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Microsoft's Mission To Reignite the PC Sector (nytimes.com)
HughPickens.com writes: Sales of personal computers have been declining for so long — 14 consecutive quarters — that it's hard remember a time when PCs ruled the tech world. Now Nick Wingfield writes in the NY Times that Microsoft is leading the way on a mission to re-ignite the PC market by taking the once-unthinkable step of competing with its hardware partners. This week, Microsoft dived even further into the business with a laptop device, the Surface Book. The stated reason that Microsoft got into the PC hardware business three years ago, with the original Surface, was not to put PC companies out of business — but to better illustrate the capabilities of its software, providing devices that would inspire PC makers to be more innovative.
One of the most remarkable things about Microsoft's growing presence in the hardware business is that it has not led to open revolt among its partners. Initially, many of them were not happy about Microsoft's moves, complaining in private. "It's positioned as a laptop, very squarely against the MacBook Pro as an example. But that could also be extended to a Dell XPS 13, or an HP x360," says Patrick Moorhead. One reason there hasn't been more pushback from OEMs is that Microsoft's Surface business is still relatively small. Another is that the money Microsoft has poured into marketing Surface has raised the broader profile of Windows PCs. While Microsoft obviously risks alienating its partners, it's doing so with a much bigger fight in mind. "Right now Microsoft really believes that it has to have a combined hardware, software, and services play to go up against the likes of Apple," says Moorhead. "That's why it's doing this. That's why it's taking such an aggressive stance now, moving to laptops."
One of the most remarkable things about Microsoft's growing presence in the hardware business is that it has not led to open revolt among its partners. Initially, many of them were not happy about Microsoft's moves, complaining in private. "It's positioned as a laptop, very squarely against the MacBook Pro as an example. But that could also be extended to a Dell XPS 13, or an HP x360," says Patrick Moorhead. One reason there hasn't been more pushback from OEMs is that Microsoft's Surface business is still relatively small. Another is that the money Microsoft has poured into marketing Surface has raised the broader profile of Windows PCs. While Microsoft obviously risks alienating its partners, it's doing so with a much bigger fight in mind. "Right now Microsoft really believes that it has to have a combined hardware, software, and services play to go up against the likes of Apple," says Moorhead. "That's why it's doing this. That's why it's taking such an aggressive stance now, moving to laptops."
ignite or ignore. either way works.
Microsoft is "igniting" PC sales like the KKK "lights" a cross.
OK, that's a bit over the top; but *nothing* MS has done implies that they're attempting to drive PC sales. They're doing everything they can to kill the PC; to transform it into an iPad that just happens to be sitting on your desktop. They're pushing spyware on it, making it a fascist data collection device instead of the PERSONAL computer that WE OWNED. Get it, MS? If you want this "ignition" to be something other than a funeral pyre, you need to get back to your roots.
My suspicion is that there just wasn't enough profit in the non-Mac PC world to motivate PC makers into taking the risks that innovation requires.
Kind of sad, really. The fact that PCs are affordable means they're doomed to be... kind of boring. (At least until Microsoft's money shakes it up.)
This is an interesting way for Microsoft to throw away bags of money for nothing. PC sales are declining for a reason. It's interesting to see how they've become exactly like IBM.
Day late. Dollar short.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Sales of personal computers have been declining for so long â" 14 consecutive quarters â" that it's hard remember a time when PCs ruled the tech world.
"Please, Old One, tell us again of this wondrous age of 'Early 2012', when the great 'Peesees' roamed across the tops of the desks all over the world."
IBM tried to compete with hardware using the proprietary Microchannel buss to replace the ISA/EISA buss. IBM refused to release documentation on the buss and sought to profit on licensing the standard through a certification program. Third party OEMs scoffed. IBM permanently lost market share as 3rd party MC cards, developed from unofficial specifications, proved to be incompatible which drove customers away from IBM towards clone makers such as Compaq and Gateway who stole the market with non-MC systems. The MC debacle ushered the end of personal computers for IBM.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
For a few decades, it transpired that content creators and content consumers were both using the same kind of device: the desktop PC. But content consumers never, ever wanted that kind of device. They wanted a media consumption platform they didn't have to understand or think about. Basically, they wanted TV 2.0.
