I pay $120 a month for broadband to the house, $30 a month for broadband to the phone (that's the exact cost on top of the dumb phone costs). Ok, I live in a "wireless" area... no wired broadband, which is always cheaper (well, short of a T1 line or Frame Relay).
Really, these are pocket computers we're talking about here. Apple's a good example... don't want the network? Buy the iPod, same thing as an iPhone 'cept for the phone part. Folks always rave about the cost of the smart phone network connection, but never mention their internet connection when talking about their PC(s). But whatever you pay, it's a direct result of that PC, just as the cellular modem service plan is the result of having a smart phone.
PCs are a commodity market. You generally get what you pay for. The average PC sold in the USA last year cost just over $500, and the profit margins were razor thin.
Smart phones have artificially high prices. They are kept high, particularly in the USA, Canada, and other countries in which phones are subsidized by telecom companies (and these artificial prices affect the international price as well). They do this to maintain the illusion that a subsidized phone is a stellar deal, which in fact, not so much.
In a competitive market, the high end smart phones would run around $300, unbundled/unlocked, give or take. Even comparing that to the very high profit margins Apple's seeing shows this clearly. The iPod vs. iPhone is the perfect comparison. If you add a mic ($1.00), a camera or two ($2-$3), and a cellular modem subsystem (radio chip, PA, switches, printed antenna... $20-$30), you get a smart phone. You can buy an iPod Touch with 8GB at Amazon for $215. Even with markup, the extra components that make it an iPhone don't get you anywhere near the $600 or so they sell for unbundled (well, the replacement price, since Apple doesn't actually sell unbundled in the USA, though they do elsewhere).
And even this is comparing, well, Apples to non-Apples. Apple hardware, all of it, is overpriced. An Archos 32, running Android, with that same 8GB runs $145 at Amazon. Not as nice as the iPod, but it does the same jobs.
This is already coming true, even with fairly weak competition. Two of the small national wireless companies, MetroPCS and Cricket Wireless, have left the subsidized phone + contract model -- you buy the phone outright, you pay by month as long as you feel like it. MetroPCS has two Android models, one at $230, one at $300... the later with OLED screen and both 3G and LTE (I won't say "4G") network interfaces (apparently their LTE service sucks, but they did roll it out before Verizon). If you could buy these as a commodity, rather than locked into any given carrier, the prices would drop still more.
I mean, really, think about it. A smartphone or ARM-based tablet has only some of the same components as a PC, but nearly every one costs less: cheaper display, cheaper battery, cheaper CPU (and it's an SOC, so no need for a "North Bridge" or other system chips), same Wifi, fewer ports, less RAM, less mass storage, no keyboard, etc. The only reason people think these things are expensive is because there's little direct competition. But things like Android are starting to change that... no more proprietary lock-in.
Apple should be an indicator, too. The average laptop, not including netbooks, sold in the USA in 2009 cost about $550. Apple's cheapest laptop starts at $1000... and they're selling the same thing. Macs ARE PC Clones. So figure, for any price Apple puts on an item, you should figure if that class of item were sold in a PC-like commodity market, the average price would be about half. This also tracks with plain old MP3 players, and it's starting to look like smart phones are heading there. Tablets, not yet, but no one's had a successful ARM-based tablet yet except Apple and Samsung... and Samsung's not fighting the high markups yet. No point yet, but in a few years, it'll be the PC Wars all over again.
In the trade, an embedded system is a system with a fixed function that's microcontroller/microcomputer powered. Like a dumb phone, a microwave oven, most modern cars, etc. An embedded system is designed to do a certain set of functions when its shipped, and those functions rarely change. Sure, in modern times you can update firmware: DVD/BD players, MP3 players, digital cameras, etc. Sometimes you can even get hacks (Canon DSLR firmware, for example), but in general, it's a fixed set of functions.
PCs, PDAs, Smart Phones, Game Consoles, etc. are all flavors of application platforms... very different than embedded systems. These devices are fitted with all kinds of extra resources designed to expand functionality with new applications. There's really nothing magical about a "PC" that makes it something fundamentally different than a smart phone in the way its used. There is something fundamentally different about your microwave oven or digital camera.
Yup. In fact, if you go back to the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were all sorts of "personal computers": Apple ][, Commodore PET, VIC-20 and 64, Atari 400 and 800, various TRS-80 models, etc. The term was coined to distinguish a "personal" computer from former "home" computers -- which had often been any computer at your home, any way you could get it. Usually in some kind of kit form. Not for those shy about hardware hacking.
Back in the early 1990s, of course, the Macintosh, the Commodore Amiga, and the Atari ST were personal computers that were not "IBM Personal Computer Clone", and no one was confused about the "personal computer" term. Apple had some years by themselves, on the PowerPC chip, when they kept on being non-PC personal computers. The Macintosh did eventually become just another PC. But that by no means limits the extent of "personal computer".
Certainly all smart phones quality as personal computers. They are not JUST personal computers, they're also generalized communications devices. But they're considerably more powerful personaly computers than most PC or non-PC personal computers for the 1990s.
"MacBook" vs. "MacBook Pro" are two arbitrary marketing designations for exactly the same kind of thing. "iPad" vs. "MacBook" refer to two completely different kinds of personal computing devices. And these days, Apple's been favoring the former kind -- the one they control, the one that generates revenue for them from 3rd party software.
It would not be a huge shock to find, over time, Apple would rather sell you an iPad than a Mac. That doesn't mean the Mac goes away, but it may be replaced by the iPad at the lower end of things.
