Ask Slashdot: Are the Big Players In Tech Even Competing With Each Other? 145
dryriver writes: For capitalism to work for consumers in a beneficial way, the big players have to compete hard against each other and innovate courageously. What appears to be happening instead, however, is that every year almost everybody is making roughly the same product at roughly the same price point. Most 4K TVs at the same price point have the same features -- there is little to distinguish manufacturer A from manufacturer B. Ditto for smartphones -- nobody suddenly puts a 3D scanning capable lightfield camera, shake-the-phone-to-charge-it or something similarly innovative into their next phone. Ditto for game consoles -- Xbox and Playstation are not very different from each other at all. Nintendo does "different," but underpowers its hardware. Ditto for laptops -- the only major difference I see in laptops is the quality of the screen panel used and of the cooling system. The last laptop with an auto stereoscopic 3D screen I have seen is the long-discontinued Toshiba Satellite 3D. Ditto for CPUs and GPUs -- it doesn't really matter whether you buy Intel, AMD, or Nvidia. There is nothing so "different" or "distinct" in any of the electronics they make that it makes you go "wow, that is truly groundbreaking." Ditto for sports action cameras, DSLRs, portable storage and just about everything else "tech." So where precisely -- besides pricing and build-quality differences -- is the competition in what these companies are doing? Shouldn't somebody be trying to "pull far ahead of the pack" or "ahead of the curve" with some crazy new feature that nobody else has? Or is true innovation in tech simply dead now?
Well... (Score:2)
Those things cost money. There are huge barriers to entry to sell a product in those markets.
Personally I have been expecting thin full frame sensor cameras to kill DSLRs for like two decades now. Only a couple years back does this (finally) seem to be starting to happen.
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your 400mm lens will always be 24 inches long
Do you mean 16 inches, or are you including a longish lens hood? And this 400mm glass lens [mflenses.com] looks to be around 6 inches long.
Re:Well... (Score:4, Interesting)
UM, Thin cameras don't exist for exactly one reason. Photographers have no desire to have the equivalent of a smart phone attached to a 5 pound lens.
Technically it's quite possible now, but ergonomically it is not viable.
Re: Well... (Score:2)
That's not true.
With mirrorless design, since the optics can sit directly on the sensor rather than some uncompressable distance from them, they can be made much simpler and smaller.
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What are you talking about? A lens has to focus the image on a flat plane, period.
Are you talking about avoiding retrofocal lenses? If so, you should know that those benefits affect only lenses with focal lengths shorter than the flange distance, i.e. wide-angle lenses. By making the flange distanc
Re: Well... (Score:1)
Well, one day computational photography will eat optical lenses too, and you'll be able to buy the arri ultraprime t1.9 180mm as a plugin for your smartphone. But that's still a few years off :-)
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The money is going to social media. (Score:1)
(Data harvesting and predictive simulation research.)
The Big Box Stores(Best Buy etc...) dictate innova (Score:3, Interesting)
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Was VoIP ban before end of subsidy? (Score:2)
Back in the day they were told straight up that if they tried to implement a VOIP solution into their mobile devices, the carriers would drop them.
How long ago was this? In particular, was it before 2013? Because that's when two things happened: prepaid smartphones became mainstream, and the major U.S. cellular carriers switched from a handset subsidy model, where the monthly bill didn't decrease at the end of the 24-month contract, to a handset financing model, where it does. Once T-Mobile and later other carriers switched to financing, it became practical for manufacturers to bypass U.S. carriers and sell unlocked phones directly to end users.
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I had a nokia n95 handset a few years ago, and it came with a built in voip client...
But the version i had used a modified firmware supplied by a network operator, the voip options were still there but didn't work. Clearly the operator intentionally broke the feature to try and discredit the use of voip. When i reflashed the handset with standard nokia firmware the voip client worked perfectly.
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Competition eats into profits (Score:5, Interesting)
These companies want profits, and competition reduces them, so they just independently come to the same price point and split the market.