Content consumers, on the other hand, wanted a powerful and open computing device.
So these two camps want very different things, and we're seeing the start of a market split into those camps. It is inevitable that when the PC market falls down below a point, economies of scale won't be there and the prices will rise, but there WILL still be a market, because content creators are not going away. It just means that, like in the 1980's, if you want a heavy-lifting creator device, be prepared to shell out for it. Most of the world is going to mobile, and that is where the economies of scale will be found.
Think that won't happen? Well, guess what? You have good company! The mainframe guys thought Unix workstations could never undercut them in the market. Then the Unix workstation guys thought the PC could never undercut them in the market. Just as now, some PC people think their cushy little world will carry on forever as it was. Just as then, there will still be PCs just as there are still mainframes today. But the market moved on, just as it will now, and not all the naysaying in the world will stop it.
I think what Microsoft may not be understanding, or may be trying to ignore, is that people aren't buying new hardware because their old hardware meets their needs. In the early days, there were two major factors that drove the PC industry -- (1) low saturation. PCs were a relatively new thing, and there were a lot of people who didn't have one yet. (2) PC hardware and software were in relative infancy -- we were on the steep end of the curve -- and resources didn't meet the needs of what people were trying to do. Software drove hardware in that each new release of the OS needed faster hardware and bigger disks to run reasonably. UI was still on the steep end of the curve, with new features coming out that were actually -- you know -- relevant, and not just eye candy.
All of that is long past now. Microsoft doesn't understand that the UI curve has flattened out, as their recent attempts to make the UI Really Different hasn't met with a lot of enthusiasm. About the time PCs routinely sold with quad core processors and terabyte drives dipped under $100, hardware stopped mattering for most people. What people could *do* with these resources started mattering more than the resources themselves. Hell, I do compute intensive work on a motherboard from 2005 sitting in a case from 2000, (running Win7 Pro) and I have no desire to upgrade anything except perhaps disk space. I do vacuum it out once in awhile.
So, Microsoft tries and fails to develop the hipster mindshare of Apple, so they need to try something different, and they see an over-saturated market, with a plethora of hardware overdesigned for most people's needs (given that "most people" do web browsing, facebook and email and other social media, and maybe a game or two, and perhaps a movie, and that's pretty much it), and decides that's the field they need to go into.
So... wow... I mean,... How is it they're still alive?
Someone I know works for Microsoft, and he's really been crowing about Microsoft's new laptop and how it's the greatest thing since, I dunno, Windows for Workgroups. And I look at it, and you know... it's just a laptop.
In summary, "reigniting the PC market" is problematic because the PC market is already saturated and over-built, and has been for years. It's like, when toasters first came out, everyone had to have one, and growth was steep. But now, everyone already has a toaster, and we only replace them when they stop working. Sorry, that's the nature of industry.
You want to create a new market, make apps for content creation on tablets (as opposed to content consumption) and maybe tablets will see a new renaissance. I don't own a tablet precisely because most of what I use a PC for is content creation, and the apps aren't there on tablets even now.
But PCs? They're toasters. Pick a size and a color.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Wow, a laptop with a removeable keyboard!
So unlike the old Surface, the tablet with an attachable keyboard...
Not only that, but "it’s impossible to close the laptop all the way." Just what I've been looking for!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
oh god they are going to burn it all to the ground like they did back then with the 286 and msdos
Enh. I have a feeling that the MacBook isn't a big seller because it's a better product, it's a big seller because Apple has been, and still is, really brilliant about developing "mindshare" amongst enough people to make a substantial profit. So they don't have to deliver a new product that's substantially better, because their followers will upgrade merely because it's new. Even when that means learning to do without some things they used to have (firewire).