In fact, in a sense it already has been -- Apple doesn't want to sell a Mac that's price-competitive with the lower end of the PC market. They could, but that would kill their huge profit margins. Being a different kind of thing, an iPad (or any ARM-based tablet) costs less to make than a low-end x86 PC... so they get their accustomed high margins in a lower price market.
However, the iPad and the generic PC laptop are at the same price-point. Apple doesn't sell a laptop below $1000, but the average laptop sold in the USA in 2009 cost $550 -- and that's excluding Netbooks.
For people who know what they want, PCs and iPads are not the same thing. For those that don't, beyond "computing device with 'the Internet' and 'apps", the generic PC laptop competes for the same cash as the iPad.
Actually, in 2009 the average US price for non-netbook laptops was $550. On the other hand, what you get for $550 from Dell or HP is about the same as what you get for $1000 from Apple, for all practical purposes. If consumers demand a better screen or more metal and less plastic (though the high carbon plastic they use is pretty good, even if it's not as thin), you'll pay for it.
Most people are looking for a tool, not a fashion statement. Things that lead to a more usable system sell; things that don't wind up gone, or a niche product.
This isn't the case with smartphones just yet... plenty high end phones sell, and probably will continue to sell. But there hasn't been much of a real mid-range in modern smartphones in the USA (I think that's largely what SymbianOS has been, elsewhere). Every iPhone is essentially high-end; sometimes Apple will sell you last year's model as an entry-level option, other times not so much. RIM isn't directly competing, either. So it's Android more or less introducing or re-introducing mid-range and low-end smartphones for consumers. For business users, you've had your choice of Palms, WinMos, and BBs over the year, but these don't deliver what Android and iOS do for the consumer.
Here's the thing.... Apple only looks at the top. Blackberry doesn't seem to consider the top worth looking at (eg, their latest offerings seem a little too 2008 for me).
But most real cell companies are used to offering dozens of different models. So yeah, Motorola and HTC and Samsung are pushing for the top.. on a phone or two. But they're also releasing a bunch of mid-range Android phones as well... every month we see something new from Motorola and/or HTC.
The high end phones can sell well, sure. But they also help establish the brand in the eyes of the public. Before Droid, people knew Motorola more as a "was"... not they're well regarded for making cool smartphones. Hasn't hurt their bottom line, either...first profitable year since 2006 or some-such. So this makes it ok to buy a slightly scaled down model. Not to mention that a mid-tier Android today is probably pretty close to my "high end" Droid-1 from last year. And while there are better, the Droid is still a damn nice smartphone... I'm not ready to trade 'er in just yet.
It's already well known in geek circles. The green robot's made prominent appearances on TV ("Fringe" just this week). There are green robot toys all over the place. I get 375,000 hits for "Android Mascot" on Google... even more than I get googling my name (80,800)... the mascot is a great marketing gimmik.
They actually started out with MIPS (back when the "ARC" platform was being positioned as an alternative to x86), but MS's usual plan with NT was to get someone else to maintain (and pay to maintain) the non-x86 versions of NT. So NEC did most of the MIPS work, Motorola did PowerPC, IBM did Alpha, etc.
The main reason for removing awful bundled software is internal flash space. That's a slowly vanishing problem, as phone makers spend the extra buck or two and go beyond the 512MB standard of 2009.
Boost resells Sprint, but Cricket is actually on their own network. So is MetroPCS. Both are tiny, even compared to T-Mobile, but they're not "resellers" in the send of Boost, Virgin, Creedo, etc.
And yeah, these guys, at least in part, have already shaken up the market a bit. Until this year or so, the cellular market was all fairly artificial competition. Each company would dangle different carrots in front of you to get your business, but the fees and services were nearly identical.
Then some of the small guys entered and countered that with the "buy the phone, no contract" options, at substantially lower prices. Market pressures at least got T-Mo and Sprint competing somewhat on price, and I guess T-Mobile even offers a lower price if you bring your own phone.
As thing heat up with "4G" (or maybe, even actual 4G in a few years), there really could be another series of shakeups. In fact, it's already headed that way I think... Sprint is currently doing "all you can eat" on WiMax, while Verizon is doing the same old download caps for LTE they do for EvDO. T-Mobile is doing the same caps too, but their "4G" is actually just the final generation of 3G, HSPA+, same thing AT&T just finished installing (though apparently, they're not supporting it with many devices yet -- could be they just cut their HSPA+ plans short in lieu of spending that money on their LTE network)
There have nearly always been x86 chips from other companies. AMD got in the game because Intel actually pushed for them to create a second source. In those days, Hitachi did second source MC68000s for Motorola, too... there was just more resistance to single sourced major components than there is today.
The reason it's called "Wintel" isn't because Windows and Intel are/were the only options. Its because they came to be driving factor behind the evolution of the PC platform, much as IBM had been in the pre-PS/2 days. Look at any PC interface in there: PCI, ePCI, USB, SATA, etc. Intel designed or codesigned most of these. Firewire? Designed by Apple... never became all that prevalent (and the only reason anyone cared: video cameras).
Sure, AMD too the reigns on some things (64-bit, links vs buses). Sure, Linux is the engine that drives the internet, as well as lots of big iron (massively parallel data servers and supercomputers, many smart phones), but it's MS/Windows and Intel, more than anything, that shaped the modern PC.
Well, that and videogames. Since gaming emerged in the early 1990s as the only mass market activity that really demanded more CPU cycles, it's been very tightly coupled to both Intel and Windows in the way PCs evolved.
People will walk into a phone store and ask for "a smartphone".
There was a time when you walked into a computer store, and saw just Apples, Commodores, and maybe Ataris or Cromemcos or Kaypros. Later on, you saw PCs, Macs, PCs, Amigas, PCs, maybe an Atari ST, and more PCs. Today, you see PCs, unless you're in one of the rare stores with Macs. And the Macs are all over in the "special people" corner of the store.
