Exactly they are missing that "good enough" has become the new great.
I'll use myself as an example. I used to be the "Must have teh new PC!" every year type during the MHz wars. Every year to year and a half i'd just HAVE to build myself a new desktop, so what happened? Computers finally got "good enough" that no matter what I did my PC didn't struggle. i've been rocking my AMD quad with 8Gb of RAM and right before the HDD OEMs got flooded i loaded up with 3Tb of HDD space, add that to the HD4850 that already cranks out the bling at the max my widescreen will do and where can I go?
as for Ultrabooks? Unless you are trying to run a database while riding the train or host a 16 man FPS battle while on the subway frankly you can get more performance than most folks can use for dirt cheap. after researching i got one of the EEE AMD Brazos netbooks, the 1215B. if anyone hasn't tried it they are sweeeeet. Full 720p, weighs only 3 pounds like in TFA, I get about 6 hours watching full screen high def, about 7.5 to 8 just doing basic office work, oh and with an upgrade to 8Gb of RAM and a nice briefcase for it the whole smash cost less than $350. Sure it has a 300gb HDD instead of an SSD, but so what? With the new win 7 hibernate it literally takes my longer to type my password than it does to get to desktop.
so I think a lot of this is just blowing smoke as with a dead economy nobody is gonna pay the early adopter prices it would take to even get a 1Tb memory card out of the lab. Frankly it just doesn't take that much to go to FB or play Farmville or take pics of the kiddies, and some might want to look up "Jeff Atwood hot crazy scale" to see what some of the professional admins are running into with the new SSDs. We are talking crazy speed followed by very dead drives with NO warning signs, just flip the switch and its toasty.
No I think the future will be thin, light, and cheap. Everyone and their dog will be mobile with 10-14 inch netbooks/laptops that weigh 3 to 4 pounds and cost less than $400 and get 6 hours on a 6 cell. heck the EEEs like mine even come with a SIM card slot so you can just pop the SIM from your phone and use your data plan, so i think it will a combo of cell for phone and "brb orly" texting with the netbooks doing the heavy lifting while the pad will be what you carry if you only want to watch a movie or play angry birds on the train. But the crazy sizes simply won't happen in a decade as we are already reaching the limits of what we can do without having electron leakage. I think the big thing won't be larger so much as cheaper.
The new AMD chips are pretty amazing and inexpensive - we've bought two inexpensive netbooks for the family - fairly powerful and good enough for most people.
Too bad that the US doesn't actually manufacture most of these things.
And that is simple to explain, it is because unlike the rest of the world there is NO penalty for exporting jobs and then importing the products! In my area a Whirlpool plant that has been here 40 years is closing, they are going right across the border to Mexico where they will pay on average $3 an hour and treat the workers like dogs and then get NO penalty for just loading those devices formerly built by your fellow Americans onto a truck and driving it across the border. With Wall street and the top 1% getting free gifts like that we frankly deserve to go under!
Gotta agree about those new AMD chips, the new AMD APU designs really make a difference. I previously had an MSI Wind with the Athlon X2 and the difference in battery life is like night and day, 3.5 hours on a 6 cell to 6 hours of HD video watching. And the prices are just insanely cheap. By shifting part of the load to the GPU you get a netbook that handles more like a CULV but costs around the same as an Atom. Great chips.
nice, we are truncating comments now?
fun.
This place just gets more and more awesome. Perhaps if they cut it down to 140 characters they'll be as successful as twitter.
that's odd.
Edit- No Raz, we're not.
Gosh, darling, in these flashing emergency lights, you really look lovely wrapped in that shock blanket.
You know, we may never know why I grabbed these two iGo Power Smart Wall Surge Protectors on my way out of your burning apartment, Janey. It seems so random, doesn 19t it? I mean, with all the flames and the smoke and the alarms, not to mention the yelling, you 19d think I 19d have just run out of there without snatching these wall-mounted 4-outlet surge protectors out of the walls. I could 19ve at least tried to find Mr. Whiskers. Poor kitty.
Or maybe, just maybe, after all that happened back there, I was still thinking of you. Yeah sure, I screwed up your special Bananas Foster dessert pretty badly. And okay, maybe I shouldn 19t have thrown the dish into the curtains next to the bookshelf in a panic. And you know what? If you want to blame me for screaming like a small child when I accidently poured the rest of the Everclear on the fire thinking it was water. But through all of it, I never forgot why I was doing all of that. It was all for you. Perhaps I had a small moment of clarity that led me to making sure I had something to give you after the smoke cleared, even if it was your own power modules. Maybe, in that brief second of peace, I saw a future where the two of us live together in a new, less burny apartment, using these surge protectors to help conserve energy by the 2 1Cactive green 1D outlets on each one that automatically powers down when the device plugged into them is not in use. Think of how happy we 19ll be with integrated iGo Green Technology reducing wasted standby power by up to 85%! And besides, I couldn 19t let today end without giving you something, you know?
