You realize that your $300 price barely covers the Intel CPU, right?
If it's running Windows for x86 / x64, Microsoft cannot lock you into their app store to subsidize hardware losses with software sales (the XBox model). They can do that with Windows RT, so they can cut the prices down and hope to gain it back on the software.
The real issue here is that Windows RT is an answer to a question nobody asked. They'll continue slashing the prices until they get dangerously close to "we can't even give them away" at which point they will just quietly cancel it. Much like their other embedded / portable failures of the past.
The Helix is expensive because of two things: 1. it carries the full enterprise out-of-band management that Yoga and ThinkPad Twist are missing; and 2. it's way thinner than either Twist or Yoga.
Twist and Yoga are great if you're a consumer - you probably won't notice any difference other than the physical dimensions. But enterprise business is going to care about the out-of-band management, because at least the business I work for is looking to standardize on vPro hardware for the massive savings in power management and standardized remote control that is based in hardware, rather than an agent that can break, running on an OS that can break. The value of vPro is easily demonstrated by rigging a machine to blue screen on boot by changing the AHCI settings in BIOS; using vPro to remote control the bluescreen'd PC while the OS is halted, reboot it and go into the BIOS, and change the setting. All remotely, from 1000 miles away.
Lenovo also never made a Yoga that they've even tried to sell to enterprise business, because they are concerned with the hinge design holding up for the standard lifecycle that business customers expect. They are going to have a Yoga-style product in the coming Haswell generation (I've heard from our sales rep, at least), but it's not here yet. Twist is just a slightly thinner X230 Tablet, if we're being honest - that product has been around for almost a decade.
You're probably looking for a +1 Funny mod, but I don't have to carry around a 23" display to use it on my desktop. I don't have to hold a 23" display to the side of my head when I'm using it.
And if you've ever seen the Mac version of Outlook, it's very clear that the Mac Business Unit developers don't share more than about 3 words with either the Exchange team, or the Windows apps team.
Back in the day, there was a fully-functional Exchange client for "Classic" MacOS that had feature parity with Windows Outlook. Then, the MacBU threw that away and gave us the glorified front-end to Outlook Web Access that we have today. What a piece of shit.
Apple does not require you to use an AppleID on a Mac. It will ask for it, but you can close the box and it won't ask again unless you try using a service that is tied into AppleID authentication.
It is basically required on iOS, but I've got several hundred people using Macs in this company, and none of them have an AppleID entered on their systems (and, in fact, iCloud is blocked at the firewall).
Unfortunately, Microsoft's cash cow is enterprise customers, and they are pushing enterprise to their new enterprise agreements which are basically software subscriptions. This way, they get the annual cash flow whether enterprise adopts the new version or not.
Why is big business signing up for this? Because Microsoft is tying in things that big business wants, or only making it available through an Enterprise Agreement. Things like MDOP, AppV, Win7 Enterprise Edition, Branch Caching, and centrally managed BitLocker.
Even if a large company doesn't adopt Windows 8, it's still worth it to get the other stuff. And that's how Microsoft will continue to survive.
Checking in from a Fortune-20 company where we have 30,000 thin clients running a Debian-based image. Citrix allows us to break away from $600+ desktops to run mundane Windows software everywhere.
Do we still have Windows boxes? Sure. Shitloads of them. But not everywhere. $300 thin clients running Linux are an incredible value proposition when you're talking about shared machines that are only used for email access and computer-based training (retail).
Windows 7 and Windows 8 both have three licensing schemes:
1. Single user licensing with "activation" - this is what retail customers get. 2. Multi-Activation Key (MAK) - this is a volume license option that still phones home to Microsoft. MAKs are available with 500 activations, and your organization can get multiple MAKs. 3. Key Management Server (KMS) - This is the full-blown Enterprise way of not having to blow holes in your firewall to phone home to Microsoft - you build up a domain controller with KMS running on it, and then load in your key for Windows (and Office) and it activates against your AD domain. It periodically continues to check in with the KMS, so that if you activate once and then never talk to AD again, it will deactivate after a few weeks of use.