This isn't the case, yet, with Smartphones. But consider reality: you go into a phone store today, there are a dozen smart phones. In an AT&T store, one of those will be an iPhone. At Sprint or Verizon, maybe one is a Palm. You probably have 2-3 Blackberries at any given store. All the rest are Android... not to bad one a year.
So it's not hard to imagine that the known-nothing, just-wants-a-smart-phone buyer will assay the selection, and do what they did for the PC: buy what apparently everyone else is buying. Which, at least this time around, is a far better thing to do than when it was PC vs. everyone else.
The big problem is that, while Android itself is a good thing (IMHO), the phone company mucking with Android, with my ability to load up alternate versions of Android, their hacking in forced Bing! or evil apps I can't remove, that has the potential to damage Android's reputation. Sure, freedom is a double-edged sword. But this kind of buying doesn't filter out the worst of these. Smart buying, when people do the research, would end this practice.
Google themselves could spend the Google equivalent of a drink at Starbucks and launch a consumer education campaign on this. It does ultimately affect their purpose behind Android -- too much locking down, and Google could actually be pushed out of the picture (imagine an AT&T phone with Bing! that only allows downloads from the new AT&T App Store, with a protected bootloader).
If you buy a TV at Best Buy, you MAY get a good price. I bought one there a few years back, a bit more expensive than B&H in New York, but that more than made up by the lack of shipping charges (for a 125lbs 71" TV).
But if you look around the TV department, accessories are crazy expensive -- and consumers by those anyway, just because it's easier. So you drop some cash on a carefully investigated HDTV, at a great price, then spend $50-$100 on an HDMI cable you could get at Monoprice.com for $5-$10. The reason is simple: Best Buy knows you're not paying attention, and the might come close to doubling their profits on the sale if they load you up with accessories.
That's why they push those antivirus solutions (I didn't know about the automatic re-purchase... these guys have nothing on the online porn industry). Years back, I bought a "Black Friday" PC for one of my kids... $200 for the whole thing, including monitor, a sweet deal. At the checkout, they all but bludgeoned me over the head to buy Norton/Symantec, depite the fact I ensure them I didn't need it, my cousin worked for McAfee (true, at the time), there were plenty of free options, etc. They really put the screws to me... I can imagine Joe Regular Consumer caving to this pressure. And I had to wait an extra half-hour to get a PC without it... they were so successful at this upsell, they had pre-installed Norton on every machine they had down on the floor.
Of course, I didn't buy that, I wouldn't sign anything that let them charge me for it later, and if they did charge my card, I'd do what I could to get it treated as a case of fraud.
The early consoles were weak... very simple designs, way behind what you found in state of the art PCs, driven by fairly small companies, often using off-the-shelf parts. The latest round used custom GPU and CPU designs, exotic memory, and pushed chip designs to their limits. In short, console development has been exponentially more complex. The five-year cycle was market-driven as much as anything... it certainly didn't take five engineering years to go from FamCom to SNES.
The console market is also an interesting one, in that, it takes so long for a company to sell the console at anything close to a profit, the market's really organized around games as the profit center. So the only advantage to making a new console is to ensure that consumers buy my games, not my competitor's. As long as they're not busting the status quo with a new console announcement, why should I. That doesn't mean there isn't one in development, only that the actual launch is going to cost me lots of money, and it might risk my position relative to the others. I'd rather hold back, as long as my console is doing well.
Technically speaking, Microsoft (and everyone else) is totally free to implement good ideas from anything they see. A patent doesn't cover an idea, it covers a very specific implementation.
Now, sure, in the real world, this may get you sued, just because companies are lawsuit-happy these days. But if your implementation is different, you should win that lawsuit. If it's not, then yeah, you're violating that patent.
Originally patents were designed to help innovation. Rather than keeping your thing secret, you told everyone how it worked -- in return for a temporary monopoly on that thing. And by "thing" I mean "specific implementation". Something that passes a rigorous test of "obviousness to one skilled in the art", prior art (including prior art that everyone knows about but isn't covered by patents), etc.
The state of patents, particularly in the USA, is much different today. Patents are granted without proper examination by experts (for example, in the first 10-or-so years of their granting software patents, the PTO didn't have a single software engineer as an examiner). They're granted on "business methods"... basically, just on ideas, not implementations, which is completely counter to their original purpose.
And large companies have evolved with this. IBM, for example, turned their patent department into a profit center back in the 1980s, and they learned to manipulate the system. Rather than investigate patenting things that were clearly new and innovative inventions, they took a different approach -- they patented anything that COULD be patented. They examined every little thing IBM engineers produced, and filed crazy patents. For example, IBM got a patent, in 1984 (now expired, at least) on cut and paste between text buffers. I saw them demonstrate this patent using Emacs... using a set of keystrokes that would have worked perfectly well on RMS's original TECO Emacs back in the 70s.
Right.. Ultracapacitors (eg, direct charge storage, rather than conversion to chemical energy) are extremely efficient at charge storage, by extremely inefficient in terms of energy density.. about 5% the capacity of a similar sized battery. The best use for the foreseeable future is a hybrid-hybrid... the ultracapactor acts as a power buffer in front of a battery. So, for example, you might manage to store some, maybe all, of the energy necessary to stop for one traffic light, then immediately re-apply it to get going again. Once you dump it to a battery, you're talking an 80% or so loss due the charge/discharge efficiency of the battery. Mitsubishi has messed around with this approach... the car gets 30-60 seconds of power from an ultracapacitor, then the battery kicks in.