Better to have 1/3rd the market with large profit margin then 3/4ers with little profit. Late stage Capitalism in action
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Pretty easy with currency and price manipulation.
But the party denies it, so I guess I must be wrong.
Re: Competition eats into profits (Score:1)
Maybe also because Huawei never created or innovated anything. They ripped off others' designs and substituted chinese silicon.
Hell, they even forgot to take out the Cisco disclaimers and copyright notices in "their" first generation software.
Fuck them and their state-owned bullshit. Respect other peoples' innovations and intellectual property.
Mature markets are mature (Score:5, Insightful)
Televisions, cameras, laptops, and to a lesser degree phones, are mature markets. There was crazy innovation for a long time, but the markets have generally decided what their focus is, what is "good enough" in terms of a feature set, and are now competing for market share in technology sectors where the primary consideration is no longer new features, but rather quality vs. price. To be fair, those markets are TOUGH to be in, and any industry where the primary differentiation is price (televisions, for example) is an industry that you can't afford to get into if you're not already there. In those industries, risk is almost always rewarded with negative returns (things like 3D TV that consumers didn't want).
If you look at emerging tech markets, though, you'll see people doing all kinds of crazy things. For example: Virtual Reality / Augmented Reality has a lot of technological improvements (some of which are rather significant) in terms of display, user interface and portability... Let alone some of the really out-there inventions folks are trying to carve out a niche in the industry.
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Indeed. There's also actually a lot of innovation going on in CPUs, etc - it's just not obvious to the end user: once you have a turing-complete computer the only improvements visible to the end user are size, speed, price, and energy consumption. None of which seem innovative unless they're very dramatic increases, regardless of how innovative the technological changes actually are.
As for product innovation, I can only blame tunnel vision. A mature technology like laptops isn't going to change much unti
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There's probably another factor, and that's the fact that so many products are assemblages of sort of common technologies that aren't made by the companies who produce final products with them.
Like with a computer, besides a small variation in component capability you're mostly shopping based on the novelty in variation of how the components are put together. Laptops mostly differ in what size screen it has, what speed of CPU, how much RAM and disk capacity.
Dell can't "innovate" the laptop because it doesn
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I'm looking at replacing my quite dated laptop, and they all seem basically the same now. Sealed in batteries, soldered in components, lack of expandability, keyboards that range from awful to barely tolerable, and an overall lack of ports. All I'm really looking for is basically the laptop I have now, but with newer guts and replace some of the legacy ports with their modern equivalent (such as ditch the VGA for Displayport).
I get that Dell may be limited in some factors. It may be hard to source non-16
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It's not that some of the variation isn't useful -- a laptop with replaceable batteries, 4 dimm slots, 2x m.2 slots AND a 2.5" drive, etc etc, is something that is desirable (to many people, at least). But it's not exactly "innovation" -- the loss of those choices/flexibility is probably most about some kind of standardization that shaves pennies per unit in cost.
And this may be what people complain about when they bemoan innovation -- that whatever economic force(s) are behind it, device makers are more a
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I'm sure Lenovo has a similar business model, but I don't know what it is without research.
single bit serial processor (Score:2)
Yeah,
I've got some preliminary thinking on a single bit serial processor specifically for serial communication mesh computing on a global scale.
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Yeah, I've got some preliminary thinking on a single bit serial processor specifically for serial communication mesh computing on a global scale.
You need to add blockchain and AI, then the VC people will be lining up to give you dump trucks full of money.
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Dole out the technology slowly (Score:1)
Competition or innovation (Score:5, Interesting)
Ditto for game consoles -- Xbox and Playstation are not very different from each other at all.
At the beginning of this generation, the PS4 was much better hardware wise than the Xbox One. Now the Xbox One X is better than the PS4 Pro.
Ditto for CPUs and GPUs -- it doesn't really matter whether you buy Intel, AMD, or Nvidia. There is nothing so "different" or "distinct" in any of the electronics they make that it makes you go "wow, that is truly groundbreaking."
