Hmm, I think I'd have to say "Mom? What is it that you want to do that requires new firmware? Oh...nothing? Oh wait a minute, I forgot. 99% of phone users dont give a crap what version of anything runs on their phone, they just want to surf the web, read email, check facebook and play angry birds. Every recent version of android does all of that just fine. Okay Mom, talk to you later".
Apple has dropped firmware updates on older iphone and ipods, and for no apparently good reason. I cant run two apps on my ipod because they both require the current version of ios, and for these particular apps there is no performance and feature issues that would require new hardware. Updating a gazillion android phones in the field would probably result in a lot of costs, problems and customer service issues. Unless there is a real compelling benefit to upgrading android 2.2 to 2.3 or 3.x to 4.x....aaaaaannnnnddddd....there isnt.
Oh and yes OCZ is STILL having problems with their drives. I just bought a 60gb vertex plus drive, and it corrupts data regularly, forcing windows to do a chkdsk on boot almost every time. They have a new 3.5 firmware out, but it still seems to be problematic for some users. OCZ also does not recommend loading image backups to their drives, suggesting that if you dont do a secure erase (which requires a cd/usb boot and a stripped machine with no other drives in it) and a regular windows install then your drives may experience corruption.
Now if this were 1982 and that requirement came with a storage product...well...I'd still think it was stupid.
But even though it was a fairly well known problem and not a hardware issue, OCZ happily allowed many of their customers to pay $12 out of their own pocket to ship their perfectly good hardware with bad firmware to them so they could send back a used/refurbished drive with the same bad firmware on it. Nice of them...
Most current drives will do their own garbage collection during idle time. So once a week, log out of windows (or whatever) and let it sit for 20-30 minutes. It'll be all good after that.
Hmm, I have one of those cheap borderline useless chinese tablets. I use it all the time to check my email, facebook, play tons of games, as a big screen gps, watch netflix and hbo-go, etc, etc, etc. What sorts of things can I not do with it that would magically come about if I used a more expensive android tablet with 'appropriate hardware'. Whats weird is that my cheap noname tablet has virtually the same hardware as the original ipad, except some people say the screen isnt as good. Which I dont seem to give a @#%$$ about.
Amazon also appears to have solved the problem with the Fire, since they realized that almost nobody gives a #$%$@ about what the hardware is, only that its inexpensive, does 98% of the stuff that 98% of users want, and has a full market of products behind it. Thus the consumer gets cheap access to content, amazon makes their profits on that, and everyone lives happily ever after.
Except for Apple, who will need to learn to either give away ipads and iphones, or lower their content prices to remain competitive. And Google, which will have to take on turning out cheap tablets/phones through their new motorola subsidiary and back it up with cheap market content. Everyone else might as well just get out of the business entirely, since nobody is going to buy $400-500+ tablets anymore, and anyone without a fully fleshed out market wont make any profit on the sale of the devices.
This, sort of. Any OS will do 99% of whatever 99% of people want to do 99% of the time. There is very little reason to hot switch in an operating system. Its a lot simpler to just find an app that does what you want on the OS you're running full time.
I bought several tablets, and unlike Apples television commercials I wasnt able to learn Mandarin Chinese in minutes, compose a sonata, and my kids didnt suddenly turn into Einstein. So I just use them to check my facebook page, read email and play games like everyone else.
I looked at ultrathin laptops, but spending 2-3x as much on a tiny computer with a tiny screen that I cant upgrade is of no use to me, or most other people who arent college students with rich parents.
So I built my own desktop computer with a huge honking monitor thats fast, expandable and allows for easy content creation and is easy on my 50 year old eyes. It cost me less than a regular laptop to build and I can probably upgrade it and keep using it for 7+ years. Unlike the tablet that isnt really useful for anything except viewing content, and the ultralight laptop that would be outdated and seem slow 2 years from now, or break because they're too fragile.
Surprisingly, I also bought almost everything from Newegg.
Seriously. Besides this being a zero profit item, Intel is still getting over that horrible beating they got from the PowerPC challengers, arent they?
Even if it does offer comparable capabilities and a price or performance benefit, theres too much inertia behind x86.
