Submitted by “HP, the worlds biggest PC vendor as of 2012, has today launched a brand new all-in-one PC running Ubuntu. But the real ‘wow’ factor comes from its pricing. At just GBP 349 HP have pitched the PC well within the reach of your average consumer. A similar, though not identical, model is also available with Windows 8 priced at GBP 499.”
HP is NOT the worlds biggest PC vendor… be it in 2012 or in 2013.
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/08/largest-comput…
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2013/02/worlds-biggest…
(Before anyone balks at the criteria used to generate those numbers… keep in mind that PC manufacturers include dumb terminals and servers to generate their overall numbers so including tablets and smart phones is on the same playing field.)
Edited 2013-03-06 02:13 UTC
If the article spoke of HP releasing a new smartphone or tablet, your sources would make sense. But it doesn’t.
What I do find interesting is that Lenovo was number two in 2012, just under HP at number one. Considering Dell’s long standing foothold in the corporate and government arenas, that’s quite an accomplishment.
My (relevant and reliable) source:
http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2301715
Why would HP need a smartphone or tablet?
For years Apple didn’t have a server nor did it ever have a dumb terminal yet they were on the losing end of the distorted statistics.
Why should HP or any PC manufacturer for that matter not be held to that standard?
You didn’t even glance at the article I linked, did you? I’ll quote the relevant bit:
In other words, the Gartner report is based purely on desktops and laptops. Not servers, not thin clients, not tablets as your horribly skewed stats did.
To put it in a way you might be able to grasp: You can’t throw out statistics with tablets and phones to try to “balance out” what you assume to be statistics that include servers and thin clients but actually don’t. Try doing some actual research before making wild assumptions and grabbing wilder statistics to try to make a point that doesn’t even need to be made.
It took me all of thirty seconds to find that Gartner report, probably less time by far than you took to find your flawed and pointless stats.
i know it’s off topic but i can understand it, your 100% right it sounds weird as you would expect Dell and HP to dominate.
Lenovo makesgreat kit, i love their hardware.
The specs are pretty damn anemic. An E2-1200? Really? A netbook CPU in a desktop?
If you are going to ripoff the iMac you may as well try and compete with it. Give it at least a 1920×1080 screen, a quad or octo core AMD CPU and an option for either the HD7970m or GTX680MX MXM GPUs so you can still have good gaming capability in side of the space and heat constraints of an all in one.
For the money I’m sure I can beat this thing with an off the shelf ITX system that I can strap to the back of any screen with a VESA mount.
Apart from aesthetics, you’re pretty much spot on. I wonder if someone will come out with an Intel NUC based solution similar to this? That board would fit inside many cheaper model LCD monitors.
What you just described would probably be three times the price.
This is a budget system, made cheaper by tossing out the windows licence. It’s not aimed at gamers.
Neither is the iMac, but there is no excuse for putting a netbook class CPU in a desktop box.
I’m saying is that there is a void in the market, and nobody is willing to fill it as everyone wants to use the most bare ass minimum hardware available and call it a day creating machines that are likely to be slower then what most people already have.
The E2-1200 is too slow for 1080p video and will likely struggle with high bitrate 720p unless they included a Broadcom CrystalHD BCM70015 in there to offload it since you don’t have proper video acceleration yet with AMD GPUs and likely wont until at least the HD8000 drops as they claimed some time back that they where working on redoing the way the video acceleration was implemented so that they could allow for them to have something like VA-API or VDPAU to actually work.
Couple that with a GPU thats barely passable for only about half of the currently available games just wreaks of a terrible user experience and thus poor sales.
Chill out, the GPU is more than capable of 1080p video, a cheap ass card from years ago can accelerate h.264 at high bitrate and resolution.
I’m sorry this isn’t a PC for you, I wouldn’t buy one either but complaining it won’t play games properly is missing the point. This is a cheap machine for big screen browsing and e-mail, that’s all most people need. Looks good value to me for all the features you get if you’d look past the clock rates and GPU grunt.
Keep in perspective that AMD have a 28nm replacement for this chip in the coming months (Kabini) that’s a complete low power SoC, I’m sure HP are getting the current chips for a steal and will have something to follow this up with (rather than just adding further features to an E-350).
I’m not saying that it won’t be a failure, maybe they’ll not properly set up acceleration or Ubuntu will push out updates which break important things but if won’t fail for the reasons you state.
OK, so what combo of kernel, X.org and drivers allows XvBA to run? Have I missed something when it comes to AMD’s drivers?
Because last I checked while the hardware is more then capable of it the drivers on Linux still don’t have the ability to make use of the GPU’s video codec offloading capabilities. Else every video you play is going to have to be played on THE CPU, which this particular model is not exactly up to the task of doing since it’s meant to be in a 9″-12.1″ laptop.
Hence why I said you’d need a CrystalHD chip to make this thing a passable system for modern content.
