6 ms·

Windows 8 tablet PC makers: We can't compete with the iPad's price

46 points by mrsebastian 14y ago

nextparadigms 14y ago
I knew this would happen, but nobody seemed to believe it. If they can't even compete with the ARM versions because of the cost of Windows, imagine how much more expensive the Intel tablets will be - and they probably won't even support any retina-like resolution (definitely not on Atom). Also keep in mind that the costs to manufacturers usually double at retail ($300 components - $600 product, etc). So $100 on a Windows 8 license to manufacturers, will be about $200 added to the tablet's price at retail.
- daulex 14y ago
  While licensing (without a doubt) is a big issue, I think the infrastructure that Apple have in place for manufacturing and sourcing of materials is second to none. This is only possible due to forward thinking people and a ridiculous amount of demand, the two together mean bulk buying prices available to them only. The competition will catch up at some point, but I fear that it might require a couple huge mergers for this to happen.
- ctdonath 14y ago
  And not just "the cost of Windows" and the less-mentioned "the cost of Pentium", but that both must be created to be general-purpose enough to work with any implementation of either - to wit, more overhead costs that don't pay off for particular instances. This vs Apple building both the OS and hardware for each other and nothing else. There's a whole lotta bulk from M$ and Intel products that Apple doesn't have to provide nor charge for.
gouranga 14y ago
Are we talking ARM or Intel. If its the latter, I expect the price to be higher as Intel windows 8 tablets are an order of magnitude more useful than an iPad. ARM? No chance. Either that or they don't want to compete with the iPad...
- nextparadigms 14y ago
  It says ARM in the beginning of the article. I expect Intel ones to be even more expensive, and I don't think there's a market for a $800 Atom tablet that runs like a netbook (the Core i5 Samsung one they showed earlier was around $1200, and it didn't even have retina display). The iPad has what now - 150,000 touch-optimized apps? Windows 8 x86 has - 100? What are you doing to do with all the unoptimized and sluggish apps on a x86 tablet that will have half the battery life of iPad or Android tablets at best, and costs twice as much?
  - gouranga 14y ago
    Correction - iPad has 149,900 shit apps and 100 good ones as does every platform. Also if its a problem for you personally, just buy a laptop :)
    - taligent 14y ago
      The famous and misguided "iPad only has a few good apps" argument. You know what you and others don't seem to understand. Your definition of good apps differs from my definition of good apps. Everyone likes and uses different apps for different reasons.
    - nextparadigms 14y ago
      You made your own correction irrelevant when you stated that this happens on every platform, which is true. But that's how great apps appear on a platform, and how great niche apps come to be born on the platform, too. You can't say "there's an app for that" on a platform with 100 or even 1000 apps totally, even if you have the "top apps" in there.
- rimantas 14y ago
  > I expect the price to be higher as Intel windows 8 > tablets are an order of magnitude more useful > than an iPad Right now I can do many useful and/or fun things on iPad. What can you do on Intel Windows 8 tablets now?
pdubs 14y ago
>Apple effectively gives iOS away (it’s a hardware company, after all), and Amazon gets Android for free While I get what the author's saying here, it's a bit disingenuous to call either of those situations "free". Both companies invest nontrivial amounts of money into their OS. Apple develops their in-house OS, and Android is a "some assembly required" product.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- sespindola 14y ago
  Yes but, in the case of android, the assembly work is rather trivial if they wanted to offer a standard android rom. Most of the complexity lies in the gui elements added by the manufacturers (TouchWiz, HTC Sense, etc) in an attempt to differentiate themselves from the rest and foster brand loyalty. In any case, I don't think the software customization cost per unit in android phones it's anywhere near those MS license costs.
  - mendocino 14y ago
    > Yes but, in the case of android, the assembly work is rather trivial if they wanted to offer a standard android rom. Only if you want to ship an SoC already supported by Linux. (Even then, there is tons of board specific code.) If not, you are looking at a very non trivial amount of work.
    - nextparadigms 14y ago