I mean, Google+ is arguably better than Facebook, so why isnt everyone on it instead of FB?
Oh and lets all listen raptly to the people who hum the "I'd be happy doing web browsing and basic office stuff on a 95MHz chip!!1!". Yeah sure. Thats why most people want the new computer after the old one has been kicking around for a few years. Going back to 1989 wont make anyone happy. People in third world countries wouldnt pee on it if it caught fire.
Because it and the iphone allowed non technical people to be able to carry their music and photos and stuff around with ease compared to alternatives. Apples success has very little to do with their products and more to do with their itunes/app store content.
Now you have amazon with all of the same content, and the ability to buy pretty much anything, with their marketplace, and their upcoming tablet.
And google, with their app store, music, video, book content, and their upcoming smartphone.
Its about the content, stupid. Who will have more of it, make it easier to get, and have price points that make sense to the broad consumer base.
Weird. I installed two Slot 1 cpu's and had to attach the included heat sink with both. To be fair, I think they were among the first 10 slot 1 cpu's the company manufactured, so maybe they changed something after that.
No kidding. AMD has had frequent long running thermal issues, coupled with a history of not incorporating thermal protection into their cpus.
Such draconian assumptions. Maybe Intel just polled the buyers for this category of product and found that they rarely or never used the stock cooler provided, so they left it out since nobody was going to use it?
I think that a computer that effectively cools itself while making little or no noise is better than one that prefers overheating in the lap and making no noise. Steve hates fans and noise. I remember working at trade shows he was at in the 70's and having to bring him trays of spare dynamic ram chips because the new Apple II was burning them up by the box full. He insisted then that there be no fan in the apple products, and he still hasnt learned his lesson.
You all also missed the 'bought recently' part to mean 'bought yesterday'. The fact is, the macbook pro 17" that was selling for almost $3k when I bought my laptop new has almost the same innards as the windows slab I bought for $499. Except as mentioned, for my faster hard drive and ram. Oh, and mine has a much better wireless card, although that wasnt compatible with OS X. With those components, my 2GHz core duo actually runs close with or faster than macbooks bought just a few years ago. $50 says that 98% of Apple users would be hard pressed to tell the difference in performance between my hackintosh and a recent model macbook.
Here's the seriously telling metric though...I can sell this 4+ year old laptop for $800-900 as a hackintosh, when it would sell for maybe $200 with windows on it. Thats $600-700 worth of faerie dust right there. Its certainly not the complexity of installing the OS. All I had to do was burn and boot a CD in the laptop, stick a retail OS X cd into it, and after the install run one program.
I'm not at all an Apple hater. I think they make nice products that are no better or worse than any other well made computers, only they cost twice as much. Thats reflected in the companies profits and their current position.
As far as other CEO's being out there, I remember Apple as a major tech company looking for and going through several seasoned veteran CEO's while nearly dropping dead. That they're out there is irrelevant if you cant get one to come and work for you. While they'd no doubt be offered a great comp package, they'd also contemplate that they would be hard pressed to improve on taking a half dead company to #1 by market cap and the heady profits. Even if you did a great job, you'd be unlikely to do as well or even maintain the position in the market. Frankly I doubt you could find someone as talented and hands on as Jobs has been...and I suspect that half the middle management at Apple is so used to the boss jumping through them to directly manipulate the products and operations that they'd perform poorly without the same sort of CEO.
ipad for $700 and non contract iphones for $500 'perfect'? I dont believe I'm arguing functionality of those products, just the price. I've used ipads and iphones and I can do just as well for half as much or less. Usually much less. They're very nice, just stupidly expensive. But profitable!
All three of these processors include virtualization support.
So once again, what features are missing that you had to pay extra for? Are you angry that Intel lets some customers buy cheaper versions of their i3 products that dont include features like virtualization and hyperthreading, which many users have no need for or wont see much benefit from?
I think I'll take the higher performing, cooler running, lower power demand cpu's that have fully disclosed prices and features, instead of the lower performing, hotter running, higher power demand cpu's that also have fully disclosed prices and features. Railing on about things that have no applicability to this specific topic or that have no basis in reality seems unnecessary and unproductive.
