Odd Laptop-Tablet Hybrids Show PC Makers' Panic 251
jfruh writes "Taipei's Computex trade show has seen an array of strange devices on sale that are somewhere between PCs and tablets: laptops with screens you can twist in every direction, tablets with detachable keyboards, all-in-one PCs with detachable monitors. Some have Intel chips, some ARM chips; some run Windows 8, some Android. They all exist because of the cheap components now available, and because Windows 8 will make touch interfaces possible — but mostly they exist because PC makes are starting to freak out about being left behind by the tablet revolution."
Re:WTF? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is slashdot. In this fantasy world, Apple innovates and everyone else imitates.
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, it was from the "Tablet PC" era, and devices lack that were a terrible failure. People already complain that the iPad is too heavy at a pound and a half, nobody wants a six pound tablet. Admittedly, one of the major failings of the Tablet PC is being addressed with the Win8 touch interface and app ecosystem.
I get it. Pc makers != Tablet makers (Score:5, Insightful)
PC makers show chimeras in tradeshows because that is what the trade shows are meant for.
Innovating is not "freaking out" (Score:2, Insightful)
Since when is innovating "freaking out". There is a long standing tradition of trying many different form factors and designs. Well at least for companies not named Apple. It's exciting to see all these possibilities. Time to move behind the frankly terrible interface of a capacitive touchscrean only.
Re:I get it. Pc makers != Tablet makers (Score:5, Insightful)
To be be fair, this is pretty much what TFA says, but the slashdot headline and summary sucks and totally misses the point.
Being concerned about not being left behind in new developments and new markets is what drives innovation and competition. It's not "freaking out".
Some will fail, some will be successful. Today's chimeras may be tomorrow's standard kit.
Old news (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the thing: this has been going on for laptop and cell phone manufacturers since... forever. These people don't know where the technology is going, they don't have a plan, and they arguably don't know how to make a good product. Given the technical capabilities of computers these days, it's amazing how poor a job manufacturers are doing of actually solving problems or giving people what they want.
No need for freaking out (Score:3, Insightful)
Tablets will get their own clientele, and will never kill off laptop/PC sales, simply because they can't get powerful enough. Each class of devices has its pros and cons, and therefore, their own market segment.
PC-s are the heavy artillery of computing: extremely powerful, but immobile. Quad-core graphics chips or no, you probably won't see someone rendering 3D models on a tablet, simply because they are not powerful enough to do what a PC's borbdingnagian graphics cards and n-core CPUs can do in a flash.
Laptops are a sort of heavy in-betweeners: increasingly mobile but ultimately constrained by their batteries and trading processing power for uptime, increasingly powerful, but unable to match PCs due to power, heat dissipation and other constraints. They can be used for heavy lifting on the go, but should only be used thus if no better options are available.
Tablets are the light in-betweeners: mainly fit for viewing content, not for creating it, they are ideal for sales people who can present media-rich demos to their clients, and top managers, who can use them to tie together various information sources on the go to make their decisions.
Smartphones are the Swiss army knives: they can do anything in a pinch, but if there's a specialized tool, better use that. They are highly mobile computing platforms, almost exclusively for viewing content due to their small screens not leaving room for a virtual keyboard, but due to their always-on Internet connections, they can be used to look up information and communicate with other systems/devices on the go.
I expect that soon, as the novelty of the iPad and other tablets wears off, and youngsters recognize that these devices are not the end-all to their computing (playing Angry Birds) problems, each platform will find their own user strata, with laptops and smartphones once again becoming the most prolific, with PCs taking sort of a back row, and tablets being mainly relegated to consumption roles instead of general purpose use or content generation.
Re:WTF? (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't know what Slashdot you are reading, but on mine everyone still screws motherboards into their turbo-button ATX cases like it's 1995, dual-boots pirated XP, and views Apple products as class warfare.
But in reality the shift has already happened. The PC industry is headed for destruction, Dell and HP are spiraling into oblivion, the entire retail channel (Best Buy et al) is dead. Margins are already below zero for some categories (ultrabooks). And the totally misconceived shitshow that is Windows 8 will just drive a stake through what little is left of the PC consumer market. Soon, PCs will be hanging onto 3rd world markets & embedded devices and will be dead for all practical purposes.
50 Million iPad owners is just the beginning. The entire younger generation has already adopted touch-based interfaces en-masse. "BYOD" iPads are already infiltrating the enterprise while PCs are pushed into dusty corners like the legacy minicomputers before them.
There is only one future in the computing industry and it is Apple iPad. Prepare your anuses.
Re:WTF? (Score:4, Insightful)
What is Microsoft bringing to the table that Android, or Apple, or even RIM aren't doing?
One of the biggest things better multitasking... as in two windows running at once side by side. That's something you won't find on the iPad. Further, things like apps that work across tablet and desktop is another big one. Further better pen support. I've used a Windows 7 Tablet PC since it came out, and pen support is way beyond what Android has to offer. And since there will be x86 platforms you still have access to all the best apps and games and universal device compatibility, which is one of the biggest shortcomings of the iPad and Android tablets.