There is some promising research. Most ultracapacitors use some nanoporous material, such as a activated charcoal or carbon aerogel, to store charge. It's entirely dependent on the material's effective surface area -- a carbon aerogel can deliver as much as 1000m^2/g. Some folks at MIT are working at replacing the aerogel with tightly bunched nanotubes. That could deliver a 5x increase in charge storage... so now you're looking at 25% the capacity of a similar battery. This might not have use in BEVs, but it's more practical in hybrids. A typical hybrid only cycles part of the battery's capacity. My 2003 Prius only runs 40% of capacity; the modern Prius runs around 60% of capacity. This is what keeps the battery alive; cycle a NiMh over its full range, and it only lasts about 1000 cycles. So assuming an ultracap can run its full range, a 5x improvement would make it practical in current hybrids. But of course, those are all NiMh, too... Li-ion cells will up the energy density again.
You might want to check that 80% figure. Sure, it depends on how high we're cycling our power plants. But based on actual energy consumption and relative "well to wheel" efficiencies (gasoline production, engine efficiency, motor efficiency, battery and transmission loss, etc), replacing just passenger vehicles with electrics would demand a doubling of the US power output, overnight (both literally and figuratively). I'm guessing we don't have that kind of excess capacity. And that's not even factoring in truck traffic.
Depends on the gas car. The SULEV certification in California (which was met by the 2001 Prius and since then even some non-hybrid cars) was designed around this (that's ULEV-II nation-wide). Back then, CA was demanding that some percentage of every car manufacturer's fleet go to electric. But in the mid-90s, electric just wasn't there. So this specification means that any conforming car is as low, or lower, in pollution than an EV powered from the grid... or at least, whatever averages powered the grid in California back in the mid-1990s. The more recent PZEV specification represents a yet-again cleaner vehicle.
So no, there are at least a number of cars as clean or cleaner than a mixed source power grid. An all-coal grid would be much worse. Of course, in some places, you can buy even cleaner power. Here in South Jersey, I'm on a 100% renewable plan (wind, small hydroelectric, and local solar). I have the option to go 100% wind power, from the Atlantic City Wind Farm (see: http://www.njwind.com/webcam.html).. still a bit expensive. I pay about $25 a month extra for all-renewable vs. "the regular mix". So in my case, that BEV would be cleaner than my 2003 Prius.
Real plug-in electric cars for sale on a large scale. The GM EV1 was just over 1,000 vehicles (660 "Gen-1" lead-acid cell cars in 1996, 457 "Gen-2" NiMh-cell cars in 1999)... basically, a science experiment. The cars were lease-only, because GM didn't want to have to comply with US law regarding replacement parts (six years of parts), which they would have, had the sold the cars. Not to mention that, at the time, they would have had to sell it at around $100,000 to break even.
Toyota had a more real launch of an electric vehicle, with the RAV4-EV in 1997. They made about 1500 of these, most of which were also leased. About 350 were sold at the end of the program. Toyota was better able to maintain support of the RAV4-EV because it shared parts with the regular RAV4 and the Prius.
There are lots of reasons BEVs haven't gone mass market yet, but a big one is patent encumbrance. Back in the EV-1 days, GM bought the patent for a functioning NiMh battery from its inventor, Dr. Stanford Ovshinsky and Ovonics Battery Company. This was later sold off and changed hands a few times. At one point it was owned by Chevron-Texaco.. it was a bit of a mess. They licensed companies like Panasonic to make small NiMh batteries (AA, D, etc) but that license didn't permit them to build larger cells. Panasonic bypassed this by building Prius and other EV batteries as arrays of smaller cells (the first Prius was literally built up from D-cells, but by the 2001 model they changed to a more space-efficient prismatic shape). There was eventually a big lawsuit, and all kinds of trouble.
So NiMh cells wind up overpriced for EVs... good enough for hybrids, but not so much for BEVs. Companies working on BEVs have been concentrating on various Lithium-based cells, but those have their own issues. In particular, Lithium batteries don't last as long as NiMh in BEV use (higher energy density, but far fewer charge/discharge cycles). Hybrids cheat.... the Prius, for example, only cycles 60% of the capacity of its cells, which seems to make them last indefinitely. This also helps preserve Lithium cells, but it's far less attractive to fit a large battery (weight, cost) in a BEV, then tell the owner you're only really getting half of that battery's range. Everyone's working on cells with longer life... supposedly, the cells used in the GM Volt will last 5,000 charge cycles, rather than the usual 300-500 in your cell phone or iPod.
Doubling the voltage reduces the current needed by that same factor of two (P = I * E). It reduces the power losses due to conductor resistance by a factor of four (P = I^2 * R).
A too-fast ramp up of electric vehicles could present a serious power problem. I did the math on this, several years ago. At the time, I into account the power used only by passenger cars, compared the relative "well to wheel" efficiencies, and the answer was pretty clear: to replace all gas/diesel consumer vehicles with electric would require a doubling of the US's power output. That's not the kind of thing that's easy to achieve in a generation, much less 10 years or so. This hasn't been a problem due to the very slow growth of electric vehicles. But if they explode into popularity, it could be a huge problem.
Of course, there are various options here. A home charging station with its own local storage (batteries, flywheel, gravity, etc... which is absolutely needed to allow anything but trickle-charging overnight) can be controlled by the power companies to suck power only when it's plentiful, even to provide power back to the grid when there's a potential brownout situation. And of course, moving to an electric vehicle makes the prospect of home solar/wind/hydro much more lucrative, for those who have the room and investment to add this (and in particular, in areas with a grid smart enough to buy excess home-generated power).
