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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.
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.
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.
Right. The desktop will die, probably in the year of the Linux Desktop. I've been hearing this for 10 years or more. Desktops aren't going anywhere soon. The market will evolve, but it isn't going to die.
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?"
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