Samsung Won't Release Windows RT Tablet In US 176
New submitter sandoval88419 writes "During CES the U.S. head of Samsung Tablet business announced they won't release Windows RT devices in the U.S. Explanations are low demand, heavy investment to educate the consumer on the differences between windows RT and 8 and more importantly the effort to keep a low retail price with the Microsoft offering. "
No big loss (Score:5, Insightful)
Not that I wanted Windows RT
Re:No big loss (Score:5, Insightful)
This makes complete sense.
Why should Samsung expend resources to push a platform that will likely have the third best market share in Mobile OSes. They need to concentrate on keeping Android the best mobile platform.
Re:No big loss (Score:5, Informative)
Arguably, this is not true. Samsung has a vested interest in being the brand consumers associate with mobile products; the more they build up any one OS, the less their individual brand grows. They need to balance the risk that Google poses with Motorola with their association with Android.
However, Microsoft doesn't offer them any improvement over developing their own platform, since they can't create a Samsung "look and feel" on that platform.
Re:No big loss (Score:5, Insightful)
I am sure they will sell Windows tablets just not Windows RT tablets.
You got to look at it this way. Windows RT exists only as a way for Microsoft to be price competitive and hopefully squeeze Android out without being seen as cannibalizing their higher priced higher margin product Windows. Microsoft biggest fear is droid or some Linux variant successfully moving "up market" and being sold on anyone's top line hardware because if the market place embraces it well, the value of the Windows property declines sharply.
Samsung lives with this reality.
They have customers who *need* windows for compatibility reasons, a large portion of those would not be served by WinRT anyway.
They have successful Android product lines they have already done the startup investment in so margin is higher
The "tablet PC" space were Windows (proper) lives from a cost of production standpoint is likely going down while prices remain much higher than the "tablet" space.
All sinking money into Windows RT would do is eat into their Droid products market. Their is no reason to do it.
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There is nothing made for Windows RT right now that is even remotely price competitive with Android. It's barely price competitive with the iPad.
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Good luck with those projections... doesn't seem to hold water where I am (arguably the exact opposite). The Note seems to be a complete failure in the US, although there is a market for a phone with really big letters for older people.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
"third best market share in Mobile OSes" - no way (Score:2)
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Yeah but nokia pretty much are phasing out whatevers left of that line in the bargain basement. Developers hate it, and nokia goofily threw all sorts of roadblocks in the way of adopting that god forsaken OS anyway. Heck the way things are looking ,other than the odd delusional pundit who still thinks blackberry is going to make a triumphunt return, Nokia will probably be on the droid bandwagon too soon anyway.
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What good would this do for the Windows RT platform?
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Given that Samsung is going to be pushing Tizen, the gospel that Windows will be third "because it's Microsoft" is really pushing it. It's a non-factor right now.
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Except RIM has been on the decline for some time now, while windows phone has been growing. Take a look at Gartner's quarterly unit sales over the past year. BB10 still isn't out, and if it reversed rims fortune at all, will take many months to do so.
Except RIM still holds about 11% of NA marketshare compared to about 2% for Windows Phone. And as we've seen Windows Phone isn't exactly growing.
Don't put new wine into old wineskins (Score:5, Insightful)
Until very recently computing has all been utilising the benefits of this year's more powerful and more resource hungry x86 processor. Relatively cheap laptops are more powerful than supercomputers 15 years ago but the user experience is not particularly more responsive because software gets increasingly bloated.
ARM devices are really a different proposition, on the plus side they have no moving parts and a long battery life, however they are a very different architecture to x86, and making the OS perform well requires lots of differences. Linux (and therefore android too) was always built to be a modular system and one thing it does well is support different platforms with many compatible but swappable components at every level. The world's top supercomputers and the £25 Raspberry Pi both happily run Linux.
Windows is very different. It is a set of very tightly integrated libraries, which has its benefits, but they all need to be scaled down to work on ARM, you cannot just swap out some resource hungry component for some open source project because the system is so interdependent. Scaling down software is much harder than scaling it up.
