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We'll Be the Last PC Company Standing, Acer CEO Says
Velcroman1 writes: At a sky-high press conference atop the new World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, Acer unveiled a sky-high lineup of goods – and placed a flag in the sand for the sagging PC industry. "There are only four or five players in the PC industry, and all of us are survivors," Jason Chen, CEO of Acer Corp, told an international group of reporters. "We will be the last man standing for the PC industry." To that end, the company showed off a slew of new laptops and 2-in-1s, the new Liquid X2 smartphone, and introduces a new line of gaming PCs, called Predator. I suspect Apple will outlive Acer; who do you think will fall next (or rise next)?
Dell and HP have enterprise staying power, Panasonic Toughbooks are basically an industry standard.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Said no one ever. And who owns Packard Bell now? The company that thinks they'll outlive them all.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
It taught me to never go cheap again.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Apple doesn't make PC's, they have their own line of computers, I think they are called Macintosh or something like that.
I expect ditto for Apple.
Work needs doing, and people don't work using Apple laptops/desktops (remoting doesn't count). But someone will need to sell work PCs for those who are actually productive.
I like puget systems. They are a bit pricier. But, the last time I was looking to build a pc they were using the exact same components which I can not say for any of the others.
I've had both an Asus and an MSI laptop and both of them exceed what I've heard of Acer machines.
I could easily see Apple abandoning the PC market. As a business they make most of the money on mobile devices & iStore. They continue to make good hardware in their laptops but it would be easy to see them decide it wasn't worth it if the pc market deteriorated further in the future.
PCs are going from commoditized to some sort of ultra-commoditized place not even yet seen in the PC market.
Intel's new SoC's reduce what you need for a basic end-user computer to a motherboard the size of a stick of gum. And that's not an exaggeration.
SoC+memory module+32 gigs EMMC+wifi chip and you're done.
Microsoft has even started seeing the light, and is pricing consumer windows down in the givaway range, because they know their old 199-for-base-99-for-upgrade model does not stand up when the hardware costs half that. Microsoft knows that they've got to give away windows and make it up on services, otherwise ChromeOS devices will eat them alive in the consumer space.
The premium PC market will remain. There are gamers. There are people that need to work.. But high-end consumer is already owned by apple. They enjoy -margins- with macbooks 1000% better than their nearest competitor. It not matters 2 shits what anyone puts out. Apple will be the only survivor because they're the only ones making money.
This had better end in a Steel Cage match.
PC Survivor Series. Make it happen.
It means you can only have things that at least 10 million people are predicted to be able to be enticed to pony up for, by word of the marketeering department. And since most people are still functionally illiterate hunt-and-peckers with a need for an "any" key on the keyboard, that's what you can have. But something like a trackpoint? No way, that's far too eclectically useful.
PC industry has "4 or 5 players"? Really?
Apple
Asus
Acer
Dell
HP
Lenovo
Toshiba
Not to mention the plethora of hardware component manufacturers which are dozens.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
There isn't a whole lot in there for them. Margins are thin and their hardware is no longer unique since they are using the same Intel CPUs that everyone else uses. Apple almost certainly makes more money on iPhones and tablets than they do on PCs and laptops; I and others expect that they will transition from selling PC and everything else to selling everything else and software.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Would they sell iOS dev kit hardware? Or release a development environment for another platform?
hell, even the TI-83 can be called a PC. Apple and Samsung are all regular computer manufacturers, but they also dominate the mobile device market, which are still by definition, PC's
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=death%20of%20the%20pc
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Technology/Pix/pictures/2013/2/1/1359732604185/Screen_Shot_2013-01-31_at_14.24.06.png
Demand for a new thing doesn't necessarily kill other things. It's just more demand for new things. The PC will live forever - as long as people want control and customization, they will survive. At some point we may all have infinitely powerful quantum computers but the form factor of a desktop or laptop will always be useful, because people like to sit comfortably and work, not hunched over a tablet. While they may change and mutate into tablet/desktop/laptop hybrids as they already have, the concept of a PC will live forever. FOREVER.
Perhaps they should focus on the more short-term goal of being the last Windows phone standing...
MSIs are indeed pretty great, in my admittedly small experience of one machine. My current laptop is an MSI - I was a little hesitant at the time to get a machine from a moderately unknown company, and one with, I've heard, pretty crap support, but the price and specs were fantastic at the time, I figured it couldn't *possibly* be worse than the HP I was replacing.