      By now Android supports most of the ARM chips architectures. The only case where this might not be true is when a completely new one appears, and Google chose to launch with another architecture and not support that one. But even then, the chip maker will do most of the work to support the latest version of Android.
      - joenathan 14y ago
        You really don't know what you are talking about, Android is only originally built around the Nexus device Google is launching with the particular version of the OS, it is a huge effort to make compatible drivers for all the different pieces of tech that goes in to the different Android devices. Hence why it took so long for the Nexus S to get Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, not to mention the plethora of other devices still waiting on a port.
DanielSwinkels 14y ago
I think at this stage of the game if Microsoft has any hope of penetrating the market they pretty much have to subsidize or make WinRT licenses free for approved devices rather than charge for it and if that's successful recoup the losses off the market. Apple seems to certainly be in a position where they could do this and absolutely crush the competition, they must just not feel threatened with the competing products available today
- latch 14y ago
  The problem is deeper than just money. There's a branding issue. There's an app issue. There's a quality issue. You need to magically fix all three of these, plus address the pricing difficulties. Good luck.
  - michael37 14y ago
    Free Windows! We've been waiting since Win95 for that.
- Drakim 14y ago
  Exactly. There is just no way that you can arrive this late to the "free" party and expect to make profits by selling.
darksaga 14y ago
For once I'd really like to see Microsoft position its product as a high end product instead of always trying to undercut everybody on price. If they think their product is better, then sell it as such. Actually say your product is better and therefore, it's going to cost more.
- janardanyri 14y ago
  "position" "sell" "say" The trouble isn't the branding, it's the building. The iPad is recognized as a quality product because it delivers quality experiences. Microsoft has rightly acquired a reputation for brittle products that will slowly break down in ways you don't know how to fix. "Microsoft" means worrying about obscure error messages, malware, backups, defrag, task management, ad nauseam. They've made solid incremental efforts with Windows releases, and Windows Phone 7 may well have eliminated all of these experience issues. Trouble is, Apple has now all but eliminated these problems across the entire product line, and they've even solved the meta-problem of tackling the remaining problems through their world-class retail and support presence. A solid product in isolation doesn't cut it at this point. The competition has a solid complete ecosystem. Amateur hour is truly over.
- iharris 14y ago
  Unless Microsoft will produce their own hardware for a Win8 tablet, I think we are going to see a whole slew of tablet models with varying (and sometimes dubious) build quality. Like it or not, the iPad is pretty well put-together - I think that the tablet manufacturers are really going to have to scramble to compete on the hardware front. I actually think that Win8 has some potential as a tablet OS, although my experience with the developer preview on a PC was a little underwhelming.
  - AUmrysh 14y ago
    The standardization of iOS devices is what makes them so easy to use and develop for. Microsoft has done a good job of making Windows behave in a standard manner on diverse hardware configurations on desktops and laptops, so we can hope that WM8 will be equally standardized across different hardware. That would at least give them an advantage over android, and if they don't drop hardware support at certain versions they might be able to take over slowly when the cost of WM8 tablets drop below the cost of an iPad.
richworks 14y ago
From one of the comments : "there will be no legacy Windows applications retrocompatibilty" Is this true? If it is, then this is a deal breaker. The only reason I've been waiting so long to buy a Windows tablet is because I assumed it would be backwards compatible with my desktop applications(of my Win7 machine). If what the comment above says is true, then I guess it will be either an Android tablet or the iPad..
- gravitronic 14y ago
  The big feature of windows 8 that puts it onto tablets is that it runs on ARM. You would not want a current-model ARM to emulate an x86. People do that with DOSBox to run old DOS games (or even win3.1) but that's the extent of the speed capabilities.
- sosuke 14y ago
