Windows 8 tablet PC makers: We can't compete with the iPad's price | Hacker News Reader

Windows 8 tablet PC makers: We can't compete with the iPad's price

extremetech.com

46 pointsmrsebastian62 comments

>Apple effectively gives iOS away (it’s a hardware company, after all), and Amazon gets Android for free

While I get what the author's saying here, it's a bit disingenuous to call either of those situations "free". Both companies invest nontrivial amounts of money into their OS. Apple develops their in-house OS, and Android is a "some assembly required" product.

Yes but, in the case of android, the assembly work is rather trivial if they wanted to offer a standard android rom.

Most of the complexity lies in the gui elements added by the manufacturers (TouchWiz, HTC Sense, etc) in an attempt to differentiate themselves from the rest and foster brand loyalty.

In any case, I don't think the software customization cost per unit in android phones it's anywhere near those MS license costs.

> Yes but, in the case of android, the assembly work is rather trivial if they wanted to offer a standard android rom.

Only if you want to ship an SoC already supported by Linux. (Even then, there is tons of board specific code.) If not, you are looking at a very non trivial amount of work.

By now Android supports most of the ARM chips architectures. The only case where this might not be true is when a completely new one appears, and Google chose to launch with another architecture and not support that one. But even then, the chip maker will do most of the work to support the latest version of Android.

You really don't know what you are talking about, Android is only originally built around the Nexus device Google is launching with the particular version of the OS, it is a huge effort to make compatible drivers for all the different pieces of tech that goes in to the different Android devices. Hence why it took so long for the Nexus S to get Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, not to mention the plethora of other devices still waiting on a port.

It only used the word "free" for Amazon's use of Android, which is factually accurate. It said that Apple gives iOS away, which again is an accurate statement. It doesn't seem disingenuous to me; in fact the wording implies that Apple is indeed "giving away" real value.

The article cites the Windows licensing price (~$90), then goes on to say how it would be "hard pushed to compete" at $10, then states Apple giving iOS for free and Amazon getting Android for free. The contextual implication is that Apple and Amazon pay ~$0 (certainly <$10) for their OSs.

The cost of iOS is accounted for in the cost of an iPad. Apple no more gives iOS away than they give the iPad's camera or flash storage away.

Not really. Microsoft wants to make significant money on it's investment in developing operating system software. Samsung wants to make money on it's manufacturing operations.

You have an extra layer of overhead with a Microsoft device vs. an iPad. Plus, because Samsung, HTC, etc are all making the devices, they cannot come close to the economies of scale that Apple does.

Apple's model is very clever. As a niche player until recently, they had to be more clever to survive. Look at their product lines -- they all share lots of components.

Exactly. Microsoft charges a license fee that represents what it thinks is fair value for the work involved in creating an OS.

Apple marks up the price of the iPad over the hardware costs, some of this includes paying for the iOS engineers.

6 of one, half a dozen of the other.

It's just that Apple is more efficient at producing the entire thing than Microsoft+Intel+Samsung are.

> Exactly. Microsoft charges a license fee that represents what it thinks is fair value for the work involved in creating an OS.

Microsoft charges a license fee that they believe will maximize their total revenue (units sold multiplied by price). Fair value is only indirectly related, in the sense that a grossly high unfair price would reduce their total revenue.

I knew this would happen, but nobody seemed to believe it. If they can't even compete with the ARM versions because of the cost of Windows, imagine how much more expensive the Intel tablets will be - and they probably won't even support any retina-like resolution (definitely not on Atom).

Also keep in mind that the costs to manufacturers usually double at retail ($300 components - $600 product, etc). So $100 on a Windows 8 license to manufacturers, will be about $200 added to the tablet's price at retail.

While licensing (without a doubt) is a big issue, I think the infrastructure that Apple have in place for manufacturing and sourcing of materials is second to none.

This is only possible due to forward thinking people and a ridiculous amount of demand, the two together mean bulk buying prices available to them only.

The competition will catch up at some point, but I fear that it might require a couple huge mergers for this to happen.