4 1/2 years later, this is the longest I've gone on a single laptop yet, since I got my first one... dang, almost 20 years ago. Haven't had to call support even once, and this is a machine I use daily. (I did have to replace the keyboard a few months ago, but it was a 10 buck ebay purchase and an easy self-swap. The plastic around the bottom of the screen is also cracking, but all the mechanical and electronic parts seem to still be working perfectly.) I would absolutely buy another MSI when my current machine eventually did die (other than, I'd be sad, that I would be forced to buy a stupid 16:9 screen no matter where I looked...)
MSIs are pretty cool... still sad Fujitsu pretty much completely got out of the "desktop replacement" market. My first couple laptops were Fujitsus, and that was a quality brand. Now they mostly just make ultrabooks and stuff.
Because they aren't a PC company, they make Apple's not PCs.
Which are PCs that manifest varying degrees of incompatibility with the vast majority of other PCs.
At least they wised up and use Intel type hardware these days.
Apple needs the Mac for their own use, and so do all of the iOS developers. They won't get out of the PC business until and unless an iPad can drive a" 5K display.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Dell, HP and Lenovo will battle it out for the business market with Lenovo winning. Dell and HP will go 100% towards the server market and merge with IBM.
PCs will be between Asus and Acer with Apple keeping it's non Windows high margin position.
Yeah, mine has a sort of frail-seeming case, but the parts are all doing pretty well.
ASUS will outlive Acer, but does it really matter?
Unless you're a gamer, you're wasting your money buying a desktop (whatever form factor). Before long reasonably priced laptops will run games well, too, and the desktop PC will be effectively dead. I've been building/maintaining towers since 1991, and I said goodbye to all but one machine this month. I don't know why I kept it. I turn it on once a month.
Maybe you want a desktop for storage. Laptops are shipping with more than 1 TB of storage, and you can replace a desktop with one or two USB 3.0 enclosures with 4 TB (or larger) 7200 RPM drives for a few hundred bucks.
Eventually laptops will be dead, too. A more interesting question might be who will be the last laptop vendor and when will nearly all people finish the switch to tablets, phones, watches, or perhaps nearly invisible computing.
That would make perfect sense to me. They don't care about the Mac, and haven't since the iPhone. Originally, products like the iPod were designed to sell more Macs -- but with the decoupling of iTunes from their "operating system" and the insane pace of iPhone sales, they realized that the real money wasn't in Macs. It never was, but it took them a long time to realize it.
I think the signs are already there. They get rid of Aperture thus shunning the "I got a DSLR a year ago, now I'm a photographer" crowd, and not long ago, the whole FCPX debacle showed the video editing world how much Apple gave a crap about them and their industry. Recently, DJs were taken aback by the lack of ports on the new MB -- because they knew that those stupid dongles would break very quickly and need to be replaced constantly as all Apple cables must be.
Nope, Apple would rather continue selling to mass market nubs who won't complain about features on their iPhone. Corporates are too much work, they have requirements and those requirements can't be dictated to them by some egotistic nutjob working at an art gallery that thinks it's a computer company.
Apple needs the Mac for their own use, and so do all of the iOS developers. They won't get out of the PC business until and unless an iPad can drive a" 5K display.
-jcr
There is no reason why iOS developement couldn't be done on PCs running Windows or Linux. And the iPad is not that far from being able to drive a 5K display. If there were a market for that, there could be a 5K - compatible iPad next year
Actually we have in the latest RFP a bunch of laptops from Fujitsu e.g 574,752,754. They are ok.
If only there were a way to write OS X drivers for generic Intel PCs, or create some sort of OpenStep^WOS X API layer for NT.
From what I see, people only work on Apple hardware. PC (esp. acer) only gets used for gaming and enterprise drones (playing solitaire/flash games all day). That will probably be the case unless Apple goes into the custom PC building.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Considering they make a shit ton of money on the Mac and still have ended production on the iPod yet, they have always to go before, if they ever give up the Mac.
You fail at slashdot. If it is a computer, and its personal, than it is a PC. PC = Personal Computer
I don't know when it became standard to have a 5yo computer that requires keyboard replacement or has cracks. Even with daily rough handling it (student loaner), I have a PowerBook G4 and IBM ThinkPad although both are very much scratched up, still going well without major damage for the last 12 years. Besides the requisite RAM upgrades and battery swaps and an SSD upgrade, I never had to open it up for repairs..