  If they are running Windows on ARM, no x86 programs will work out of the box, they will need to be recompiled or recoded in some way.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- untog 14y ago
  It's my understanding that this was always the case- if the tablet is ARM-based, then it's not going to be able to run legacy x86 apps. Not to mention the UI problems. The good news is that it will be much easier for developers to port from x86 Win7 to ARM/x86 Win8 than it would be to make an iPad/Android version of their application.
  - taligent 14y ago
    So true. Microsoft actually has a great "developer story" to tell if they can pull all their pieces together. The idea that you could trivially port your .NET apps across to tablets is very compelling. Throw in the ability to have apps running on a future XBox could be a game changer as well. It's when you look at everything they have you realise that it would be stupid to ever rule Microsoft out.
iharris 14y ago
I can really feel the irony here - one of the biggest gripes of Apple critics was the price of their products. It'll be interesting to see if things have turned around.
- taligent 14y ago
  I don't know where you've been the last 10 years. The iPod was the first wave of Apple devices where the price was actually cheaper than the competition. Then that trend continued with the MacBook Airs and iPads. Even the iMacs/MacBooks are very competitive.
  - betterth 14y ago
    The iPod may have beat the competition in the beginning, but after a couple of years it quickly remained the either the most expensive or close to the most expensive device in it's class. Apple notoriously only sold the shuffle under $100 while many competitors offered devices with dramatically more space and screens for under $100. By the 2007 era and the beginning of keeping your music on your phone, it would have been utterly disingenuous to call the iPod "cheap" or anything close to it.
  - iharris 14y ago
    Right, I should have been more specific - I mostly meant in the PC/laptop product line, where there was often a notable price gap if you compared similar hardware specs. I'm not saying that either product was inferior, just that if the average uninformed consumer is comparing a PC and Mac with similar horsepower, price would definitely factor into the decision.
stefanve 14y ago
Wouldn't it be possible that it is 90-100 Taiwan dollar instead of US dollar. than the license cost is 3.4 US dollar. It seems to me that it would be suicide of MS to command such a high price for its tablet OS. It would make the tablet as expensive as its desktop OS. Not a great strategy to conquer the "iPad market". A pricing akin to windows mobile would seem to be more logical.
- nextparadigms 14y ago
  No. Having to charge $100 even for the bare-bones/no-legacy support Windows 8 ARM version is exactly why they did this instead of using WP7 and expanding it for tablets. Because then they would've had to charge only $15 for it, or maybe a little more, but that's about it. It's still a huge mistake for Microsoft to do this though, when Android is free.
  - joenathan 14y ago
    Android isn't free if you want the Play Store/Google Maps/Gmail, not to mention the effort needed to write the drivers for the hardware.
wslh 14y ago
It doesn't seem right. If I go to http://s.dealextreme.com/search/android+tablet http://s.dealextreme.com/search/android+tablet and search for chinese android tables I can find competitive prices there, some at ~ USD 100, so adding the license tag will not change that much. "In China We Trust"
- sp332 14y ago
  None of those can run Win8, and certainly they can't run Win8 + applications people would want.
  - kyriakos 14y ago
    you'll be surprised what chinese have achieved. there is currently on sale chinese tablets with dual core cpu and quad core gpu, 1gb ram, 16gb storage, 10inch IPS screens and all bells and whistles (like HDMI output, SD card support, dual USB ports etc) with 7+ hours of battery life for 215 USD.. its all a matter of a win8 RT driver for the particular SoC. run a search for "Rockchip RK3066" SoC (in particular check for a tablet called R2000 or Cube U30GT. I already own the single core version of that tablet and i assure u the build quality, screen etc are in par with ipad2.
  - wslh 14y ago
    Why they can't run Win8?
- jonhendry 14y ago
  The cheap ones there are all 7".
nivertech 14y ago
I think the author failed to understand one thing: there are will be 2 kinds of Win8 tablets: x86 and ARM based. The x86 tablets are essentially full-blown PCs, to which you can connect mouse and keyboard and they compete with netbooks, laptops and PCs, so the Windows license for them will be probably $90+. The license for Win8 on ARM tablets will be much cheaper ($10-$30), because they compete with iPads and Android tablets.