For computers and for a share of stock. When Steve finally moves on (one way or the other), the company will go the same route it did the last time he left. He's an example of a driven visionary that jumps right through all the middle management to directly manipulate products, services and the marketing messages. How often does your CEO drop into your product meetings to tell you how to make it work or what not to do?
Oh yeah, and stress causes cancer.
In other news I completely frustrated several of my Apple buying friends by taking a 4 year old 17" laptop and spending 2 hours hackintoshing it. Its as good or better than the $2000-3000 apple laptops they've bought recently. When they said "Well, but thats not the same" I challenged them to tell me what was deficient about it or what the extra money bought them. They couldnt come up with a thing. In fact, my laptop runs faster in benchmarks than similar apple laptops, because it has a faster disk drive and ram than Apple put in them. It also runs cooler because the fan runs more than the fan does in the macbook.
The message here is that when you have a huge cost/profit built into a product that appear to be based entirely on perception, when the chief influencer of that perception goes away...so does the profit.
Unless of course you can find another really smart, really driven leader willing to kill himself stomping around Apple trying to out-do what Steve Jobs did. Good luck with that.
Right. AMD does exactly the same 'ripping off'. They speed limit for binning purposes and disable perfectly good cores and perfectly good cache to turn out lower end cpus. The only thing they dont do is give you a sanctioned upgrade path that maintains your warranty. Thats much better!
Years ago manufacturing yields werent as good and materials variability caused vendors to have to speed and function test all the products and bin according to what their capabilities indicated. These days manufacturing yields are excellent and materials variability and processing are also much better. That means you sell everyone an expensive, fast cpu or you artificially bin, the latter being what every single cpu manufacturer does. Consider also that when you're buying a cpu thats limited to 1/2 or 3/4 of its actual performance limit, its going to be a lot more reliable than a cpu thats running at 95% of its actual speed capability.
I hope you dont have a Playstation 3, because that'd really tick you off.. Those have 8 cores that are almost always all good, but they turn one off because half of the yield has one bad core, and they dedicate one core to the operating system even if its not using it! Those @%^#@$'s!!!
But it is true that every silver lining has a cloud, so keep looking for it.
Because it costs the same amount of money to make a fast chip or a slow one. But many people wont pay more than $xx for a cpu at a specific performance level.
This sort of thing has gone on in the electronics and computer business for 50 years. Back in the 60's and for several decades IBM offered a single printer that could print at three different speeds at three different monthly lease points. The only difference between them was a rubber belt. You'd ask for the upgrade, IBM would raise your lease fee, and a guy would show up to change the belt.
While some chips get binned lower due to inability to run at a certain speed or having a bad core, most are simply made to run slower at a lower price point.
What really is the alternative? Would you like the chip companies to have separate manufacturing process for each speed level, causing an overall increase in cost across the line? Just charge everyone the top cost and give them all the fastest chip?
I think its a cool thing that you can buy an inexpensive computer, pay a small fee, and have it go faster rather than buy a new computer. Why someone would work overtime to find an issue with this is preposterous...
Its completely doable. I have a $169 tablet that has essentially the same or better internal specs as the original ipad (1.2GHz A8, 512MB ram, 4GB nand flash upgradeable to 64GB), runs android 2.3, 6 hour battery life...but obviously its a little thicker and a little bit heavier and the screen isnt quite as nice as the ipads. But its $169.
Perfectly usable, runs everything I've thrown at it. Since I bought it last month I see A9 based tablets with perfectly decent capacitive screens for under $200.
The really nice part is when my six year old says "Dad, can I play angry birds?", I can hand it over to him without any concerns. Saw a mom pass her new ipad 2 to her kid the other day, who dropped it during the hand off. Smasho.
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Sure it was pocket lint? Watching porn on your phone can have all sorts of drawbacks.
Not yet. I'm sort of enjoying them.
NO ONE expects the Spanish Inquisition!
You seem to talk to your mom a lot. Are you living in the basement and yelling up the stairs?