I know of at least 5 Fortune-100 companies that are either in early-life support, or full rollout of Mac OS X as an IT-supported option. They wouldn't be doing that if there wasn't a reason - either user choice in order to make employees happier, a TCO argument that pencils out, or something that works better and more efficiently.
Are they replacing all their Windows boxes? No. But if large insurance companies are supporting them somewhere besides the marketing department, then something in the IT zeitgeist has changed.
OSX is unquestionably one of the most productivity hostile systems ever created
You're going to have to back this up with some evidence, bro. You can't claim something that far out of popular opinion without backing it up.
Especially since I have data regarding marketing departments switching from Windows to OS X and realizing double-digit percentage gains in page count being produced with zero additional head count.
If the founders were so worried about the people's decisions, why did they bother mentioning things like "we the people" that emphasized a nation made up of free citizens?
Because they rightly extol the idea that government derives it's power from the people that allow it to exist, but also rightly understand that every citizen, even in today's day of practically instant communication, cannot be experts on every issue and vote accordingly. Thus, they founded a representative republic, allowing the people to send representatives to form a government to vote on their behalf and represent their ideals and values.
It worked pretty good for a couple hundred years, too. It's only coming off the rails now because those representatives are not holding up their end of the bargain, and their constituents are failing to realize that these representatives work for them, and are accountable to them. Somewhere along the road the representatives seem to have altered the perception to make people think that they are accountable to their political party, and not the voters that put them there.
And Apple's never been down the sole-supplier road for CPUs in the past, with the Motorola 680x0 series CPUs, the Motorola PowerPC (601,603,604,750), the Motorola PowerPC G4 (74xx, 75xx) or the IBM PowerPC G5 (9xx); all of which had product delays and shortages delaying Apple products from launching.
Apple couldn't get away from that mess fast enough, and Intel did them a huge favor when they abandoned the NetBurst Pentium4 architecture in favor of Core, giving Apple enough horsepower to emulate PowerPC code at reasonable speed.
That's what allowed Apple to switch to x86 without pissing everyone off.
The performance may be good, but it's not adequate.
There isn't an ARM CPU that can keep up with a dual or quad-core Ivy Bridge processor like you find in any Mac, and they sure as hell aren't 64-bit, which Lion and Mountain Lion are front-to-back.
ARM makes sense in low power devices where space constraints are at a premium. In a laptop, and especially a desktop, people are looking for performance that just can't be delivered at this time. If it could be, then Apple might be doing exactly that.
Oh, and there's that whole "does it run all my software I've purchased over the last 5+ years" problem - Apple has dealt with that problem three times before (MC680x0 > PowerPC, Mac OS > Mac OS X w/ Classic, PowerPC > Intel x86), and each time they got away with it because the architecture switch delivered WAY more performance in order to emulate the previous environment. ARM can't do that right now.
Wait, you thought that they care about people? They care about what keeps them in Washington, evidenced by delaying the massive political meltdown that was 6 months away, 9 months before the next midterm election.
This is the worst kind of politics - shoving through a bad law that people increasingly don't like; and then delaying the enforcement of the law until the political backlash won't matter, leaving the people that the law would have helped twisting in the wind.
So go ahead and re-elect those Senators to 6-year terms. By the time they are up for a potential firing again, everyone will have forgotten about this ridiculous mess.
Run yourself into the hole for -$32M and make sure you have negative income. You'll see it start to bounce between -$32M in red, and +$32M in black. Hit the save game key when it's black, and then reload, and when the next tick of expense comes off, you'll be at 31M and change.
Apple's strategy is to make content consumption devices (iPad, iPhone, iPod, AppleTV) and content creation devices (MacBook line, iMac line, Mac Pro). The day they move Mac to ARM is the day every creative professional that Apple has had in their pocket jumps ship. The Mac Mini isn't adequate do page layout workflows with a low voltage i7 inside of it - there's absolutely no chance whatsoever that a 32-bit ARM core can do it.
Apple's already done the "we're using a different CPU architecture than everyone else" thing. Twice. ARM can't deliver the power they need for content creation, thus the continued use of Intel X86 on Mac. The one Mac that would make sense to move to ARM - MacBook Air - was the first Haswell-based Mac launched.