Therefore I am not suprised that Samsung found Windows' ARM version slow and resource hungry. Just because Windows dominated the x86 era, it does not mean it will be suitable for the new and disruptive ARM age.
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Until very recently computing has all been utilising the benefits of this year's more powerful and more resource hungry x86 processor.
Yes, indeed. That explains why the TDP of processors is constantly going down: 125W to 95W to 77W.
Oh wait ...
Re:Don't put new wine into old wineskins (Score:5, Insightful)
During the last 10 years, there was this ghz race. Processors were built with inefficiencies (power consumption) over raw power and time to market. With the (re)birth of ARM, Intel likely came to realize that raw power might not work for everyone. So they are now engineering their flagship processors the way they should have in the first place.
Re:Don't put new wine into old wineskins (Score:4, Insightful)
Windows has lot of bulk, some might call it bloat. As a result it does not lend itself so much to a solid state device, which is where computers have heading for 50 years.
The mistake that Windows has made it to label both these devices WIndows. Apple labeled their legacy OS Mac OS X and their tablet OS iOS. The consumer is going to see these as separate devices.
Some of the problems are going to unavoidable, like the netbook. People are going to be looking for a cheap computer, and then complain that it does not run windows, and demand a return. But other problems are avoidable.
I am sure that some of the problem is that MS is playing the money game, like it has done with Windows for a long time. Supply an arbitrarily limited OS that can be sold on inexpensive computers. Then they demand additional monies to unlock the full feature set of the WIndows OS.
And we have seen this hardware issue with MS Vista. Contemporary computers being sold as MS Vista ready. when they weren't. MS has put themselves in the position in which consumers assume that every computer sold today is going to be able run the MS Windows sold today, and the OEM is going be held responsible if it doesn't. Does it surprise anyone if Samsung does not want to deal with the consumer backlash.
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There was never a problem with netbooks other than that manufacturers faced very low profits after MS forced them to put Windows on them, which didn't run well on the weak hardware.
With a lean distro an Atom has sufficient power to run all your typical applications like email, browsing, word processing and spreadsheets that aren't humongous. The only problem is with video, which isn't accelerated due to the proprietary PowerVR drivers.
Those systems are still very viable - they're just called Chromebooks tod
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I am not a fan of WinRT and some of the decisions made, but this is total bullshit.
With every year that passes, there is more and more distance between the performance of curren
I heard... (Score:5, Funny)
I heard they'd cost an ARM and a leg...
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would that be the Intel LEG processor?
interesting... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:interesting... (Score:5, Informative)
Funny the Slashdot community skipped right over the news Microsoft sold 60 million licenses so far. this place really is the fox news of tech.
Because:
1) That's actually a low rate for Windows adoption;
2) More importantly, it provides no information at all on sales of Windows RT tablets.
Re:Those are OEM sales (Score:5, Informative)
OEM buys the licenses beforehand.
All MS has to do is say "Ok, instead of having 1 months supply of Windows 8 licenses I need you to buy 5 months ahead of time!"
Then MS releases a press release saying "OMG DEMAND FOR WINDOWS 8 WENT UP 500%!" Intentionally, exgerated of course but that is my point. We all know the accounting tricks of Vista numbers where people and businesses bought them but wiped them and downgraded to XP.
Online website counters are the real way to predict adoption. If anyone is interested in the real number of people *actually using* windows 8 click here [statcounter.com] from statcounter who checks millions of websites each day? Windows 8 was 2% the last I looked. In comparison Windows 7 jumped 3x more in the same time period 3 years ago!
In otherwords it is a dud.
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The blue line is before Windows 8 launch, the red line is after. Windows 7 was at an all time weekly high the week of Oct 26, when Windows 8 was launched. It's been going down steadily since then (minus some distortion due to holidays, but it's now just about back on the original trajectory started on Oct 26).