Hmm, I think I'd have to say "Mom? What is it that you want to do that requires new firmware? Oh...nothing? Oh wait a minute, I forgot. 99% of phone users dont give a crap what version of anything runs on their phone, they just want to surf the web, read email, check facebook and play angry birds. Every recent version of android does all of that just fine. Okay Mom, talk to you later".
Apple has dropped firmware updates on older iphone and ipods, and for no apparently good reason. I cant run two apps on my ipod because they both require the current version of ios, and for these particular apps there is no performance and feature issues that would require new hardware. Updating a gazillion android phones in the field would probably result in a lot of costs, problems and customer service issues. Unless there is a real compelling benefit to upgrading android 2.2 to 2.3 or 3.x to 4.x....aaaaaannnnnddddd....there isnt.
Oh and yes OCZ is STILL having problems with their drives. I just bought a 60gb vertex plus drive, and it corrupts data regularly, forcing windows to do a chkdsk on boot almost every time. They have a new 3.5 firmware out, but it still seems to be problematic for some users. OCZ also does not recommend loading image backups to their drives, suggesting that if you dont do a secure erase (which requires a cd/usb boot and a stripped machine with no other drives in it) and a regular windows install then your drives may experience corruption.
Now if this were 1982 and that requirement came with a storage product...well...I'd still think it was stupid.
But even though it was a fairly well known problem and not a hardware issue, OCZ happily allowed many of their customers to pay $12 out of their own pocket to ship their perfectly good hardware with bad firmware to them so they could send back a used/refurbished drive with the same bad firmware on it. Nice of them...
Most current drives will do their own garbage collection during idle time. So once a week, log out of windows (or whatever) and let it sit for 20-30 minutes. It'll be all good after that.
His brother Engelbert was a great singer in his day.
Hmm, I have one of those cheap borderline useless chinese tablets. I use it all the time to check my email, facebook, play tons of games, as a big screen gps, watch netflix and hbo-go, etc, etc, etc. What sorts of things can I not do with it that would magically come about if I used a more expensive android tablet with 'appropriate hardware'. Whats weird is that my cheap noname tablet has virtually the same hardware as the original ipad, except some people say the screen isnt as good. Which I dont seem to give a @#%$$ about.
Amazon also appears to have solved the problem with the Fire, since they realized that almost nobody gives a #$%$@ about what the hardware is, only that its inexpensive, does 98% of the stuff that 98% of users want, and has a full market of products behind it. Thus the consumer gets cheap access to content, amazon makes their profits on that, and everyone lives happily ever after.
Except for Apple, who will need to learn to either give away ipads and iphones, or lower their content prices to remain competitive. And Google, which will have to take on turning out cheap tablets/phones through their new motorola subsidiary and back it up with cheap market content. Everyone else might as well just get out of the business entirely, since nobody is going to buy $400-500+ tablets anymore, and anyone without a fully fleshed out market wont make any profit on the sale of the devices.
Without knowing that number trick, how would one know that "2" comes after "1" or that "3" is better than "2"?
This, sort of. Any OS will do 99% of whatever 99% of people want to do 99% of the time. There is very little reason to hot switch in an operating system. Its a lot simpler to just find an app that does what you want on the OS you're running full time.
I bought several tablets, and unlike Apples television commercials I wasnt able to learn Mandarin Chinese in minutes, compose a sonata, and my kids didnt suddenly turn into Einstein. So I just use them to check my facebook page, read email and play games like everyone else.
I looked at ultrathin laptops, but spending 2-3x as much on a tiny computer with a tiny screen that I cant upgrade is of no use to me, or most other people who arent college students with rich parents.
So I built my own desktop computer with a huge honking monitor thats fast, expandable and allows for easy content creation and is easy on my 50 year old eyes. It cost me less than a regular laptop to build and I can probably upgrade it and keep using it for 7+ years. Unlike the tablet that isnt really useful for anything except viewing content, and the ultralight laptop that would be outdated and seem slow 2 years from now, or break because they're too fragile.
Surprisingly, I also bought almost everything from Newegg.
Seriously. Besides this being a zero profit item, Intel is still getting over that horrible beating they got from the PowerPC challengers, arent they?