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I pay $120 a month for broadband to the house, $30 a month for broadband to the phone (that's the exact cost on top of the dumb phone costs). Ok, I live in a "wireless" area... no wired broadband, which is always cheaper (well, short of a T1 line or Frame Relay).
Really, these are pocket computers we're talking about here. Apple's a good example... don't want the network? Buy the iPod, same thing as an iPhone 'cept for the phone part. Folks always rave about the cost of the smart phone network connection, but never mention their internet connection when talking about their PC(s). But whatever you pay, it's a direct result of that PC, just as the cellular modem service plan is the result of having a smart phone.
PCs are a commodity market. You generally get what you pay for. The average PC sold in the USA last year cost just over $500, and the profit margins were razor thin.
Smart phones have artificially high prices. They are kept high, particularly in the USA, Canada, and other countries in which phones are subsidized by telecom companies (and these artificial prices affect the international price as well). They do this to maintain the illusion that a subsidized phone is a stellar deal, which in fact, not so much.
In a competitive market, the high end smart phones would run around $300, unbundled/unlocked, give or take. Even comparing that to the very high profit margins Apple's seeing shows this clearly. The iPod vs. iPhone is the perfect comparison. If you add a mic ($1.00), a camera or two ($2-$3), and a cellular modem subsystem (radio chip, PA, switches, printed antenna... $20-$30), you get a smart phone. You can buy an iPod Touch with 8GB at Amazon for $215. Even with markup, the extra components that make it an iPhone don't get you anywhere near the $600 or so they sell for unbundled (well, the replacement price, since Apple doesn't actually sell unbundled in the USA, though they do elsewhere).
And even this is comparing, well, Apples to non-Apples. Apple hardware, all of it, is overpriced. An Archos 32, running Android, with that same 8GB runs $145 at Amazon. Not as nice as the iPod, but it does the same jobs.
This is already coming true, even with fairly weak competition. Two of the small national wireless companies, MetroPCS and Cricket Wireless, have left the subsidized phone + contract model -- you buy the phone outright, you pay by month as long as you feel like it. MetroPCS has two Android models, one at $230, one at $300... the later with OLED screen and both 3G and LTE (I won't say "4G") network interfaces (apparently their LTE service sucks, but they did roll it out before Verizon). If you could buy these as a commodity, rather than locked into any given carrier, the prices would drop still more.
I mean, really, think about it. A smartphone or ARM-based tablet has only some of the same components as a PC, but nearly every one costs less: cheaper display, cheaper battery, cheaper CPU (and it's an SOC, so no need for a "North Bridge" or other system chips), same Wifi, fewer ports, less RAM, less mass storage, no keyboard, etc. The only reason people think these things are expensive is because there's little direct competition. But things like Android are starting to change that... no more proprietary lock-in.
Apple should be an indicator, too. The average laptop, not including netbooks, sold in the USA in 2009 cost about $550. Apple's cheapest laptop starts at $1000... and they're selling the same thing. Macs ARE PC Clones. So figure, for any price Apple puts on an item, you should figure if that class of item were sold in a PC-like commodity market, the average price would be about half. This also tracks with plain old MP3 players, and it's starting to look like smart phones are heading there. Tablets, not yet, but no one's had a successful ARM-based tablet yet except Apple and Samsung... and Samsung's not fighting the high markups yet. No point yet, but in a few years, it'll be the PC Wars all over again.
In the trade, an embedded system is a system with a fixed function that's microcontroller/microcomputer powered. Like a dumb phone, a microwave oven, most modern cars, etc. An embedded system is designed to do a certain set of functions when its shipped, and those functions rarely change. Sure, in modern times you can update firmware: DVD/BD players, MP3 players, digital cameras, etc. Sometimes you can even get hacks (Canon DSLR firmware, for example), but in general, it's a fixed set of functions.
PCs, PDAs, Smart Phones, Game Consoles, etc. are all flavors of application platforms... very different than embedded systems. These devices are fitted with all kinds of extra resources designed to expand functionality with new applications. There's really nothing magical about a "PC" that makes it something fundamentally different than a smart phone in the way its used. There is something fundamentally different about your microwave oven or digital camera.
Yup. In fact, if you go back to the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were all sorts of "personal computers": Apple ][, Commodore PET, VIC-20 and 64, Atari 400 and 800, various TRS-80 models, etc. The term was coined to distinguish a "personal" computer from former "home" computers -- which had often been any computer at your home, any way you could get it. Usually in some kind of kit form. Not for those shy about hardware hacking.
Back in the early 1990s, of course, the Macintosh, the Commodore Amiga, and the Atari ST were personal computers that were not "IBM Personal Computer Clone", and no one was confused about the "personal computer" term. Apple had some years by themselves, on the PowerPC chip, when they kept on being non-PC personal computers. The Macintosh did eventually become just another PC. But that by no means limits the extent of "personal computer".
Certainly all smart phones quality as personal computers. They are not JUST personal computers, they're also generalized communications devices. But they're considerably more powerful personaly computers than most PC or non-PC personal computers for the 1990s.
"MacBook" vs. "MacBook Pro" are two arbitrary marketing designations for exactly the same kind of thing. "iPad" vs. "MacBook" refer to two completely different kinds of personal computing devices. And these days, Apple's been favoring the former kind -- the one they control, the one that generates revenue for them from 3rd party software.
It would not be a huge shock to find, over time, Apple would rather sell you an iPad than a Mac. That doesn't mean the Mac goes away, but it may be replaced by the iPad at the lower end of things.
In fact, in a sense it already has been -- Apple doesn't want to sell a Mac that's price-competitive with the lower end of the PC market. They could, but that would kill their huge profit margins. Being a different kind of thing, an iPad (or any ARM-based tablet) costs less to make than a low-end x86 PC... so they get their accustomed high margins in a lower price market.
