[CoffeeFiend]

I was already saying that

Build your own ARM CPU that's faster than everything else there is (included the on-die GPU) that is also low enough in power usage for the battery to last, 1GB of RAM, throw in an amazing custom made 3 megapixel (as in 50% more pixels than a HDTV on it) screen with a coating for fingerprints and a great touchscreen too, two decent cameras, the wifi chipset, audio codec, all the sensors including GPS, battery, a custom-made high quality case... We design and build embedded hardware at work and I know that this stuff costs real money (not counting engineering time, prototyping and such). Also, there's the OS license. A Windows CE 6 license (C6G) is ~$17 in qty of 100 and I don't see a "fancier" version of Windows costing less (I don't see them risking their desktop OS business for $10 tablet OS licenses either)

It's very hard to compete with the iPad hardware cost-wise. Some Apple hardware is overpriced, but some of it is spot-on. The Macbook Air is another example of that (besides the iPad). Some OEMs stated that they just can't produce something similar at that price point (so they're phasing out these products since they sell poorly). Look at android devices approaching the specs of the iPad and you'll see the price quickly get there too. And even if you disregard the price, lots of OEMs simply unable to produce something like the iPad. Even big OEMs like Dell just don't have the resources to do things like custom CPU design.

The other kind of Windows "tablet" devices being pushed are sucky laptop/tablet hybrids which cost more than the iPad. Like the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga with its super high TDP Intel i7 draining your battery and producing massive amounts of heat, which has double the thickless, double the weight, and has half the screen resolution of the iPad 3 while also showing all fingerprints, at a 1000$ price point. It's not a device I'd want to lug around everyday and it's too pricey as well. The iPad 3 also has 2 cameras, does 1080p video capture, has image stabilisation + autofocus + face recognition, etc.

Also, the iPad's UI is made just for tablets. It's a custom, no-compromises tablet OS unlike the all-compromises Win8 frankein'OS. There's far more software for iDevices (especially high quality software), and the developers' mindshare is much more on the Apple side (or even Android). MS is angering developers with their latest development tools, and no one seems to care about Metro there either. Combine that with the previous sales figures for the MS Zune/Kin/Phones which screams "this won't sell either", then why would you even develop for it?

Nevermind that saying "it has Metro on it" probably won't be a big selling point once people have tried it on a desktop (you might as well tell people it runs on Vista). Then again, the demand for Windows tablets is quickly dying. I've lost all interest in one too. Too little, too late. There's nothing it does that a iPad wouldn't do better for me. I just can't think of a single reason to buy one anymore.

[Joseph_sw]

when the first time MS announce that Win 8 will support not x86/64 & ARM cpus,
I was hoping to see the new appearances of high-spec ARM based desktop computers for consumer markets..

but alas, the mandatory/obligatory/forced Metro interface is really unsuitable for desktop usages,
not to mention MS demands ARM based Windows OS must use Secure-Boots without any option to disable them.

[CoffeeFiend]

Joseph_sw, on 23 May 2012 - 09:20 PM, said:

high-spec ARM based desktop computers for consumer markets

Honestly, I wouldn't see the point of that. Even a high-spec'ed ARM CPU is still fairly weak compared to basically all modern desktop CPUs. To illustrate the point, take the multithreaded linpack benchmark. Some of the highest-end ARM chips like the Tegra 3 score a bit over 100 megaflops. Meanwhile, some last generation i5 2500K's bench close to 100 gigaflops. That's roughly 1000x faster (admittedly that's just one very specific bench). The video performance is also a lot slower than any modern "onboard" video (even that of a CPU which has a GPU on the same chip), let alone any discrete video card. Nevermind that existing motherboard form factors (and layouts), current PC architectures (like having PCI-e slots, or CPUs typically having memory controllers on-die meant to connect directly to DDR3 memory sticks), power supply designs and so on really aren't suited to an ARM system. At best you'd have something completely different, with the usual commodities tacked on as one gigantic hack. Its niche is battery powered, low-power mobile computing devices mainly. Tablets, phones, MP3 players, ebook readers and so on.