As for Windows 8, the stats are broken down when you download the CSV data.
Re:interesting... (Score:4, Interesting)
Because of the large numbers of those that are immediately downgraded back to 7 by corporate customers?
8's actual usage is pathetic.
Re:interesting... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I thought the confusion between the two is a major marketing tool.
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Oh, the confusion's due to a tool allright...
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That doesn't mean the licenses move over or that you can run X86 apps on ARM or vice-versa. Just because they use the same source base means little- just like you're not going to get native ARM libraries for Android to run right at the moment on AndroidX86. Same source base. If you're talking Dalvik code and only Dalvik code, you can even run the app on AndroidX86, but it's not going to run a wide range of applications because they rely on NDK generated libraries.
Re:interesting... (Score:5, Informative)
Or put another way
Windows 8 Usage Sinks Below Vista Levels
Windows 7 had more than 10 times the usage at this point in its lifecycle
http://www.dailytech.com/Windows+8+Usage+Sinks+Below+Vista+Levels/article29546.htm [dailytech.com]
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Re:interesting... (Score:4, Interesting)
Mandatory corporate upgrade? I haven't heard of any corporations that are moving all of their users to Windows 8, but I guess they may exist. It's my understanding that corps like to wait it out and make sure that everything works before moving over (thus why many are only now moving to Windows 7).
For myself, I bought Windows 8 because it was less than a third of the cost of Windows 7, and Internet hyperbole aside, it behaves basically the same way as Windows 7 in all the ways that actually matter. I actually prefer it over 7 (if you care enough to know why, it's in my posting history...somewhere...).
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Even those who hate Windows 8 can see there are some improvements. However, the reason to actually upgrade is less that Windows 7 sucked than Microsoft wanting you to get into not-Metro.
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All the ones I heard from (including at my own employer) say "Windows 8: No way until MS provides the old UI or an emulation."
Nobody is going to retrain the entire workforce and face their wrath.
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The majority of licenses are bundled in with computers and people have little to know choice in what they get. Compare that number to the number of PCs sold in the same period and you're going to find a very similar number. Windows 8 adoption rates can really be measured when that computer arrives and the user pulls out their win7 CD from their last computer and installs it.
Re:interesting... (Score:5, Informative)
How many of those licences are installed on computers currently sitting in warehouses and on the shelves at Best Buy? They're in the channel (on all new PCs, whether people want it or not), not necessarily in the end user's hands.
Re:interesting... (Score:5, Insightful)
OEMs try to keep as little inventory as possible. They only buy as many as they think they can sell. So how many exactly are in consumer's hands? Less than 60M and more than you care to admit.
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Technically that could imply only that 20m have been sold- that 40m were purchased, half of which have been sold an restocked. Or a number of other inscrutable arrangement of the numbers.
Frankly, we're not going to know the state of things for Windows 8 for a long time yet. Windows spokespeople (plus fanboys) insisted Vista was doing well right up until Microsoft put a bullet in its brain and launched Win 7. It's going to take at least 6 months to a year before the "pipeline effect" can be considered wiped
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Windows spokespeople (plus fanboys) insisted Vista was doing well right up until Microsoft put a bullet in its brain and launched Win 7.
Of course they did, that's their job (the spokespeople, not the fanboys). But Microsoft's own licenses sold numbers about Vista show the failure. Microsoft announced that they sold 20M Vista licenses in the first month. That rate dropped to an average of 9M units per month for the next two years. That's not the rate you want to be selling at when manufacturers are selling 20M PCs per month worldwide. Windows 7 sold at a rate of 20M units per month on average over its lifetime, when OEMs were shipping 30M un
Re:interesting... (Score:4, Interesting)
A better statistic would be to find out what percentage of new PC purchasers would pay a bit more for a Windows 7 downgrade.
C'mon, Microsoft. We dare you to make that offer. The statistics would be helpful, even to you.
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How many of those licences are installed on computers currently sitting in warehouses and on the shelves at Best Buy?
