andrewducker | The proper price for a tablet

HP released the 16GB touchpad at £350. Nobody bought it.

They then decided to get out of that market and dropped the price to £89 in order to get rid of them. They sold out pretty much instantly.

And now they seem to be selling on ebay consistently for about £200.

Which tells us that for an average 10" tablet that's not an iPad, the correct price to sell them at is probably around that, if you want to go mass market.

The problem being that nobody seems to be able to make them that cheaply. About as good as it gets seems to be the Archos 101, which looks distinctly old-fashioned now.

I suspect I'll be holding off for at least a year, probably two, before I end up with one. At the moment, they just aren't worth the money for one that's worth having.

Crossposts: http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/2527625.html

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From:

andrewducker

Yup. Laptop makers just don't seem to have been willing to break out ultralaptops into their own category to the point of making them as good as the Air. It really shouldn't be that hard.

And I do get fed up with PC sites that feed you a load of rubbish as the starting point. There must be a better way of matching up the various things that consumers want. I should be able to pick a monitor size, be told what baseline battery life is, and then watch it go down as I choose more powerful components for it (for instance), but that's not something they're set up to do.

From:

undeadbydawn.livejournal.com

I read an article on this very affect recently, I think linked by daring fireball.

having only attempted to buy a non-Apple machine once [my ex-wife's desktop] it kinda surprises me that web portals use language that uselessly vague. It's fortunate that I was aiming for low end, cost-effective, or I'd have had no clue what to buy. I fairly quickly ordered an Inspirion 530 with 20" monitor. I think.

From:

andrewducker

They have two choices: vague language (that's useless for techies) or specific language (useless for the mass market). Guess which one works better for them :->

From:

undeadbydawn.livejournal.com

except that it doesn't. PC sales are shit, and proliferation of technologies makes it insanely difficult to choose without a lot of guidance.

between vague language and specific language is *clear* language. The cluttered market-speak offered by many retailers means nothing to anyone, other than marketers. This is in much the same way as manager-speak serves only to make people think they're being clever when they actually sound utterly retarded.

Say, for example, I want to buy a graphics card. What I want to know is, is this designed for 3D design or gaming. It can be good at either, but what *specifically* is it intended for.

If I look at a site that says 'good mid-range performance at a reasonable price' I will not buy. If it says 'Optimised for 3D modelling, suitable for most games' or 'Perfect for online gaming', I know exactly where I am and will buy accordingly.

fragmentation of expectation is killing the traditional pc industry.

From:

andrewducker

All graphics cards are for gaming. That's what they do. I don't think there have been ones for 3D design for about a decade now.

And the PC market is up 3.8% this year, was up 13.8% in 2010, and up about 2% in 2009. Hardly "shit", particularly in the middle of a depression.

From:

philmophlegm.livejournal.com

"All graphics cards are for gaming."

Hmmm.

In my view, a graphics card suitable for gaming would be one capable of playing the latest games at the resolution of a pretty typical modern monitor with a minimum frame rate of say 30 frames per second and an average frame rate of closer to 60 fps.

A typical resolution for a modern monitor would be 1920x1080. At this resolution, a brand new GeForce GT430 costing £60 will give you average frame rates of 10 frames per second in two year old games like Far Cry 2 and Crysis Warhead. That's completely unplayable.

This sort of confused marketplace isn't a problem for someone like me who builds his own PCs, subscribes to magazines like Custom PC and knows the best websites to go to for benchmarks. For the average mainstream consumer who goes into PC World to buy a gaming PC, it's a nightmare.

PC World will sell the latest PC games, but either very few or none of their PCs on sale in store will have suitable specs to play them as they should be played. And PC World doesn't even sell high-end graphics cards any more. They will display shelves of pretty-looking laptops and the tiny specs sheet might say (if you're lucky) that this machine has a dedicated graphics chipset, but it won't say what it is. I suspect most people who buy a PC in PC World buy it because looked nice in the shop. Then they get it home, find that actually it doesn't run Battlefield 2: Bad Company at more than 5 frames per second, give up and buy an XBox360 instead.

From:

andrewducker

If I wanted something dedicated to playing the latest games, and I wasn't me, then going to Dell shows a category for Gaming, PC Specialist have a Gaming PC, Acer have "the really colourful ones clearly aimed at games players".

PC World aren't really aimed at that market. If you want cheap gaming then a Console really is the answer. A PC gaming rig will cost a fair chunk more.

From:

philmophlegm.livejournal.com

I agree - PC World clearly aren't aimed at that market. But they should be.

When it comes to PCs, they only seem to sell mass market, lowest common denominator stuff. But they also sell high end super-expensive Macs* - so there is clearly a market at PC World for more expensive personal computers that offer something more than a Packard Bell with integrated graphics and a last-generation budget CPU. Computers with nice shiny aluminium cases would be one high end market. Computers capable of playing the latest games - games that are on sale in the same shop - should be another high end market.

* In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if the fastest Windows PC available in PC World was actually a Mac running Boot Camp.

From:

andrewducker

I'm not sure why PC World are aimed at the lower-end. Unless it's because people who want high-end PCs don't go to PC World in general, because they are techier than people who wander in "wanting a laptop". Except for Mac users, who know what they want, and it has a little Apple logo on it.

From:

philmophlegm.livejournal.com

I imagine that people who buy expensive PCs are probably techier than people who buy expensive Macs and are less likely to buy one from PC World. (In fact, I wonder how many people with high-end PCs bought them and how many built them.) However, if your large shop sells a big range of similarly specced low-end and mid-range PCs, then you take away from your salesmen the ability to upsell. If I was a PC World manager, I would install a range of games and other demanding software on the demo machines, so that I could show demonstrate to people how well they run on each computer. I would also want to drastically cut back on the number of different available models.

From:

andrewducker

I agree that they should have more of a spread of models. I assume they don't because they have limited shelf space, and they'd rather have a Toshiba _and_ an Acer on the shelves at the same spec, than just have Toshiba's at a range of specs.

One thing they could do would be to have an exclusivity contract with one manufacturer, and then have their whole range in-store. I'm not sure how well that would work though.

From:

undeadbydawn.livejournal.com

ugh

I really need to stop ranting without checking my facts.

You do appear to be incorrect on graphics cards. As a 3D enthusiast [I am Not Very Good at it] I see a *lot* of cards that are great for gaming given low scores for modelling and rendering performance.

I don't know anywhere near enough about hardware architecture to say why that is, I just happen to know it's true. I bought my own for 3d modelling, not gaming. I ended up doing far more of the latter, and have to dial down considerably

:)

From:

andrewducker

Interesting, I hadn't realised that. I stupidly assumed that if a card can churn out enough polygons to make Crysis then it can do modelling. I wonder where the difference lies.