And not just "the cost of Windows" and the less-mentioned "the cost of Pentium", but that both must be created to be general-purpose enough to work with any implementation of either - to wit, more overhead costs that don't pay off for particular instances. This vs Apple building both the OS and hardware for each other and nothing else. There's a whole lotta bulk from M$ and Intel products that Apple doesn't have to provide nor charge for.

I think the author failed to understand one thing:

there are will be 2 kinds of Win8 tablets: x86 and ARM based.

The x86 tablets are essentially full-blown PCs, to which you can connect mouse and keyboard and they compete with netbooks, laptops and PCs, so the Windows license for them will be probably $90+.

The license for Win8 on ARM tablets will be much cheaper ($10-$30), because they compete with iPads and Android tablets.

From one of the comments :

"there will be no legacy Windows applications retrocompatibilty"

Is this true? If it is, then this is a deal breaker. The only reason I've been waiting so long to buy a Windows tablet is because I assumed it would be backwards compatible with my desktop applications(of my Win7 machine). If what the comment above says is true, then I guess it will be either an Android tablet or the iPad..

The big feature of windows 8 that puts it onto tablets is that it runs on ARM. You would not want a current-model ARM to emulate an x86. People do that with DOSBox to run old DOS games (or even win3.1) but that's the extent of the speed capabilities.

If they are running Windows on ARM, no x86 programs will work out of the box, they will need to be recompiled or recoded in some way.

It's my understanding that this was always the case- if the tablet is ARM-based, then it's not going to be able to run legacy x86 apps. Not to mention the UI problems. The good news is that it will be much easier for developers to port from x86 Win7 to ARM/x86 Win8 than it would be to make an iPad/Android version of their application.

So true.

Microsoft actually has a great "developer story" to tell if they can pull all their pieces together. The idea that you could trivially port your .NET apps across to tablets is very compelling. Throw in the ability to have apps running on a future XBox could be a game changer as well.

It's when you look at everything they have you realise that it would be stupid to ever rule Microsoft out.

No, it's not. One thing MS has always done well is backward compatibility. You can still run DOS programs from the 80s on Windows 8 (x86+64). In order to be competitive on ARM, however, they had to massively strip down Windows. They made a very bold move to remove a huge amount of legacy APIs and components in order to get a small footprint with excellent performance characteristics on ARM.

So Windows 8 is really two things: 1. an update to Windows 7 that works well with touch devices running on Intel and AMD hardware and, 2. a Metro only build for ARM that doesn't have a conventional desktop.

One of the great things about W8 over Windows Phone 7 is that you can build native apps using C++, so you can leverage many of the libraries that you couldn't in a managed only environment.

It does take a bit of a shift, though, since you're programming against a new API, Windows Runtime, which is a small subset of what you may be familiar with. In addition, it requires adopting an asynchronous programming model so the UI thread is not impacted. Any operation that nominally takes more than 50ms to complete is mandated to be async only. This means that the file I/O, network, etc. interfaces don't have a synchronous mode.

I can really feel the irony here - one of the biggest gripes of Apple critics was the price of their products. It'll be interesting to see if things have turned around.

I don't know where you've been the last 10 years.

The iPod was the first wave of Apple devices where the price was actually cheaper than the competition. Then that trend continued with the MacBook Airs and iPads. Even the iMacs/MacBooks are very competitive.

Right, I should have been more specific - I mostly meant in the PC/laptop product line, where there was often a notable price gap if you compared similar hardware specs. I'm not saying that either product was inferior, just that if the average uninformed consumer is comparing a PC and Mac with similar horsepower, price would definitely factor into the decision.

The iPod may have beat the competition in the beginning, but after a couple of years it quickly remained the either the most expensive or close to the most expensive device in it's class.

Apple notoriously only sold the shuffle under $100 while many competitors offered devices with dramatically more space and screens for under $100.

By the 2007 era and the beginning of keeping your music on your phone, it would have been utterly disingenuous to call the iPod "cheap" or anything close to it.

For once I'd really like to see Microsoft position its product as a high end product instead of always trying to undercut everybody on price.

If they think their product is better, then sell it as such. Actually say your product is better and therefore, it's going to cost more.