Generally for chips, they are approaching the limit of manufacturing when it comes to feature size. Specifically for GPUs, the latest thing is raytracing. While NVidia's offering in the RTX line doesn't create magic for games it is a first step. Price and performance wise, AMD has been better than NVidia lately. However for CPUs, the latest advancements in speculative execution has turned out to be a security nightmare for Intel. AMD has increasingly been taking away Intel's market as Intel has hit a barrier at 10nm.
On the mobile GPU market, everyone has been making advances. The graphics quality of phones in the last 5 years is something to note. Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung, NVidia have all made large strides in getting mobile GPUs closer to desktop ones.
Ditto for sports action cameras, DSLRs, portable storage and just about everything else "tech."
Mirrorless is the latest innovation that could help on size and weight of professional cameras.
I feel that that the poster seems to define competition as every player in each market making huge innovations all the time. That may not always be the case. Sometimes competition in a market is just about performance and price. AMD seemed to be dead a few years ago but has come back to be competitive in the CPU and GPU markets making competitive chips at competitive prices.
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I feel that that the poster seems to define competition as every player in each market making huge innovations all the time. That may not always be the case. Sometimes competition in a market is just about performance and price. AMD seemed to be dead a few years ago but has come back to be competitive in the CPU and GPU markets making competitive chips at competitive prices.
I would actually argue the opposite is what happens 99.9% of the time, we don't just notice how the incremental improvements add up because they're gradual. I'd argue there's been no revolutionary changes to a car since the T-Ford, you could drive from A to B in that and you still drive from A to B today. Sure, when it comes to comfort, performance, reliability, features, build quality, fuel efficiency, price etc. it's evolved a lot over the years but I don't think there was any point you said this year's m
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> don't think there was any point you said this year's model does anything fundamentally new
I can actually think of a few examples: seat belts and air bags were both dramatic functional changes - just ones you hope to never have need of. On-board diagnostic modules were another big change - vastly simplifying diagnosis of what had become an extremely complicated system what with all the emissions control systems, etc.
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That's a huge implementation change I'll grant you, but the functional change as seen by the owner is mostly whether you fill the "tank" with gas or electricity - the whole point of modern electrics is to make the difference as invisible as possible.
Nothing like the change from the original electric cars to gas, which extended the range dramatically. Lead-acid batteries in a self-propelled carriage left much to be desired.
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Sure, when it comes to comfort, performance, reliability, features, build quality, fuel efficiency, price etc. it's evolved a lot over the years but I don't think there was any point you said this year's model does anything fundamentally new. Heck, even Ford himself was basically just delivering a good enough product at a much lower price.
The main improvements have not been in the engines but auxiliary or sub-systems. For example better smart phone integration is one of the features I would like in a new car for things like navigation. My current car allows me to connect via only audio. Better and more sensors/cameras also help. They add to a better overall driving experience as opposed to something like more MPG.
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If you opened up the hood of a modern car for Henry Ford, you'd have to immediately explain three things:
* fuel injection
* pollution control
* electronic regulation
None of these would be entirely outside of his wheelhouse (platinum as a surface catalyst might challenge his general chemistry knowledge), but I suspect that the sophistication of the electronic regulation would still blow his mind.
If you refactor th
TVs (Score:4, Interesting)
There’s plenty of competition in most consumer technology segments. Even CPUs have become competitive again, and SSDs are getting so inexpensive that my next PC probably won’t even use any spinning disc drives for bulk storage.
I’m not sure what the author of this is looking for and I doubt they know either. We already know what makes most products good and in fact I would be much happier if they’d stop trying to add pointless crap to try and claim they have more bells and whistles. Part of the reason I don’t really want a new TV is that too many of them come bundled with crap I don’t need or want. I just want a dumb monitor that displays a good image. I don’t even care if it has speakers. I have a sound system for that and I’m pretty sure if I looked into that I would find newer speakers with better sound quality at lower prices than what I paid for the ones I have now.