Add to that the fact that it wouldn't run any single app or game you've ever run or that's ever existed for the PC so far (including all drivers for any hardware you might own -- having completely different instruction sets and architectures will do that), and you just got the slowest, lamest PC ever. One that's slow and that can't really do anything useful (Metro would just add insult to injury). I can't see those flying off the shelves.

[JorgeA]

CoffeeFiend, on 23 May 2012 - 06:53 PM, said:

It's very hard to compete with the iPad hardware cost-wise.

CoffeeFiend,

You've written the best explanation of the situation that I've seen. I understand the problem better now than ever before. Maybe you should be writing for some of those tech sites!

This was especially instructive for me because I'm one of those who's tended to view Apple's products as severely overpriced for what they do.

--JorgeA

[CoffeeFiend]

JorgeA, on 23 May 2012 - 10:34 PM, said:

Maybe you should be writing for some of those tech sites!

Thanks, but my English really isn't that great. I'd have to work on my articles quite a lot for them to be mostly readable and well structured.

JorgeA, on 23 May 2012 - 10:34 PM, said:

This was especially instructive for me because I'm one of those who's tended to view Apple's products as severely overpriced for what they do.

In a lot of cases they are. Especially if what you want is a nice, fast and powerful desktop PC. If you're not looking for a laptop, their crappy overpriced and underpowered Mac mini or their my-monitor-is-my-computer iMac just like me, then their only choice is the Mac Pro. That is EXTREMELY overpriced for what it is (yes, I know it's a Xeon CPU in there -- I don't care about that, just give me raw performance regardless of the branding). Just a quick comparison:

I recently upgraded my work PC: I got an Antec Sonata III case and it's good quality PSU: an Antec 500W that's 80+ gold certified. An ASUS P8Z68-V LX Z68 motherboard (great OEM, great Z68 chipset, USB3, SATA 6Gbps, etc), a Core i5 3550 that benches @ 7660 (stock), 16GB of good DDR3 1600, a 128GB Crucial M4 SSD as a boot+software drive (it's enough, don't need more), a 2TB HD for storage and an ASUS 24x DVD writer. It's all good quality parts and not some 2nd rate junker. I kept my existing video card, so keep that in mind. That was $750 CAD total, which is $730 USD at the current rate. Not bad really.

A "decent" Mac Pro, with the middle of the road quad core 3.2GHz Nehalem CPU (I'm assuming it's a Xeon W3565) which benches @ 6069 (my CPU is ~25% faster), 16GB of RAM (4x4GB), a 2TB storage drive, the only SSD option there is, the basic ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB that's slower than my existing card, a ghetto 18x DVD drive and nothing else... Their store tells me it would cost me $5224 USD. That's almost exactly ten times what I paid for a faster upgrade. Even a ghetto iMac (you know, the my-monitor-is-a-PC thingy) with a similar-ish CPU, 16GB RAM, a 2TB drive and 256GB SSD (the only SSD option there is) and a Radeom 6770M 512MB card is still over $3000! Ok then, let's try a Mac mini perhaps? The one with the Core i7 2635QM which benches @ 6232 (slower yet again), half the RAM (8GB), a small 750GB storage drive and the usual only SSD option (256GB), crappy onboard GPU with no upgrade options... That's still $1750!

So other than their portable devices (laptops, mp3 players, phones, tablets) they're a pretty darn bad value IMO. And even when it comes to laptops, depending on your needs, they're not necessarily a good value either. You want a durable, well build business-grade laptop? Sure, no one is giving those away. But if you're just after any old laptop with a 17" screen then you're in for a surprise. You can easily find some laptops with a 17" LCD and a i3 CPU around $500 (I've even seen some going for $400, *if* an AMD E450 is fast enough for you). Apple's only option is a MacBook Pro that starts from $2500.