Unless Microsoft will produce their own hardware for a Win8 tablet, I think we are going to see a whole slew of tablet models with varying (and sometimes dubious) build quality. Like it or not, the iPad is pretty well put-together - I think that the tablet manufacturers are really going to have to scramble to compete on the hardware front.

I actually think that Win8 has some potential as a tablet OS, although my experience with the developer preview on a PC was a little underwhelming.

The standardization of iOS devices is what makes them so easy to use and develop for. Microsoft has done a good job of making Windows behave in a standard manner on diverse hardware configurations on desktops and laptops, so we can hope that WM8 will be equally standardized across different hardware. That would at least give them an advantage over android, and if they don't drop hardware support at certain versions they might be able to take over slowly when the cost of WM8 tablets drop below the cost of an iPad.

Microsoft doesn't sell a product, it sells a component. It's the OS that OEMs buy when building their products. If an OEM wants to build a low-end, high-end, or vertical-market product using Windows, Microsoft will gladly sell them the OS and let the OEM take the business risk. Some will succeed and some will fail, but all will pay their license fee.

The only high-low positioning that Microsoft tends to do with Windows is the myriad "editions" which everyone tends to dislike anyway.

Amateur hour is over?

On a related note, I think that Microsoft and OEMs would have a hard time overcoming consumers' perception of the iPad as 'sexy' or 'luxurious'. Apple's had the head-start to build this sort of brand recognition for the iPad and IMHO, I fear that any attempts by OEMs to budge it will appear 'cheap' (quality-wise) or imitative.

Take the laptop market for example. Some attempts have been made at a sleek design that rivals the Macbook (HP Envy, Dell Adamo etc) but those products haven't really taken off.

As for the software and OS? I really like the Metro interface - I guess we'll have to wait and see how it turns out with regard to the app library and user experience.

"position" "sell" "say"

The trouble isn't the branding, it's the building. The iPad is recognized as a quality product because it delivers quality experiences.

Microsoft has rightly acquired a reputation for brittle products that will slowly break down in ways you don't know how to fix. "Microsoft" means worrying about obscure error messages, malware, backups, defrag, task management, ad nauseam.

They've made solid incremental efforts with Windows releases, and Windows Phone 7 may well have eliminated all of these experience issues. Trouble is, Apple has now all but eliminated these problems across the entire product line, and they've even solved the meta-problem of tackling the remaining problems through their world-class retail and support presence.

A solid product in isolation doesn't cut it at this point. The competition has a solid complete ecosystem. Amateur hour is truly over.

I think at this stage of the game if Microsoft has any hope of penetrating the market they pretty much have to subsidize or make WinRT licenses free for approved devices rather than charge for it and if that's successful recoup the losses off the market.

Apple seems to certainly be in a position where they could do this and absolutely crush the competition, they must just not feel threatened with the competing products available today

The problem is deeper than just money. There's a branding issue. There's an app issue. There's a quality issue.

You need to magically fix all three of these, plus address the pricing difficulties. Good luck.

Free Windows! We've been waiting since Win95 for that.

Exactly. There is just no way that you can arrive this late to the "free" party and expect to make profits by selling.

It doesn't seem right. If I go to http://s.dealextreme.com/search/android+tablet and search for chinese android tables I can find competitive prices there, some at ~ USD 100, so adding the license tag will not change that much.

"In China We Trust"

None of those can run Win8, and certainly they can't run Win8 + applications people would want.

you'll be surprised what chinese have achieved. there is currently on sale chinese tablets with dual core cpu and quad core gpu, 1gb ram, 16gb storage, 10inch IPS screens and all bells and whistles (like HDMI output, SD card support, dual USB ports etc) with 7+ hours of battery life for 215 USD..

its all a matter of a win8 RT driver for the particular SoC.

run a search for "Rockchip RK3066" SoC (in particular check for a tablet called R2000 or Cube U30GT.

I already own the single core version of that tablet and i assure u the build quality, screen etc are in par with ipad2.

Why they can't run Win8?

The cheap ones there are all 7".

Wouldn't it be possible that it is 90-100 Taiwan dollar instead of US dollar. than the license cost is 3.4 US dollar. It seems to me that it would be suicide of MS to command such a high price for its tablet OS. It would make the tablet as expensive as its desktop OS. Not a great strategy to conquer the "iPad market". A pricing akin to windows mobile would seem to be more logical.