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I don’t even care if it has speakers. I have a sound system for that and I’m pretty sure if I looked into that I would find newer speakers with better sound quality at lower prices than what I paid for the ones I have now.
You might be surprised. I have found that most "modern" audio equipment is not very good at all, until you start getting into the audiophile level stuff. I have bought up a bunch of older equipment and found that the sound quality is so good that it actually rekindled my love of music after many years of not listening. Some of the older stuff really goes to 11 so too speak. I have componant stereo in my shop, that I did not spend more that $20 for any part of it, and if I even go near it my dog goes and hid
Recent TV Innovations (Score:2)
All with lower prices all the time.
They aren't all that similar (Score:3)
I just paid 2-3x more than normal TVs for an LG OLED TV and it is incredible. But most people wouldn't pay it. I'd say that the fact that most consumers shop largely on price is why most things are similar; they are the best they can do for as cheap as possible.
This is the same thing with airfares. The Economist recently ran a piece on this, and despite all of our complaints about the airlines, the primary thing people care about is price. So we complain about crappy airlines and no leg room, and then we buy the cheapest fare, thus rewarding airlines with the least legroom and worst service.
But even in airlines there are outliers like Southwest that I have good experiences with.
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Well, you can't easily compare things like chair comfort without actually being in the plane. The price is the only thing you can easily compare.
It is the same reason men typically evaluate women on looks rather than personality. One is rather obvious the other not so.
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I just paid 2-3x more than normal TVs for an LG OLED TV and it is incredible.
I did the same with my printer. I got a Brother which was substantially more expensive and with lower specs than the competing printers. It is groundbreaking in that it actually prints when I tell it to every time which is something of a striking innovation when it comes to printers.
Most people don't do that then complain about how shit their printer is and what a hassle it seems to be.
Standards. (Score:5, Interesting)
Once things mature, they tend to start obeying standards. The more critical the piece of infrastructure, generally, the more closely it follows a standard (which is why you generally don't get people innovating on new sides of the road to drive on with any great frequency).
When you get to that kind of level, you get evolution, rather than revolution (and what the article seems to imply is that innovation is revolution, which I'd disagree with).
The TVs have better quality screens than years ago, with lower weight, lower power consumption, better response, better clarity, more flexible 'embedded applications' and so on. In general, people don't seem to want a huge amount built into the TV, they want good quality screens that are lightweight, slim, quiet and look good. That evolution has required an awful lot of innovation to get there (better chip designs, better manufacturing processes, efficiency gains in components and so on).
The reason the article's author doesn't see innovation is because they're simply not looking, and doesn't really understand what innovation is. If you're looking for the next big "Wow, that blew my socks off" thing, then you're looking at a very specific class of innovation that does happen from time to time, when a lot of other supporting innovations provide the supporting framework for it to happen.
Then that too will face competition, evolution and eventually standardisation. That's how innovation works.
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I'm going to challenge convention and drive home on the underside of the road tonight.
Re: Totally.. (Score:2)
Cars already have a fifth wheel. It's called a steering wheel, and you're supposed to wrap your hands around it and use it to turn. As for the seats facing backwards... hmm... I guess you could always do a custom mod for that one. :p
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Would you settle for tail fins?
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Todays cheap lenovo laptops are nothing like the ibm thinkpads of old...
Just last week i was faced with a cheap lenovo laptop where the built in keyboard was unable to interact with the bios, you had to plug in a usb keyboard if you wanted to modify bios settings.
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It's a very good question. (Score:2)
And I think the answer is: Price and privacy.
I agree with you that the big guys and gals have flattened out on technological growth and innovation they're just putting a coat of paint on old shit.
The good news (maybe) is that a price war would differentiate one company from another.
--
Recall Apple's refusal to unencrypt iPhones and to build in back doors? They know that a competitor would step up and say, "Look! Our product is better than Apple."
