Monday 13 January 2014

THE ONE EIGHTY DEGREE TURN

Intel has a long history of deliberate over pricing, anti-trust along with anti-competetive behaviour. I have noted that they have reached such a size that they do not really worry about breaking any laws. They always look for other ways to gain an advantage even though they have had a huge one for quite sometime now.

A couple of years back I was quite interested in AMD's new APUs like their first one of Llano. I intended to get a laptop with one in bit ended up getting something else. A little time later I remember visiting retails stores expecting over half the stock to be powered by AMD's APUs with just one or two GPUs. It never quite happened.

Instead what did curiously happen was something that did not make sense to me and that was the talk of Ultrabooks. These things looked very svelte in all honesty but if I wanted that I would go with an Apple (ugh). They were also graphically underpowered and had the first solid state disk drives has opposed to the spinning hard drives. Only these were mostly 128BGB and were not even enough to store what I had on my current laptop!

Before long every store I walked into was awash with these Ultrabooks?! AMD based laptops did not amount to half the number of Ultrabooks on offer. Then there were the All-In-One PCs that mostly had Intel Core i3 CPUs in them?! I lost count of the number I walked straight by because they had Intel's i3 and i5 and very few AMD APUs?!

I also never saw anyone actually seriously looking at them and I did fancy a Lenovo model that did have an APU because it did look good. But I did not. I thought at the time how mad it was and simply could not understand how these manufacturers thought for one moment that people were going to buy them. Not anyone that understood their hardware, that is for sure. Yet they were slightly over-priced too and everywhere.

After all this time I now see this report with the link provided below that states that Acer got into troubles and they blame it on the Ultrabooks?

What you mean that not everyone thinks that Intel CPUs on their own are all that?! Even in slim and sexy metal chassis with nice keyboards?! Should not believe all the forums you read on the Internet, nor Intel for that matter.

The funny part about all this is that Intel's own questionable behaviour may well be coming back to bite them in the arse?! Ultrabooks making everyone a little touchy and wary and with AMD chips going inside the consoles and not the talk about Kaveri and its four different approaches to gaining speed on Intel.

Should be an interesting year for sure.

New CEO pins Acer's troubles on Ultrabooks - http://pulse.me/s/Jf9eA

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