's tablet is going to "completely eliminate" most PC manufacturers as "common"? (!?!)
Only someone who ignores reality completely could come to such a misguided conclusion... let me guess.. big Apple fan?
News flash: nearly 90 million PCs sold in Q3. 8 times the number of tablets sold. The PC is already commonplace and suffers from it's own success in that they have become so reliable and so capable that upgrades and replacements just aren't that common. The tablet is brand new and new models with compelling improvements come out every few months. Yet still we see massively more PCs sold than tablets.
A single manufacturer of tablets is going to completely eliminate the PC industry?
Sorry, no.
-Lod
While I agree with the sentiment mostly, DEMANDing security is not in the spirit of that quote. Freedom comes with responsibility, not security. You really cannot have freedom in a perfectly safe system, that is precisely why the quote talks about trading one for the other. The very power and flexibility that lets you experiment also lets you do stupid things that compromise security. Rather than demanding things, I think it's high time we accept that personal education and personal responsibility are the only way to provide both freedom and the safety that a walled garden claims to provide.
-Lod
A lot of people didn't worry about committing their work to closed document formats in the nineties too, and people are still paying for it.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol