Intel says get ready for $99 tablets, $299 Haswell notebooks, $349 hybrids
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
I've been looking for a new laptop for over 2 years, and nobody's been selling anything worthy of replacing what I'm already using, which was built in 2010. For a few brief months that year, HP made a wonderful MBP clone (magnesium alloy case, 1600x900 14" screen with edge-to-edge glass, SSD, etc). Soon after, that product line turned into the same plastic 1366x768 crap everyone else was selling, and that's been what's filled store shelves ever since. Meanwhile, my 2010 laptop is starting to fall apart, with dead pixels, an overheating GPU and lost battery capacity.
I am looking forward to buying an ASUS UX301 this November to replace it. That's the first and only Ultrabook-class laptop I've seen since 2010 that'll actually be an "upgrade" without buying some thick "gaming" monstrosity. It'll have a Haswell i7-4558U, which comes with the Intel HD 5100 graphics, the first Intel integrated graphics chip to outmatch the 3-year-old Radeon in my current laptop. Plus 8GB RAM, 512GB of RAID-0 SSD, an all metal and glass case and up to 9 hours of battery life. Assuming this PC in that configuration actually makes it to market.
What's amazing to me is that this many months after Haswell parts started showing up in stores, that one ASUS laptop is still the only announced product by any name-brand manufacturer with the i7-4558U/HD 5100 parts. Every other new/"refreshed" laptop that'll be in stores this holiday season will either have an integrated GPU incapable of playing games well on the higher resolution screens they ship with, or give up its thickness and battery life for a discrete GPU.
If I buy a new laptop it will either be a surface pro or a mba however.
Installing Linux with all the customized hardware inside, just get an X screen/GUI is non-trivial, even on old Macs. Check out the Bumblebee Project to get an idea of how painful it is to just leverage the two graphics cards properly. This is not to mention even on Debian Wheezy (stable), you will load without the proper HW-interfacing components to spin up the fan. You can see how that is dangerous for an amateur, and you will know three hours later while configuring when your thighs turn bright red. Not that it happened to me though.
This is just one small thing, go to any Linux distro wiki, how about Debian for example[1] if you cannot tell my bias, and read the MacBook page, then read all the personal blog posts, for old and new Macs and see the pain it takes. Even though it is annoying, I will give them credit as properly the only laptop popular enough to force even barely useable UEFI support. But Macs also half-ass that too.
Seriously, if you are a Mac fan, but like Linux, you will end up in the end saying fuck Apple for all the unintentional pain they inflict on you. But hey, at least they invented cups, so how much can I complain?
Now it is back to zero, and I can be the Apple contrarian I yearn to be. :-)
First, there's the principle of not giving Apple any more money!
Second, Apple's laptops don't have any form of docking so using them in the office is rather cumbersome.
With TB ports and the like it could have been worked out to one cable instead of an edge connector, yet they seem to have zero interest in the business.
I have run Windows 7 even as primary at times but in the end went back to a Dell for work put an iMac back on my home desktop.
Don't get me wrong, the MBP does look nice. And plenty of people are clearly willing to throw lots of money at Apple for both the real and perceived benefits of the premium price. But if performance per dollar is my concern --and I'm forgoing the operating system, one of the "real" benefits IMHO-- numerous other competitors blow Apple out of the water.
The point of a laptop is good, light, sturdy industrial design, long battery life, and quality interaction features (solid keyboard, responsive touchpad, good webcam, flat SPL curve on speakers, etc.), while optimizing performance given that. That's what you're paying the Apple premium for, not the OS. Those qualities remain when you run Windows on the hardware.
Out of the frying pan, into the fire...
I have a friend who keeps bugging me about how expensive MBPs are. I asked him to find a better laptop for the money. I care about the following, in order: quality of screen, quality of keyboard, tough case, light wight, long betters life, fast hd, fast CPU, good gfx card. So far no results :) I actually kind of wish there was more choice in the high end market. I have seen a few nice ultrabooks, but they cost as much as a Mac, if not more, so what's the point?
For example, $1000 shoes that last 1 year are reasonable when compared to going without shoes - only $3 a day, and you'll save money that you would have to pay to repair damage to your bare feet.
