Sharp To Quit Making Personal Computers 93
cylonlover writes "Sharp has reportedly decided to pull the plug on their PC operations — not entirely shocking given that the company has not released any PCs at all in the past year. The company will apparently 'focus on marketing its Galapagos tablet devices coming out in December, along with providing content such as e-books, music and video for these products.'"
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sharp made PCs?
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
I mean people are stupid enough to actually believe this guy? Thats infinitely funnier than any sitcom about really dumb characters.
No, it isn't. It's sad. Just fucking sad.
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, back in the day, just like their PDAs up until the end they were as proprietary as hell. Now I just wish we could lose the proprietary as hell portables like laptops and now the "i" devices like iPad. Most who have read my past comments know I have NO problem with proprietary OSes, but that is because one has plenty of choice. Don't like Windows? There is a bazillion Linux OSes, BSD, Haiku, OSX, etc. It is trivial to replace and therefor one isn't locked into anyone else's upgrade cycle.
Running a little PC repair and sales shop, and talking to others in the same business, I've seen the future, and it does suckth. It is eWaste, miles and miles, mounds and mounds of it. With desktop there is no shortage of suppliers of parts, making competition drive down the prices. Sadly this is NOT the case with the portables, as the proprietary nature makes them disposable objects. Pricing parts for even a 2 year old laptop, thanks to the fact the only place one can get parts is from the OEM or cannibalizing other machines, makes them simply not worth fixing. Time and time again I've seen portables that if they were a desktop would have been a cheap fix being shitcanned because the price of parts simply made them too expensive to repair. Hell just replacing a couple of worn out hinges and a stuck keyboard will often cost more than a new netbook depending on the model.
So I for one am glad that we don't deal with proprietary manufacturers like Sharp anymore, but reading TFA it seems they have just moved from one proprietary medium to another. sadly I don't see a hardware revolution coming for the portables like we saw for the desktop, the OEMs are making too much money forcing everyone to dump them and get another when anything breaks. The unforeseen price will be the huge amounts of waste and toxic chemicals dumped increasingly on the third world that frankly is just shameful. With the jobs most people use a laptop for they could easily hang onto them for 5 to 7 years or more, but the price of repair makes that an impossibility in most cases. Selling new machines every 2 years may be good for business, but it is lousy on the environment.
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
In defense of consumers: there is no real way of judging build quality in modern computers. "Brand name" strength is a terrible indicator, as brands like HP and Sony have some of the most miserable long-term reliability numbers. Industry numbers like Mean Time Between Failures bears little or no resemblance to reality.
Also, computer innovation generally means adding crap that isn't supported properly in the OS anyway, and will go away the moment you need to reinstall. The Lenovo I'm typing this on has a touchstrip launcher that takes twice as long to launch as extra buttons would, a camera-driven login system that only logs you in ideal circumstances, and a couple of unique hardware buttons that are mapped uselessly. The most genuinely innovative feature is a hybrid SSD / Disk HDD, which speeds up access and boot times significantly but at the cost of a proprietary HDD driver in all relevant OSs.
But really, the biggest problem with modern "innovations" in computing hardware is that they are always specific enough to be useless. Computers with built-in camera docs so you can print directly and easily. Wait, that's Windows 7-32 computer with a Canon camera doc to print to a Canon printer easily if you haven't put anything on top of your tower. Here's an innovative computer with built-in biometric detector. Wait, that's tied to a proprietary XP modification, only works on a vanilla login screen, and doesn't really work anyway.