However, the iPad and the generic PC laptop are at the same price-point. Apple doesn't sell a laptop below $1000, but the average laptop sold in the USA in 2009 cost $550 -- and that's excluding Netbooks.
For people who know what they want, PCs and iPads are not the same thing. For those that don't, beyond "computing device with 'the Internet' and 'apps", the generic PC laptop competes for the same cash as the iPad.
Actually, in 2009 the average US price for non-netbook laptops was $550. On the other hand, what you get for $550 from Dell or HP is about the same as what you get for $1000 from Apple, for all practical purposes. If consumers demand a better screen or more metal and less plastic (though the high carbon plastic they use is pretty good, even if it's not as thin), you'll pay for it.
Most people are looking for a tool, not a fashion statement. Things that lead to a more usable system sell; things that don't wind up gone, or a niche product.
This isn't the case with smartphones just yet... plenty high end phones sell, and probably will continue to sell. But there hasn't been much of a real mid-range in modern smartphones in the USA (I think that's largely what SymbianOS has been, elsewhere). Every iPhone is essentially high-end; sometimes Apple will sell you last year's model as an entry-level option, other times not so much. RIM isn't directly competing, either. So it's Android more or less introducing or re-introducing mid-range and low-end smartphones for consumers. For business users, you've had your choice of Palms, WinMos, and BBs over the year, but these don't deliver what Android and iOS do for the consumer.
Here's the thing.... Apple only looks at the top. Blackberry doesn't seem to consider the top worth looking at (eg, their latest offerings seem a little too 2008 for me).
But most real cell companies are used to offering dozens of different models. So yeah, Motorola and HTC and Samsung are pushing for the top.. on a phone or two. But they're also releasing a bunch of mid-range Android phones as well... every month we see something new from Motorola and/or HTC.
The high end phones can sell well, sure. But they also help establish the brand in the eyes of the public. Before Droid, people knew Motorola more as a "was"... not they're well regarded for making cool smartphones. Hasn't hurt their bottom line, either.. .first profitable year since 2006 or some-such. So this makes it ok to buy a slightly scaled down model. Not to mention that a mid-tier Android today is probably pretty close to my "high end" Droid-1 from last year. And while there are better, the Droid is still a damn nice smartphone... I'm not ready to trade 'er in just yet.
It's already well known in geek circles. The green robot's made prominent appearances on TV ("Fringe" just this week). There are green robot toys all over the place. I get 375,000 hits for "Android Mascot" on Google... even more than I get googling my name (80,800)... the mascot is a great marketing gimmik.
They actually started out with MIPS (back when the "ARC" platform was being positioned as an alternative to x86), but MS's usual plan with NT was to get someone else to maintain (and pay to maintain) the non-x86 versions of NT. So NEC did most of the MIPS work, Motorola did PowerPC, IBM did Alpha, etc.
The main reason for removing awful bundled software is internal flash space. That's a slowly vanishing problem, as phone makers spend the extra buck or two and go beyond the 512MB standard of 2009.
Boost resells Sprint, but Cricket is actually on their own network. So is MetroPCS. Both are tiny, even compared to T-Mobile, but they're not "resellers" in the send of Boost, Virgin, Creedo, etc.
And yeah, these guys, at least in part, have already shaken up the market a bit. Until this year or so, the cellular market was all fairly artificial competition. Each company would dangle different carrots in front of you to get your business, but the fees and services were nearly identical.
Then some of the small guys entered and countered that with the "buy the phone, no contract" options, at substantially lower prices. Market pressures at least got T-Mo and Sprint competing somewhat on price, and I guess T-Mobile even offers a lower price if you bring your own phone.
As thing heat up with "4G" (or maybe, even actual 4G in a few years), there really could be another series of shakeups. In fact, it's already headed that way I think... Sprint is currently doing "all you can eat" on WiMax, while Verizon is doing the same old download caps for LTE they do for EvDO. T-Mobile is doing the same caps too, but their "4G" is actually just the final generation of 3G, HSPA+, same thing AT&T just finished installing (though apparently, they're not supporting it with many devices yet -- could be they just cut their HSPA+ plans short in lieu of spending that money on their LTE network)
Right.
There have nearly always been x86 chips from other companies. AMD got in the game because Intel actually pushed for them to create a second source. In those days, Hitachi did second source MC68000s for Motorola, too... there was just more resistance to single sourced major components than there is today.
The reason it's called "Wintel" isn't because Windows and Intel are/were the only options. Its because they came to be driving factor behind the evolution of the PC platform, much as IBM had been in the pre-PS/2 days. Look at any PC interface in there: PCI, ePCI, USB, SATA, etc. Intel designed or codesigned most of these. Firewire? Designed by Apple... never became all that prevalent (and the only reason anyone cared: video cameras).
Sure, AMD too the reigns on some things (64-bit, links vs buses). Sure, Linux is the engine that drives the internet, as well as lots of big iron (massively parallel data servers and supercomputers, many smart phones), but it's MS/Windows and Intel, more than anything, that shaped the modern PC.
Well, that and videogames. Since gaming emerged in the early 1990s as the only mass market activity that really demanded more CPU cycles, it's been very tightly coupled to both Intel and Windows in the way PCs evolved.
People will walk into a phone store and ask for "a smartphone".
There was a time when you walked into a computer store, and saw just Apples, Commodores, and maybe Ataris or Cromemcos or Kaypros. Later on, you saw PCs, Macs, PCs, Amigas, PCs, maybe an Atari ST, and more PCs. Today, you see PCs, unless you're in one of the rare stores with Macs. And the Macs are all over in the "special people" corner of the store.