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Just as it dropped the DVD drive before most were comfortable with the idea, Apple will absolutely dump the PC market as soon as it is forward-thinking to do so.
The day Apple makes a product that can act as a drop-in replacement for retail, kiosk, industrial, scientific and equipment PC's there will still be Wintel PC's. If they could simply work with third parties to port apps and hardware interfaces and "gag" backwards compatible ports to support the vast majority of existing installs, it will not happen. However the day it does the sales of those units will exceed the Mini by a multiple. Apple just needs to sell the hardware and they can do so with a minimal warranty just like Wintel crap.
Now that is newsworthy.
One person's forward-thinking is another's backwards implementation. //enjoying my laptop with a Blu-Ray drive for camping or just going to hotel's with crappy TV
> who do you think will fall next [?]
I'm probably the wrong person to ask. I've been predicting for awhile that HP will fall next, it just seems so obviously likely, but I continue to be wrong. At least, so far. Maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The core functionality of a tablet is currently only held back by its physical size. I expect that as components continue to get smaller, lighter, and battery tech gets better, the days of an iPad putting out 5K-8K will be sooner than you think.
Already, tablets and 2-in-1s are progressing much faster than the desktop, which hasn't seen any truly revolutionary leaps in ages (tech-wise, anyway).
I was always a big nay-sayer on tablets taking off, and I still think the classic version of the iPad-style tablet has limited long-term appeal. But as a core device that can be docked and used like a traditional desktop or removed and used like a tablet, there's really no downside. It's all about the battery life and processing power, and those only get better.
... a substantial sum to acquire the Packard/Bell brand, I find this hard to believe.
"...and IBM ThinkPad although both are very much scratched up, still going well without major damage for the last 12 years. Besides the requisite RAM upgrades and battery swaps and an SSD upgrade, I never had to open it up for repairs..
Flag as Inappropriate."
Don't worry Lenovo has fixed that problem, now a ThinkPad is not better than an Acer.
Yes there is. Apple doesn't want you to. They want to control how you use their platforms from planning to release. OS X and their lineup of personal computers are meant for that.
When the Acer guy says "PC" I'm pretty sure he's talking about the category of "computers that come with Windows installed". That's how consumers use the term.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Shouldn't that be "last person standing"?
There will be two major companies remaining: Lenovo and Apple. Lenovo has Chinese support, and owns the ThinkPad line that is widely used in Business. And Apple is Apple.
Apple doesn't need to build Mac hardware to use or to do the development. It needs OSX. There is absolutely nothing stopping them from selling their hardware manufacturing arm to someone like ACER and then releasing OSX to the market. Potentially releasing it as a free item in order to increase market penetration. In fact there would be an argument to be made for combining iTunes and OSX into the same package and releasing that to the market.
Actually, a few years ago at WWDC, the whole "Apple isn't making personal computers anymore" came up in one of the labs. And the comment from one of the Apple guys was, "Do we really want iOS development to be dependent on Windows?"
Only Acer left. Who wants this ?
I remember back then, several friends bought Acer laptops because it was cheap, few of these survived. Even store brands fared better.
I hope they are better now because otherwise, it would be a nightmare.
Didn't someone once say, "We'll be the last buggy whip company whipping"?
There's actually a lot of cross-pollination going in between the 2 platforms. For some things it's easier to release first on the desktop at WWDC and let the devs play with it a year or 2 before it ends up on iOS. Look at the new Force Touch thing they're rolling out. Apple Watch -> MacBook -> iPhones/iPads last.
Then you have things like Continuity in Yosemite that tightly binds a Mac and iPhone, that increases sales of both and prevents commoditization.
Besides, in a few years phones will be at the "good enough" phase like desktops are and people won't be upgrading every 2 years, so the current huge growth of mobiles can't be their only source of income when they start slowing down.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Some people need the biggest screens they can (often two or more), at an ergonomic height, and the most comfortable keyboards. Plus decent drawing surfaces and other large peripherals.I suppose you could include a laptop at the heart of the setup, but the system as a whole is still desk bound.
That's weird, my work machine is a 15" MBP... and I don't see the BSoDs (black, not blue), frequent reboots, dropped wifi, or the cursing in general that the 'doze users commonly do.
It's also easier to have an OS that does both the necessary evil of MS Office/Outlook, and at the same time gives me a usable bash shell without having to use PuTTY, Cygwin, or something similar.
