7 ms·

Wait... what? I'm a bit confused here. Can someone please explain why Samsung isn't selling laptops besides the article's dismissive "It's common knowledge tha

by scoofy 12y ago

Wait... what? I'm a bit confused here. Can someone please explain why Samsung isn't selling laptops besides the article's dismissive "It's common knowledge that the PC market is in decline." Is it that they are spinning off their laptop division, or is there is some other dominant manufacturer? Why on earth are laptops not selling?

georgemcbay 12y ago
PC sales (laptop and desktop) in general have been on the decline since 2010 or so and the margins in that market for players who aren't Apple are generally so low that the declines don't have to be that bad to really put a squeeze on manufacturers. The iPad/Tablet market gets almost all the credit for this decline in the media but while I'm sure that's part of it I personally think the fact that we hit a point around 2010 where desktops and laptops were just plain good enough (truly good enough, not 640k good enough) for almost everything people normally do was as much or more of a factor than tablets. Short of having a machine die on you there are precious few reasons to run out and buy a new system anymore. I'm a software developer, a hobby photographer who shoots in RAW and a gamer and even I haven't bought a new desktop or laptop in 4 years (and I used to be someone who would build an entirely new desktop system yearly with major upgrades 6 months in to boost it up).
- rurounijones 12y ago
  Agreed, the last great upgrade was the SSD. After that, for people using their laptops as non-intensive consumer devices, what else do they need?
  - chx 12y ago
    Indeed. If you have a late 2008 all Intel laptop with a Penryn CPU and an X25-M SSD (fiendishly expensive at that time) to this day, six years later, it's hard to see what's the point of getting another laptop. For a few more years, the decreasing costs of SSDs were giving incentive but yes, once you have that, what incentive remains? The high resolution screen is still more trouble than advantage. I was purchasing newer and newer ThinkPads for a few more years, until I could put 16GB (for a sw developer, having lots of RAM is helpful) in a 14" model, then stopped at the T420 in 2011 and that's the end of laptops for me for the foreseeable future.
    - Alphasite_ 12y ago
      The substantial improvements in battery? Better screens (brighter, better fov, more resolution 2008 laptops had atrocious screens)? More portable designs? USB3? Better trackpads and keyboards? More durable designs?
      - 72deluxe 12y ago
        I second the battery and screen improvements. And perhaps increased CPU performance because I like short compile times please.
- wfjackson 12y ago
  Lenovo is doing good and getting better. http://www.cnet.com/news/lenovo-earnings-soar-on-solid-pc-smartphone-sales/ http://www.cnet.com/news/lenovo-earnings-soar-on-solid-pc-sm...
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    Lenovo sells more than just consumer PCs.
toyg 12y ago
Basically, in my experience, Dell and Lenovo now rule the corporate market, while the consumer market is now 1) smaller (since tablets and smartphones cannibalized some of it) and 2) clearly split between Apple and "everything else", where "everything else" runs on thin margins and is perceived as cheap and uncool. My anecdotal datapoint is that, in the last 5 years, I haven't seen anyone in my sector (finance / IT in the UK) using anything but Dell, Lenovo or Apple laptops (with the very occasional Sony Vaio, which Sony recently stopped selling). On a larger scale, the rise of smartphones and tablets has clearly shrunk the traditional PC market, a market that already struggled with the end of Microsoft-led forced upgrades (that "good enough" level others mentioned; Microsoft used to periodically redefine what "good enough" was, but their products have substantially fossilized in the last decade). This doesn't mean PCs and laptops will go away for good; it's just that large margins are now elsewhere, so the industry is adapting.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  HP also has a chunk of the corporate market, but of course they aren't Sony or Samsung who are the subject here.
- tomw1808 12y ago
