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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)?
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.
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.
Apple isn't going anywhere. At worst, their smartwatch has mediocre sales like iPods do now, where the line is kept and maintained, but not actively updated like iPhones are.
I would say that the PC company that will be left standing is Apple in the consumer sector.
However, what isn't mentioned is enterprise sales. Businesses buy just as many PCs as individuals. In this market, I'd say it will be a tossup between Dell, Lenovo, and HP.
Dell isn't under the lash of the quarterly shareholders, so they can do what they well please. Charge off a quarter just for R&D? Dell can do that and not face shareholder lawsuits from the HFT guys.
Lenovo is China. They also can do what they well please because of the government/company interaction involved. They are not going anywhere because Chinese businesses need desktops, laptops, servers, and other items.
HP... who knows. They have a solid ground in the enterprise, but are shackled by being publically traded. However, their products are decent.
As for PC vendors, they just need to start realizing that the desktop is now a role that can be done by a tower, mini tower, laptop, tablet, or even a cellphone (as in the case of the Motorola Atrix). They also need to start adding functionality into their machines. A few examples:
1: There is a reason why NAS drives are hitting the market. Apple's MacBook and fast wireless connections are creating a market for NAS drives as well as larger servers for home use. Plus, backups don't hurt either, and file servers will only get more buyers as ransomware and other malicious software gets more common. There is a market here. For wired machines, sell iSCSI, 10gigE, and the ability to boot from the NAS (well, used as a SAN in this case.) One drive array then handles all the home files, and is easily backed up and managed.
2: Virtualization. Windows 10 is going whole hog with Docker containers, both "plain" and in Hyper-V VMs. It might be wise for EMC/VMWare to get with hardware makers and put ESXi into BIOS of computers before MS overruns the market with Hyper-V, or both players have to deal with OpenStack/Xen/KVM.
3: SAN functionality like snapshots, copying backups on the array level, deduplication, and other tools would be useful on PCs. Malware can't touch previous backups if done on the snapshot level.
4: Time to bite the bullet and move to SSD wholesale, at least for the OS. HDD bays are still useful, but the machine should at least boot, if not run its apps and data from SSD.
5: Consumer level backup media. Malware isn't going away anytime soon, and there is nothing out there that actually gives resistance from malware overwriting backup media, except for CD/DVD/BD-R drives. What would be ideal would be some form of inexpensive tape drive with the media able to be write-protected, maybe even WORM media available, so if some CryptoWall or CryptoLocker variant does its nasty work, stuff is still recoverable.
PC companies just need to open their eyes, perhaps move some enterprise features down the chain, and they will still have not just a market, but the ability to expand and get people to buy new stuff.
One of my favorite "features" of some of the old Packard Bell models was the power switch configuration. The true power switch was actually a tiny little button that was soldered directly onto the motherboard. That is, they didn't have the two-pin power-on mechanism that has become common on most consumer motherboards, so there was no way to wire a switch on the case to start the computer. Packard Bell solved this problem by engineering a fairly complicated push rod system that mechanically linked the switch on the front of the case to the little button on the motherboard. As I remember it, the push rod mechanism extended for most of the length of the horizontal desktop case, too. It was really something to behold -- I wish I had taken a picture of it.
Makes you wonder what type of constraints they were working under to come up with a solutions like [the power switch rod]...
If memory serves, this was to meet UL certification rules. For some reason, line voltage was not allowed to cross the case to the switch. That said, my first PC was a whitebox clone that completely violated these rules, so don't be surprised if your no-name PC from that era also lacked the Rube Goldberg rod linkage.
The ATX form factor solved this by using a low voltage signal to control the power supply -- the wires crisscrossing the case for this carry no more than 5V (with a large series resistance). Shorting that to ground turns the power supply on; this (plus a 5V standby signal powering a small supervisor microcontroller) is how your motherboard can control the power to the system.
but ALL laptops were consumer-level crap. (Don't recall having seen a Dell desktop - seems companies want everyone to use laptops these days)
Look past the casing (the enterprise doesn't place any value on looks). The Latitude and precision series are extremely powerful and reliable as well as very easy to fix. Its no coincidence that organisations that use dell tend to have long replacement cycles (4 or 5 years in some places).
I've worked with procuring laptops in both small and big business, I have no problems in recommending Dells as they've demonstrated that they can:
1) go the distance.
2) bend over backwards to fix problems.
After sales support with Dell's business laptops is top notch, regardless of if you bought 10 or 10,000 laptops.
My only real complaints with them are they're fugly as hell and a tiny bit on the heavy side (as in maybe half a kilo). Both of these are easy to get over.
I've seen a few Dell desktops, SFF desktops are making a bit of a come back, but laptops are still dominant.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.