But you know, YMMV...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I hope they die today.
Their products are uniformly flimsy, ugly and poorly constructed. It's truly more expensive to support these cheap things than to pay the difference for something of average or good quality.
Apple is not a PC company. That's the catch.
What Apple learned from the PC manufacturers, is to not depend on anyone. They are one of the few companies who keep all design and technology in-house.
It's key to how Apple operates that they can and do switch suppliers and manufacturing locations.
The whole PC-clone industry became possible because IBM and others didn't own the designs or the technology. It is why companies like ASUS, MSI, AMD and many others exist in the PC industry, but there are no equivalents in Apple land.
It is the key difference between the PC and Apple industry. It is also the reason why I think Apple will be making machines for OSX for a long time, at least as long as those are needed to develop software for Apple (iOS or whatever). Apple doesn't want to depend on any one and doesn't want anyone to be easily able to copy them. It is at the core of their business model.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
There will always be a market for PCs - there is no way a tablet is going to replace everything a computer can do. In particular, programming on them is clunky, they are very poorly optimized for a keyboard / mouse combination, they overheat if doing anything remotely difficult, and are very unreliable. We were told that mobile devices were going to completely replace desktops way back in 2008 - here we are, almost a decade later, and we're still in the same position as back then.
Will sales be reduced? Almost certainly. Will the market ever disappear? Almost certainly...
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
I see tablets and laptops eventually merging into incarnations of the same thing. If they focus on that, they should be okay.
The trick may be different requirements for x86 conventions versus ARM such that it's difficult to have interchangeable parts and share manufacturing for both.
Table-ized A.I.
If Acer has a bright future, that means dark days for the laptop industry. I have an Acer laptop (V3-771G, 17" with i7 & 2 HDD bays) and it is a consummate piece of junk. Everything from the keyboard to the durability (or lack thereof) of the bottom case to the operation of the recovery disks (!) reeks of mediocrity and inexperienced product design. On a regular basis, one of the many small pieces of flotsam inside the case rolls around and jams up the processor fan. WTF. Did I mention that the battery life was down to ~15 minutes within 1 month of very, very light usage?
My point is that Acer can spend all the money they want making high-profile announcements to the pundits, but let's keep some of the discussion where it belongs: on the absolute crap that they charge money for.
Determined to be the last of a dead market segment! Quite the aspiration you have there.
Bunch of nonsense anyhow. PCs aren't going away.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Yes but that doesn't mean they have to build the hardware.
As for your comment about phones I think we are already there. A huge number of people are still using their Samsung S2s and are quite happy. The difference though is life is pretty hard for a phone and you can always tell whose phone is long in the tooth just by the bumps and scrapes. I think this means for most people the 2 year cycle will continue because their phone is battered rather than obsolete.
...which is itself myopic. OpenStep can run on top of Windows OR Linux OR BSD, and would be a perfectly fine environment in which do to iOS dev work.
However, I don't see the Mac market vanishing any time soon; it might shrink a bit, get a bit more expensive/specialized, but there are still a number of markets that lean heavily on Macs and would be loathe to give them up for whitebox + POSIX OS.
"... press conference atop the new World Trade Center in lower Manhattan..."
&
"We'll Be the Last PC Company Standing"
Seriously?
One was the original 386 dx 2 that was pretty nifty, and the next was the Acer Aspire - which sucked ass since it was actually a Packard bell when the company truly sucked at making a PC
http://www.pcworld.com/article...
I've been afraid of Acer ever since then. The next compputer I bought was Alienware - a p2-450 (pre-dell)- after that I started building my own.
Are Acer pc's any good now?
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Anecdotally, I'm hearing a lot of people lately wishing they'd bought a small laptop instead of a tablet. It's the typing that's the main problem it would seem. Sure, you can use a bluetooth keyboard with most tablets, but having it right there built-in is a lot more convenient. Combined with the drop off in sales of tablets, it might suggest that the tablet "era" ends up short-lived and will turn into a resurgence for full-fledged laptops.
Apple seem to be aware of this as well, with their latest Macbook Air being only slightly larger and heavier than an iPad but with a usable keyboard.
People are now used to devices with few to no ports, and connecting to everything wirelessly. The days of chunky laptops that have CD burners, ports galore and are nearly an inch-thick are long gone, but lightweight laptops that are really like super tablets seem to be the future.