Many of them are not even on the shelf yet. To inflate the perception of Windows 8 adoption, Microsoft has included licenses sold to manufactures for computers that haven't even been built yet.
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Exactly. You won't see a difference in the numbers for months yet. Both launches involved a big "stocking up" phase at the beginning. Once that is out of the way, you'll either see growth drop off (once the OEMs are all stocked up and are wating for the stock to sell) or be sustained (as units sell and are replaced).
Presuming we consider Windows 7 a success- Windows 8 will need to sustain the same rate of growth as Windows 7 did over the next 6 months or so. If it drops off, we'll know it isn't doing as wel
Dumping (Score:5, Interesting)
If you dump mass licenses of W8 to OEMs with W7 downgrade rights this is going to happen. They save up millions of licenses and bring down their costs - they have to to remain competitive. But this has nothing to do with which version of the software gets delivered to the customer, nor how popular it is.
Go to dell.com or HP.com and look at their premium desktops. Windows 7 gets top billing still and Windows 8 is an option. In HP's case there are more preconfigured options with SUSE Linux than Windows 8. In Dell's case not one system comes with Windows 8 by default.
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...Microsoft sold 60 million licenses so far. this place really is the fox news of tech.
Stuffed down the throats of hapless consumers who don't want them, more like it. The number of dazed, confused people not buying computers in the Windows 8 aisle at Frys the other day was truly epic.
No surprise (Score:5, Informative)
You don't become the leading smartphone manufacturer by being a sucker.
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There's a benefit to Android - if one manufacturer annoys you, you can go to another one. With Apple and the iPhone, if you get annoyed with the phone (as I did with the iPhone 3G)... you don't have a choice except get a completely different phone, which I wound up doing.
Honestly, I've tried Android and iOS, and I really wouldn't mind trying Windows Phone 8, but I'm not spending $600 to find out it isn't what I want. If a Win8 phone is given to me, I'd use it to try it out. After being burned with WinMo 5.x
Not clear? (Score:2)
What's not clear about it. Looks like Samsung is strong-arming Microsoft for something else.
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Thunk about the non tech-savy people.
"What do you mean it's not Windows 8? It looks the same!"
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You don't buy something for Android and expect it to run on your Linux desktop "because it's all Linux underneath, right?"
You don't buy something for your Windows 8 desktop and expect it to run on your Windows tablet. IMHO, Microsoft has the advantage in that it's going to deliver a tablet with actually Windows 8 x86 capable of running those apps "grandma bought".
Anyone, perhaps I s
Re:Not clear? (Score:4, Informative)
You don't buy something for your Macbook and expect it to run on your iPhone "because it's all Apple, look, it's similar"
iOS and OSX look completely different.
You don't buy something for Android and expect it to run on your Linux desktop "because it's all Linux underneath, right?"
I've never seen a Linux distro with an Android-like UI out of the box. The closest I've seen are the tablet UI's for KDE or Enlightenment e17, but neither of those are enabled out of the box, either, and it'd be difficult to mistake either one for Android even if they were.
You don't buy something for your Windows 8 desktop and expect it to run on your Windows tablet. IMHO, Microsoft has the advantage in that it's going to deliver a tablet with actually Windows 8 x86 capable of running those apps "grandma bought".
Oh wait. I can't make the same argument, here. The two UI's are virtually identical in this case.
You're not thinking like a user.
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"iOS" and "Macbook" don't have anything in common in names.
Compare to "Windows 8" and "Windows RT". See the problem here? Particularly since there's also going to be a Windows 8 tablet, the source of confusion is obvious.
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You don't buy something for your Macbook and expect it to run on your iPhone "because it's all Apple, look, it's similar"
Apple's two products look and function completely differently. The interface is different, the layout is different, the visual styling is different. They also have a completely different naming scheme- "Apple Mac" for the Mac OSX ones, "Apple i[Name]" for the iOS ones.
