16 November 2009

ARM netbooks still not hitting store shelves



If you knew me quite well (but you don't, as I started this blog ... well, yesterday), you knew I would sell my soul for one of these. I have been desktop free for ca. two years now because upgrading the box resulted in a 23% increase of power bill with me basically doing the same internet, programming and graphics editing work as before, at exactly the same speed.

My current primary workstation is an Asus EEE 701, upgraded to 2 GB of RAM, hooked up to a 19" widescreen monitor and a bunch of peripherals attached via a 13-port active USB hub. As I found out by measurements, the netbook draws about 12-16 watts under normal interactive workload and about 22 watts when the integrated Intel graphics have to do 3D. I verified the battery runtime to be about 3½ hours, including some gaming and some WLAN use. Arch + KDE 4 + desktop effects are really speedy on it.

Thus, I learned to love netbooks as reliable universal gadgets at an irresistible price point. Then Windows was dumped upon the market for free, and netbooks became slightly shrunken laptops at a price point that would make you rather choose the full-size laptop. Voíla, more Vista sales for Microsoft, Linux killed off, netbooks killed off, mission accomplished.

Today I realize netbooks were not just a random trend out of nowhere. Linux had been taking off large scale in embedded years before as a means of keeping microprocessor costs low. Software license costs are obviously an issue if your electronic goods sell for somewhere between 0.10€ and 10€ per unit. Also, smartphones had become more powerful and full-featured but still suffered from small screens and limited methods of user input. Netbooks basically emerged as the missing link between high-end embedded and low-end non-embedded.

When they came out, I immediately bought one because it was the first time I saw preinstalled Linux on a store shelf, but foremost because I knew they wouldn't be available forever, being vulnerable because of them being x86 based. They were (sort of) capable of running desktop Windows; more precisely I heard reports that it felt like wading through tar on the first-generation netbooks which had been designed with Linux + simple everyday tasks in mind. Which was nothing a good portion of lobbying and vendor strong-arming couldn't fix. After everybody was convinced that a netbook's primary purpose consists of playing egoshooters, running Photoshop on a 7" screen and spending 600€ for an additional Microsoft Office license, Vista laptops finally started selling.

Various more or lesser known OEMs have since tried to fill the gap from the other side using ARM based netbooks. Linux runs as fine on ARM as it does on x86. Microsoft can only counter on this architecture using their unpopular Windows CE offering. They can't exert pressure via the software platform, as CE is a completely different kernel from desktop Windows and doesn't have the amount of software or extended hardware support Linux offers.

On the hardware side you can expect 8 hours of runtime when not plugged in, and ARM licensees can sell CPUs cheaply because they produce approximately 1 billion of them a quarter. You get a 150€ netbook that is on par with a 349€ Atom netbook, with half the power consumption.

Yet we see ARM netbooks being announced all the time, showcased, everybody is excited, then they disappear before hitting sales channels. Something nasty might be going on behind the scenes, I suspect. I'm very sorry that my money can't find its way into an ARM OEM's pocket; a quadcore Cortex-A8 as a mobile workstation would surely make me nerdgasm.

15 comments:

  1. LOL your "workstation" is a netbook?

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  2. How can you complain about supposed "price dumping" by Microsoft, when Linux has been offered free for 18 years?

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  3. The netbook is in use as a machine for my everyday work (mostly web and IDE based), but processing intensive tasks are better done on my secondary machine - and that's a quite decent laptop ;)

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  4. How can you claim that Microsoft is price dumping? Linux is free right? Then shouldn't it be flying off the shelves compared to something that one has to pay for? Linux: The only OS that people don't want to use even for free.

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  5. Welche IDEs und Programmiersprachen benutzst du?

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  6. "How can you claim that Microsoft is price dumping? Linux is free right?"

    They weren't dumping in the strict sense because they didn't sell a (physical) product at a loss, however they had to give Windows away for something like $2-$5, and in some instances for free, to make inroads into the netbook market. The price difference between the Linux and Windows versions were very noticeable for some time (up to $50), so they had to lower the price for licenses dramatically in that market segment.

    "Welche IDEs und Programmiersprachen benutzst du?"

    C++/KDevelop und Python/Kate.

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  7. "They weren't dumping in the strict sense because they didn't sell a (physical) product at a loss,"

    So then your entire point is moot. They didn't do any dumping of a product at all.

    "however they had to give Windows away for something like $2-$5, and in some instances for free, to make inroads into the netbook market."

    So? If Linux can be given away for free, why is it a bad thing if Microsoft sells a 9 year old OS for a low price?

    "The price difference between the Linux and Windows versions were very noticeable for some time (up to $50), so they had to lower the price for licenses dramatically in that market segment."

    Which is a completely normal business practice. I'm still failing to see the outrage.

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  8. Ich werde Entwickler und will mehr über Open Source zu lernen. Wie kann man entwickeln ohne Microsoft Software? Ich muss jetzt Visual Studio benutzen und glaube ich, dass das bringt mich um!

    Unterstütze Microsoft? Das geht nicht!
    Übrigens, enwickelst du fürs FSF? Das ist ja toll!

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  9. "Which is a completely normal business practice. I'm still failing to see the outrage."

    They did nothing illegal by entering the market and crushing.... er, competing, the outrage is rather in the result: form factors and hardware specs had to increase rapidly because Microsoft wanted to sell Vista, which effectively killed the lightweight netbook. Embedded devices growing into netbooks would be a more long-lived niche because there is no vendor with enough influence to damage the market long-term.

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  10. "They did nothing illegal by entering the market and crushing.... er, competing, the outrage is rather in the result: form factors and hardware specs had to increase rapidly because Microsoft wanted to sell Vista, which effectively killed the lightweight netbook."

    Huh? The whole point of Asus putting Linux on their netbooks was a a tactic to force Microsoft into giving them cheap XP licenses. They never did it because they cared about Linux.

    "Embedded devices growing into netbooks would be a more long-lived niche because there is no vendor with enough influence to damage the market long-term."

    VxWorks has a far greater share of embedded market than Linux could ever dream to have. In the smartphone market Symbian is the dominate player. Despite all the claims about Linux being so great for embedded devices, it is a niche market in that space.

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  11. "Wie kann man entwickeln ohne Microsoft Software? Ich muss jetzt Visual Studio benutzen und glaube ich, dass das bringt mich um!"

    Das kenne ich zu gut - habe selber mal VS benutzt. Im Prinzip ist es egal, welche Entwicklungsumgebung und welchen Compiler Du benutzt, wenn Du auf plattformunabhängige Bibliotheken wie z.B. SDL setzt, nicht auf eine bestimmte Betriebssystem-API hin codest und das Projekt die gängigen Buildsysteme verschiedener Plattformen unterstützt.

    Unter Linux kann ich für C/C++/Java z.B. Eclipse empfehlen, speziell für C++ eignet sich KDevelop oder Qt Creator, letzteres ganz besonders, wenn Du ein wirklich plattformübergreifendes Anwendungs-Framework mit allem Drum und Dran brauchst.

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  12. Michael Schumacher won because he used italian engines

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  13. Klar, warum sollte das Programmieren spass machen mit Visual Studio und DirectX, wenn man sich auch mit Eclipse und SDL abquälen kann weils die 0,96% Linuxwelt auch benutzen will.

    Ne danke, die 70er sind vorbei, der Traum der Plattformunabhängigkeit ist ausgeträumt.

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  14. Stop speaking that Nazi gibberish.

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