This isn't the case, yet, with Smartphones. But consider reality: you go into a phone store today, there are a dozen smart phones. In an AT&T store, one of those will be an iPhone. At Sprint or Verizon, maybe one is a Palm. You probably have 2-3 Blackberries at any given store. All the rest are Android... not to bad one a year.
So it's not hard to imagine that the known-nothing, just-wants-a-smart-phone buyer will assay the selection, and do what they did for the PC: buy what apparently everyone else is buying. Which, at least this time around, is a far better thing to do than when it was PC vs. everyone else.
The big problem is that, while Android itself is a good thing (IMHO), the phone company mucking with Android, with my ability to load up alternate versions of Android, their hacking in forced Bing! or evil apps I can't remove, that has the potential to damage Android's reputation. Sure, freedom is a double-edged sword. But this kind of buying doesn't filter out the worst of these. Smart buying, when people do the research, would end this practice.
Google themselves could spend the Google equivalent of a drink at Starbucks and launch a consumer education campaign on this. It does ultimately affect their purpose behind Android -- too much locking down, and Google could actually be pushed out of the picture (imagine an AT&T phone with Bing! that only allows downloads from the new AT&T App Store, with a protected bootloader).
If you buy a TV at Best Buy, you MAY get a good price. I bought one there a few years back, a bit more expensive than B&H in New York, but that more than made up by the lack of shipping charges (for a 125lbs 71" TV).
But if you look around the TV department, accessories are crazy expensive -- and consumers by those anyway, just because it's easier. So you drop some cash on a carefully investigated HDTV, at a great price, then spend $50-$100 on an HDMI cable you could get at Monoprice.com for $5-$10. The reason is simple: Best Buy knows you're not paying attention, and the might come close to doubling their profits on the sale if they load you up with accessories.
That's why they push those antivirus solutions (I didn't know about the automatic re-purchase... these guys have nothing on the online porn industry). Years back, I bought a "Black Friday" PC for one of my kids... $200 for the whole thing, including monitor, a sweet deal. At the checkout, they all but bludgeoned me over the head to buy Norton/Symantec, depite the fact I ensure them I didn't need it, my cousin worked for McAfee (true, at the time), there were plenty of free options, etc. They really put the screws to me... I can imagine Joe Regular Consumer caving to this pressure. And I had to wait an extra half-hour to get a PC without it... they were so successful at this upsell, they had pre-installed Norton on every machine they had down on the floor.
Of course, I didn't buy that, I wouldn't sign anything that let them charge me for it later, and if they did charge my card, I'd do what I could to get it treated as a case of fraud.
The early consoles were weak... very simple designs, way behind what you found in state of the art PCs, driven by fairly small companies, often using off-the-shelf parts. The latest round used custom GPU and CPU designs, exotic memory, and pushed chip designs to their limits. In short, console development has been exponentially more complex. The five-year cycle was market-driven as much as anything... it certainly didn't take five engineering years to go from FamCom to SNES.
The console market is also an interesting one, in that, it takes so long for a company to sell the console at anything close to a profit, the market's really organized around games as the profit center. So the only advantage to making a new console is to ensure that consumers buy my games, not my competitor's. As long as they're not busting the status quo with a new console announcement, why should I. That doesn't mean there isn't one in development, only that the actual launch is going to cost me lots of money, and it might risk my position relative to the others. I'd rather hold back, as long as my console is doing well.
The only side certain to win -- the lawyers. They're getting very well paid, on both sides of the case.
Technically speaking, Microsoft (and everyone else) is totally free to implement good ideas from anything they see. A patent doesn't cover an idea, it covers a very specific implementation.
Now, sure, in the real world, this may get you sued, just because companies are lawsuit-happy these days. But if your implementation is different, you should win that lawsuit. If it's not, then yeah, you're violating that patent.
Yup.
Originally patents were designed to help innovation. Rather than keeping your thing secret, you told everyone how it worked -- in return for a temporary monopoly on that thing. And by "thing" I mean "specific implementation". Something that passes a rigorous test of "obviousness to one skilled in the art", prior art (including prior art that everyone knows about but isn't covered by patents), etc.
The state of patents, particularly in the USA, is much different today. Patents are granted without proper examination by experts (for example, in the first 10-or-so years of their granting software patents, the PTO didn't have a single software engineer as an examiner). They're granted on "business methods"... basically, just on ideas, not implementations, which is completely counter to their original purpose.
And large companies have evolved with this. IBM, for example, turned their patent department into a profit center back in the 1980s, and they learned to manipulate the system. Rather than investigate patenting things that were clearly new and innovative inventions, they took a different approach -- they patented anything that COULD be patented. They examined every little thing IBM engineers produced, and filed crazy patents. For example, IBM got a patent, in 1984 (now expired, at least) on cut and paste between text buffers. I saw them demonstrate this patent using Emacs... using a set of keystrokes that would have worked perfectly well on RMS's original TECO Emacs back in the 70s.
Right.. Ultracapacitors (eg, direct charge storage, rather than conversion to chemical energy) are extremely efficient at charge storage, by extremely inefficient in terms of energy density.. about 5% the capacity of a similar sized battery. The best use for the foreseeable future is a hybrid-hybrid... the ultracapactor acts as a power buffer in front of a battery. So, for example, you might manage to store some, maybe all, of the energy necessary to stop for one traffic light, then immediately re-apply it to get going again. Once you dump it to a battery, you're talking an 80% or so loss due the charge/discharge efficiency of the battery. Mitsubishi has messed around with this approach... the car gets 30-60 seconds of power from an ultracapacitor, then the battery kicks in.