46 points by mrsebastian 14y ago

I knew this would happen, but nobody seemed to believe it. If they can't even compete with the ARM versions because of the cost of Windows, imagine how much more expensive the Intel tablets will be - and they probably won't even support any retina-like resolution (definitely not on Atom). Also keep in mind that the costs to manufacturers usually double at retail ($300 components - $600 product, etc). So $100 on a Windows 8 license to manufacturers, will be about $200 added to the tablet's price at retail.

daulex 14y ago
While licensing (without a doubt) is a big issue, I think the infrastructure that Apple have in place for manufacturing and sourcing of materials is second to none. This is only possible due to forward thinking people and a ridiculous amount of demand, the two together mean bulk buying prices available to them only. The competition will catch up at some point, but I fear that it might require a couple huge mergers for this to happen.
ctdonath 14y ago
And not just "the cost of Windows" and the less-mentioned "the cost of Pentium", but that both must be created to be general-purpose enough to work with any implementation of either - to wit, more overhead costs that don't pay off for particular instances. This vs Apple building both the OS and hardware for each other and nothing else. There's a whole lotta bulk from M$ and Intel products that Apple doesn't have to provide nor charge for.

gouranga 14y ago

Are we talking ARM or Intel. If its the latter, I expect the price to be higher as Intel windows 8 tablets are an order of magnitude more useful than an iPad. ARM? No chance. Either that or they don't want to compete with the iPad...

nextparadigms 14y ago
It says ARM in the beginning of the article. I expect Intel ones to be even more expensive, and I don't think there's a market for a $800 Atom tablet that runs like a netbook (the Core i5 Samsung one they showed earlier was around $1200, and it didn't even have retina display). The iPad has what now - 150,000 touch-optimized apps? Windows 8 x86 has - 100? What are you doing to do with all the unoptimized and sluggish apps on a x86 tablet that will have half the battery life of iPad or Android tablets at best, and costs twice as much?
- gouranga 14y ago
  Correction - iPad has 149,900 shit apps and 100 good ones as does every platform. Also if its a problem for you personally, just buy a laptop :)
  - taligent 14y ago
    The famous and misguided "iPad only has a few good apps" argument. You know what you and others don't seem to understand. Your definition of good apps differs from my definition of good apps. Everyone likes and uses different apps for different reasons.
  - nextparadigms 14y ago
    You made your own correction irrelevant when you stated that this happens on every platform, which is true. But that's how great apps appear on a platform, and how great niche apps come to be born on the platform, too. You can't say "there's an app for that" on a platform with 100 or even 1000 apps totally, even if you have the "top apps" in there.
rimantas 14y ago
> I expect the price to be higher as Intel windows 8 > tablets are an order of magnitude more useful > than an iPad Right now I can do many useful and/or fun things on iPad. What can you do on Intel Windows 8 tablets now?

pdubs 14y ago

>Apple effectively gives iOS away (it’s a hardware company, after all), and Amazon gets Android for free While I get what the author's saying here, it's a bit disingenuous to call either of those situations "free". Both companies invest nontrivial amounts of money into their OS. Apple develops their in-house OS, and Android is a "some assembly required" product.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
sespindola 14y ago
Yes but, in the case of android, the assembly work is rather trivial if they wanted to offer a standard android rom. Most of the complexity lies in the gui elements added by the manufacturers (TouchWiz, HTC Sense, etc) in an attempt to differentiate themselves from the rest and foster brand loyalty. In any case, I don't think the software customization cost per unit in android phones it's anywhere near those MS license costs.
- mendocino 14y ago
  > Yes but, in the case of android, the assembly work is rather trivial if they wanted to offer a standard android rom. Only if you want to ship an SoC already supported by Linux. (Even then, there is tons of board specific code.) If not, you are looking at a very non trivial amount of work.
  - nextparadigms 14y ago
    By now Android supports most of the ARM chips architectures. The only case where this might not be true is when a completely new one appears, and Google chose to launch with another architecture and not support that one. But even then, the chip maker will do most of the work to support the latest version of Android.
    - joenathan 14y ago
      You really don't know what you are talking about, Android is only originally built around the Nexus device Google is launching with the particular version of the OS, it is a huge effort to make compatible drivers for all the different pieces of tech that goes in to the different Android devices. Hence why it took so long for the Nexus S to get Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, not to mention the plethora of other devices still waiting on a port.