I could easily see Apple abandoning the PC market. As a business they make most of the money on mobile devices & iStore. They continue to make good hardware in their laptops but it would be easy to see them decide it wasn't worth it if the pc market deteriorated further in the future.
Apple makes more profit selling PCs than all the other manufacturers together, and these profits are growing year after year after year. Why would they get out of that business?
There is absolutely nothing stopping them from selling their hardware manufacturing arm to someone like ACER and then releasing OSX to the market.
Been there, done that, and NeXT nearly went out of business. Not to mention, how much of a pain in the ass it was to configure Dells or other generic PCs to run NeXTSTEP.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
lol using physical media in 2015. What a joker.
The homebrew PC market is still booming.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I used to feel the same way you do about tablets / mobile devices but I've changed my tune in the past couple of years. Outside of work where I need a desktop / laptop for coding and doing some content creation that's way easier with a keyboard and mouse than it is with a touchscreen I'm finding that my primary computing device(s) are my iPhone and iPad.
For browsing the web, watching movies, listening to music and doing light content creation like sending the occasional e-mail, typing up small documents, managing my calendars, contacts, to do lists, playing the occasional game, etc there isn't a reason to take the time to walk over to my desktop at home when I can just whip out my iPhone or grab my iPad that's on the coffee table and get it done. I've got an Apple TV so when I want to watch videos on a larger screen I can use Airplay to view the content on my TV or use the remote and the Apple TV to view the content without needing the iPhone or iPad. I bought a Cannon printer that supports wireless printing from iOS based devices so I can prin most of the things I need to print from my mobile devices as well.
I really only use my desktop when I'm working from home or need to write a long document or do more complex content creation / editing tasks where it makes sense to use a keyboard and mouse over a touchscreen or I need to use multiple applications to get something done.
Most of my non-techie friends and family members use smart phones and tablets as either their primary computing device(s) or, increasingly, as their only computing device(s).
The iPad isn't quite there yet but I could totally see using a Surface Pro 3 that can run desktop class applications (and has the ability to connect a standard keyboard and mouse) as my only personal computing device completely eliminating the need for a desktop / laptop at home. A tablet style device with a mobile OS and without a keyboard / mouse can do 80% to 90% of what I need to do when I'm at home.
I think in the next 5 - 10 years most consumers will only have tablets and/or smartphones. Desktops and laptops will be a thing of the past for most. They'll remain necessary for gamers, home users who do moderate to heavy content creation and users who do a lot of work from home and need desktop / laptop class applications to facilitate that.
The working world will be another matter entirely. There are too many industry specific line of business applications that don't run well or at all on mobile devices. I work in IT and regularly interact with users in small and medium sized businesses that use line of business applications written in the late 90's / early 2000's that still run on Windows 7 and 8 and will continue to run on Windows 10. You wouldn't believe how many VB 6 based applications are still out there and in use today in a lot of small and medium sized businesses. Many have software that was customized specifically for them either by the vendor or written by somebody in-house. It's very specific to their business and you can't just buy off-the-shelf software that replicates all of the functionality out of the box. They won't change until they are forced to because of costs involved in terms of buying new software, training users, migrating as much of their data as is possible, etc.
Right now I don't see laptops / desktops going away anytime soon because they are still the best devices for content creation that requires a lot of user input and for running legacy desktop class applications that are still very prevalent in the business world but I think the consumer market is going to be primarily mobile in the not to distant future. It already is in most developing nations. It'll be the same way in developed nations sooner rather than later if it isn't already.
All I ever see is people working on Macs. I can't remember the last time I saw a laptop that wasn't a Mac. University commons is filled with Macs. The campus radio station is all Mac. The Maths department is Mac only.
I do applied research and use 50+ windows applications on a rock solid i7 dell. Mostly to interface with measurement systems, instrument ts, and building auto matron systems built on windows. Basically a few multi tens to hundreds of billions of dollars of real industry where real people do real things instead of program mindless novelties. Your mac is useless to hundreds of companies that dictated so. Eat shit and die.
Apple needs the Mac for their own use, and so do all of the iOS developers. They won't get out of the PC business until and unless an iPad can drive a" 5K display.
-jcr
There is very little stopping that. You can already stick a COTS discrete GPU onto an ARM chipset. The only reason there isn't a readily available consumer version already is because a discrete GPU would be so power hungry that battery life would be terrible on a mobile device. This is easily mitigated by having the machine plugged into the mains, as for laptops, I've had a dual GPU laptop for years now that uses an Intel GPU for low power and a NVIDIA GPU for high performance.