[xpclient]

Has there been any Metro product which has been successful? Windows Phone. Nah. Zune No. Zune Software maybe but it's still "simplified" - doesn't serve advanced uses like Media Player does, Xbox 360 Metro Dashboard - p***ed off many users and again removed functionality like true 1080p playback. Other products with Metro-inspired design and all the wrong decisions are also likely to fail - Visual Studio 11, Office 15, SharePoint and Exchange 15, Windows Server 2012. And yet they are arrogantly sticking to it. Way to repeatedly p*** off users when they are telling MS they are already getting p***ed off.

This post has been edited by xpclient: 24 May 2012 - 02:08 AM

[belgianguy]

You won't be able to develop anything but Metro applications, unless you cough up the dollars.

Well, it's another bullet in whatever there is left of their foot. I won't be extorted to program for a platform, whatever happened to writing Hello World! in a console FOR FREE? Ubuntu/Eclipse, here I come.

[JorgeA]

Does anybody have access to the video of what Steve Ballmer actually said in South Korea?

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

CoffeeFiend, on 23 May 2012 - 11:41 PM, said:

So other than their portable devices (laptops, mp3 players, phones, tablets) they're a pretty darn bad value IMO.

CoffeeFiend,

Thanks for the excellent rundown, I understand the situation with Apple much better now.

I'd suggest that even the iPod is way overpriced, for our purposes anyway. My wife bought one a couple of years ago simply to download some talk-show podcasts, and both of us found iTunes to be the most inflexible, opaque, and arbitrary program we've ever tried. The manual, though extensive, didn't help to clarify matters. The iPod is still sitting in its case, slowly getting covered with dust.

Shortly after that exercise in frustration, I bought a Sansa Fuze for like one-third the price of the iPod. I can drag and drop stuff into it at will and it will find and play the MP3s, no muss no fuss. It doesn't insist on "syncing" anything for me (thankfully), the transfer process works predictably, and it doesn't try to channel me into doing things one particular way. Best little A/V purchase I've ever made.

--JorgeA

[CoffeeFiend]

belgianguy, on 24 May 2012 - 03:33 PM, said:

You won't be able to develop anything but Metro applications, unless you cough up the dollars.

Well, it's another bullet in whatever there is left of their foot. I won't be extorted to program for a platform, whatever happened to writing Hello World! in a console FOR FREE? Ubuntu/Eclipse, here I come.

I already posted this stuff twice They made the VS Express IDEs completely worthless (Metro-only). Also, the VS Express IDEs cannot legally be used for commercial work anymore. They're also taking the C++ compiler out of the SDK. And no more compiling for XP... MS is quickly and utterly destroying all their very best core products. The whole situation is turning into one huge farce. It's as if they decided to get rid of all their users as quickly as possible. Basically nobody will willingly "upgrade" to the new trash they're pushing out.

JorgeA, on 25 May 2012 - 12:25 AM, said:

I'd suggest that even the iPod is way overpriced, for our purposes anyway. My wife bought one a couple of years ago simply to download some talk-show podcasts, and both of us found iTunes to be the most inflexible, opaque, and arbitrary program we've ever tried.

Well, it's getting pretty hard to find to find anything besides an iPod nowadays in the first place, and similar devices from other manufacturers usually cost near the same. We all use cheap Sony mp3 players here, but the sync'ing with WMP kind of sucks (the smart playlists are really basic compared to iTunes'). iTunes does suck on Windows though, it's like they've made no effort whatsoever to make it run decently on that platform.

[Tripredacus]

CoffeeFiend, on 25 May 2012 - 01:06 AM, said:

iTunes does suck on Windows though, it's like they've made no effort whatsoever to make it run decently on that platform.

That's why I use Winamp with my iPod!

[CoffeeFiend]

Tripredacus, on 25 May 2012 - 08:16 AM, said:

That's why I use Winamp with my iPod!