It's *way* too late for Microsoft to build that kind of following. And this leaves them nowhere to go. Microsoft's machine is not a MacBook killer for one simple reason -- it doesn't have the Apple logo on it. And that's enough. They can't do it on specs, because there just isn't enough technical differentiation anymore to really swing people one way or another.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Using mindshare to sell your products means you aren't going to expand your market significantly. MacBooks obviously have qualities that appeal to people, or they wouldn't sell. Apple works on making them nice and easy to use, and many people are willing to pay for that.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Even the laptops are giving way to tablets
If you want to type anything longer than a paragraph, you need to add a keyboard, which turns your tablet right back into (yes) a laptop.
Gaming has moved from the desktop to the laptop or game console. And at some point, it will be in the domain of the tablet/console.
Let me know when tablet or console games have (legit) mod support nearly as thorough as that in PC games. If your answer is Super Mario Maker, let me know when it has tools to create new block types or new enemy types.
virtually ALL mobile devices using UEFI-SecureBoot WITH NO option to support legacy BIOS
Secure Boot is a UEFI feature that requires bootloaders to be digitally signed with a certificate stored in the PC's firmware. But there are two ways to implement it: normal or forced. With normal Secure Boot, the owner of a PC can replace the certificate or turn off the feature entirely. Forced Secure Boot, sometimes called Restricted Boot, cannot be disabled, much as in iOS devices and major video game consoles. In the Windows 8 (x86 and x86-64) era, Microsoft required normal Secure Boot for logo certification; it forbade Restricted Boot. As of Windows 10 (x86 and x86-64), Microsoft has changed the policy to allow either normal or forced Secure Boot. In theory, PC buyers could just avoid PCs with Restricted Boot, so long as they don't greatly outnumber PCs with normal Secure Boot. Have x86-64 PC manufacturers actually started to implement Restricted Boot widely?
My parents use their computer to browse the internet, connect with people via social media and play browser based games. All these things are achieved with an average smartphone / tablet.
I use a computer to make software, do business, make artwork, play video games. A phone is nice but it will be along time before I'm running Visual Studio off it, a PC fits my needs.
I'll take a wild ass guess that most people don't need a desktop computer to do what they need, and that's why there is a shift, and why there is no need to realign them.
There is a market for desktop computing, it's just not nearly as big anymore.
crazy dynamite monkey
Sell me an OS instead of using the OS to sell me.
Somehow people don't wanna be a product, ya know...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
14 quarters of failing to meet the expectations of their customers.
Wasn't there an article the other day about the PC sales slump continuing because Win10 got pushed out as a free upgrade? Anything MS is doing with their own hardware isn't a market rejuvenation, it's a land grab. I predict within 2 years Redmond will outright buy an OEM, possibly with a Nokia-style Trojan executive scheme.
First they refused to go along with windows rt and undercut win8 every chance they could. Then they shoveled a bunch of crappy chrome books out the door. None of that helped, though they were right about winrt. So now they have nowhere to go. It's not like Apple will let them ship osx so what are they supposed to do? Ship Linux systems? Good luck with that...
Nope. They're still hitched to windows because that's what people want, especially now that Win10 is a huge hit.
It is not a fringe minority on Slashdot by any stretch of the imagination. The Snowden leaks have had legal ramifications world wide and changed how US companies have to do business across the globe. Even the nanny State of California just had to sign a No SPY-ON-US bill because even the far left is afraid of the behavior demonstrated by the NSA. (And of course the turds holding office that are allowing and pushing this behavior.)
Because people were not out burning buildings and killing people you believe there was no impact? I'll give you that the legal process is not fast, but there has been some ground made. Not a lot, and not enough.. but some. Further, I'd almost consider what we see in politics as a mass riot. The entrenched are having a really hard time and I don't see it getting any easier for them (even though the media is pandering it's ass off)
What Google did and does is not the same as MS having a build in keylogger sending your Keystrokes to MS. I'll give you partial credit for that, but have to point out that you are completely ignoring how bad Windows 10 is. Why are they getting away with it so far? Well it's a few months in and it's a "free" OS. People have figured out how to turn things off already, and I'm sure this will get better over time.. That "better" has nothing to do with MS however, it's intelligent consumers circumventing MS.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I looked at the store in windows 8 and most of it was boring to scary (viruses). They need to get interesting app. ms office just isn't going to do it.