Apple would fold. People want more privacy and still be able to
Folding phones not innovative? (Score:2)
They list a bunch of innovations that haven’t been released. They ignore the foldable phones coming out, maybe, and the lessons that going first with this kind of innovation can teach. Like the risks of blowing billions on defective products.
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There is also the spectre of patents (Score:2)
They are a major hurdle, especially as they keep getting tweaked to keep them alive for as long as one wants.
Substitute tech for hammers (Score:5, Insightful)
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One hammer is much like any other hammer, the difference is only in quality and price point
I'll tell you though, DeWalt recently came out with a new claw hammer that is innovative and so nicely balanced in its shape that a 16 ounce hammer hits with the force of a 21 ounce hammer. Sweet stuff if you care about carpenter hammers.
Ummm... Elon Musk? (Score:3)
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Unified platform (Score:2)
You can try building a unified platform, giving customers and easy to use system that requires minimal bullshit to make everything you want to do work together seamlessly... but then get accused of abusing your position with anti-trust accusations.
Why bother being different when being the same as everyone else costs less and is good enough?
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The new innovation = creative artificial scarcity (Score:4, Interesting)
eg. Digital cameras are basically an image sensor with basic processing and storage and/or a communications and control bus. Modern digital cameras are not defined so much by what their hardware does differently, but by what the manufacturers deliberately choose not to support in their software. They can pick and choose what features to include simply by omitting things every single level of hardware are capable of doing - as long as the software to do it gets written and included.
Pretty much all modern hardware looks this way to me: the price-points et al are nearly all blatant lies. For a nominal increase in development costs every level of kit could have nearly the exact same features with functionality based on the actual real-world performance of the hardware, not by what the makers choose not to include in order to screw their customers into buying the more expensive version that is really only different because of a few lines of code they deliberately omitted, or because they chose not to include a $0.003 sensor in order to increase the price of the next model up to make it seem like they're innovating when they're really just reiterating.
You can apply the same logic to display panels, cars, computers in general of course (hooray for software updates that remove functionality everyone was using and should really be considered base functionality - looking hard at you, Apple), household appliances.. basically everything that runs on software. Which is pretty much everything, now.
There is no innovation or competition when everyone involved think that innovation means finding new creative ways of omitting (often basic) features for no reason other than to inflate the price point of the next model(s) up, and competition means meeting with your supposed competitors to fix prices to equally screw all customers everywhere.
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Pretty much all modern hardware looks this way to me: the price-points et al are nearly all blatant lies. For a nominal increase in development costs every level of kit could have nearly the exact same features with functionality based on the actual real-world performance of the hardware, not by what the makers choose not to include in order to screw their customers into buying the more expensive version that is really only different because of a few lines of code they deliberately omitted, or because they chose not to include a $0.003 sensor in order to increase the price of the next model up to make it seem like they're innovating when they're really just reiterating.
Of course they do it to increase sales and profits. By adding or deleting features they can sell at different price points so the person who will only pay X has an option as well as the one willing to pay X+Y for one with additional features. If they built all of the features in they would price out all the X buyers, leaving a lot of revenue on the table.
This is what PERFECT competition looks like (Score:2)
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> You don't even need to buy that $1k iphone when you can pick up a $669 phone with nigh the same features
The problem here is that all these phones are essentially identical. I've long since lost interest in phone developments - pretty much everything that comes out now is just yet another Qualcomm phone (with the exception of Samsung's flagships, Apple stuff too but I really don't care for that).
They all look exactly the same and they're all shedding features at the same rate - first to go was physical
What about PSVR? (Score:2)
Xbox and Playstation are not very different from each other at all.
What about PSVR? The PlayStation has a full VR rig available, which Sony has put a ton of R&D into, with various motion controllers to go with it, and some truly innovative games.
I mean, if that doesn't qualify as "different" from the Xbox which has exactly none of those things, then I don't know what could.