DanielSwinkels 14y ago

I think at this stage of the game if Microsoft has any hope of penetrating the market they pretty much have to subsidize or make WinRT licenses free for approved devices rather than charge for it and if that's successful recoup the losses off the market. Apple seems to certainly be in a position where they could do this and absolutely crush the competition, they must just not feel threatened with the competing products available today

latch 14y ago
The problem is deeper than just money. There's a branding issue. There's an app issue. There's a quality issue. You need to magically fix all three of these, plus address the pricing difficulties. Good luck.
- michael37 14y ago
  Free Windows! We've been waiting since Win95 for that.
Drakim 14y ago
Exactly. There is just no way that you can arrive this late to the "free" party and expect to make profits by selling.

darksaga 14y ago

For once I'd really like to see Microsoft position its product as a high end product instead of always trying to undercut everybody on price. If they think their product is better, then sell it as such. Actually say your product is better and therefore, it's going to cost more.

janardanyri 14y ago
"position" "sell" "say" The trouble isn't the branding, it's the building. The iPad is recognized as a quality product because it delivers quality experiences. Microsoft has rightly acquired a reputation for brittle products that will slowly break down in ways you don't know how to fix. "Microsoft" means worrying about obscure error messages, malware, backups, defrag, task management, ad nauseam. They've made solid incremental efforts with Windows releases, and Windows Phone 7 may well have eliminated all of these experience issues. Trouble is, Apple has now all but eliminated these problems across the entire product line, and they've even solved the meta-problem of tackling the remaining problems through their world-class retail and support presence. A solid product in isolation doesn't cut it at this point. The competition has a solid complete ecosystem. Amateur hour is truly over.
iharris 14y ago
Unless Microsoft will produce their own hardware for a Win8 tablet, I think we are going to see a whole slew of tablet models with varying (and sometimes dubious) build quality. Like it or not, the iPad is pretty well put-together - I think that the tablet manufacturers are really going to have to scramble to compete on the hardware front. I actually think that Win8 has some potential as a tablet OS, although my experience with the developer preview on a PC was a little underwhelming.
- AUmrysh 14y ago
  The standardization of iOS devices is what makes them so easy to use and develop for. Microsoft has done a good job of making Windows behave in a standard manner on diverse hardware configurations on desktops and laptops, so we can hope that WM8 will be equally standardized across different hardware. That would at least give them an advantage over android, and if they don't drop hardware support at certain versions they might be able to take over slowly when the cost of WM8 tablets drop below the cost of an iPad.

richworks 14y ago

From one of the comments : "there will be no legacy Windows applications retrocompatibilty" Is this true? If it is, then this is a deal breaker. The only reason I've been waiting so long to buy a Windows tablet is because I assumed it would be backwards compatible with my desktop applications(of my Win7 machine). If what the comment above says is true, then I guess it will be either an Android tablet or the iPad..

