http://liliputing.com/2013/04/those-200-notebooks-intel-is-promising-will-pro...Now who is jerking on whose chain this time around?
Intel is now saying their next year boast of a $200 laptop DOES NOT INCLUDE A MICROSOFT OPERATING SYSTEM.
OK, so currently Intel has their Bay Trail chipset out at the OEM laptop builders for prototyping purposes and they are getting their early OEM feedback --
none of the OEMs are interested in trying another Win8 RT anything at this point in time.So, Intel is now re-hawking their 2014 x86 Bay Trail as it CAN run Android or Chrome OS as the operating system to see if they can get any interest at all out of the OEMs to build something/anything with the still very early prototype chipset that they are hawking around the far east at this time.
Here is the pure hell that is inherent in that situation --- if you can run 64 bit Android/Chrome on Bay Trail and you can run 64 bit Android/Chrome on various ARM quad core through octa core chipsets at similar to greater speeds
and the ARM chips cost less than half the Bay Trail cost -- then just who is jerking on whose chain this time around?
I think I smell some pure old Wintel style FUD that is busy backfiring on Intel.
Intel just got told their Bay Trail is smelling like a dollar short and a whole YEAR late to the OEMs. Intel has also been told "no Microsoft, no way" at nearly a $80 cost adder to the $200 theoretical product cost that Intel is promising.
In essence, there is no $200 Bay Trail product out there at this point in time. Some product will come, yeah, surely it will -- but at a cost of $400 and up.
Intel's very own
Next Unit of Computing is a likely candidate to include a Bay Trail Chipset pretty soon as Intel controls that product completely. But with a MS OS it costs too much right now even using the current lesser Atom embedded chipsets that are available now.
============
Salt on the Wintel wounds, Google is adding tablet features to Chrome OS and Chrome OS features to Android. There may still remain a separate focus market for each product, but each product will be able to do the entire enchilada that people need to get done on their device of choice.
And even if they don't combine Android and Chrome OS soon, they both will have all the same capabilities going into 2014 time frame 64 bit ARM changeover time.
(PS -- both products can open a MS Office file natively now, and put it back but not 100% all formatting features will work as MS keeps changing the formatting on purpose with every update).
Speaking of Open Source and MS Office files ---- Microsoft is churning Word and Excel so very very much lately that they are losing back compatibility to themselves between versions. There is no doubt this is the same forced upgrade trick that MS has done repeatedly over the years.
Folks in the real world are using Open Office and Libre Office to bridge this formatting gap that MS can't (or won't) bridge unless you buy the brand new, greater than ever MS Office 360 and pay your yearly $100 for upgrades. Sad thing is the free open source software is doing a perfectly usable job for the businesses involved, but their IT Dept has it in their head they must use MS and stay on the update train or else the IT dudes may be realized to be not so bloody necessary either.
This is a threat to them because the "BYOD" movement is showing that all you really need is a good netmaster who keeps a good reliable running intra-net with a central server that holds the company approved apps with everything being all net based on that intra net.
The older IT guys are going the way of the IBM mainframe big iron that they replaced when they came in.