Asus to surpass Apple in notebook sales: TrendForce
taipeitimes.com
taipeitimes.com
I would say two things about this:
1) Except for the MacBook, it has been a year without new Apple notebooks until last week's announcement. Most of the Mac product line has been pretty crusty all year, so I imagine a lot of people have been waiting.
2) Asus ships some sub-$300 notebooks. Apple's start at $1000.
Given all that, I wouldn't say this comparison is particularly revealing.
The industry's constant race to the bottom is getting really tiresome.
I don't discredit the disappointment in the recent Apple laptop announcements, but I do think that paying a premium price for a genuinely solid machine is reasonable, even if that machine doesn't have a rapid change in features. I've never had any other laptop last over 5 years without any major problems.
And it is also hard for me to deny that after lugging around a heavier laptop for awhile, having a light Macbook Pro definitely is easier when on the go.
You don't say, but, were they higher-end Dell laptops or not?
I've got an 6-year-old Dell Studio 17 still going strong, which cost about $1,000 when I bought it. I recently replaced it solely because I've learned that waiting until a machine is completely dead to replace it produces stress, when you end up having to go to Best Buy or equivalent and just buy whatever they may happen to have lying around, which is not what I'm looking for. The battery lasts about 10 minutes tops right now but I never bought it for its battery life anyhow. It's in pretty good shape for 6 years old. The screen's doing something weird with diagonal streaks developing in the top and bottom, but it's still perfectly usable at the moment.
On the other hand, the bottom-of-the-line Dell stuff is crap I'd hardly expect to last two years. It depends on what you buy.
As an owner of a 2011 MacBook Pro with a recently replaced battery, I don't believe you. We either don't share the same understanding of "all day", "serious activity", "without a charge", or "goes".
I can easily make it through a full work day doing this without plugging in the machine.
If your battery runs out on the macbook, you're just done.
The only reason it's getting any positive feedback from anyone is because it's Apple and people are charitably imagining that software developers are going to dedicate resources to support a doodad that doesn't even exist on 90% of apple machines (and only ~5% of notebooks/desktops are Apple in the first place!).
I also think Apple expectations are kinda low. I think everyone is used to Apple and just deal with their oddities and questionable decisions. The same way Windows guys just shrug and upgrade to Win10 without question. People don't want to learn new platforms and just want something similar to what they had, so they'll make a lot of excuses to avoid the pain of migrating platforms.
If this had been a macbook update I don't think there would have been as much a backlash, but a macbook pro is not the same thing as a macbook in terms of expectations for ports or power
And this is hardly the first Apple release that has been met with complaints, even within the pro notebook category.
Wish I had enough money for the UX390UA. It's basically faster, thinner, lighter, sexier Dell XPS...
Be sure to watch Lisa's comparison with the 12" macbook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhoAACXWNHU
The 4K screen has a "faux 4K" pentile-like layout so smaller text and any type of thin line look horrid on Windows and stock Ubuntu (I Hackintoshed it for better multi monitor support and OSX anti-aliasing looks much better, making me wonder if Retinas have the same type of "faux 4K")
The screen also has the same horrible yellow tint defect as several other 13" 4K models I looked at.
The touch screen has a layer above the screen that becomes really noticeable in certain light (Bot that the touch screen is really of any use on a non-transforming laptop).
The list goes on.
TBH, 4K laptop screens are a total scam.
Hi-Dpi support was so shoddy with multiple monitors on Windows and Linux that I sacrificed access to the 940M to Hackintosh it
How easy was the installation? Any crazy stunts to get it all working?
The fanless Core-Y UX360CA never had any issues, works out of the box.
UX501VW has fan control issues with 16.04, which you can solve by installing a newer kernel (4.8 series) or by upgrading to 16.10. You must do this, otherwise the fan will run at loud, insane speeds and might eventually wear out. NVidia graphics will work without issues, but switchable graphics doesn't work via NVidia's control panel. I don't need the discrete GPU, so I'm exclusively using Intel drivers. Driver does crash (screen flickers) at times with my external 4k monitor. Apart from that, Powertop takes care of Power management issues. Overall, expect to spend 3-4 hours getting UX501VW set up.
1. Razer 2. Asus 3. Microsoft 4. Dell 5. Lenovo 6. HP 7. Acer 8. Sony (?) 9. Samsung Apple (?) Clevo (?) Toshiba (?) system76 (?) alienware (?)
Maybe the only exceptions to that are Razer and Microsoft who don't do low-end crap.
Not all ideapads are as crappy as they're believed to be.
Finally gave up and now use it as a home computer (still running fine after some cleaning and hard-drive change)
This laptop will probably outlive me, not even using it as a hammer managed to kill it...