  I recently saw a colleague with a surface pro (version 1) as a workstation, I was rubbing my eyes, because I couldn't believe that this is working. That said, I'm now working (as a programmer, yes) from a Sony Vaio Multi-Flip 13". It has everything I ever wanted: Good resultion, sleek, quite remarkable performance for that tiny little thing, convertible, etc etc. It also "look good", as the apple devices do, and, in addition, you can flip it over to a tablet. Well... in theory the best thing that I ever had. In theory. The closing mechanism sometimes doesn't recognize a "is closed" properly and the notebook shuts down and comes up again in camera mode. I recently had to replace the keyboard, because the return key was broken, which is not easy with an ultrabook when warranty is over, since its soldered or brazed (or how you call that) with plastic pins. When I got it, I think I got a refurbished device, one key was stuck, and circumstances required that I open it myself and fix it and found the inside overwhelmingly full of fingerprints and screws in wrong places. I could continue like that and I am not alone. All these things, these little quality and qc glitches between an Apple device and "all the others" are (for me) the main reason why everyone runs to apple. They are producing just the best quality and for me as a consumer, its still affordable, and it even looks better and feels better. I am no friend of iOS, I grew up with windows and linux, which is no excuse not to buy an Apple, but I would still first look everywhere else for alternatives. So, that samsung is also shutting down is very sad, since they produces very nice models. A friend of mine has the older samsung series and has also quality glitches. Beside apple, it seems the market has realized it has to produce good quality, good looking and good functioning devices, but most of them are all show and no substance. For my understanding. I was hoping they would slowly slowly introduce newer models, better processing, better overall quality. Instead they are shutting down. I'm sad.
tdicola 12y ago
> Why on earth are laptops not selling? If someone had the answer to that question then Microsoft, Sony, Samsung, etc. would be much, much happier. The entire PC industry has been shrinking for the last few years, sometimes with double digit declines. Nobody wants a heavy, hot, loud, and crappy laptop when a tablet like an iPad can do everything that matters to most people (email and web) and then some.
- Silhouette 12y ago
  It doesn't help that (a) consumer Windows laptops have come so pre-loaded with junkware that they were just downright unpleasant (and often unreliable) to use, and (b) Microsoft dropped the ball so hard with Windows 8 that it fell through the earth's core and came out the other side. Compare the extremely unappealing offering that is Windows 8 on a junkware-laden laptop with the convenience of a tablet for everyday consumption/casual gaming uses or a much more polished MacBook Something for more serious users, and it hasn't really been a serious contest for several years now. Plenty of people already had a laptop that was good enough for what they needed anyway, and most people looking to buy something new have dramatically more appealing options than the kind of thing Sony or Samsung were selling.
- Swizec 12y ago
  > Nobody wants a heavy, hot, loud, and crappy laptop when a tablet like an iPad can do everything that matters to most people (email and web) and then some. Anecdotal counterevidence: My mum is almost 50 years old. She has never been computer savvy. All she ever does is read email and browse the internets. Barely browse the internets. She uses her TV cable far more than she does internet. Last year I bought her a tablet. One of those big fancy Galaxies with a stylus and everything. Not six months later she started begging me to get her a computer because "This tablet thing is just so useless. I can't type (she got an external keyboard too), I can't tell which app I'm in, what I'm trying to open, and it's just so damn small. I don't like using this stupid thing." She's been using it as her only computer regardless, but she's been complaining all along about how small it is, that she has to hold it up and a bunch of other things. This year I'm getting her a refurb MacBook Air. We'll see how that goes.
Steko 12y ago
The killer features ended up being battery life and connectivity, exactly the areas where a traditional wintel laptop struggled. In contrast its primary strength was the enormous windows app catalog and that's been heavily mitigated.
ulfw 12y ago