Microsoft entering hardware business will lead to bad blood between HP Acer Asus Dell Samsung and the like and Microsoft. No matter how much it assures the partners, things will sour. The culture in Microsoft, the incentives it sets up, the way it administers incentives etc leads all the Microsoft employees to game the system and get any advantage they can get from other divisions to win over the competition. That tiny division will have some VP who would do things to get an edge over the rivals, and it would snowball. Microsoft does not know how to play nice.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I want a pc that fits in my pocket and has a touchscreen. It needs to be able to make phone calls and receive texts. It would be nice if I could also listen to music and if it could connect to things via bluetooth. Wi-fi would also be a good feature.
Someone told me that such a PC might already exist.
But in reality there is a PC that I would like that is close to the above. I want a PC basestation that is effectively my phone. Something that is just a keyboard, mouse and monitor but gets its computing power from my phone. I would snap the phone in and boop, I have a good computer, I pull it out and I have a good phone. Ideally though when it was a computer it would actually be a computer with proper mouseclicks, complicated interfaces, and whatnot. But when it was a phone it wouldn't be a crappy little computer but a good phone. But the real killer is that the basestation would not be proprietary to just that company or even just that phone series but general to all makes and models that supported the standard.
Oddly enough one of the things that has hurt the PC market is that about 8 or so years ago most cheap laptops and desktops were good enough for most people's purposes. They could watch 1080 videos without stuttering, they could connect to Wi-fi faster than their ISP would feed them data, and the USB standard means that few devices shortly before or anytime after wouldn't work. Unlike the 90s when this year's computer could do things that last year's couldn't we have nearly a straight decade where 99% of people don't need more power than is available in any of the latest machines.
We are now crossing that threshold with phones. They are crossing a power demand for most people. More than 1080 on a typical phone is nonsense, more than a quadcore 1.5ghz processor is nonsense, more than G wi-fi is nonsense, more than LTE data is nonsense. The few features that people really want are more battery, more durability, and lower price.
So why not take this ever growing pile of power and combine it with the generally minimal needs of the laptop/desktop world?
With a proper keyboard, mouse, and interface tied into a smartphone I know of few people who would need anything more than that.
Then the era of the PC would simply have a new chapter.
1) Stop shipping U.S. jobs to india and replacing those here with H1B's. H1B's should be reserved for brilliant and rare candidates who are truly in short supply.
2) Stop being so evil with Windows 10. Seriously- rip a lot of stuff out.
3) Develop something cool that actually needs more power. My computers have been at 5% to 10% CPU for the last 15 years except when playing currently released video games.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Using mindshare to sell your products means you aren't going to expand your market significantly. MacBooks obviously have qualities that appeal to people, or they wouldn't sell. Apple works on making them nice and easy to use, and many people are willing to pay for that.
But seriously... What's the real functional difference between the Lenovo X series and the Macbook Air? Besides the logo?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Apps for Window Phone and Windows 8+ will take a long time for a adoption. But once some good ones are out there, people will like Windows for its ability to run apps without getting a virus. If Microsoft designed Windows98 from the ground up for the Internet, they could have made it so .exes could have been run safely without getting a virus. I'm surprised they waited 15 years before making the apps that are run unable to give the computer a virus. It should catch on eventually, but adoption is slow.
God spoke to me
Sounds almost like you're asking for this: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us...
But that can't be right!
Sure when you have work to do you need an actual workstation but the days of the Desktop (Personal Computer) let's not forget what PC stands for... are gone your real "personal computer" sits in your pocket.
If MS really wants to reignite the PC industry they need a compelling reason for you to sit your @#$ down... and take it seriously. In other words, focus on BIG things that your phone just can't do... markets evolve, and companies need to evolve with them. Who would have thought that in 2015, the OS debates would be centering around Google and Apple, and that they would be about MOBILE OS'.... and that MS would be the one that everyone predicts the "Death of" at least in the mobile space.