Even if it does offer comparable capabilities and a price or performance benefit, theres too much inertia behind x86.
I mean, Google+ is arguably better than Facebook, so why isnt everyone on it instead of FB?
Oh and lets all listen raptly to the people who hum the "I'd be happy doing web browsing and basic office stuff on a 95MHz chip!!1!". Yeah sure. Thats why most people want the new computer after the old one has been kicking around for a few years. Going back to 1989 wont make anyone happy. People in third world countries wouldnt pee on it if it caught fire.
Because it and the iphone allowed non technical people to be able to carry their music and photos and stuff around with ease compared to alternatives. Apples success has very little to do with their products and more to do with their itunes/app store content.
Now you have amazon with all of the same content, and the ability to buy pretty much anything, with their marketplace, and their upcoming tablet.
And google, with their app store, music, video, book content, and their upcoming smartphone.
Its about the content, stupid. Who will have more of it, make it easier to get, and have price points that make sense to the broad consumer base.
Weird. I installed two Slot 1 cpu's and had to attach the included heat sink with both. To be fair, I think they were among the first 10 slot 1 cpu's the company manufactured, so maybe they changed something after that.
No kidding. AMD has had frequent long running thermal issues, coupled with a history of not incorporating thermal protection into their cpus.
Such draconian assumptions. Maybe Intel just polled the buyers for this category of product and found that they rarely or never used the stock cooler provided, so they left it out since nobody was going to use it?
It does turn a profit, its just that its being pocketed.
I think that a computer that effectively cools itself while making little or no noise is better than one that prefers overheating in the lap and making no noise. Steve hates fans and noise. I remember working at trade shows he was at in the 70's and having to bring him trays of spare dynamic ram chips because the new Apple II was burning them up by the box full. He insisted then that there be no fan in the apple products, and he still hasnt learned his lesson.
You all also missed the 'bought recently' part to mean 'bought yesterday'. The fact is, the macbook pro 17" that was selling for almost $3k when I bought my laptop new has almost the same innards as the windows slab I bought for $499. Except as mentioned, for my faster hard drive and ram. Oh, and mine has a much better wireless card, although that wasnt compatible with OS X. With those components, my 2GHz core duo actually runs close with or faster than macbooks bought just a few years ago. $50 says that 98% of Apple users would be hard pressed to tell the difference in performance between my hackintosh and a recent model macbook.
Here's the seriously telling metric though...I can sell this 4+ year old laptop for $800-900 as a hackintosh, when it would sell for maybe $200 with windows on it. Thats $600-700 worth of faerie dust right there. Its certainly not the complexity of installing the OS. All I had to do was burn and boot a CD in the laptop, stick a retail OS X cd into it, and after the install run one program.
I'm not at all an Apple hater. I think they make nice products that are no better or worse than any other well made computers, only they cost twice as much. Thats reflected in the companies profits and their current position.
As far as other CEO's being out there, I remember Apple as a major tech company looking for and going through several seasoned veteran CEO's while nearly dropping dead. That they're out there is irrelevant if you cant get one to come and work for you. While they'd no doubt be offered a great comp package, they'd also contemplate that they would be hard pressed to improve on taking a half dead company to #1 by market cap and the heady profits. Even if you did a great job, you'd be unlikely to do as well or even maintain the position in the market. Frankly I doubt you could find someone as talented and hands on as Jobs has been...and I suspect that half the middle management at Apple is so used to the boss jumping through them to directly manipulate the products and operations that they'd perform poorly without the same sort of CEO.
ipad for $700 and non contract iphones for $500 'perfect'? I dont believe I'm arguing functionality of those products, just the price. I've used ipads and iphones and I can do just as well for half as much or less. Usually much less. They're very nice, just stupidly expensive. But profitable!
All three of these processors include virtualization support.
So once again, what features are missing that you had to pay extra for? Are you angry that Intel lets some customers buy cheaper versions of their i3 products that dont include features like virtualization and hyperthreading, which many users have no need for or wont see much benefit from?