I didn’t come here for an argument, things have probably changed since you last checked.
https://launchpad.net/~wsnipex/+archive/xbmc-xvba
Hardware H.264 decoding in XBMC is fine with the propitiatory driver; to be fair, hardware MPEG-2 isn’t complete yet but that isn’t something the CPU will have trouble with.
Instead of an unnecessary chip replicating hardware functions already present, it’d surely be better to have the masses create a bigger demand for the finishing touches in areas like this.
Ew, Ubuntu is getting too mainstream, quick let’s all get into Haiku
I think it’s FreeBSD’s turn.
I actually think that it would be good for all linux users if one distribution went mainstream.
The only problem (and a big one) is that Ubuntu seems to be forgetting where they come from and are shooting themselves in their own foot.
Well, the latter might be caused by your former.
Ubuntu is going mainstream and lo and behold, they forget where they came from and shoot themselves in the foot.
Or rephrased, stop being a traditional Linux distribution in the GNU/Linux sense and shift more and more to an Android model.
I don’t think they are forgetting where they came from. They have been planning to be mainstream from day one. It’s just that now that they are realizing some of their goals, the Linux crowd thinks they are selling out.
I can recall year after year Linux people cheering this is the “year of the desktop”. In order to accomplish that, you have appeal to the wider audience. You can’t just appeal to nerds. Now that Ubuntu seems to be making good strides getting main stream, those same nerds are shouting, “sellouts”.
I’ve been using Linux for about 15 years. I love Linux. I want to see it succeed everywhere (mobile, desktop, server and so on). And, I think that Ubuntu is making all of the right moves to see that happen.
So, for the nerds screaming “sellout”, let me ask you this, “What can you NOT do with Ubuntu?” If you tell me you don’t like the direction or defaults, I’m just going to laugh at you.
I think the “forgetting where they came from” might be directed at the whole mir display server thing.
That reeks of NIH syndrome. Ubuntu tried bashing Wayland to explain the decision, but had to reverse course when wayland devs spoke up.
Ubuntu just scored as being the prototypical linux distro with steam, but with mir Steam will end up kind of forking it, if they use it at all. Bullet meet foot.
They had Unity 2D written in QT, then dropped it leaving Unity in GTK only. Then decided to rewrite it for Mobile in QT. Now they are standardizing unity on all form factors in QT.
It kind of looks like they don’t have as much technical vision as they like to pretend.
I’m thoroughly convinced that some people are never happy. The thought that big names like HP and Dell would be putting out Linux boxes would have been unheard of just a few years ago. If you truly want the end of Windows dominance you have to support the change. Just because Ubuntu is starting to use other “non-standard” components in their software stack doesn’t mean they aren’t open source and beneficial to the community.
About 4 years ago Dell came out with their mini 9 with Ubuntu and I put my money where my mouth is and bought one specifically with Ubuntu. Now the hardware durability and software support were not world class, but I hopefully helped show that there is a market for non-windows PCs. If I needed a new desktop I would seriously consider this.
i agree i think the good thing is that a company like HP who isn’t doing that well int the hardware / desktop biz is putting out a Linux machine. I think that the large amount of RAM will offset the processor, obviously this is an internet type terminal, facebook and stuff should be ok on it.
I agree completely. I hadn’t seen your reply when I wrote mine (http://www.osnews.com/permalink?554348).
Nice, but I think they target the wrong audience.
People that run Linux want advanced fast hardware. This will end up in the hands of people with little knowledge that doesn’t know what an OS is, and even less the difference between Windows and Linux.
The result will be dissatisfied customers and high return rate and HP will get to the conclusion that people doesn’t like or buy Linux.
To succeed thy need more high end stuff, and they need to make sure that every component in their offering have open source drivers.
I think you’re right, this isn’t aimed at people who already run Linux. This is aimed at being the lowest possible cost iMac-a-like that Joe Bloggs might pick up at Tesco while doing the weekly shop.
HP are gambling that typical user needs (i.e. not people who read OS news) can be met with Ubuntu; Win8 has probably helped their decision since they’ll probably get just as big a proportion of angry calls about the user interface from those sales.
Surely a bigger userbase is a good thing for Linux… isn’t it?
Noooo… we’ll get GUI instead of an arbitrarily located text files and n00bs infesting the forums
The article mentions the machine running Windows and links to the Windows version of the product. The link for the version of the product running Linux is way down at the bottom of the page. The direct link is: http://h20386.www2.hp.com/UKStore/Merch/Product.aspx?id=ECC_BUNDLE_…
Edited 2013-03-06 12:49 UTC
Thanks for the link, Thom.
Interesting to see that the savings over the Windows version is a full 150 pounds. In the U.S. when you buy Linux they usually just within $50 of the Windows version (because of Microsoft’s OEM licensing agreements), thereby making it hardly worth the savings to buy Linux.