Why would it be expensive, when they use the same processor they are already using in current generation iPad? No, it won't have 1400 shaders in the GPU, but iOS developers don't care, and iOS gamers don't either.
See: the billions of games sold on iPhone / iPad / Android.
So in which departments does ATIV Book 9 Plus beat the MacBook AIR?
* Great design
What the hell does this even mean? The MacBook Air defined the "Ultrabook" form factor, which this is following onto. Oh, but somehow Apple is behind when this is the exact same form factor, with a bit of side moulding?
* 256GB SSD (seems 128GB would be the base model)
Exactly the same as MacBook Air, except the MacBook Air has faster storage, because it's PCI-E based instead of SATA.
* 3200x1800 resolution
Yes, that's more pixels then MacBook Air. However, there is no OS you can run on this thing that properly deals with Hi-DPI displays.
* Touch Screen
Do not want.
* Haswell Processor
Same as MacBook Air.
* 12 Hours battery life
Claimed 12 hour battery life. Is this a real "I can use it for 12 hours on wireless, with the backlight on, doing real work" or "It can idle with the backlight and all radios off, and every power management setting at maximum, and it will barely squeak out 12 hours" ? MacBook Air's 11 hour battery life is real world proven by reviewers.
* More 'standard' ports as compared to Apple's proprietary ports.
What the hell does this mean? Mini-VGA is not any standard you'll find on anything. What on the MacBook Air is "proprietary" to Apple, other than the MagSafe power? DisplayPort is a VESA standard. Thunderbolt is a licensable tech from Intel.
Slashdot Mirror
Time to take a remedial math course. Your 7th grade multiplication skills are lacking.
You realize that your $300 price barely covers the Intel CPU, right?
If it's running Windows for x86 / x64, Microsoft cannot lock you into their app store to subsidize hardware losses with software sales (the XBox model). They can do that with Windows RT, so they can cut the prices down and hope to gain it back on the software.
The real issue here is that Windows RT is an answer to a question nobody asked. They'll continue slashing the prices until they get dangerously close to "we can't even give them away" at which point they will just quietly cancel it. Much like their other embedded / portable failures of the past.
The Helix is expensive because of two things: 1. it carries the full enterprise out-of-band management that Yoga and ThinkPad Twist are missing; and 2. it's way thinner than either Twist or Yoga.
Twist and Yoga are great if you're a consumer - you probably won't notice any difference other than the physical dimensions. But enterprise business is going to care about the out-of-band management, because at least the business I work for is looking to standardize on vPro hardware for the massive savings in power management and standardized remote control that is based in hardware, rather than an agent that can break, running on an OS that can break. The value of vPro is easily demonstrated by rigging a machine to blue screen on boot by changing the AHCI settings in BIOS; using vPro to remote control the bluescreen'd PC while the OS is halted, reboot it and go into the BIOS, and change the setting. All remotely, from 1000 miles away.
Lenovo also never made a Yoga that they've even tried to sell to enterprise business, because they are concerned with the hinge design holding up for the standard lifecycle that business customers expect. They are going to have a Yoga-style product in the coming Haswell generation (I've heard from our sales rep, at least), but it's not here yet. Twist is just a slightly thinner X230 Tablet, if we're being honest - that product has been around for almost a decade.
You're probably looking for a +1 Funny mod, but I don't have to carry around a 23" display to use it on my desktop. I don't have to hold a 23" display to the side of my head when I'm using it.
And if you've ever seen the Mac version of Outlook, it's very clear that the Mac Business Unit developers don't share more than about 3 words with either the Exchange team, or the Windows apps team.
Back in the day, there was a fully-functional Exchange client for "Classic" MacOS that had feature parity with Windows Outlook. Then, the MacBU threw that away and gave us the glorified front-end to Outlook Web Access that we have today. What a piece of shit.
Like someone above said, what SQL Server needs is more "live tiles."
Being a Microsoft memo, you have to wonder if your bingo overflow allowed remote execution of arbitrary code and privilege escalation...