Could you find a better pair of shoes for less than $1000? Where's the gold leaf, and why do they lace up the front rather than snap up the sides? I think not.
Of course, same arguments can be applied to almost anything, but this thread was about premium laptops. You can't have a premium laptop that's also very cheep.
The X1 Carbon is kind of nice. But same thing applies. Low res screen is a letdown, and by the time you load it up to be comparable to say, rMBP, it's about the same price.
They will also release a Thinkpad Yoga in november, with less attractive specs unfortunately - it'll be a 12.5" 1920 x 1080 display. (Which is unfortunate for me since I can't live without a Trackpoint on a laptop and only the Thinkpad model offers it)
For just a little more money they could've put at least an HD 5100 part in it. While the TDP would be higher, the higher-TDP Haswell parts still idle at very low wattages, so when you're not using the extra power they get similar battery life, but it's there when you want it.
The performance difference between the 4400 and 5100 is huge. It's on par with an older discrete Radeon/GeForce chip.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the X240 to not become an Ultrabook. So far it looks like a downgrade, or at most like Lenovo managed to put in FullHD over a course of two years.
http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-15-l521x/pd?oc=dncwx18bw7&model... 16GB RAM, 512 SSD, 3rd gen i7, NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 640M with 2GB GDDR5 VRAM
I've had i think 3 versions of the same. It's always tried to break the mould in design. They tried funky designer covers in the past. Lately they've been going with the metallic finish of macbooks on the outside(but better in my opinion). On the inside its the black soft touch finish(which feels so much more warm than an MBP). I also own an MBP btw.
The one thing that PC laptops are getting wrong is the battery. The MBP battery outperforms the dell by atleast 2-3 times. But for me that's not an issue, since i work plugged in most of the time.
Also the first thing i do is remove windows and install Linux. The machine boots in like 3 seconds flat. I've not had any issues with drivers or anything.
Looks nice, I'll compare that to the Mac competition next year when I change my Latitude e5520.
The Latitude has non-glare FHD screen for less money. (Bought an SSD separately.)
Only built in graphics is a feature; I can't play games :-)
I think all those years of churning out bland clones made them lose their expertise. They can't execute on something like a Mac Mini or a high end laptop. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but it appears that these are difficult problems that take competence.
Don't own one, but just linking to give an example that there is a pretty decent looking PC Mac Mini clone out there.
Newegg has a category specifically for these form factor machines: http://www.newegg.com/Mini-Booksize-Barebone-PCs/SubCategory...
All of these "mac mini" style machines target the low end market. They all have low end processors & video cards. I have yet to see a premium machine like the mac mini that is available in a small form factor.
That resolution is a dealbreaker.
http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/04/campaigns/precision-m3800...
I will have to buy server hardware on my next upgrade.
Plus, it looks goofy. I'm not 17 and don't want to carry around a laptop that glows neon green at tech conferences or coffee shops.
One thing to remember is that you are replacing a MBP with an ultrabook, a more fair comparison is to look at the specs in the Macbook Air, to which many ultrabooks compete in terms of thickness and weight.
do you really need that extra bit of performance to justify increased risk of loosing data and inconvenience of a rebuild?
If you buy a 256GB SSD, you're probably buying 8 32GB chips and a controller.
Here, you're buying 16 instead of 8 chips, but two controllers. So they call it "two drives in RAID-0", but it's very little different from one SSD.
It's not 16 times more likely to fail; I think the annual SSD failure rate is about 30% that of a spinning disk. Even if the double controllers means a double failure rate, it's still statistically more reliable than a single new spinning disk.
HP, Dell, Lenovo need to stop selling the bottom of the barrel hardware with bottom of the barrel Windows experiences. The end business result is they are working really hard to sell a zero margin product only to watch Intel and Microsoft turn a tidy profit.
If HP, Dell, and Lenovo want to stay in the game long term, they need to stop catering to the low end.
Great as a side-laptop for personal reading / email.
The HP Chromebook 14 (14" 1080p) is $299, and the Acer C270 Chromebook (11.6" 720p) is $249; both of them are Haswell-based.
I never cease to be amazed at how people judge things by what's out right now, rather than where the puck will be tomorrow.