You don't buy something for Android and expect it to run on your Linux desktop "because it's all Linux underneath, right?"
Linux is just the kernel. Android is not the same as, say, Ubuntu. They're called different things. They look different. They're marketed differently. Android doesn't even use the word "Linux" in their marketing. Everything about them is diffe
Xbox and Xbox 360 (Score:2)
One has a Windows operating system, the other has a Windows operating system. So yes, I have good reason to expect the desktop app to run on the tablet. Unless they don't share an architecture, of course. But do I know about architectures?
Not all games for the original Xbox run on Xbox 360 because of the different architecture. Microsoft tried to push out emulators to run the popular ones, but it never achieved more than about half coverage [wikipedia.org]. And only those PlayStation 3 consoles sold soon after launch can run PlayStation 2 games.
Re:Not clear? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm actually interested in a Tablet PC ecause I'd ike to run windows binaries on that form factor without recompiling myself. Which I can't.
But every tablet device is advertised and reviewed so lazily that it is hard to tell if it is runing Windows 8 or RT. RT is a whole new eco system to invest in. Currently I'm running Android, Windows and Linux. I do not want another OS in my life.
This RT/non RT thing will confuse people for another few years. How would you market a 10" super thin tablet with 8hrs+ battery life and x86 architecture running Windows 8? How would you distinguish it from the hordes of Windows RT devices?
The name "Windows" has become diluted beyond belief. This has to be the most bone-headed marketing move ever.
Tell your parents that Win8 won't Win8 programs (Score:5, Insightful)
Further, explain to ANYONE why they should spend $400 on a WinRT tablet that's less functional than a $180 Android tablet.
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Grandma can take Microsoft Office back for a refund because it is already included in RT
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Yes, actually.
Re:Tell your parents that Win8 won't Win8 programs (Score:4, Insightful)
Except that Windows RT comes with Microsoft Office, for free, already installed.
I get your point, though. But the same argument can be made for so many other things.
Grandma bought $app (for Mac OS) because she has an iPad and knows that it's made by Apple.
Grandma bought $app for her Android (v1.23) tablet because she knows that it runs Android. Except it is only supported on v4.56.
Yes, there is a lot of confusion in the marketplace. But Microsoft does not have the monopoly on it.
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Except that Windows RT comes with Microsoft Office, for free, already installed.
First of all it's not the full functional Office that you would expect. It is Office for RT which has reduced functionality which is somewhat understandable given the difference in UI and architecture.
Grandma bought $app (for Mac OS) because she has an iPad and knows that it's made by Apple.
Apple clearly distinguishes iOS and OS X. There are separate app stores for both. MS has blurred the lines with Win 8/RT. This has the same makings of the Vista Ready/Capable disaster. It is rather impossible for her to install an OS X app on her iPad and vice versa.
Grandma bought $app for her Android (v1.23) tablet because she knows that it runs Android. Except it is only supported on v4.56.
Not the same. This goes beyond a versio
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I wasn't clear what "reduced functionality" there is in Office RT, so I searched it out for my own information. This page from MS lays out the differences pretty clearly.
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/home-and-student/office-home-student-rt-preview-FX103210361.aspx [microsoft.com]
Yes, there are obviously some things missing (for now?), but it seems like it'd be pretty functional overall. The "commerical use" restriction (if obeyed) is probably the largest restriction, imo.
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Microsoft should not have named it "Windows" at all to avoid the confusion. That's the point.
Do you really think iOS and OSX has more distinction than Windows 8 and Windows RT? I've had to explain the difference between iOS and OSX many times to friends and family who were confused as to which was which. This was even worse in the early days of iPhone, when Apple and Steve Jobs insisted very publicly that iPhone ran OSX.
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Jobs never said that iPhone ran OS X. What he said to developers was that iOS uses Objective C and came from the same background as OS X. But he was clear that you can't expect an OS X application to work on it. OS X developers wishing to become iOS developers would find the transition easy. This was said to developers who would think understand the difference.