"MacBooks obviously have qualities that appeal to people, or they wouldn't sell."
Indeed, and it isn't price. Start with a well built case - I know the guts are the same as any PC but Macs are incredibly well put together compared with the typical cheap PC and to get a PC that competes with a Mac for build quality you actually spend more because those PCs don't sell in the same volume as the Mac does. Go figure, the Mac is cheaper.
Then you add an operating system that is solid and stable and designed for the machine it runs on rather than being a combination of drivers from various vendors to run whatever the currently cheapest components are stuffed into a box all on an operating system that just doesn't know what it wants to be - desktop, tablet, phone. Choose one MS. Seriously, Windows 10 is still a huge step backwards from Windows 7 even if it is better than Windows 8.
The SurfaceBook looks interesting but it isn't reigniting anything. If I want to spend that sort of money, I'm not buying a Windows box, I'm buying a Mac and if I want a Windows box, I'm not paying that money, I'll take the cheapest crap Dell and co are putting out. There's the crux of the problem. All the money is going to Apple even if MS and co are getting the volume. Making little money on high volume isn't a good business to be in because you have a lot of customers to support and insufficient cash coming in to do it. The result is your software appears buggy and you appear unable to deal with it. Sound familiar? Worse, if I wanted something really cheap, I would look at a Chromebook. MS is getting squeezed at both ends and they don't have an answer. Windows 10 certainly isn't it.
We're witnessing a change that has been brewing for a long long time. The roots of things change date back into the 90's and the momentum is now so great that MS hasn't got the power to push back. They can either accept it and restructure around the new reality where PCs and Windows aren't the centre of the computing world, or they can die.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
"Hey! Cars aren't selling! We'll try making some too!" "They'll also have a bicycle and roller skates and a jet pack built in!" You would walk away from them very fast.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Why don't you stop trying to feed me. Finish your stupid shitty software.
content creators and content consumers
The use of the loaded terms "content", "consumer", and "creator" is slightly confusing. I prefer "users who create works" ("authors") for short and "users who view works created by others" ("viewers" for short). But terminology aside:
So these two [author and viewer] camps want very different things, and we're seeing the start of a market split into those camps. It is inevitable that when the PC market falls down below a point, economies of scale won't be there and the prices will rise
At first, I sort of agreed with your core sentiment that the economies of scale for devices for creating works may evaporate as walled garden mobile devices continue to gain popularity among pure viewers. But there will still be a need for devices on which university students can prepare homework, and a locked-down walled-garden device such as an iPad isn't quite ideal for a freshman computer science course. On the one hand, this means that at least university students will form a market for PCs. On the other hand, it could justify overcharging for PCs the way publishers overcharge for textbooks.
Slashdot users' opinion on this issue appears split. Some users, such as betterunixthanunix and one Anonymous Coward, think children will be harmed by lack of access to devices designed for creating works. Others, such as geekoid and another Anonymous Coward, think used laptops and Raspberry Pi single-board computers ought to be enough for anyone.
The field has changed, anything they make can be made to run only what they expect and nothing more.
I have a Laptop with an UEFI I can't access it to change it, so it's stuck to 8.1; a worthless POS, I dislike very much.
It's like, when toasters first came out, everyone had to have one, and growth was steep. But now, everyone already has a toaster, and we only replace them when they stop working.
But in this market, even replacements can often be hard to find. I have a 10 inch Dell laptop running Xubuntu that I use to work on hobby coding projects while riding public transit to and from my day job. But since December 2012, it's hard to find a 10 inch laptop. With what should I replace it once it stops working? I looked around, and unfortunately, the 10 inch 2-in-1s such as ASUS Transformer Book don't seem to work well with any X11/Linux distribution that I'm aware of.
I also saw this in the 1990s. Microsoft has long been an anomaly. It's been rare to see an operating system be developed separately from its hardware. Think of all the different operating systems you have used, and paid for, and tell me which ones were not developed by the same people that built the hardware.