It's been going on for a few years. If you look at the level of performance improvements (intel chips have single to barely double digit percentage gains in performance per generation upgrade now, whereas they used to almost double in speed every two years) and at the installed base (good enough screens with good enough resolution, good enough SSDs or HDs with enough space) it just shows that the replacement rate obviously will go down. Back a few years ago you HAD to upgrade to keep up with innovation (audio files won't fit on a 40MB HDD, videos won't fit on a 1GB HDD, HD won't fit on a 32GB HDD etc, XP won't run on 512MB RAM, video compression/decompression will be better on a Pentium II than a 486 etc etc), but honestly what's the difference (to a non-developer casual end user) between say a gen 2 Core i Chip with 4GB of RAM and a 256GB HDD on a 14" 1400 px Screen compared to say a Haswell i5 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 15" 1920 px Screen machine. Nothing. Tablets are facing similar issues. What'll be the big difference between an iPad Air and this year's iPad Air 2?
- rdtsc 12y ago
  No doubt. Still using a 7 year old Core 2 <something> Thinkpad and it still works great. Resolution and speed are not a problem. Replaced the hard drive for a solid state, the fan at some point but otherwise I just don't see a good reason to spend another $1k or $2k on a new laptop.
  - ekianjo 12y ago
    I just bought a Lenovo x220 which is about 2 years old, and it runs both Win7 and Linux Mint perfectly. Very fast, and I can even do SOME gaming with it. Best 200 USD purchase ever. There's no clear reason to upgrade laptops every year, until then I was using a 5 years old HP PC, which was working fine, too. Shutting down your PC line in Europe is stupid, though. Well, that's better for the other competitors, which will fill the gap.
Throwaway12830 12y ago
I agree with all the other posters, and believe performance and form factor have reached a point that makes frequent upgrades less common. However, I'll add one more point into the mix... Modern computer specifications are confusing. Back in the day it was extremely linear. Oh, your computer is 233 MHz, this new one is 300 MHz, or 450 MHz, or 1 GHz. It was like owning a Supersoaker 2000, and wanting the newly released 3000. Now, I have no idea what I even own. As someone else said, it's a dual-core something or other. There's no upgrade path, or direction for consumers to follow. If you walk into a store, it's quite confusing, and it's difficult to make sense of all the recent hardware, and I think it leaves people not knowing what they want to buy, or what's even considered an upgrade.
- weego 12y ago
  In the UK at least if you walk into a store you will find they have a confusing set of badly specced models of brands you probably shouldn't buy at prices you probably shouldn't pay. I give a lot of credit to Apple in keeping their line fairly straightforward (usually only devs or photo/video people need upgrades) otherwise everyone gets the same base model for one of a tiny number of variants. The prices across channels and concessions are always the same too.
- lucaspiller 12y ago
  The model numbers manufacturers have definitely don't help. A friend recently bought an Acer Aspire E1, of which there are about a million different combinations. The range she got has model numbers like E1-472P-XXXX, where the last four digits mean "whatever configuration of components we plucked out of a hat". Her's is Core i5 4200U, 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD - which I can't find anywhere online :D As another commenter said Apple has it right in that it's easy to say "this is the 2013 model". I bought a TV yesterday, and although they seem to have confusing model numbers too, at least the shop displayed them saying which was the latest models and it was easy to see the difference between them (apparently "dual core CPU" is a feature of TVs now). EDIT: Typos.
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  It isn't that different though. You still look at clock speeds on the CPU, as well as the burst speed for what it can ramp up to. So that's the 233/300/450 comparison done. Then perhaps look at whether it is i3/i5/i7 - the higher ones are better. But then instead of just thinking that your processor is one CPU, count how many logical processors are in there: dual core, quad core etc. It's still the same - the higher numbers are better :-) Of course, other things to take into consideration (like it has always been) are FSB speed, RAM clock speeds, disk cache size, disk type, amount of RAM, GPU processing capability (use the same rules as the CPU - count the RAMDAC speed, the amount of RAM, the number of cores), and so on. I don't think it's changed that much. Just there are more brand names and model names on things now, perhaps?
dragonwriter 12y ago
They are still selling laptops, just not in Europe.
TheTaO 12y ago
Samsung wasn't a big laptop or PC seller anyways. I think they are more interested in selling (relatively) high margin devices that they can control and market (like phones and wearables). It's not that PC market is in decline, as others have pointed out, Samsung sees more money elsewhere.