Yaz
No (Score:1)
Itâ(TM)s called Blue Ocean Strategy and itâ(TM)s taught in every business school. Donâ(TM)t compete, make something slightly different and grab a different subset of the market that wasnâ(TM)t competing for the original market. Being directly competitive is Red Ocean Strategy and is frowned upon.
oh dry me a river.. (Score:3)
bitch bitch bitch bitch bitch....
what a whiny ask slashdot this is. Or its trolling, baiting, or just ignorant. Does he have a point? I doubt it. new things come out all the time and then of course all the companies adopt the same tech, they can't not. For instance, the m.2 slot, the CVT transmission, solid state drives, cylinder deactivation, 3d printers and laser cutters, 10 gig over copper, the h264 codec (and for that matter, mpeg 2).... The list goes on of truely wondrous things from the last 30 years. I personally can't believe microwaves actually cook food. If you stop and think about it, its amazing!
Perhaps its just that when a technology becomes commonplace, you start thinking its less 'whiz bang', and then its ubiquity reinforces that view in your own mind.
I think its just a mental hole you are falling in and it does not reflect others realities necessarily, but you may have found one of those interesting brain faults that people have. I dont personally observe this really as i still find most of those technologies fascinating and wondrous.
The really truly wondrous stuff becomes completely common after 30 years. Probably has always been that way.
Wait a second, phones still innovating (Score:2)
nobody suddenly puts a 3D scanning capable lightfield camera, shake-the-phone-to-charge-it or something similarly innovative into their next phone.
Maybe not a light-field camera (could that even fit into a phone??) but what about Amazons phone with five cameras for 3D shots? What about the RED Hydrogen phone with a holographic display? What about the notch baring iPhone X that introduced 3D facial scanning technologies? What about the recent set of folding phones?
There still seems to be pretty robust co
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You're looking in the wrong place (Score:2)
If you want innovation then you should look at failed products.
There's a reason why successful products mostly look the same. Shake to charge phone? For real?
Ask not what your monopoly can do for you (Score:2)
Ask not what your monopoly can do for you, because your monopoly is going to tell you what to do for it.
Just recently I ran into George Dyson's critical quote about tech monopolies on page 308 of Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe : "Facebook defines who we are, Amazon defines what we want, and Google defines what we think."
He left out Apple and Microsoft. Apple got a few mentions elsewhere in this discussion, but I was a bit surprised to find out that Slashdot is apparently suffering
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Whoops. Forgot to not the time... About 3/8 o'clock by the Slashdot front page.
Capitalism is working exactly as it's supposed to (Score:3, Interesting)
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Your points would be better taken if there were some amount of formatting instead of that huge wall of text.
Selling what people buy (Score:2)
For capitalism to work for consumers in a beneficial way
Consumers benefit when companies sell what consumers want to buy. You rarely hear about companies that offered something completely new and different because they almost always fail (Apple under Steve Jobs being the notable exception).
They are (Score:3)
The thing is once a technology has gotten to a certain point, innovations are a way to lose. You do expensive R&D and increase your bill of materials to add a function no one cared about. Now the only distinctions between you and a competitor is you are more expensive and you have some gimmick nobody cares about. Sometimes they can try something differennt that doesn't put them at a cost disadvantage and they do, but no one cares because it's no longer addressing a need of the market.
Most 4K TVs at the same price point have the same features -- there is little to distinguish manufacturer A from manufacturer B.
What differentiation would you seek in that market at this point? A TV who's smart platform is Roku verbatim? Ok, TCL is the only company that does that. Cool, but I can add that to any tv for less than $50. You want google assisstant in your TV and be able to verbally ask your tv to turn off after a video ends? You'll have to buy LG (I personally would rather not have those). The problem is all the features you'd actually care about are a settled matter (picture quality, variety of sizes).