I think back and there was Commodore, Atari, SGI, Apple, Sun, DEC/Digital, and I'm probably forgetting some. All of them had the same company build the OS and the hardware. Some of them tried to survive by separating the OS business from the hardware business but none were successful with competition from Microsoft, Apple, and (IMHO largely) Linux.
Free operating systems like Linux killed a lot of unix-like operating systems, leaving the desktop to be split between Microsoft and Apple. It seems it's quite hard to maintain an operating system on your own without hardware profits to keep it funded. I'm amazed Microsoft has survived as long as it has without a large hardware division to fund their software development.
My predictions of Microsoft no longer licensing their OS and make their own hardware like Apple may come true, I'll only be off by a decade or two on when that happens.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I plan on buying the Surface Pro 4. Of course, I plan on putting Linux on it - probably Lubuntu but maybe Debian or Arch. Maybe Elementary but that'd not be a long-term install by any means. The form factor looks interesting and it's got nice specs. I really don't need yet another computer but that's never stopped me before. In fact, that's kind of been a problem in the past. I have hardware still in boxes. I have a variety of hardware that spans the ages and I do get rid of it over time but I also like keeping a little from each generation to save for posterity.
Anyhow, I don't want to admit this but I did look at the article(s). I didn't read them, calm down. I looked at the pictures. I did read the words under/in the pictures and kind of skimmed a paragraph. Yes, I'm aware that I almost broke the rules but I felt it necessary and think the end result is good. Meaning this...
If this pisses off the OEMs and they don't have much in the way of recourse - maybe they could start offering more Linux desktops? You can generally find a few, here and there, but I can't say that I've ever once bought one just to have Linux installed. I generally buy white boxes or see something on sale that catches my eye and buy that. I can get an OS installed and generally don't like what it came with so that doesn't stay installed at all.
But, if they want to swing back at MS for this then offering and heavily promoting Linux might actually be a good way to do it. Don't mistake me for a zealot, however. I don't generally recommend people use Linux unless they have a compelling reason to switch. I'm the jackass that suggests people use what works best at allowing them to accomplish their needs with the least amount of effort. For most people, currently, that's Windows on the desktop. If they want something different (or better, in my opinion) then Linux it is... Or BSD... Anyhow, the OEMs could offer it, promote it, and whatnot... That's one way of swinging at MS and at least giving them a bloody nose before MS kicks the shit out of them. I mean, if you're going to get your ass kicked then you might as well fight back.
I don't know what they'll do and that's not a prediction - just a possible turn of events. It'd be interesting to hear people talk about the new Dell commercial that is advertising compatibility with Linux and coming installed with Ubuntu on it.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Actually other than it being by Microsoft that is pretty damn close. The key is that the docking hardware is of such a common standard that I could hook up my iPhone, android, MS phone, etc and they would just go, "Oh look a docking station; now I'm a desktop,"
If I had to make a prediction this hardware probably costs way too much and thus it would be cheaper to go get a halfway decent laptop and/or the thing is going to be so proprietary that it will only work for even a limited number of MS phones of a single brand let alone other OS based phones.
Yet this would be a brilliant thing for them to licence to the other companies, they could have the standard on connecting phones like this.
No but, to use your example, I can buy a BMW for much less than a Porsche and have something functional, stylish, more than able to keep up in the real world, and actually get stuff done without having to worry about arguing who is and who isn't right on the internet.
Also, antivirus and support? Do you know where you are? We *are* the support and we don't need antivirus because we don't run Windows.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
You know that Google makes one of the most popular OSes on the planet, right?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Tough crowd in here. If MS survival came down to Slashdot population it would be out of business in 30 seconds.
http://www.unetbootin.sourcefo...
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
There was a precedent with CP/M. CP/M was a boring OS running on very boring and generic hardware (you have a 8080 or clone, text mode and floppy drives) made by many companies or possibly hand built by an individual.
MS-DOS was more of the same on IBM and compatibles, but easier - a standardized BIOS, floppy formats, keyboard interface, graphics standards etc. Around 1993, Commodore and Amiga were killed off and around 2000 the Unix workstations (that weren't even marketed to the general public) died off too.