MS actually did Surface RT once. But I understand it was a test phase.
You want the enterprise lines: focus on reliability and backwards compatibility rather than price or whiz-bang features. Just a year or two ago one of the best signs that you were getting one of those would have been the presence of a VGA port.
And the same probably goes for a lot of other brands (IdeaPad vs Thinkpad for example)
As for Razer, I hear their products are excellent (laptop wise).
As for their peripherals, please guys, there's Roccat just down the road and it's cheaper and better.
With Clevo resellers, you get excellent components for the money, but the chassis is usuallt not the 'sexiest'. I'de go with a clevo reseller purely because you can get a rediculous spec for little money (1TB SSD, i7, 8-16GB RAM in clevo world is like 256GB SSD, i5, 8GB RAM in the 'branded' world)
As for Samsung, I've owned one for 5 years and it's still going strong. Flexy chassis though.
HP...sticky keyboard I've heard from friends and wider.
Lenovo...still not forgotten SilverFish crap. As for hardware though, I've heard their business line up is tough and rugged as fck. Suits the frequent traveller I suppose.
Don't talk to me about Apple...planned obselence, bribing developers to not developer for Linux and only MacOS (even though they are 99% the same fcking thing), rip off, etc. Battery is good and heard the frame is rugged enough though. MacOS is obviously stable as hell, depending on release (lol Sierra tho).
As for the others, can't say.
As a preliminary list, i'de say:
1) Clevo reseller (think SCAN, PCS, XMG, etc.)
2) Razer
3) Lenovo
4) Samsung
> Don't talk to me about Apple...planned obsolescence, bribing developers.
I also read somewhere in the comment that they blacklist all those news websites which does bad review of their product.
I don't know enough about what is entailed after black listing but I guess they stop giving them news or prereleased products in advance.
Ahhhh, Roccat, the makers of the least reliable keyboard I have ever owned in 30+ years. Email support is terrible. Amazon refunded after the 4th broke.
The Kone mouse I bought at the same time has been lovely and is still going.
Here too.
ps: and only when using the touchpad.
For quality and reliability. This is astonishingly subjective and quite probably wrong :p
1. Thinkpad. Not as good as they were, but appear to be trying to improve again. Usually a fairly safe bet for BSD & Linux drivers. Support (UK) have been excellent.
2. Dell 2. HP (Like with Lenovo separate the cheap consumer crap, and the well made professional ranges)
3. The rest
4. Apple. Well made, hopeless for upgrade, now very overpriced. New keyboard seems to be disliked on reviews so far.
99. Acer - Pet hate brand that always seems to have far more than fair share of issues, and support (UK) terrible.
No experience of clevo or system76. Not sure MS have been around long enough with Surface to judge well yet. Personally I would be wary of Razer, though I've not owned a laptop of theirs, which might be superb. None of their mice and keyboards seem to last 5 minutes. Santa will bring the kids no more Razer Nagas.
Also one mustn't discount post sale service in evaluating options. The value of a particular laptop is more than the box itself. What happens if you have problems? How easy is it to get it fixed? How long will you be without it for in the meantime?
Had several Thinkpads, only one needed repair, was handled quickly and smoothly. Repaired first time.
HP and Dell have been OK, for me, with support.
I've had issue with individual products of theirs, but not laptops.
I didn't like how Dell handled a faulty monitor, but is it relevant to their pro laptop experience?
They're both harder to deal with than Thinkpad, in my experience, in my country.
As long as you're willing to put in a tiny bit of effort, you can know that all the software on your machine is coming from known people and companies, that you chose to trust.
Apple is the only company I would trust [at this time] to put only Apple software on retail Apple hardware. But that is because even if anybody was willing to comply with the inevitable list of strict requirements, Apple would almost certainly try to charge the third-parties so much to bundle their software, that no one would reasonably be able to justify the cost.
Microsoft, I could see making a deal with some third-party to put into certain models of the Surface. It might just be something like hardware drivers with a Windows GUI to change some settings, but they would do it.
They seem to act like they're separate. Hardware build and installed software is entirely different. I was under the impression they still operated as separate divisions. UK Support was even on separate numbers until fairly recently - now it separates at top level.
If Lenovo get a strike, Sony probably should for the rootkit.
If you're not comfortable ignore my "probably wrong" suggestions! :)
First thing I do with any Win machine is remove the crap and demos or clean install and add drivers. Or occasionally start immediately with !Windows.
EDIT: Oh I forgot about the absolute ton of crapware on the machine out of box.
Don't like the 6 row chiclet keyboard, sound is garbage on recent machines I've had, don't seem as resilient, and not the same attention to detail.