gravitronic 14y ago
The big feature of windows 8 that puts it onto tablets is that it runs on ARM. You would not want a current-model ARM to emulate an x86. People do that with DOSBox to run old DOS games (or even win3.1) but that's the extent of the speed capabilities.
sosuke 14y ago
If they are running Windows on ARM, no x86 programs will work out of the box, they will need to be recompiled or recoded in some way.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
untog 14y ago
It's my understanding that this was always the case- if the tablet is ARM-based, then it's not going to be able to run legacy x86 apps. Not to mention the UI problems. The good news is that it will be much easier for developers to port from x86 Win7 to ARM/x86 Win8 than it would be to make an iPad/Android version of their application.
- taligent 14y ago
  So true. Microsoft actually has a great "developer story" to tell if they can pull all their pieces together. The idea that you could trivially port your .NET apps across to tablets is very compelling. Throw in the ability to have apps running on a future XBox could be a game changer as well. It's when you look at everything they have you realise that it would be stupid to ever rule Microsoft out.

iharris 14y ago

I can really feel the irony here - one of the biggest gripes of Apple critics was the price of their products. It'll be interesting to see if things have turned around.

taligent 14y ago
I don't know where you've been the last 10 years. The iPod was the first wave of Apple devices where the price was actually cheaper than the competition. Then that trend continued with the MacBook Airs and iPads. Even the iMacs/MacBooks are very competitive.
- betterth 14y ago
  The iPod may have beat the competition in the beginning, but after a couple of years it quickly remained the either the most expensive or close to the most expensive device in it's class. Apple notoriously only sold the shuffle under $100 while many competitors offered devices with dramatically more space and screens for under $100. By the 2007 era and the beginning of keeping your music on your phone, it would have been utterly disingenuous to call the iPod "cheap" or anything close to it.
- iharris 14y ago
  Right, I should have been more specific - I mostly meant in the PC/laptop product line, where there was often a notable price gap if you compared similar hardware specs. I'm not saying that either product was inferior, just that if the average uninformed consumer is comparing a PC and Mac with similar horsepower, price would definitely factor into the decision.

stefanve 14y ago

Wouldn't it be possible that it is 90-100 Taiwan dollar instead of US dollar. than the license cost is 3.4 US dollar. It seems to me that it would be suicide of MS to command such a high price for its tablet OS. It would make the tablet as expensive as its desktop OS. Not a great strategy to conquer the "iPad market". A pricing akin to windows mobile would seem to be more logical.

nextparadigms 14y ago
No. Having to charge $100 even for the bare-bones/no-legacy support Windows 8 ARM version is exactly why they did this instead of using WP7 and expanding it for tablets. Because then they would've had to charge only $15 for it, or maybe a little more, but that's about it. It's still a huge mistake for Microsoft to do this though, when Android is free.
- joenathan 14y ago
  Android isn't free if you want the Play Store/Google Maps/Gmail, not to mention the effort needed to write the drivers for the hardware.

wslh 14y ago

It doesn't seem right. If I go to http://s.dealextreme.com/search/android+tablet http://s.dealextreme.com/search/android+tablet and search for chinese android tables I can find competitive prices there, some at ~ USD 100, so adding the license tag will not change that much. "In China We Trust"

sp332 14y ago
None of those can run Win8, and certainly they can't run Win8 + applications people would want.
- kyriakos 14y ago
  you'll be surprised what chinese have achieved. there is currently on sale chinese tablets with dual core cpu and quad core gpu, 1gb ram, 16gb storage, 10inch IPS screens and all bells and whistles (like HDMI output, SD card support, dual USB ports etc) with 7+ hours of battery life for 215 USD.. its all a matter of a win8 RT driver for the particular SoC. run a search for "Rockchip RK3066" SoC (in particular check for a tablet called R2000 or Cube U30GT. I already own the single core version of that tablet and i assure u the build quality, screen etc are in par with ipad2.
- wslh 14y ago
  Why they can't run Win8?
jonhendry 14y ago
The cheap ones there are all 7".

nivertech 14y ago

I think the author failed to understand one thing: there are will be 2 kinds of Win8 tablets: x86 and ARM based. The x86 tablets are essentially full-blown PCs, to which you can connect mouse and keyboard and they compete with netbooks, laptops and PCs, so the Windows license for them will be probably $90+. The license for Win8 on ARM tablets will be much cheaper ($10-$30), because they compete with iPads and Android tablets.