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Jobs never said that iPhone ran OS X.
Jobs said exactly this at the original iPhone keynote, to tech journalists and Apple customers (the only people who watched that sort of thing in those days). Not just developers. Developers weren't even allowed on iPhone back then, so I don't know how you remember that it was specifically targeted toward developers. From the keynote [engadget.com]:
iPhone runs OS X! Why would we want to run such a sophisticated OS on a mobile device? It's got everything we need. Multitasking, networking, power management, graphics, security, video, audio, core animation... It let us create desktop class applications and networking, not the crippled stuff you find on most phones. These are real desktop applications.
Emphasis mine. He unequivocally stated iPhone runs OSX. This was further emphasized on Apple's website under the original iPhone product page [archive.org], which I think you will agree is t
Re:Tell your parents that Win8 won't Win8 programs (Score:5, Informative)
Grandma bought $app for her Android (v1.23) tablet because she knows that it runs Android. Except it is only supported on v4.56.
Then she didn't buy it from the Google Play store or any other decent Android app store. They check compatibility.
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I thought it was clear enough that Windows RT is to be the Windows version for ARM tablet devices that will compete directly with iPad and Android tablets.
Clear enough for a nation that has to put warning labels on microwaves so that buyers know not to dry pets in them?
Re:Not clear? (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought it was clear enough that Windows RT is to be the Windows version for ARM tablet devices that will compete directly with iPad and Android tablets..
End users don't grok these differences that seem obvious to you and to me. Here's a snippet of conversation I've had multiple times:
User: I've been thinking about switching to Mac.
Me: I really like my Mac, but you need to think about how you use your computer. Do you have any Windows-specific software you need to run?
(Clarification about what that means)
User: Yeah I've got Program X that I need for my work.
Me: That wont run on a Mac. There may be Mac-based alternatives, or you could probably buy virtualization software and run it that way.
User: Why does a Mac need different software? ...
Poor naming (Score:4, Informative)
heavy investment to educate the consumer on the differences between windows RT and 8
I still think it was an absurdly foolish decision not to make Windows 8 and Windows RT obviously and distinctly separate products. Call it Windows Tablet or something. Even for people who do know the difference (8 = 7 with a wider start menu, RT = locked down tablet OS), you often need to drill down to the 'tech specs' page when looking at tablets in order to tell whether it has a useful OS or not.
Re:Poor naming (Score:5, Funny)
you often need to drill down to the 'tech specs' page when looking at tablets in order to tell whether it has a useful OS or not.
Can't you just check if it says "Windows" on the cover?
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When I buy a device that's running Windows I want to be able to run the stuff on it I already own. I'm not interested in repurchasing everything again.
It is a completely separate eco system. And I'm already invested in Android.
Also reviews and product tech specs are often done so lazily you can't even be sure which one of these are running on the device. I predict lots of returns by confused customers.
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How many of your Android tablet apps will run on your desktop/laptop?
My desktop and laptop don't run Android.
Every Windows RT app that I've bought works on both my Surface RT and my two Windows 8 machines.
Yeah, great.
Out in the real world, we don't buy a new version of Windows (sorry, I guess it's Window now since it's all designed for full-screen apps) so we can run new apps on an old version of Window, we buy a new version of Window to run old apps from old versions of Window and DOS on the new one. If those apps don't run, there's no reason to pick Window over a more robust and user-friendly operating system.
Microsoft astroturfing is really getting lame.
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However, none of us will buy it for our desktop. I like windows 7 on my desktop and my father love is mint/debian/ubuntu frankendistro workstation. Just because some disagree with you it do not mean they are astroturfers.
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I still think it was an absurdly foolish decision not to make Windows 8 and Windows RT obviously and distinctly separate products.
I thought the whole idea for W8 was to have a single interface for different devices? So having two distinct, largely incompatible products that look the same sounds like insanity to me. I just don't get it. Why RT at all?