No. Having to charge $100 even for the bare-bones/no-legacy support Windows 8 ARM version is exactly why they did this instead of using WP7 and expanding it for tablets. Because then they would've had to charge only $15 for it, or maybe a little more, but that's about it. It's still a huge mistake for Microsoft to do this though, when Android is free.

Android isn't free if you want the Play Store/Google Maps/Gmail, not to mention the effort needed to write the drivers for the hardware.

Are we talking ARM or Intel. If its the latter, I expect the price to be higher as Intel windows 8 tablets are an order of magnitude more useful than an iPad. ARM? No chance.

Either that or they don't want to compete with the iPad...

It says ARM in the beginning of the article. I expect Intel ones to be even more expensive, and I don't think there's a market for a $800 Atom tablet that runs like a netbook (the Core i5 Samsung one they showed earlier was around $1200, and it didn't even have retina display).

The iPad has what now - 150,000 touch-optimized apps? Windows 8 x86 has - 100? What are you doing to do with all the unoptimized and sluggish apps on a x86 tablet that will have half the battery life of iPad or Android tablets at best, and costs twice as much?

Correction - iPad has 149,900 shit apps and 100 good ones as does every platform.

Also if its a problem for you personally, just buy a laptop :)

The famous and misguided "iPad only has a few good apps" argument.

You know what you and others don't seem to understand. Your definition of good apps differs from my definition of good apps. Everyone likes and uses different apps for different reasons.

You made your own correction irrelevant when you stated that this happens on every platform, which is true. But that's how great apps appear on a platform, and how great niche apps come to be born on the platform, too.

You can't say "there's an app for that" on a platform with 100 or even 1000 apps totally, even if you have the "top apps" in there.

  > I expect the price to be higher as Intel windows 8
  > tablets are an order of magnitude more useful
  > than an iPad

Right now I can do many useful and/or fun things on iPad. What can you do on Intel Windows 8 tablets now?

Now nothing.

When released, whatever I do on my laptop, which is an order of magnitude more than I can do on an iPad.

I dread trying to use desktop apps on a tablet. If I wanted to use desktop apps while on the go, I'd buy a laptop.

I look forward to doing what I do on my desktop and more on a tablet, but the typing aspect isn't quite there yet. Why fear something like full Photoshop on the go, or a real suite of programming tools at your disposal?

If the typing issue was resolved (without adding a clunky, external keyboard) Then there it would effectively replace the laptop in my eyes.

Because the UI for Photoshop was never designed for a touchscreen.

And what on earth makes you think the typing issue can be resolved. Tablets have been around for 20+ years and nobody has solved it.

Tablets have come a long way in those 20 years, my pessimistic friend. At the scale of tablet use, with loads of developers and very smart people in general looking at usability issues, many issues have been solved, and will be.

Any ideas on how they plan to solve the "fingers are big and imprecise" issue?

Not to mention no tactile feedback (deal-breaker for any serious typist) and ridiculous amounts of screen real estate lost to an onscreen keyboard (deal-breaker for any serious programmer).

We will one day have something to replace the keyboard - but it won't be the touchscreen.

How about the fact that the UI of many desktop apps responds to hover? Or the fact that UI elements are too small for big stubby pointing implements like fingers?

Typing? So old-school.

In the future, text entry will be via some combination of voice input and a Dasher-like system that lets you gesture-input commonly used words and phrases lightning fast.

Kill your Boddhas. Challenge your assumptions. Or if you will not, get ready to have your mind blown when Apple does it for you.

considering 50% of humans can barely shit in the middle of a toilet instead of the seat, I reckon you're about 1000 years off...

Also for the young and inexperienced, PalmOS grafitti did that in the 90s and it was a POS.

>>When released, whatever I do on my laptop

That's the sweet, sweet promise of vaporware you're buying into. I seriously doubt the usability and true functionality of the upcoming round of Windows Tablets.

its not vapourware. I have an X61 convertible tablet already (but I tend to use my T61 more often).

This is just an evolutionary step of something that already works.

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