Re:Here's what I want as a technical user (Score:5, Insightful)
The beauty of capitalism and the free market is the fact that you can have your pony and the other guy can have his tablet.
Re:WTF? (Score:4, Insightful)
The "Feaking Out" is from the traditional PC people. The standard, Desktop CPU, Monitor, Key Board and Mouse. Is going out. So is the normal Clam-shell Laptop.
Performance isn't as big of a deal as it was 10/15 years ago.
1998 There was a huge difference if you had a 486 vs a P2. Or a system with 16 Megs of ram vs 32 megs.
Now in 2012 there is less of a difference between a Core 2 Duo and a Sandy Bridge Core i5, a System with 3gigs vs 8gigs.
Now it isn't that the new stuff isn't orders of magnitudes faster and better. But the stuff we use computers for doesn't fully utilize the hardware anymore.
We are preferring to say with slower computers and get systems that are smaller, longer battery, and overall just more portable. Because our needs for a computer isn't following Moors Law.
Re:Innovating is not "freaking out" (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm by no means an Apple fanboy but I do think it's dishonest to deny that they've been pretty good at getting the market to move in various directions.
The iPhone may not have been the first smartphone with a touchscreen but the user experience factor of it was strong enough that suddenly "everyone"* wanted to build something similar.
The iPad wasn't the first tablet but it did get "everyone" to put more focus into tablets (and actually believe in the tablet market, remember when the iPad was first presented and people were debating whether there would even be a market for it?).
The Macbook Air wasn't the first ultraportable laptop but if you look at the bulk of the Ultrabook-spec machines out there they look an awful lot like the Air, a few of them actually to the point that at a glance they can be mistaken for the Macbook Air, I find it very hard to believe that this is a coincidence.
* I'm using quotation marks here because otherwise someone will insist that I literally meant everyone.
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
No idea what "The Tablet PC Initiative" is -- sounds like prog rock band or something.
I'm going to assume this was an attempt by Microsoft to innovate the future with a product they couldn't figure out how to sell to anybody? Like the Smart House or all the features in Longhorn which never happened?
If all they were trying to do was jam XP onto a touch screen, no wonder nobody bought them.
That sounds all well and good, until you consider a few extra things. The first person I knew with a tablet had one in 2003; it was a Fujitsu Lifebook. As a result, "no wonder no one bought them" sounds right in 2012, but requires a bit of perspective...
In 2003, Wi-Fi was still relatively new at the consumer level. If you wanted cellular data, you would likely end up with a GPRS connection, or EDGE if you were lucky; it complimented Windows Pocket PC Edition, Palm Treos, and early Blackberry units pretty nicely. Capacitive touch wasn't practical at the consumer level; it was either resistive or the Wacom-on-glass system that they ended up using. iOS didn't exist yet (the second-gen iPod was just getting out of the gate; Apple was looking like they could afford to keep the lights on), broadband had only recently hit critical mass. ARM processors lived in devices running embedded operating systems; they were nowhere near powerful enough to run a general purpose OS. Atom didn't exist.
In *that* world, the primary market for tablets were people taking notes with a pen. For all its faults, Windows Tablet PC Edition did a pretty impressive job of recognizing handwriting, which was good because it was the primary reason to be a tablet. Meanwhile, text entry was still king, and 5 hours of battery life was a pretty reasonable amount of time to be using your tablet.
No one is claiming that the first generation of tablet PCs running Windows XP struck a chord with the general populous; they clearly did not. Their target demographic were students, medical professionals, and other people for whom OneNote was the killer app. There was no iOS, there was no Android, and desktop Linux was still getting its pants on regarding getting a decent desktop distribution out the door. Windows XP was just about the only thing that *could* work on the systems at hand, because Apple was just about the only company who was able to write an OS specifically for tablets and have people look at what they *could* do as opposed to what they *couldn't* do, and even that was highly based upon the fact that there were a few years' worth of iPhone OS builds behind it, during which people had built up some level of software library for that platform.
I might not be the biggest iOS fan in existence, but you'd be hard pressed to find me a company besides Apple that would have been capable of generating demand for a new computing form factor and a new OS for the paradigm at the same time. If Microsoft released WindowsRT back in 2004 and had capacitive touch and 802.11g and an App Store and an unlocked EDGE cellular modem and sold it at $499...it would have bombed then too because the immediate reaction would be "running Office 2003/Quickbooks/AutoCAD/$WINDOWS_SOFTWARE doesn't work!" or similar complaints regarding hitting 16x16 pixel toolbar icons with a finger and being productive.
It's not that people overlooked swivel tablets running XP because iOS was that much better, it's that the target demographic of people who would benefit from handwriting into their laptop was a very small market, and there was no Facebook, Angry Birds, or Netflix streaming to justify a tablet as a consumption device.