3D scanning capable lightfield camera
That is a hugely expensive thing that even dedicated device could not find a market for.
shake-the-phone-to-charge-it
As low energy as phones have gotten, they still need *WAY* too much energy for that to be an even vaguely practical thing.
something similarly innovative into their next phone
Best example here I can think of is when Motorola added mods. It was a very cool engineering thing, a good connector (no-effort, yet very strong with a healthy pin count, and high durability). All sorts of devices could be designed. I really liked it. Problem is, it added cost and the market didn't care at all. Shake to flashlight and twist to camera are two motorola gestures I find incredibly useful, but it does not seem to be an adequately marketable benefit.
Xbox and Playstation are not very different from each other at all. Nintendo does "different," but underpowers its hardware.
Playstation is invested in VR while Microsoft has not yet. Nintendo's difference *requires* underpowered hardware (if it had PS4/Xbox One power, it could not be portable).
Ditto for laptops -- the only major difference I see in laptops is the quality of the screen panel used and of the cooling system.
So lenovo has a dual screen laptop (yoga book c930) and a laptop with no keyboard but a drawing surface (yoga book). They have demoed a laptop with a folding screen. I have never seen these in the flesh so I suspect those are not big product winners for them.
The last laptop with an auto stereoscopic 3D screen
This is because almost no one wants them. I had an auto-stereoscopic phone and a stereoscopic TV and it's just a pathetically bad technology compared to a VR headset to do the same thing.
So where precisely -- besides pricing and build-quality differences
Those are huge categories to dismiss. That's pretty much how almost all markets work in the real world.
The problem for these products that have had many years to get rolling is that the 'low hanging fruit' of what the general market wants out of them. You are disappointed that some technologies you want are no longer available, but it's not because of some conspiracy not to compete, it's that there aren't enough that share your enthusiasm to actually pay for such technologies to make it feasible for the product designers.
Re: They are (Score:1)
The Yoga Book failed because nobody wants to type on a keyboard with no tactile feedback (vibration motors don't count).
MAYBE they would have been more successful if they had some kind of overlay or perhaps a thin actual keyboard that could be slid over the second screen that would provide this, and the laptop can still be closed normally with it in place. As it stands, you have to carry a seperate physical keyboard so you can do proper typing work. This is a non starter for most people.
I think the
Laptops (Score:3)
Ditto for laptops -- the only major difference I see in laptops is the quality of the screen panel used and of the cooling system.
Then frankly you haven't been looking and that's your fault not the laptop's fault.
Laptops range from small and light, to luggable workstations monsters with discrete GPUs through to ruggedised laptops and tablets (i.e. toughbooks), down to things like the pi-top. even within the middle of the road laptpos things arnn't equal with Lenovo for example having far and away the best keyboards (IMO) and of course the cli.. uh ni... er trackpoint mouse for whoever likes those. Not to mention recent additions to the laptop world like external GPUs and so on.
You're just cherrypicking a bunch of random crap you've seen over the years that didn't turn out to be especially useful in practice.
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There is not one laptop on the market without secure boot UFEI rubbish also including drivers you cant override, When EOLifed, the bios key is never revealed, ending the chance of repurposing.If someone does have a fringe laptop, is the ME crap disabled? in this context management means controlled, as the owner sure cannot set any/all options has he/she pleases.
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There is not one laptop on the market without secure boot UFEI rubbish also including drivers you cant override,
What about system 76?
Comment removed (Score:3)
For some products, they are literally the same (Score:2)
Caterpillar is another counterexample (Score:3)
Strong recommendation !!!! (Score:2)
You won't be disappointed!!!
High barriers to entry, low profits (Score:2)
The hardware vendors are. (Score:2)
Since AMD launched Ryzen in 2017, Intel has added Hyper-Threading to some of its low-end processors, added +2 CPU cores to its Core i3 products, added +2 CPU cores to its Core i5 products, and added up to four CPU cores on its Core i7 CPUs. Prior to the launch of Ryzen and Threadripper, an 8-core Broadwell HEDT CPU cost over $1K, while a 10-core chip was ~$1700.
Today, Intel sells 8-core CPUs for $500 (instead of $1000) and 10-core chips are down from ~$1700 to ~$1000. And AMD's Threadripper offers far highe