Crapware? Access Connections (Adobe Air made it slow junk), warranty/help/update thing. No Norton any more. They started adding other junk?
As for crapware: my T450s came with a bunch of Lenovo-branded garbage, like a settings app, a power management app, and an update app. That leaves you with, e.g. two different ways to configure your power management settings, and three different ways to configure things like mouse settings (the Windows modern app, the lenovo app, and the Windows app). For $1,000, a machine should just come with Microsoft software.
I forgot a few. I killed them too.
Except I kept update for TP drivers. Win Update has got them wrong in the past. 'apt-get upgrade' starts to look quite advanced! :D
The default shipped screens are okay-ish.
The IPS displays have a reputation of good quality but you gotta pay extra.
As I own a mac I have some bitter experience with it when it comes to keyboard shortcuts. For example:
If you cmd+M to minimize an app, how would you bring it back.
Navigating in application windows in Mission control using arrow keys.
I use MacBook Pros at work a lot and they are fine, but they seem very overpriced.
Quanta is probably the biggest notebook manufacturer, followed by Compal and Pegatron. Compal and Pegatron probably have the best quality overall.
Most PC suppliers use several manufacturers, sometimes as many as five (Dell, I think). Asus currently uses Pegatron, Compal and Wistron, so it's average quality should be pretty good.
It's a tough business because the number of viable contract manufacturers is growing while the number of viable PC OEMs is shrinking. (No more Gateway, Compaq, TI, IBM etc, except as brands.)
In addition, companies with large volume sales can afford to offer several product ranges aimed at different markets. Dell, for example, has different ranges for consumers (Inspiron is low end, XPS is high end) and for businesses (Latitude, Optiplex, Precision), plus Vostro for the SO/HO market.
So, it doesn't really make a lot of sense to compare, for example, Dell with HP with Lenovo. They all have multiple ranges made in different factories -- and they could all be using the same factories!
You'd really need to compare the same types of laptop (low-end, mid-range, high-end / consumer, business, enterprise) across different PC manufacturers.
If you don't do this, the "worst" brand is likely to be whichever company makes the biggest volumes of really cheap consumer laptops, especially if they don't support them particularly well. This used to be Acer. Today, it's probably Lenovo.
Conversely, the "best" brand is likely to be whichever company makes the smallest volumes of really expensive laptops ;-)
Last laptop I bought was maybe 3 years ago. I was comparing everything at the local Microcenter and wanted something fairly powerful but not to the point that I was paying a hefty premium for that last "tier" of polish and quality. By sorting the options to include only i7, at least 16GB RAM, dedicated GPU, and at least 1920x1080 display, I was left with some silly Asus that looked like a Michael Bay Transformer, another Asus with a tasteful aluminum chassis, and a Macbook Pro.
The black thing with red LED lighting was out because I guess I am still a bit shallow and superficial. The other Asus had a better GPU, lower quality TN display, and spinning HDD in comparison to the lower-end GPU, nicer IPS display and SSD on the MBP. But the aluminum Asus cost $999 and the MBP was $2399.
I wouldn't have minded buying an Apple notebook if there had been a more affordable option with similar tradeoffs but as you say, they don't make ones like that. And I'd certainly like a nicer screen but not for more than double the price. A SSD was easy enough to swap into the Asus and when I upgraded the one in my desktop, I passed that older SSD down to the laptop.
I guess the main point is that these other OEMs like Asus still do decent sales and produce options with less-than-top-tier parts because there's a real market for those who are fine buying an Accord instead of a Mercedes even if the Mercedes has some superior features or build. Not sure how much of it is artificial (as far as intentionally targeting different price brackets with parts that may only cost the OEM $100-200 less to include).
Either way, as my current budget stands, I'll continue to gravitate toward whatever company can sell me "not quite the best" for half the cost of the top tier.
The thing is that most manufacturers have significantly raised the quality of their products especially in the high end range. We probably have to thank Apple for that which showed that is a huge market for high end laptops. Even HP builds quality machines these days.
Having said that, decreasing volume, something which is now never-ending for Apple in the last few quarters, consecutively, is a marker for doom, or at least the end of life of the product line.
When you're selling less and less, you can't keep revenues up by just increasing the margin on each unit forever. It's unsustainable and unstable.
edit: early morning post needed clarity.
Also as an ordinary person why would you be interested "margins and revenues"?
In that case Panasonic's Toughbooks would be the clear winner in the general-market space. Their low-end 'business rugged' laptops start at £1800 for an i5 spec... though with a three-year warranty.