I'd be happy with more synergy between my office applications, and my office applications. Can we start there first?
There is also no proof that you actually read what I wrote, since I specifically said:
Are they replacing all their Windows boxes? No.
Apple does not require you to use an AppleID on a Mac. It will ask for it, but you can close the box and it won't ask again unless you try using a service that is tied into AppleID authentication.
It is basically required on iOS, but I've got several hundred people using Macs in this company, and none of them have an AppleID entered on their systems (and, in fact, iCloud is blocked at the firewall).
Unfortunately, Microsoft's cash cow is enterprise customers, and they are pushing enterprise to their new enterprise agreements which are basically software subscriptions. This way, they get the annual cash flow whether enterprise adopts the new version or not.
Why is big business signing up for this? Because Microsoft is tying in things that big business wants, or only making it available through an Enterprise Agreement. Things like MDOP, AppV, Win7 Enterprise Edition, Branch Caching, and centrally managed BitLocker.
Even if a large company doesn't adopt Windows 8, it's still worth it to get the other stuff. And that's how Microsoft will continue to survive.
Hi.
Checking in from a Fortune-20 company where we have 30,000 thin clients running a Debian-based image. Citrix allows us to break away from $600+ desktops to run mundane Windows software everywhere.
Do we still have Windows boxes? Sure. Shitloads of them. But not everywhere. $300 thin clients running Linux are an incredible value proposition when you're talking about shared machines that are only used for email access and computer-based training (retail).
Windows 7 and Windows 8 both have three licensing schemes:
1. Single user licensing with "activation" - this is what retail customers get.
2. Multi-Activation Key (MAK) - this is a volume license option that still phones home to Microsoft. MAKs are available with 500 activations, and your organization can get multiple MAKs.
3. Key Management Server (KMS) - This is the full-blown Enterprise way of not having to blow holes in your firewall to phone home to Microsoft - you build up a domain controller with KMS running on it, and then load in your key for Windows (and Office) and it activates against your AD domain. It periodically continues to check in with the KMS, so that if you activate once and then never talk to AD again, it will deactivate after a few weeks of use.
Not yet.
I know of at least 5 Fortune-100 companies that are either in early-life support, or full rollout of Mac OS X as an IT-supported option. They wouldn't be doing that if there wasn't a reason - either user choice in order to make employees happier, a TCO argument that pencils out, or something that works better and more efficiently.
Are they replacing all their Windows boxes? No. But if large insurance companies are supporting them somewhere besides the marketing department, then something in the IT zeitgeist has changed.
OSX is unquestionably one of the most productivity hostile systems ever created
You're going to have to back this up with some evidence, bro. You can't claim something that far out of popular opinion without backing it up.
Especially since I have data regarding marketing departments switching from Windows to OS X and realizing double-digit percentage gains in page count being produced with zero additional head count.
You realize there's a difference between hating the military, and hating the government's use of the military in enforcing misguided policy, right?
Short hand: don't hate the players, hate the game.
If the founders were so worried about the people's decisions, why did they bother mentioning things like "we the people" that emphasized a nation made up of free citizens?
Because they rightly extol the idea that government derives it's power from the people that allow it to exist, but also rightly understand that every citizen, even in today's day of practically instant communication, cannot be experts on every issue and vote accordingly. Thus, they founded a representative republic, allowing the people to send representatives to form a government to vote on their behalf and represent their ideals and values.
It worked pretty good for a couple hundred years, too. It's only coming off the rails now because those representatives are not holding up their end of the bargain, and their constituents are failing to realize that these representatives work for them, and are accountable to them. Somewhere along the road the representatives seem to have altered the perception to make people think that they are accountable to their political party, and not the voters that put them there.
And Apple's never been down the sole-supplier road for CPUs in the past, with the Motorola 680x0 series CPUs, the Motorola PowerPC (601,603,604,750), the Motorola PowerPC G4 (74xx, 75xx) or the IBM PowerPC G5 (9xx); all of which had product delays and shortages delaying Apple products from launching.