Apple are merging OS X into IOS, albeit very slowly. The Fan, erm... Frogboys need to be boiled very slowly. As for IOS developers, all Apple need to do is port the dev tools after all, you use Windows to develop for Windows.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
We'll be the last manufacturer of ...
buggy whips
35mm film
VHS tapes
incandescent light bulbs
Being the last one standing in this case might be more like being the last of your species...
Being the last to die is not so much a "win"
Cheap and well built. I recently bought a $250 from the local Microcenter and first thing I did when I got it home was to take it apart. Let's just say I was impressed with the quality of the parts inside. Very much reminded me of Apple, expect it was easier to put back together, all the screws were the same size and had standard heads on them that didn't require a special tool to deal with. I buttoned it up and installed Linux. Go Acer!
What Apple learned from the PC manufacturers, is to not depend on anyone. They are one of the few companies who keep all design and technology in-house..
LoL,
Apple are as dependent on others as any other PC manufacturer. In fact they do less in house manufacturing than many of their competitors like Asus.
First off, Apple are almost entirely dependent on external suppliers for everything. Hynix RAM, Samsung screens, Nvidia GPU's, Intel GPU's. Even their mobile SoC's are dependent on external chip manufacturers and licensed designs as well as Samsung for manufacturing.
In fact Apple is heavily dependent on manufacturers like Samsung not being as vindictive and petty as they are.
Secondly, Apple owns none of their own manufacturing facilities. Dell produces 95% of its laptops from it own factories in Malaysia (Penang) and China (Xiamen), Asus owns factories in Taiwan, Mexico, Czech Republic and more recently, mainland China.
Apple is far from being independent, the only reason their business model isn't being copied is because it's inferior to the business model currently being used. As soon as Apple becomes passe, its over for them, no other business sees any sense in taking that risk.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
To reduce OS X to "OpenStep" is to ignore all engineering that has gone on in the kernel, Foundation, and all the other frameworks that makes AppKit work as well as it does.
I don't think we should count the PC industry out just yet. At some point there is going to be some killer app, the businesses need, that is not just a glorified spreadsheet or word processor. And it won't fit onto a tablet, at least not right away. And no one will want to run it in the cloud, or over thin client whatevers, because of what it is. Also PC gaming will also push the envelope. Consoles have a really draw back. Also I have yet to convince ANYONE that they should just hook up a bluetooth keyboard to a cheap Android notebook and not buy a laptop. I think these companies are all victims of two things: 1) not understanding that you can't be just a software company OR a hardware company, you have to be both, and 2) they sell garbage. Apple gets both of those correct, and they are doing just fine in the PC market.
Acer wouldn't be anywhere near my first choice for last man standing.
It would have to be Dell, HP or Lenovo.
But the real truth is that the industry is not going to change that significantly.
PC's are not going to die out in my lifetime.
IBM needed three years to make it in house, but they only gave themselves one due to the apple threat. Because of this they had to use off the shelf components with the only thing proprietary being the bios. Compaq reverse engineered and the rest is history.
In doing this IBM.created the standard pc buy I often wondered if IBM did have the time how different the picture would be.
And what I would be interested in has some dismal reviews, it has a long way to go to get any sort of following. http://us.acer.com/ac/en/US/co...
Good Points+
Silent operation.
Bad Points
Reviewer left no comment -say what? And it goes downhill from there.
You have to be pretty scared to start telling everyone you're going to be the last one standing. I think this means acer will be out of business in a couple months.
Porn. Lots of porn.
I've never, ever in my part of life connected in any way to computers have I seen an Acer product that would've jumped over my quality threshold. I've never bought any of their products, but I've seen enough to know I made a good choice. Their Predator is no less disturbing - anyone (well, not anyone, ...) can put together PC parts, but it would be really an impossible task to find a worse PC case than they've built their parts into. Anyway, if they think they'll be the last to go, then I really hope I won't live to see it.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
If anything kills PCs (AKA microcomputers), it'll be nanocomputers like the Raspberry Pi or the Odroid.
that i'll buy a pc from
Nope... 'PC' is a generic term for a (wait for it) personal computer (advertising aside, it's always been like that). Apple and Acer are competitors (even though Acer is predominantly known for making cheaper, low quality computers); their products fill the same function.