Once you move into specialist fields such as mediical and defence there are vendors whose laptops have margins that would make Apple cry, but who 'earn' those through jumping through many many regulatory hoops. Dell played-around in that space in the late 2000s, their mil-cert laptops started around $5000 with standard Latitude innards.
They also earn it by knowing that those niches are willing to pay and normal computers can be problematic to an outright danger[1].
If you happen to have an employee that is a bit "rough" with their notebook and is a Windows user, a Panasonic Toughbook is a great buy. They are built like tanks and Panasonic knows their users.
Also, if you have a dust or grain dust[2] environment, you most definitely should buy medical computers. We have a carpentry area that needs computers and the sealed medical computers are perfect. I use http://www.cybernetman.com because I like the reps.
1) having a sealed computer that you can wipe down with Lysol is an amazing benefit for a hospital setting.
2) do not f around with normal computers in a grain dust environment unless you like fires and explosions. You want to take precautions to get proper clean airflow or use sealed computers.
Before that I always used thinkpads. I still think the 15" T60 was one of the best computers I have owned. I would have stayed with it if I could upgrade 16gb (ahh Java development). The new thinkpads are bad.
I'm sort of annoyed that I finally got used to mac and it is now down a path of crap (love the form factor... hate the Mac UI and no upgrade).
People always said Apple evokes feelings. Now it seems obvious that it goes both ways. I acknowledge that it is impossible to be objective on this issue (different use cases, different people, different habits and so on) but saying that they are on a "path of crap" is too strong for most of the time, I bet. I haven't ever used any Apple product, so it's just a somewhat external observation.
Maybe not as good as older thinkpads, but I think it's quite a stretch to call all new thinkpads bad.
I use a T460s for work - its a great machine. I prefer it to my 2013 MBP.
That's how I discovered one of Apple's secret weapons, which it seems nobody is talking about: purchasability.
My expectation was that Asus's site would allow me to:
1. Browse their catalogue of computers.
2. Compare their pricing and features.
3. Buy one.
Okay, let's try "Find Your Zen" -- maybe, um, that'll help me pick a machine per the features I want?
No, it's some kind of personality profile, asking me what my aspirations are in life. My aspirations are to buy a fucking 13"-14" notebook with a decent CPU, an hdpi screen, an SSD, 8gb of RAM and a real HDMI port. Fine, let's pick some random options and see what it gives us.
Oooh, it says I should by some kind of flip-book! Actually I didn't know that existed and it looks pretty cool. The UX360UA. Yep, I'd go for that I guess, but it would be nice to see it side-by-side with other options. Anyhow, how much does it cost?
No idea. Doesn't say anywhere on the site. WTF?
Okay, let's go to http://currys.co.uk/ to find out. Search for Zenbooks. 78 options. Damnit, no, let's narrow down the screen size. WTF, it says they doesn't have any 13" models? Oh, no, I see -- their search filters are just completely busted. Fine, let's search through the whole list until we find what we want.
Hm. They don't have the UX360UA, but they have something that looks identical called the UX360CA. Er.... what's the difference? Is that like a different model number for the UK market? No way to tell.
...Spend 5 minutes Googling, since there's no way to search for anything or compare features on the ASUS site... finally find a comparison which makes it clear that the UX360CA is has a down-rated CPU, definitely unsuitable for my work. Looks like Curry's just doesn't carry the machine I want.
Okay, let's try Amazon.
Searching for UX360UA pulls up scores of options, most of them having nothing to do with the UX360UA. Finally, however, I can see a price -- a mere half an hour after first looking for it on the Asus site -- but it's out of stock! Alas. Oh, it's also available from other vendors for a bit more, but still a good deal... let's do that!
And, hey, this is thing is loaded! It's got a 256gb SSD and a 512gb HD. I admit: I could make use of that.
I get as far as putting it onto my wishlist before I notice that it's actually a UX310UA rather than a UX360UA. Just one character difference: can't blame Amazon for thinking that the Levenshtein distance was close enough to make it a match. But WTF, I now have no idea what kind of computer this is or whether it would be suitable for me. Still have no idea how much a UX360UA that I can actually buy would cost, nor have I been able to do a side-by-side comparison of it with any other options.
So how the hell am I supposed to purchase this thing??? Had to give up for the day; I'll come back to it when I have more free time.
In contrast, Apple's retail experience (both online and physical) is... well, there's a lot of it that's extraordinarily polished, probably to the point of superfluousness, but they've got the very most basic mechanism figured out:
1. Here's what we've got.
2. Choose what you want.
3. Buy it.
And no, Dell isn't any better at this. Nor is HP. I haven't checked with Silverfish^H^H^H^H Lenovo yet but am not particularly interested in their machines. In any case, this is one area where industry needs to get better at aping Apple.