Vizio Plans To Undercut The Market For All-In-One PCs 268
TV maker Vizio is famous for undercutting competitors' prices on LCD TVs; now, the company has released word that it will introduce a new line of budget computers, and next week will be showing them off at CES. Bloomberg reports that the company won't yet disclose actual prices (the kind with numbers), but says instead only that they will be at a "price that just doesn’t seem possible." As the article mentions, the all-in-one desktop machines shown look a lot like Apple products; BetaNews has pictures, and ominously mentions Apple's tendency to sue over similar-looking products.
Re:Wondering about desktop sales ... (Score:2, Informative)
Desktop sales are already in a steep decline in the western world. People are moving to mobile platforms like smartphones and tablets.
Desktop sales:
2005: 35 million units
2008: 32 million units
2010: 25 million units
2014 (predicted): 22 million units
Mobile sales (tablets and smartphones):
2005: 66 million
2008: 126 million
2010: 170 million
2014 (predicted): 264 million
Desktops are becoming as irrelevant to computing as traditional windows PCs are to gaming in the face of consoles.
Re:Good for them. (Score:5, Informative)
Habitat for Humanity (dot org will resolve) often give stuff away, never mind just having $5 Pentium 4s.
They'll take donations, too.
cheers,
Trolling.. must try HARDER (Score:4, Informative)
The keyboard looks exactly like Apple's flat keyboard, and the trackpad is the Magic Trackpad that Apple started offering a year or so ago.
--it's not at all surprising that Apple is going to be proactive in protecting its design work.
But sites like Slashdot are full of Apple-haters who don't want to give the company credit for anything
bonch writes [slashdot.org]
The keyboard looks just like Apple's flat keyboard introduced a few years ago, the trackpad is a clone of the Apple Trackpad
I'm not surprised at all that, with all the design work Apple puts into its products, it is going to try to protect that work from knockoffs.
I realize Slashdot comments tend to have an Apple slant (to put it mildly), but come on, this is completely obvious "inspiration" from Apple.
I think what really goes on here is that some people just don't want to give Apple credit for anything,
Re:Good for them. (Score:5, Informative)
I find that hard to believe an economic system like that is called communism. In order for a capitalist society to exist, at least in the type that the US is, you have winners and you have losers. Most of the winners had quite a bit to start with and most of the losers didn't have much to start with.
This whole notion of upward mobility hasn't been true in at least 40 years. Sure you get some people that manage it, but the money that would have gone to making that work out is now being siphoned directly to the richest Americans.
Re:Good for them. (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, the people and implementations are flawed, not the theory. The theory is beautiful and perfect. Why can't reality be more like the theory?
Why don't we take capitalism to its fullest extent and just give one guy all the money. The only way that you get the game to reset is a 100% estate tax. Otherwise oligarchy/fascism/plutocracy is inevitable.
"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
Re:Good for them. (Score:4, Informative)
I don't think you understand what a zero-sum game is. Zero-sum games occur when winners win exactly what losers lose. If economics was zero-sum no growth would EVER be possible, by definition. Anything gained by expanding producers would necessarily be lost by someone else (other producers, probably).
And capitalism has no requirement that there be any losers at all. It doesn't preclude losing situations, but in a strict market capitalist system, any transaction that is KNOWN to be a losing proposition will never go forward. Every transaction that does go foward in such a system.. has no known losers. Both sides expect (and generally do) to come out in better positions than when they went in. Which is why they went into the transaction in the first place.
Marketing/PR Bulls*** (Score:5, Informative)
PCs are already rock-bottom pricing with tiny margins. Visio isn't going to be able to do anything significant. Maybe their first units will be loss-leaders to try and get into the market, but that's about it.
Visio is already in the business, remember? Their Android tablet is pretty expensive, at $320 USD on Amazon right now.
The only unique and cost-cutting thing they could do would be to introduce PCs with ARM (or MIPS) CPUs, instead of x86. I doubt it, but if so, good luck to them. That still won't bring prices down significantly.
Re:Good for them. (Score:4, Informative)
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of capitalism. Economics is not a zero-sum game. In a capitalist society, you have big winners and you have small winners. Every transaction is made because both participants feel it is advantageous for them to make it. If either party feels a transaction will make them a "loser", they simply will not make the transaction. Failing to be a big winner is not losing. If you're consistently generating losers, that points to a problem either in your implementation of capitalism (e.g. overly broad patents prevent competition from introducing and lowering prices for flat, rectangular computing devices), or in the people (lack of education/information, or irrational decision making).
For a transaction to occur both parties have to have something that the other wants. It could be an object of some sort, a service, or a form of currency. If you have little (you're poor), you are at an inherent disadvantage. You can certainly still provide some sort of service, but if there are millions of other people as poor or poorer than you, they may be willing to exchange their services for less.
Further complicating the problem, - what if machines are introduced that can perform the service for even cheaper? It doesn't take machines to wreak havoc on the system though. What if the potential buyers of said service collude, and agree that none of them will pay any more than a paltry sum?
The more you have, the more you can control the nature of the transactions and the exchange rate. The less you have, the more you are at the whims of those that do. This is playing out every day. It has nothing to do with patents or irrational decision making.
Playing a simple game of Monopoly bears this out fairly quickly. It's not hard to grasp.
It's been a while, but 10 or 15 years ago, economists were freaking out over the tight labor market. It was driving up costs and was bound to lead to trouble. You know what? There were still lots of people unemployed. Capitalism depends on having a supply of employed people, - i.e. losers.
Re:The Curse of the Rounded Rectangle (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.vizio.com/lcd-hdtvs/va26lhdtv10t.html [vizio.com]
http://www.vizio.com/lcd-hdtvs/vx240m.html [vizio.com]
They aren't copying Apple, they are copying Sony: http://www.amazon.com/Sony-NSX-32GT1-32-Inch-Featuring-Google/dp/B004BBA6B2 [amazon.com] (who very well may have copied Apple, but that's beside the point).