I'd honestly rather use WMP (or pretty much anything else) than Winamp. However next time we buy new mp3 players it'll likely be iPods. That will pretty much force me away from WMP, especially since I'm getting tired of its not-so-smart playlists (it's such a pain to make it sync exactly what I want) and its inability to handle different formats (like FLAC) intelligently... WMP was already a terrible video player (the absolute, very worst I've tried in ages, by a quite long shot) and its ability to share stuff with media center just lost the last little bit of relevance it might have had with Win8. To be honest, I'm not even sure why I'm still using it today. Lots of people say foobar is better (it looks like it has real potential) but it feels like way too much work to hunt for skins, try to set it up to use ratings, etc. It feels more of a construction kit than ready-to-use software.

On a totally different note, developers everywhere are really angered about MS' latest moves. So many articles on so many different sites, and thousands of comments... MS trying to force terrible stuff onto its users and developers, hoping they all bend over and take it. This can't end well for them, unless they do a quick about turn with Win9.

[JorgeA]

Ars Technica is reporting that another business-oriented tablet has bit the dust.

Quote

Cius wasn't killed by the market-leading iPad and Kindle Fire; it was killed by consumers. While work laptops and desktops are still primarily provisioned to employees by corporate IT shops, mobile devices follow the opposite path, being brought into work environments by employees. Smartphones shifted from a business-driven model dependent on the BlackBerry to a consumer-driven one focused on the iPhone and Android devices, but tablets have never been a business-first device (with the exception of some Windows tablets deployed for industry-specific use cases).

What (if anything) does this say about the prospects of Windows 8 tablets? One might speculate that employees will be taking their tablets into the office, but in combination with what we've seen about the comparative production costs and price of iPads vs. Windows tablets, it doesn't look that hard to predict which tablet brands people will be taking to work.

--JorgeA

This post has been edited by JorgeA: 25 May 2012 - 11:15 PM

[CoffeeFiend]

JorgeA, on 25 May 2012 - 11:12 PM, said:

it doesn't look that hard to predict which tablet brands people will be taking to work

iOS and Android devices are all that rage. The answer to that is pretty obvious.

Another proof that MS couldn't sell mobile devices even if they came with a free gold ingot.

The smartphone shipments have gone up 50% in one year, from 101.6M units to 152.3M units. Both iOS and Android devices saw tremendous growth (145% and 88.7%). Despite MS doing their best to promote their stuff in a market that's rapidly expanding (it should be easy to sell your stuff when there's so much demand), they managed to lose 0.4% of the market (from 2.6% down to 2.2%). I can see Windows tablets selling almost as well. And I expect Metro to be almost as successful on desktops as Silverlight has been on the web.

[JorgeA]

CoffeeFiend, on 25 May 2012 - 11:35 PM, said:

JorgeA, on 25 May 2012 - 11:12 PM, said:

it doesn't look that hard to predict which tablet brands people will be taking to work

iOS and Android devices are all that rage. The answer to that is pretty obvious.

Another proof that MS couldn't sell mobile devices even if they came with a free gold ingot.

The smartphone shipments have gone up 50% in one year, from 101.6M units to 152.3M units. Both iOS and Android devices saw tremendous growth (145% and 88.7%). Despite MS doing their best to promote their stuff in a market that's rapidly expanding (it should be easy to sell your stuff when there's so much demand), they managed to lose 0.4% of the market (from 2.6% down to 2.2%). I can see Windows tablets selling almost as well. And I expect Metro to be almost as successful on desktops as Silverlight has been on the web.

So, basically, this is more evidence of how Microsoft may be letting its tablet tail wag the PC dog: in other words, inconvenience the vast majority of its customers (not to say, outright p*ss off lots of them) to pursue the chimera of explosive success in the tablet market.

Meanwhile, I'm wondering if an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal last week (May 21; I took too long to get around to posting about it and the full text was no longer available at the WSJ site when I checked) might help to explain Microsoft's behavior around Windows 8:

Quote

A race to liberate computer users from the mouse is kicking into high gear, inspired by the potential of turning hands and other body parts into digital controllers.