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The interface is still the same, even if not all programs will run or be available on all versions.
Pretty sure the culture here will damn MS no matter what they do. If they ignored ARM, they'd get shit for that. If they released "just another Windows" on tablets, they'd get shit for not doing anything new. When they do something new, they get shit for it being different.
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Nah, they just get that for releasing the same . . . :)
hawk
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If they ignored ARM, they'd get shit for that.
One word: emulation. Programs would run slower than non-native ARM code, but they would still run. It's laziness on MS's part.
MS is like AT&T before they were broken up, immortalized by Lilly Tomlin's "Ernestine the telephone operator" -- "We're the phone company. We don't have to."
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How much slower? If MS is taking a page from Apple, it'll be on future releases. Keep obvious features out to entice upgrades.
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It's for the sake of unifying interfaces across devices, not just to do something different. Granted, it may not have been the best choice, but they tried it. I think it's fairly obvious that a conventional Windows interface wouldn't be best for phones and most tablets.
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Just because the MS answer is looking like the wrong kind of unification, it doesn't mean it's not a worthy goal. Desktops and tablets aren't as different as cars and airplanes.
MS is just going to add a "Default to Desktop" option and a fucking start menu and 90% of the squeaky wheels will shut up. Well... they'll never really shut up completely. There's always something new or different to be afraid of.
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>I thought the whole idea for W8 was to have a single interface for different devices?
That's why they had to stop distributing them on disks. Wiseapples kept sticking them in the microwave.
Worse, some of them had so little reseblence of a life that they knew how to translate the runes.
"One OS to rule them all; one OS to find them. On OS to bring them all, and in the darkness bind the. In the land of Redmond, where the shadow grows."
hawk
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Call it Windows Tablet or something.
AFAICT there are two separate facts that the brand name 'Windows' conveys to the consumer:
1) This product will be compatible with the ubiquitous Win32 ABI, so you can go into BestBuy (or whatever), purchase any "Windows compatible" software box, and have it install and run.
2) This product has a user interface with windows in it (i.e. little GUI rectangles with widgets in them that the user can drag around, minimize, maximize, place in front of each other, etc, as seen in all previous "Microsoft Windows" pro
No tablets.... (Score:2)
From what I gather, the budget x86 Windows 8 tablets having been waiting on the new low power atoms
Why would Samsung release RT elsewhere either? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, aside from the US, why would Samsung even do an RT tablet anywhere, when they have one of the most successful Android products in both the Galaxy phone & the Galaxy tab?
If they wanted, it might make sense for them to do an Atom/Fusion based Windows 8 tablet, and that would probably be the only good platform for Windows 8 in that it will be able to run Wintel apps as well.
Windows RT will be an even bigger fiasco than either Windows NT on RISC (Alpha, MIPS) or Windows Server 2008 on Itanium ever was.
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We should encourage a healthy ecosystem if that ecosystem is something people actually want.
I don't hear a whole lot of people screaming for Metro and touch desktops, yet Microsoft decided their ecosystem should be based on that. If it died a horrible flaming death, this would be no big loss to PC users everywhere.
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Wintel 8 for tablets would probably be the same cost for vendors who want to make tablets based on Atoms, rather than ARMs. I doubt Microsoft will price it that differently, particularly when they want to gain marketshare in tablets. They'll continue to gouge on desktop OSs, however.
I don't think that Android will necessarily be a Monopoly. If Plasma Active, WebOS, Ubuntu and other tablet based distros take off, there could be pretty healthy competition. Plus there are other potential choices, such as
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Precisely!!! I'm fully aware that NT was developed on RISC boxes, such as an i860 as well as a MIPS based DECstation3000 box. Doesn't mean squat as to what took off. DEC never offered the Turbochannel based MIPS nor Alphas w/ NT, while Silicon Graphics offered an R4400 based box called the Magnum w/ NT, which didn't succeed either, so they let NeTpower handle any NT based business. And those boxes actually had the firepower to handle NT. ARM, by contrast, will pretty much crawl when running RT.