You really need to leave the Starbucks at some point. Macs are still very much a niche market. Most of the world still revolves around windows (may the dark ones curse it's system files). Macs are fine if you want to write your blog and fool around in Photoshop; but generally speaking linux (server) and windows (workstations) are where things actually get done.
Is he suggesting that as the rest of the industry abandons PCs to move into better solutions, he intends to remain hellbent on a known to be a technology which is obsolete?
Maybe he should try selling typewriter ribbons too
The personal computer will not be around in 50 years. With computers getting smaller, and nanotech on the rise, our needs will adapt to fit the advances of science and technology.
http://www.extremetech.com/ext...
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
You make some good points but there's one thing I think is going on and is worth pointing out.
Apple is in an interesting spot at the moment in that, due to the sheer popularity of just about everything they make, they're selling more Macs now than ever before. People are switching to Macs more now than ever did during that "I'm a Mac" campaign. It's anecdotal evidence, sure, but my wife switched to OS X from Windows and didn't lose any momentum.
The issue Apple faces is that they've always had this small but devoted group of people to sell to. They could get away with software being done the way it was and at the quality level it was because they knew their core contingent would lap it up. And they did. But it likely left them with software that was difficult to maintain and lacking in features which would be difficult to add to the existing code.
Take Microsoft, for instance. By all accounts, the source code for the Office products is a fucking nightmare for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the need to maintain compatibility with all of the documents already out there (and we know they don't always get that right either). The story goes that a several years ago they tried to rewrite everything from scratch while maintaining compatibility with existing documents. It was called Project Pyramid or Triangle or something. It was a disaster and after years of work and millions of dollars it was canceled. Fortunately they had continued to work on the regular Office suite so they still had something to ship (no Netscape level mistake made) but they simply had too much code in use by too many people to merit changing it. Look what happened when they tried to redo large portions of Windows - Vista was the result and it was a disaster that's kept a lot of the world on XP to this day.
Apple has their iWork suite and they realized with as many people getting Macs these days, and with Microsoft for a long time refusing to upgrade Office for Mac, if they were ever going to redo the code base now would be the time. Now, before millions more people use it and maybe make it part of their workflow. Same as Final Cut Pro. Thing is they don't know which features are really being used and which ones aren't so they come out with basic versions missing those features and when people complain that Thing X is missing, they put it back in.
It's true that the killing of Apeture is becaue they're not interested in the pseudo-pro photogtapher scene but I think that their other recent maneuvers with software are because if they want code that is long term maintainable, now would be the time to do it, before tons of other people use it and then they're stuck.
As for the DJ's and the cables, I would think anyone who wants to use a Mac professionally would know to get something other than the new MB. Its likely neither the most durable or portable Mac (11" MBA probably has it beat on portability) but its worth noting that if you have AppleCare (yes, an added expense) they'll replace broken cables for free just by bringing them to the store. Not an option if there's not an Apple store in the area but as a counter point to the "they make the cables crap so you have to buy new ones" argument, they'll replace your worn out cables for free under AppleCare.
Schnapple
Apple does not make most of the physical silicon in any of their produts. Why do you think everything is in house?
I don't think that being the "last man standing" in any market is a good thing. If you're the last, it means the market is already dead... and you'll be dead too very soon. Just sayin'
Apple are merging OS X into IOS, albeit very slowly.
Nope. I've been there, and nobody at Apple has any such intention. Features will get passed back and forth between them, but they're very aware of the reasons that Tablet PCs failed, and they're not going to copy MS's mistakes.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Funny, where I work these days, and the contracts I had before, it was Dell, with a rare HP, and some Macs. I will note that I've only dealt with *enterprise* grade PCs and workstations, not "consumer" grade; certainly, Dell's enterprise support beats everyone else hands down. (And one that shall remain nameless, but who's retiring honcho owns a Hawaiian island and a fighter jet, is below "none of the above", and equal to "self-abuse".)
And it *did* say "PC", not "laptop", or anything else, or I'd have mentioned Lenovo.
mark
Many things are possible but it won't happen.
It's all Acer. All the Dells and HP/Compaq laptops that enter my trash heap are usually repairable save for a major motherboard malfunction or two.
The majority of Acer laptops in my pile all have fatal problems that cannot be repaired by swapping parts. They'll be the last one standing because their hardware fails and people keep buying it.
Really people. I doubt Apple's going to outlast everybody else.
It could still serve as a serviceable boat anchor for several hundred years probably...