There is some promising research. Most ultracapacitors use some nanoporous material, such as a activated charcoal or carbon aerogel, to store charge. It's entirely dependent on the material's effective surface area -- a carbon aerogel can deliver as much as 1000m^2/g. Some folks at MIT are working at replacing the aerogel with tightly bunched nanotubes. That could deliver a 5x increase in charge storage... so now you're looking at 25% the capacity of a similar battery. This might not have use in BEVs, but it's more practical in hybrids. A typical hybrid only cycles part of the battery's capacity. My 2003 Prius only runs 40% of capacity; the modern Prius runs around 60% of capacity. This is what keeps the battery alive; cycle a NiMh over its full range, and it only lasts about 1000 cycles. So assuming an ultracap can run its full range, a 5x improvement would make it practical in current hybrids. But of course, those are all NiMh, too... Li-ion cells will up the energy density again.
You might want to check that 80% figure. Sure, it depends on how high we're cycling our power plants. But based on actual energy consumption and relative "well to wheel" efficiencies (gasoline production, engine efficiency, motor efficiency, battery and transmission loss, etc), replacing just passenger vehicles with electrics would demand a doubling of the US power output, overnight (both literally and figuratively). I'm guessing we don't have that kind of excess capacity. And that's not even factoring in truck traffic.
Depends on the gas car. The SULEV certification in California (which was met by the 2001 Prius and since then even some non-hybrid cars) was designed around this (that's ULEV-II nation-wide). Back then, CA was demanding that some percentage of every car manufacturer's fleet go to electric. But in the mid-90s, electric just wasn't there. So this specification means that any conforming car is as low, or lower, in pollution than an EV powered from the grid... or at least, whatever averages powered the grid in California back in the mid-1990s. The more recent PZEV specification represents a yet-again cleaner vehicle.
So no, there are at least a number of cars as clean or cleaner than a mixed source power grid. An all-coal grid would be much worse. Of course, in some places, you can buy even cleaner power. Here in South Jersey, I'm on a 100% renewable plan (wind, small hydroelectric, and local solar). I have the option to go 100% wind power, from the Atlantic City Wind Farm (see: http://www.njwind.com/webcam.html).. still a bit expensive. I pay about $25 a month extra for all-renewable vs. "the regular mix". So in my case, that BEV would be cleaner than my 2003 Prius.
Real plug-in electric cars for sale on a large scale. The GM EV1 was just over 1,000 vehicles (660 "Gen-1" lead-acid cell cars in 1996, 457 "Gen-2" NiMh-cell cars in 1999)... basically, a science experiment. The cars were lease-only, because GM didn't want to have to comply with US law regarding replacement parts (six years of parts), which they would have, had the sold the cars. Not to mention that, at the time, they would have had to sell it at around $100,000 to break even.
Toyota had a more real launch of an electric vehicle, with the RAV4-EV in 1997. They made about 1500 of these, most of which were also leased. About 350 were sold at the end of the program. Toyota was better able to maintain support of the RAV4-EV because it shared parts with the regular RAV4 and the Prius.
There are lots of reasons BEVs haven't gone mass market yet, but a big one is patent encumbrance. Back in the EV-1 days, GM bought the patent for a functioning NiMh battery from its inventor, Dr. Stanford Ovshinsky and Ovonics Battery Company. This was later sold off and changed hands a few times. At one point it was owned by Chevron-Texaco.. it was a bit of a mess. They licensed companies like Panasonic to make small NiMh batteries (AA, D, etc) but that license didn't permit them to build larger cells. Panasonic bypassed this by building Prius and other EV batteries as arrays of smaller cells (the first Prius was literally built up from D-cells, but by the 2001 model they changed to a more space-efficient prismatic shape). There was eventually a big lawsuit, and all kinds of trouble.
So NiMh cells wind up overpriced for EVs... good enough for hybrids, but not so much for BEVs. Companies working on BEVs have been concentrating on various Lithium-based cells, but those have their own issues. In particular, Lithium batteries don't last as long as NiMh in BEV use (higher energy density, but far fewer charge/discharge cycles). Hybrids cheat.... the Prius, for example, only cycles 60% of the capacity of its cells, which seems to make them last indefinitely. This also helps preserve Lithium cells, but it's far less attractive to fit a large battery (weight, cost) in a BEV, then tell the owner you're only really getting half of that battery's range. Everyone's working on cells with longer life... supposedly, the cells used in the GM Volt will last 5,000 charge cycles, rather than the usual 300-500 in your cell phone or iPod.
Doubling the voltage reduces the current needed by that same factor of two (P = I * E). It reduces the power losses due to conductor resistance by a factor of four (P = I^2 * R).
A too-fast ramp up of electric vehicles could present a serious power problem. I did the math on this, several years ago. At the time, I into account the power used only by passenger cars, compared the relative "well to wheel" efficiencies, and the answer was pretty clear: to replace all gas/diesel consumer vehicles with electric would require a doubling of the US's power output. That's not the kind of thing that's easy to achieve in a generation, much less 10 years or so. This hasn't been a problem due to the very slow growth of electric vehicles. But if they explode into popularity, it could be a huge problem.
Of course, there are various options here. A home charging station with its own local storage (batteries, flywheel, gravity, etc... which is absolutely needed to allow anything but trickle-charging overnight) can be controlled by the power companies to suck power only when it's plentiful, even to provide power back to the grid when there's a potential brownout situation. And of course, moving to an electric vehicle makes the prospect of home solar/wind/hydro much more lucrative, for those who have the room and investment to add this (and in particular, in areas with a grid smart enough to buy excess home-generated power).