While
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I was specifically talking about RT. I do think Samsung could - and should - do tablets based on Medfield/Hondo. And it would at least meet the expectations of people who would buy Windows tablets in the first place - it would run existing Windows apps (assuming one could install it on the tablets). It would not suck in performance when emulating x86 binaries - which was what killed both MIPS and Alpha in the first place.
If they want to leverage Windows apps on tablets, Windows 8 on Medfield based tabl
Ass Backwards (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft is releasing their new Surface devices in the wrong order. Instead of bringing RT devices to market, and then Windows 8, they should've ONLY released full Windows 8 devices, let people become familiar with the dual paradigm, waited for the app store to fill up nicely, THEN came out with the RT devices, which would be much more appealing if they had plenty of software available, and if people were already accustomed to getting things done in RT mode.
As things are now, RT has been tainted, possibly irreparably. Maybe it could be saved if it had the ability to run Windows Phone 8 apps. Why that was not part of the plan seems like a huge failure to me.
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It's actually worse than that.
Why should I even bother with either Win8 or WinRT if the apps are not compatible with the old stuff? If I'm going to be buying new stuff, why not go with an established product that actually does most of this stuff better? Because it's got the "Windows" name on it or that Microsoft made it? Really?
The low numbers are due to the fact that Metro's a bad idea for anything other than a touch device and there's nothing that gives a real advantage to it over Android 3/4 or iOS 3/
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Should you use the term "no brainer" to describe a computer? Doesn't that defeat the point?
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Win 8 is Microsoft's doom, Apple is closing up their machines, will Linux finally rise to the desktop occasion and save us all?
At Frys yesterday nobody was buying Windows 8 machines. Nobody. Looking but not buying. Buying tablets, yes, and mostly Android tablets at that, from what I could see. Ah, and the Windows 8 tablets. Growing cobwebs, truly. They are so fat and heavy, people pick them up and put them right down again. I was also impressed at how many people weren't buying iPad minis. Something about "not retina".
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Someone big needs to jump into the desktop area with both feet and Linux will win.
Not really. Linux still lacks 3rd party support, and without that, no matter how big the push, it will fail. Yes, more use would spur 3rd party development, but without 3rd party support getting more use would be a nasty uphill battle.
Also, no matter how much /. users rant about Linux being usable now, it still doesn't really compete with OS X or Windows 7-8 in that arena yet. I install various flavors of Linux every year just to see if they are ready to replace Windows (and previously OS X, before I ret
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I agree, the Blizzard news is very nice. I am hopeful that between Blizzard and Valve they start pulling more people towards Linux. While I don't think Linux is "there" yet, I would love to see more major players in the OS market, and the old nerd in me really wants the "year of the Linux Desktop" to come, just so /. shuts up about it.
I haven't really checked out Darktable, and I will read up on it. Lightroom (and Aperture, more so) are really kind of crap products. They work, I spend ungodly hours in L
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windows is just as complex as linux, if not more so because it is full of dialogs rather than everything being available from a single command.
I'm talking about file structure. I've been using Linux on-and-off for years and I'm still not 100% sure of where everything is, and what every directory is actually for. It isn't unfamiliarity, its just arcane for using it as a PC and not a server. Windows was pretty much made for people like my parents, Linux was made for servers, and running workstations. More specifically, its ancient Unix roots are showing.
I don't know about Darktable yet, I bookmarked it to try later. It does look pretty good th
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Now that Steam runs on Linux, imagine an x86 Android with Steam games. It wouldn't take much more than that to steamroller things since Microsoft lowered the bar so much with 8.
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What retard modded this shit up?
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Depends on what they're actually doing with Tizen. Tizen's the backup/low-end plan from what I understand. And it's aiming for a slightly different market segment. Anyone that thinks that Android's going to be great for everything is making the same mistakes Microsoft's currently making with Metro right now.