Here is your first $250 laptop running a dual core A-15 Samsung chipset
(the list price is $250, not a discounted price on Ebay)

Don't get too hyped that it is a Chromebook, Fedora and Ubuntu have already been running on the thing as it has a "bootable" SD card slot.

It isn't a 10" netbook, it is an 11.6 inch super thin laptop that is lighter than the old netbooks used to be as the A-15 ARM chips need NO FAN and the battery can be smaller while actually lasting longer.  The same machine running Wintel costs over $100 more money.

And, as you can see it moves pretty durn quick even while running emulators and multiple multiple overlaid windows.  The reviewer says that the performance is scarcely noticably different from the more expensive Wintel version of the same machine.

Remember, this is just the dual core A-15 Samsung Exnos chip, what Apple is going to be using is the half again more powerful quad core A-15 (Apple A8?) that they have been customizing for their lighter laptops and IPads -- starting out shipping early-mid next year.  

Then late next year for Christmas Apple will be shipping out their first 64 bit dual and quad core A-57 chipsets (Apple modified version of course) which will be one hell of a Intel killer of a chipset.

Obviously, the A-15 can run Linux, OS-x Apple, Microsoft RT and by using Wine and the various emulators it can run Office and other various "mission critical legacy" softwares using your favorite Linux as the base layer.

The orientals will do this same sort of thing with the chip except they will likely chose to run their favorite native language OS (Android).

As long as they make the SD cards bootable, you will be able to pick up a laptop for $200 or slightly less and run whatever you want (that isn't MS that is).

Reactos/Wine is the wild card that could totally crumple up MS with all this new hardware coming out --- look for MS to start suing everybody in fluent rented Russian as soon as Reactos goes beta, seeking US import bans, etc.   This will likely not work out for them very well as the Russian government "supports" the project as a home written, FOSS (Wine) based program.  Plus, if Microsoft were successful in Russian courts, then the project would simply "move" to mirrors in another country that MS can't sue in (can you say China? Iran? North Korea? North Vietnam?).

   http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html

For you, the $99 Ouya Android gamer system, open source, ARM based.  
http://www.t3.com/features/ouya-specs

It will ship with the current Tegra 3 chips but will be upgraded this year to the A-15 level chips as soon as the Kickstarter group gets what they contracted for and already paid for (they provided the $8 million in front money after all).

Hey OldFeller,

Miniand just released a limited edition version of the Hackberry board with 8gb of NAND flash on-board on the 1gb ram models.  They sent me an email last night to let me know about it and I've got 2 of them on the way.  Now I just gotta get them working properly as the media center boxes like I'm wanting to and working from a shared folder on the network, plus some sort of remote for each preferably by x-mas as these are intended as gifts for my kids so they can get the movies off the home network on the TV's in their rooms now, instead of just being able to networked movies in the living room.

R.F.

The Empire Strikes Back .....        http://liliputing.com/2012/11/deals-of-the-day-11-05-2012.html


Stung mightily by Google's release of the $249 Chromebook (that can run any Linux ARM distro out there off of the built in bootable SD card slot) Microsoft has struck back with an identical looking 11.6" laptop running their low cost Wintel product line.

"We will annihilate them !!!!  Fire the Deathstar !!"  Sez Darth Surface.



Slowly the humongus battle station swings its moon like bulk into alignment and the five beams merge out at the apex of the huge focusing mirror .....

ZAP !!   ..... but nothing much happens.  The $499 price point is ludicrous as it is exactly twice as much money as the Google Chrome book costs and they function about as fast as each other for all the common user consumption type uses.  

Heck, the Death Star can't even wound the normal $399 laptop crowd at Best Buy with that kind of evil death beam pricing.   And their stuff doesn't even talk to you yet, ether so you can't even get the death screams right when Darth cries out in frustration  "Die !!?? Why won't you die ??"

So, true to form, Darth Surface reaches out and chokes him yet another Death Star Commander to death, venting his endless frustration by yet another internal lay off at team Wintel ....

rfw2003 wrote on 11/04/12 at 01:15:46:



Hey, that's neat.   Your kids are very lucky and don't even realize it very much (fish in water and all that).  Their own room, their own TV, their own net access node complete with built in storage.

Hey, you wanna adopt me?

 
I feel like a little bit of Apple math .... how 'bout you?

Apple peaked at 3 million new IPad this and that which were sold on the very first roll out weekend.   (lining up hours early on opening day is part of the Apple mystique, don't you know?)

That math's out to 4320 rpm (retail sales per minute).

Gotta have us a motorcycle reference in here somewhere, now don't we?

So, it took Apple all of 12 minutes to outsell an entire 72 hour opening weekend's worth of Wintel's new Surface stuff (at 50,000 total units sold).  

And that was with all the roll out TV advertising and pre-sold stuff that Microsoft did on their Surface line that first weekend.

===========

I was going to count for you the very few seconds it took for the Google/Samsung $249 Chromebook to whup up on the 50,000 units sold from Wintel's Surface Weekend, but instead I'll have to report that inside 1 hour the $249 Google/Samsung laptop that can run anything but Windows was totally sold out through Christmas.  

Since the $249 Chromebook orders were all pre-punched before the sales even opened it took 3.2 picoseconds for the system to rack them all up and go "Tilt" -- product is on backorder".   We guesstimate that the 50,000 unit point was crossed inside the very first of the 3.2 picoseconds.

I wonder if that crazy Samsung net camera is gonna outsell the MS Surface stuff too?




(did you know that the Raspberry Pi out sold the Surface stuff on Surface Weekend too?   That is really really sad, isn't it?)

Black Friday is 11 days from now .....


What are you willing to line up for this time?