Eventually smartphones followed that model : everything uses Android. That's when smartphone adoption skyrocketed. (there was Windows Mobile before it, funnily)
If you weren't around using computers in the 80s or the very early 90s, you are likely to only ever have used MS-DOS, Windows and maybe Linux. Some people had a computer that didn't run an OS (Commodore 64 etc.). I had gaming consoles that didn't have an OS (that was the norm in the 80s and 90s)
And what is the market for mod making pc's? Hundreds of millions potential mod makers?
It's not only the thousands of mod makers but also many millions of mod users. Unlike PCs, locked down platforms such as iOS and video game consoles have cryptographic mechanisms to prevent the owner of a machine from installing and using mods created by other dedicated amateurs.
A desktop is slowly becoming a niche product, and in a market of niche products the race to the bottom doesn't exist. Those who really need a desktop spend money for good quality and support.
In this respect, is a laptop "desktop" or "mobile"? It's battery-powered like a mobile device, but it runs desktop applications on a desktop operating system. And a lot of these desktop applications are used by millions of university students on millions of laptops. For example, good luck finishing "Intro to programming and problem solving with C++14" on an iPad.
From the linked article by David Elner about dual-booting Ubuntu on a Surface Pro 3: "Sleeping the system while running Ubuntu does not work. (Instantly wakes up.)" In a Disqus comment to that article, Emre Erenoglu called lack of suspend a "deal breaker." It is also a deal breaker for me. I want my session to be restored when I come back to the machine after having taken my seat on the bus, and I want pages open in tabs in the web browser to still be open and loaded even if I have no network connection. Shutting down in a desktop environment that supports session restoration and starting the computer once I have taken my seat is not a substitute, even if it is faster on SSD than on an HDD, because tabs open in the web browser reload to "Problem opening page: You are offline". The buses in my city do not provide Wi-Fi to riders. Has suspend on the Surface Pro 3 improved since December 2014 when the article was published?
This page says they're exclusive to Japan. I don't live in Japan. Is the warranty valid outside Japan?
there's more windows 10 cause MS gave it to you in a download, not becuase people bought new PC's the two are completely unrelated as it is very much possible to be runnung a 5-6 year old rig with windows 10 and never even notice a difference tween that and a brand new machine for most average applications
"it's hard (to) remember a time when PCs ruled the tech world" Really? We (a small Consultancy and VAR serving professional offices and SMB) have had record hardware sales this year both in servers and client machines. Guess what? In several hundred client computers sold only one was a convertible/tablet type of form factor. Most were desktops and a handful were laptops. I have noticed a shift to smaller machines, for example most of this year's desktops were Lenovo Tinys since they take up very little space and have the same capabilities as a full sized tower or desktop form factor (minus the card slots which nobody in business ever uses). I'm going to assume that the creator of this article is talking about the consumer market since the business market doesn't resemble these remarks in any way.
Officially a geek since 1984
Not OP but, I had some time to play with a x1 carbon (first version) two years ago and it was definitely much worse than my then 3 year old macbook air.
For start the trackpad was unusable. Yes it was that bad. Keyboard was definitely better than Air's but not *that* much of a difference. I never saw a laptop with a keyboard which was unusable though.
Display was not so much better, cannot remember anymore. And I hate 16:9 screens.
Battery life was poor. Windows performance was also not as expected because it was full of Lenovo programs.
So yeah, I definitely can say that the experience was not so great. I hope the last gen is better though. The second gen had strange keyboard layout and non-physical F buttons (which is a bad joke). And also terrible trackpad IIRC.
Trolls are like broken clocks. They show the truth two times a day. The rest of the day they talk nonsense.
That and PCs are so good that we don't need to keep replacing them every year or two just to run software, as opposed to only replacing them when they're actually unfixably broken, which is not that frequently, since they're also generally pretty good at not breaking.
So basically Microsoft's mission to "reignite the PC sector", sale-wise, would have to be, "get PC manufacturers to sell us suckier computers that break more often". Great.