Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 22nd Aug 2011 21:19 UTC
Last week, HP killed its webOS devices unit. Over the weekend, the company slashed the prices on the TouchPad. The result? The TouchPad sold out completely in a matter of hours. This confirms what I've been hearing from friends and family: "I'd love a tablet, but I'm not paying laptop money for one."
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Member since:2006-01-01
There's a huge difference. Today's $100 tablets are piece of junk. Tomorrow's $100 tablets will be good enough. At which point the $500 tablet market will become a niche, just like $4000 laptops are a niche nowadays.
Apple makes the best selling laptops and their cheapest laptop is twice this price so this theory is clearly not valid.
http://amzn.to/mPtlJ4
Because Apple have been clever and have made cheap iPods too 
There are mp3 players at a fraction of the cost of the cheapest iPod and they do exactly the same thing as the iPod but the iPod still dominates.
http://amzn.to/qgqX7X
Notice that the best selling mp3 player is actually USD 229 a whopping 11 times a competing player also on the top 10.
So this is a nice theory but the market reality just does not back it up.
Member since:2010-03-08
Apple makes the best selling laptops and their cheapest laptop is twice this price so this theory is clearly not valid.
http://amzn.to/mPtlJ4
http://amzn.to/mPtlJ4
Apple's 13-inch macbook pro sells best because it's the cheapest OSX-running laptop that isn't a piece of junk. As it happens people need OS X specifically for some tasks like media editing (legacy reasons play a big part there) or iOS development (iOS currently playing a big part in the mobile ecosystem).
So basically, the main reasons to buy a mac instead of an equivalent PC are the abusive OS X and iOS SDK licensing terms. Does not exactly say much about their chances to compete in a free market.
There are mp3 players at a fraction of the cost of the cheapest iPod and they do exactly the same thing as the iPod but the iPod still dominates.
http://amzn.to/qgqX7X
Notice that the best selling mp3 player is actually USD 229 a whopping 11 times a competing player also on the top 10.
http://amzn.to/qgqX7X
Notice that the best selling mp3 player is actually USD 229 a whopping 11 times a competing player also on the top 10.
As said elsewhere, I think it was in this thread, iPod sales are in steady decline in favor of the cheap mp3 players bundled in cellphones.
So this is a nice theory but the market reality just does not back it up.
Well, it goes to show that stuff like monopolies and well-worded licensing terms can help the most expensive stuff to stay alive.
Like Windows.
Edited 2011-08-23 15:08 UTC
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 22:43 UTC
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.More News »
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Member since:
2010-03-08
There's a huge difference. Today's $100 tablets are piece of junk. Tomorrow's $100 tablets will be good enough. At which point the $500 tablet market will become a niche, just like $4000 laptops are a niche nowadays.
4 year is not maturity, even for computers. Microcomputers have appeared in the late 70s, and that market has only reached the stable equilibrium that we know well in the early 90s. I think we are still up for some surprises in the smartphone world.
Because Apple have been clever and have made cheap iPods too
Well, my own interpretation's above. In the end, your guess is as good as mine, I guess, but I'm ready to bet
Edited 2011-08-23 06:06 UTC