The goal: to manage computers and other devices with gestures rather than pointing and clicking a mouse or touching a display directly. Backers believe that the approach can make it not ony easier to carry out many existing chores but also take on trickier tasks such as creating 3-D models, verifying whether clothes fit, training athletes and browsing medical imagery during surgery without touching anything.

...Microsoft, which helped ignite the action with the 2010 introduction of its Kinect accessory for gaming consoles, on Monday is updating the software that allows developers to build applications for the PC version of the product.

...

Later on, the article gives the name of this MS software as, Kinect for Windows.

Any thoughts, speculation, educated guesses?

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

Without intending at all to close this thread, please do see the new thread, "Now they're chopping up the Start Button's bones."

They do seem to be consciously jumping off the deep end.

--JorgeA

[MagicAndre1981]

why do you start a new thread?

[CoffeeFiend]

JorgeA, on 28 May 2012 - 10:27 PM, said:

Kinect for Windows.

Any thoughts, speculation, educated guesses?

I've heard about this stuff a while ago. I can't see any practical uses for it. Far too imprecise, and gesticulating all day sounds even worse than using touch monitors (not that we'll have them) all day. The only place it might have had a chance is games, but with publishers caring more about consoles lately, and the very low odds of having such a device on the PC makes it a waste of time to develop for, especially when that group of gamers is well known to be mouse/keyboard addicts.

[Fredledingue]

Quote

Later on, the article gives the name of this MS software as, Kinect for Windows.

Any thoughts, speculation, educated guesses?

__________________
I was reading an article recently about a new kinetic control device, an invisible keyboard and mouse if you will, which was 100X more precise than any existing game console.

Cool stuff!

The problem with such interface is the unintended gestures interpretated as a command by the machine. When all your moves are watched by the machine, the machine tries to catch commands from you eventhought you didn't want to. Inadvertant mistakes may happen much more often.
You scratch an itch on your back and Oooops, the software closed the file without saving!
What happens if another person is next to you and also move his or her hands in all directions?
Poeple will need a real button control, to turn on and off the gesture detection.
It's still not clear how often office workers will have to turn it on anf off but it can be pretty often, to the point a mouse may still be the most convenient device.

For having worked on a drawing tablet, my experience with non-mouse pointing devices tells me that you must have a large area of maneuvre to enjoy precision on the screen. If you area is not larger than that of the mouse, it's pointless, no pun intended.
It would be cool to work on a gesture detection area half the size of your both arms spread left and right, and verticaly the same ratio as for your monitor screen.
Large gesture in reality for small pointer moves on the screen. But designer and manufacturer always want to do things cheaper and they don't understand this need for large areas.

It's also not obvious to click, let alone to right-click or middle click or double-click with all the variants, when it's not a mouse.
The mouse was designed especialy for easy clicking. Not a pen. And definetly not your empty hands.
How will you click without a material cick-button, I don't know. You won't have the material feel of it at your fingertips. It will look wierd.
Aigain, with my experience with drawing tablet, I never get used to clicking easily with the pen. I always switch to the mouse for click-intensive tasks.

It's not sure if this device will be needed on all computers. If your main job is typing on a keyboard, what for?
What is the real time-saving advantage of poiting your finger toward the screen versus fetching your mouse and moving it?
There certainly must be, but one cannot predict that it will replace the mouse totaly.
I don't think we will get such device out of the box working in an ideal manner immediately.
The wow! effect yes, but real efficiency, maybe not.
It will take years of improvements for the millions users to use aerial area instead of the mouse and its carpet.

This post has been edited by Fredledingue: 30 May 2012 - 03:19 PM

[JorgeA]

MagicAndre1981, on 30 May 2012 - 01:33 PM, said:

why do you start a new thread?

Andre,

I thought that the news might be more visible (seen by more MSFN visitors) if it stood out in its own thread, instead of being buried in the middle of this long one.

But if you think that it will be seen by more people if we make it part of this thread, then I'll be happy to ask the moderators to merge it into this one.

--JorgeA