Bah, PC makers have done this to themselves. Look at their starting lineup...compare it to your average tablet. The tablet is, surprisingly, a better experience. Why? Because it has a solid state drive.
It's kind of like what would happen to Porsche / BMW / Mercedes-Benz if a car maker came along that offered an electric sports car for $20K that performed like their $70K offerings. No one wants to buy a $50K BMW that performs worse than a $20K electric car...that's easy to understand. Unfortunately, these PC makers haven't grasped this concept...which says a lot about them; they are too intent on preserving their price structure (that overpriced upgrade to a SSD) to realize that they need to spec them in standard, or they will collapse (their company will shed stock). The nature of the game has changed, but they're still worshiping Jobs and picking over his final words for any hidden meanings to guide them to profitability. Yesh.
I mean seriously, Ultrabooks? "Oh yeah, we'll just copy the MacBook Air, and BAM! Profit!" Because that's what consumers want...a more expensive, less useful version of a laptop. Only now that the Jobs reality distortion field is fading are we seeing people wake up, and wonder whether they really want an iPhone 6.
At the consumer level the cheap laptops and desktop PCs in shops make a big point about the capacity of their hard drives. 500Gb bottom end, 1Tb more common. I'm assuming it is the 'bigger number looks better' pitch. They even have little labels saying how many songs/pictures/videos you can fit on the disc.
Anyone done research on how much storage is actually used? I've never filled a hard drive yet but I'm old school with music.
It's kind of like what would happen to Porsche / BMW / Mercedes-Benz if a car maker came along that offered an electric sports car for $20K that performed like their $70K offerings. No one wants to buy a $50K BMW that performs worse than a $20K electric car...that's easy to understand. Unfortunately, these PC makers haven't grasped this concept...which says a lot about them; they are too intent on preserving their price structure (that overpriced upgrade to a SSD) to realize that they need to spec them in standard, or they will collapse (their company will shed stock). The nature of the game has changed, but they're still worshiping Jobs and picking over his final words for any hidden meanings to guide them to profitability. Yesh.
I mean seriously, Ultrabooks? "Oh yeah, we'll just copy the MacBook Air, and BAM! Profit!" Because that's what consumers want...a more expensive, less useful version of a laptop. Only now that the Jobs reality distortion field is fading are we seeing people wake up, and wonder whether they really want an iPhone 6.