Anyway, here you go, honey, two iGo Power
A kitten bigger and stronger than anyone lived with his animal friends on the side of Mount Ashigara.
One day a samurai saw young KittentarD fell a tree with his bare paws and, impressed with the kitten 19s incredible strength, offered to teach him the ways of the honorable warrior. So KittentarD left his mother and his home to train. As the years went by he grew even stronger, often beating bears in sumo wrestling matches. He fought and dispatched demons, making the hillsides safe for villagers once again.
Once a full-grown cat, KittentarD changed his name. From then on, he would be known as Sakata no Kittentoki. The samurai who had brought the kitten down from the mountains, Minamoto no Yorimitsu, took the feline as his personal retainer in Kyoto. There, Sakata no Kittentoki studied martial arts and became the chief of Yorimitsu 19s four braves.
One day the villagers came to find Sakata no Kittentoki, crying that a great, evil carp had made his home in the river near the village and ate all who dared swim or bathe or fish there. This was the moment Sakata no Kittentoki had waited his entire life for. He ran straight for the river and, upon its banks, released a mighty yowling cry. He dove into the water and met the demon fish head on. The two battled for days, while the river foamed and bubbled and churned as if possessed by magic. The villagers feared the worst.
On the fifth day, Sakata no Kittentoki emerged; he was soaking wet, his fur matted to his sides, but he looked to be much, much heavier. The brave warrior cat said nothing, but upon seeing the villagers 19 imploring eyes emitted only a large belch and patted his stomach contentedly.
Wear this shirt: While recording a three minute intro for a 30 second YouTube video of your cat looking annoyed.
Don 19t wear this shirt: While marching through the woods looking for some animals to wrassle. Animals like to wrassle naked.
This shirt tells the world: 1CI 19m a big fan of Japanese art and culture, just not the parts with all the tentacles. 1D
We call this color: Asphalt Oni
A kitten bigger and stronger than anyone lived with his animal friends on the side of Mount Ashigara.
One day a samurai saw young KittentarD fell a tree with his bare paws and, impressed with the kitten 19s incredible strength, offered to teach him the ways of the honorable warrior. So KittentarD left his mother and his home to train. As the years went by he grew even stronger, often beating bears in sumo wrestling matches. He fought and dispatched demons, making the hillsides safe for villagers once again.
Once a full-grown cat, KittentarD changed his name. From then on, he would be known as Sakata no Kittentoki. The samurai who had brought the kitten down from the mountains, Minamoto no Yorimitsu, took the feline as his personal retainer in Kyoto. There, Sakata no Kittentoki studied martial arts and became the chief of Yorimitsu 19s four braves.
One day the villagers came to find Sakata no Kittentoki, crying that a great, evil carp had made his home in the river near the village and ate all who dared swim or bathe or fish there. This was the moment Sakata no Kittentoki had waited his entire life for. He ran straight for the river and, upon its banks, released a mighty yowling cry. He dove into the water and met the demon fish head on. The two battled for days, while the river foamed and bubbled and churned as if possessed by magic. The villagers feared the worst.
On the fifth day, Sakata no Kittentoki emerged; he was soaking wet, his fur matted to his sides, but he looked to be much, much heavier. The brave warrior cat said nothing, but upon seeing the villagers 19 imploring eyes emitted only a large belch and patted his stomach contentedly.
Wear this shirt: While recording a three minute intro for a 30 second YouTube video of your cat looking annoyed.
Don 19t wear this shirt: While marching through the woods looking for some animals to wrassle. Animals like to wrassle naked.
This shirt tells the world: 1CI 19m a big fan of Japanese art and culture, just not the parts with all the tentacles. 1D
We call this color: Asphalt Oni
Huh?
Bullshit text I c/p to test out if comments were being truncated. They aren't. It's more likely that he used a symbol that the site doesn't recognize. Like... the PLUS sign.
raz-00
Uhm, do they know what year it is now? TB flash memory commonplace in 2 years? You can get it now if you have 3-4k to drop. But right now, the sweet spots are 32gb SDHC and 128gb SSD. both are about $1.50 per gig for something decent.
People currently love $450 notebooks, and $160 cameras. Right now, the most popular denomination of flash memory are 2gb cards. They are $4. That's 2.5% of the camera cost. Your average cheap laptop comes with 320gb of hard drive. That's a $50 part, or 11% of the product cost. Figure 7% inflation for 2 years. You get a value of $57 for laptop ubiquity, and $4.60 for ubiquity in the camera world (or your phone memory expansion). The top of the line (i.e. market equivalent of a 1tb laptop drive and 64gb SDHC you are looking at an adjusted market price of roughly $184 for the cards, and $285 for an SSD, but those would put in the early adopter retail consumer area).
Rgiht now, a 1TB SSD costs $5000.00. Two years ago a 32gb SDHC card (sweet spot for the actual underlying chips) was $128, now it is about $40. The year in between it was about $80. How the hell are you going to get from $5k to