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Laptop Vendors Are Left Sitting On the Sidelines Waiting For the Next Waltz To Start (pcper.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Intel's delayed release of a new processor is going to have a noticeable effect on the laptop market this year. As there is little chance of seeing anything new until towards the end of this year, laptop designers will not be able to offer new models for the holidays and will instead have to rework existing products. DigiTimes suggests we will see trimmed down models with lower price tags to try to entice consumers into purchasing something, as they expect lower demand than we saw last year. Hopefully some gaming machines may become more affordable, or we will start to see models incorporating AMD's new chips become more common.
Apples 2 year behind in processors. They don't matter.
My i7 Haswell based laptop is within 95% performance of a comparably priced brand new machine. Only one still works, after keyboard was replaced under extended warranty. It is now on third battery. Why would I bother upgrading?
Laptop vendors can do more than new CPUs to bring some usefulness and features. Being able to have an OS in ROM would be handy, if only to have a way to restore an OS without having to worry about recovery media. If a Tandy MS-DOS clone back in the 1980s can do this, so can a PC vendor. Other things come to mind as well, be it the ability to charge (albeit slowly) on USB-C for beefier laptops, allowing for multiple USB chargers to charge a battery at the same time, built in vitualization and encryption so one can have their gaming stuff, their work stuff, personal stuff, and stuff nobody should see, all on one laptop, perhaps using something like PhonebookFS to further hide the presence of other VMs.
Another idea would be to have better support for external GPU breakout boxes. That way, one can go from running command line stuff to Crysis fairly easily, as well as providing fast access to additional storage.
CPUs are nice, but there are still many things that can be done to differentiate one's product from everyone else.
Intel seems to assume customers want MORE CORES at a lower clock rate. No, I want a faster clock rate using less power!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I am getting really sick of all this closed hardware designed for toys being used in my professional tools!
While AMD is absolutely kicking ass - especially when you consider its market cap compared to Intel or Nvidia - I see an industry that is plagued with implied 'tit for tat' arrangements unwilling to piss off Intel.
We're seeing all sorts of 'bargain-bin' consumer laptops with AMD processors - but we're really not seeing business-grade laptops available at all using AMD. The industry knows Intel is basically stuck in the mud and AMD has it beat for a while. Meanwhile, no one dares build a laptop with such business essential items like a docking station, durable build, and customization.
In any other industry, we'd see tons of new high-end models if the competition got better. In this industry, we see laptops limited by the unwillingness of the industry to build what everyone wants. Remember when Steve Jobs was so damn disruptive with the Ipod? He basically just built what everyone wanted at the time while the music industry (and players like Sony) refused to build anything with mp3 for an embarrassingly long time. I wonder how long it will take until someone is disruptive in this space.
I can't wait to upgrade my 3 year old Macbook Pro.. but there is nothing available right now that beats it across the board. I don't want to 'upgrade' to a bigger heavier laptop. Nor do I want it to have less resolution or battery life. I want what everyone upgrading a laptop wants - more processing power, more cores, more memory, hard drive space, speed, etc..
--- We need more Ron Paul!