Well if open source supporters ever wanted the perfect market its education. Books are going to be gone, it will be an education system of tablets and the like, where are the big projects to put down an open source solution? (admittedly I haven't found any that stood out but I may be looking in the wrong places)
Simple and cheap at $340 new in 2011.
I use it for web development and playing older or indie games.
It's the difference between driving a Ferrari and worrying about a minor scratch and driving a station wagon through a muddy road.
$200 tablets arentr very satisfying either. Web browsers can't do nearly as much as a cheap laptop can.
Pretty much all the major PC makers have new laptops they announced at trade shows in July/Aug/Sept that they've been holding back until November. They'll be shipping with Windows 8.1 which they couldn't do if they put them on shelves in the summer.
Wouldn't be so sure. Acer has a Haswell Chromebook out already, and if Intel really wants to stave off ARM, they'll come down...
And while Chromebooks work with low powered CPUs, they're better with a faster CPU. WebGL is getting real, Google already has Nacl in the browser (examples are 'From Dust', 'Bastion'), and as web apps become more 'native-like', the extra power will be appreciated.
1) keep going up market, and be disrupted in the most classical way possible
2) compete with ARM on price, which is unsustainable for a company like Intel
Not only is Intel used to high margins on its chips, but it's also a very small player in the mobile world, and the PC world is shrinking continuously, so "making it up" in the PC market won't cut it.
Also, if they're promoting "$300 Haswell notebooks", virtually nobody will buy $700-$1000 notebooks in the future, and Intel will never be able to raise prices, and their profits, again.
Whether Intel will die like Blackberry and Nokia (yes, I consider the acquisition as dying, since it was a move out of bankruptcy desperation) or will survive as a tiny shadow of what they used to be, I'm unsure.
I suppose it's possible for them to survive as a company that is 1/10 of what they used to be, if they really compete on price, and make radical changes within the company (end all unprofitable/low volume divisions and fire execs or engineers that are too expensive). But that really depends on how willing they are to make those hard decisions.
Your world seems to be missing servers.
The striking thing is that, per Hz, x86 is still far more powerful than ARM (like, integer factors, I've heard x5). If they can get the power consumption low enough and/or more performance is needed in phones/tablets, they could possibly win (though it seems unlikely).
Their best bet is to lead the next disruptive category - watches or glasses or whatever it is - but unfortunately their bias towards performance over power consumption doesn't bode well for them.
-x86? check
-bay trail? check
-long battery? check
-stylus support? check
-high ppi? check
-under $300? check
Perfect notebook replacement. Not a laptop replacement but as a companion device it is perfect.
Just not with Intel CPUs.
Expect prices to drop again and specs to be revised up in the run up to christmas, which means Intel is still on the trailing edge in the low end of the tablet market.
What's even more intriguing is that you can now flush the firmware on the 2012 model and it becomes just a regular PC that you can install windows/osx/linux in the regular way with no faffing about. Hopefully the same will be done for these new models.
Arch on an HP Chromebook 14" sounds for $299 sounds awesome to me.
http://johnlewis.ie/pre-built-coreboot-firmware-for-chromebo...
Keeping them seems one benefit to dual OS (reusing the Chrome kernel). It's nice to be able to watch HD video without hiccups.
Not sure if that's fast enough, but at least it's better than the typical 20MB/s for USB 2.0.
(We're talking about "it could be bad timing for Amazon and it's new Kindle Fire HDX tablet", right?)
> it could be bad timing for Amazon and it's new Kindle Fire HDX tablet
Is it valid here? If so, why? I've always been taught that "it's" was only a valid contraction of "it is" or rarely "it has", neither of which fit here.
Scroll down to historical note.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/it%27s#Adjective
This is one of the more common pitfalls that freshmen of Grammar Hitlerjugend step into.
For my next laptop, might get a System76.
Slightly OT, but had money to burn for a work desktop and went with a Supermicro workstation. Very nice hardware. More expensive but much better than Dell/HP/Lenovo workstations. Ironically, still cheaper than a Mac Pro desktop. Also better -- Mac Pro RAID was a poorly thought through overpriced garbage, last time I worked with it up a couple of years ago.