More stuff about Intel & MS is coming out along with the newest Chromebook talk. Gist is Intel is functionally giving up on the entire lower end of laptop/tablet space because of the dumping off of the Atom line of chipsets.
What is really being missed right now by users is the extreme levels of price supports and contra-revenue $$$ that Intel and MS used to drop in our pockets when we bought their Wintel products in this segment area. The real true pricing is coming through now, and it isn't pretty.
Chromebook and Android own all that bottom end PC segment by default now. Mid-to-low end space has Windows 10 and Chromebooks/Android squaring up for a duke off during the rest of this year, with Chromebooks swinging upgraded specs and a slightly higher price point as people are asking for more storage memory since they are holding on to more local loaded & stored stuff than before. SD cards can do this duty, but SD cards tend to run slower than main systems memory or SSD drives. People want that SSD storage.
Windows and Apple are both down slightly again in new unit laptop sales, but Win 10 is running around Borging millions & millions of new users abruptly right now whether they want to be Borg or not. Many users are uninformed and uncaring, but some users are right irritated at the moment because of driver issues making their old favorite softwares not work right (the old softwares MS didn't trash outright as "unapproved" during the upgrade process, that is).
Breaking your old computer in order to prompt you to go buy a new one is a really really harsh marketing plan, don't you think?
Now that MS will be charging normal prices for Win 10 going forward, this puts a price drag on all Windows machines which will affect sell through in all markets other than professional.
Seeing Win 10 heading towards the business world makes me wonder what Win 10 has to offer the IT world that Win 7 doesn't already offer to them? Most of the gimcrack stuff won't be turned on or enabled by IT, nor would the gimcrack stuff really be wanted by business users in general.
Intel is "de-emphasizing" PC and tablet and laptop -- main focus is now on Internet of Things and rackspace/mainframe style large computing. In other words. Intel hopes to "own" IoT and make their normal large profit margins in rackspace/mainframe as they see themselves as owning that right now too.
Intel's big new directional moves are too late again. Qualcomm and the other phone boys are supplying IoT devices right now with various cheap light and fast ARM Cortex M derivative chipsets and they are the ones that really do currently "own" that IoT market. Intel will fail in attempts to own IoT for the same exact reasons they failed at mobile. Too slow, too large, too expensive with poor energy use characteristics and poor battery life.
The move to rackspace finds the largest customers (Google, Facebook, Amazon and the like) are busy designing and building their very own highly customized rack chipsets to go along with their very own cut down speeded up customized Linux softwares.
Where/who are all of those big deep pocket "high margin" customers again, Intel?
Remember, Itanium runs x86 code, while rackspace runs on Linux ......
In short, Intel is a many times loser lately that is making yet another set of frantic moves that are going absolutely nowhere yet again.
They cannot design a good chipset for any rapidly changing needs and they certainly cannot make anything at a low cost posture, even if given whole years to do it in.
Intel is a huge, out of date dinosaur and the new post impact climate is starting to snow on them .......
Extinction is Intel's eventual real game plan. We will get to watch them shrink and squirm and shrink again and flail around wildly yet one or two more times before they collapse and finally die.