I think I'll take the higher performing, cooler running, lower power demand cpu's that have fully disclosed prices and features, instead of the lower performing, hotter running, higher power demand cpu's that also have fully disclosed prices and features. Railing on about things that have no applicability to this specific topic or that have no basis in reality seems unnecessary and unproductive.
But you have a nice day now.
For computers and for a share of stock. When Steve finally moves on (one way or the other), the company will go the same route it did the last time he left. He's an example of a driven visionary that jumps right through all the middle management to directly manipulate products, services and the marketing messages. How often does your CEO drop into your product meetings to tell you how to make it work or what not to do?
Oh yeah, and stress causes cancer.
In other news I completely frustrated several of my Apple buying friends by taking a 4 year old 17" laptop and spending 2 hours hackintoshing it. Its as good or better than the $2000-3000 apple laptops they've bought recently. When they said "Well, but thats not the same" I challenged them to tell me what was deficient about it or what the extra money bought them. They couldnt come up with a thing. In fact, my laptop runs faster in benchmarks than similar apple laptops, because it has a faster disk drive and ram than Apple put in them. It also runs cooler because the fan runs more than the fan does in the macbook.
The message here is that when you have a huge cost/profit built into a product that appear to be based entirely on perception, when the chief influencer of that perception goes away...so does the profit.
Unless of course you can find another really smart, really driven leader willing to kill himself stomping around Apple trying to out-do what Steve Jobs did. Good luck with that.
Right. AMD does exactly the same 'ripping off'. They speed limit for binning purposes and disable perfectly good cores and perfectly good cache to turn out lower end cpus. The only thing they dont do is give you a sanctioned upgrade path that maintains your warranty. Thats much better!
Years ago manufacturing yields werent as good and materials variability caused vendors to have to speed and function test all the products and bin according to what their capabilities indicated. These days manufacturing yields are excellent and materials variability and processing are also much better. That means you sell everyone an expensive, fast cpu or you artificially bin, the latter being what every single cpu manufacturer does. Consider also that when you're buying a cpu thats limited to 1/2 or 3/4 of its actual performance limit, its going to be a lot more reliable than a cpu thats running at 95% of its actual speed capability.
I hope you dont have a Playstation 3, because that'd really tick you off.. Those have 8 cores that are almost always all good, but they turn one off because half of the yield has one bad core, and they dedicate one core to the operating system even if its not using it! Those @%^#@$'s!!!
But it is true that every silver lining has a cloud, so keep looking for it.
Because it costs the same amount of money to make a fast chip or a slow one. But many people wont pay more than $xx for a cpu at a specific performance level.
This sort of thing has gone on in the electronics and computer business for 50 years. Back in the 60's and for several decades IBM offered a single printer that could print at three different speeds at three different monthly lease points. The only difference between them was a rubber belt. You'd ask for the upgrade, IBM would raise your lease fee, and a guy would show up to change the belt.
While some chips get binned lower due to inability to run at a certain speed or having a bad core, most are simply made to run slower at a lower price point.
What really is the alternative? Would you like the chip companies to have separate manufacturing process for each speed level, causing an overall increase in cost across the line? Just charge everyone the top cost and give them all the fastest chip?
I think its a cool thing that you can buy an inexpensive computer, pay a small fee, and have it go faster rather than buy a new computer. Why someone would work overtime to find an issue with this is preposterous...
Came here to say this.
So you're not the only one. There are at least two sick bastages.
Its completely doable. I have a $169 tablet that has essentially the same or better internal specs as the original ipad (1.2GHz A8, 512MB ram, 4GB nand flash upgradeable to 64GB), runs android 2.3, 6 hour battery life...but obviously its a little thicker and a little bit heavier and the screen isnt quite as nice as the ipads. But its $169.
Perfectly usable, runs everything I've thrown at it. Since I bought it last month I see A9 based tablets with perfectly decent capacitive screens for under $200.
The really nice part is when my six year old says "Dad, can I play angry birds?", I can hand it over to him without any concerns. Saw a mom pass her new ipad 2 to her kid the other day, who dropped it during the hand off. Smasho.
This is a photo of where all of apples ideas will be coming from, post Jobs.