Apple couldn't get away from that mess fast enough, and Intel did them a huge favor when they abandoned the NetBurst Pentium4 architecture in favor of Core, giving Apple enough horsepower to emulate PowerPC code at reasonable speed.
That's what allowed Apple to switch to x86 without pissing everyone off.
The performance may be good, but it's not adequate.
There isn't an ARM CPU that can keep up with a dual or quad-core Ivy Bridge processor like you find in any Mac, and they sure as hell aren't 64-bit, which Lion and Mountain Lion are front-to-back.
ARM makes sense in low power devices where space constraints are at a premium. In a laptop, and especially a desktop, people are looking for performance that just can't be delivered at this time. If it could be, then Apple might be doing exactly that.
Oh, and there's that whole "does it run all my software I've purchased over the last 5+ years" problem - Apple has dealt with that problem three times before (MC680x0 > PowerPC, Mac OS > Mac OS X w/ Classic, PowerPC > Intel x86), and each time they got away with it because the architecture switch delivered WAY more performance in order to emulate the previous environment. ARM can't do that right now.
Wait, you thought that they care about people? They care about what keeps them in Washington, evidenced by delaying the massive political meltdown that was 6 months away, 9 months before the next midterm election.
This is the worst kind of politics - shoving through a bad law that people increasingly don't like; and then delaying the enforcement of the law until the political backlash won't matter, leaving the people that the law would have helped twisting in the wind.
So go ahead and re-elect those Senators to 6-year terms. By the time they are up for a potential firing again, everyone will have forgotten about this ridiculous mess.
Best flaw was this:
Run yourself into the hole for -$32M and make sure you have negative income. You'll see it start to bounce between -$32M in red, and +$32M in black. Hit the save game key when it's black, and then reload, and when the next tick of expense comes off, you'll be at 31M and change.
Yay for unsigned variables!
Apple's strategy is to make content consumption devices (iPad, iPhone, iPod, AppleTV) and content creation devices (MacBook line, iMac line, Mac Pro). The day they move Mac to ARM is the day every creative professional that Apple has had in their pocket jumps ship. The Mac Mini isn't adequate do page layout workflows with a low voltage i7 inside of it - there's absolutely no chance whatsoever that a 32-bit ARM core can do it.
Apple's already done the "we're using a different CPU architecture than everyone else" thing. Twice. ARM can't deliver the power they need for content creation, thus the continued use of Intel X86 on Mac. The one Mac that would make sense to move to ARM - MacBook Air - was the first Haswell-based Mac launched.
Why would it be expensive, when they use the same processor they are already using in current generation iPad? No, it won't have 1400 shaders in the GPU, but iOS developers don't care, and iOS gamers don't either.
See: the billions of games sold on iPhone / iPad / Android.
So in which departments does ATIV Book 9 Plus beat the MacBook AIR?
* Great design
What the hell does this even mean? The MacBook Air defined the "Ultrabook" form factor, which this is following onto. Oh, but somehow Apple is behind when this is the exact same form factor, with a bit of side moulding?
* 256GB SSD (seems 128GB would be the base model)
Exactly the same as MacBook Air, except the MacBook Air has faster storage, because it's PCI-E based instead of SATA.
* 3200x1800 resolution
Yes, that's more pixels then MacBook Air. However, there is no OS you can run on this thing that properly deals with Hi-DPI displays.
* Touch Screen
Do not want.
* Haswell Processor
Same as MacBook Air.
* 12 Hours battery life
Claimed 12 hour battery life. Is this a real "I can use it for 12 hours on wireless, with the backlight on, doing real work" or "It can idle with the backlight and all radios off, and every power management setting at maximum, and it will barely squeak out 12 hours" ? MacBook Air's 11 hour battery life is real world proven by reviewers.
* More 'standard' ports as compared to Apple's proprietary ports.
What the hell does this mean? Mini-VGA is not any standard you'll find on anything. What on the MacBook Air is "proprietary" to Apple, other than the MagSafe power? DisplayPort is a VESA standard. Thunderbolt is a licensable tech from Intel.
This article is astroturf garbage.