by scoofy 12y ago

georgemcbay 12y ago

PC sales (laptop and desktop) in general have been on the decline since 2010 or so and the margins in that market for players who aren't Apple are generally so low that the declines don't have to be that bad to really put a squeeze on manufacturers. The iPad/Tablet market gets almost all the credit for this decline in the media but while I'm sure that's part of it I personally think the fact that we hit a point around 2010 where desktops and laptops were just plain good enough (truly good enough, not 640k good enough) for almost everything people normally do was as much or more of a factor than tablets. Short of having a machine die on you there are precious few reasons to run out and buy a new system anymore. I'm a software developer, a hobby photographer who shoots in RAW and a gamer and even I haven't bought a new desktop or laptop in 4 years (and I used to be someone who would build an entirely new desktop system yearly with major upgrades 6 months in to boost it up).

rurounijones 12y ago
Agreed, the last great upgrade was the SSD. After that, for people using their laptops as non-intensive consumer devices, what else do they need?
- chx 12y ago
  Indeed. If you have a late 2008 all Intel laptop with a Penryn CPU and an X25-M SSD (fiendishly expensive at that time) to this day, six years later, it's hard to see what's the point of getting another laptop. For a few more years, the decreasing costs of SSDs were giving incentive but yes, once you have that, what incentive remains? The high resolution screen is still more trouble than advantage. I was purchasing newer and newer ThinkPads for a few more years, until I could put 16GB (for a sw developer, having lots of RAM is helpful) in a 14" model, then stopped at the T420 in 2011 and that's the end of laptops for me for the foreseeable future.
  - Alphasite_ 12y ago
    The substantial improvements in battery? Better screens (brighter, better fov, more resolution 2008 laptops had atrocious screens)? More portable designs? USB3? Better trackpads and keyboards? More durable designs?
    - 72deluxe 12y ago
      I second the battery and screen improvements. And perhaps increased CPU performance because I like short compile times please.
wfjackson 12y ago
Lenovo is doing good and getting better. http://www.cnet.com/news/lenovo-earnings-soar-on-solid-pc-smartphone-sales/ http://www.cnet.com/news/lenovo-earnings-soar-on-solid-pc-sm...
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  Lenovo sells more than just consumer PCs.

toyg 12y ago

Basically, in my experience, Dell and Lenovo now rule the corporate market, while the consumer market is now 1) smaller (since tablets and smartphones cannibalized some of it) and 2) clearly split between Apple and "everything else", where "everything else" runs on thin margins and is perceived as cheap and uncool. My anecdotal datapoint is that, in the last 5 years, I haven't seen anyone in my sector (finance / IT in the UK) using anything but Dell, Lenovo or Apple laptops (with the very occasional Sony Vaio, which Sony recently stopped selling). On a larger scale, the rise of smartphones and tablets has clearly shrunk the traditional PC market, a market that already struggled with the end of Microsoft-led forced upgrades (that "good enough" level others mentioned; Microsoft used to periodically redefine what "good enough" was, but their products have substantially fossilized in the last decade). This doesn't mean PCs and laptops will go away for good; it's just that large margins are now elsewhere, so the industry is adapting.

sliverstorm 12y ago
HP also has a chunk of the corporate market, but of course they aren't Sony or Samsung who are the subject here.
tomw1808 12y ago
I recently saw a colleague with a surface pro (version 1) as a workstation, I was rubbing my eyes, because I couldn't believe that this is working. That said, I'm now working (as a programmer, yes) from a Sony Vaio Multi-Flip 13". It has everything I ever wanted: Good resultion, sleek, quite remarkable performance for that tiny little thing, convertible, etc etc. It also "look good", as the apple devices do, and, in addition, you can flip it over to a tablet. Well... in theory the best thing that I ever had. In theory. The closing mechanism sometimes doesn't recognize a "is closed" properly and the notebook shuts down and comes up again in camera mode. I recently had to replace the keyboard, because the return key was broken, which is not easy with an ultrabook when warranty is over, since its soldered or brazed (or how you call that) with plastic pins. When I got it, I think I got a refurbished device, one key was stuck, and circumstances required that I open it myself and fix it and found the inside overwhelmingly full of fingerprints and screws in wrong places. I could continue like that and I am not alone. All these things, these little quality and qc glitches between an Apple device and "all the others" are (for me) the main reason why everyone runs to apple. They are producing just the best quality and for me as a consumer, its still affordable, and it even looks better and feels better. I am no friend of iOS, I grew up with windows and linux, which is no excuse not to buy an Apple, but I would still first look everywhere else for alternatives. So, that samsung is also shutting down is very sad, since they produces very nice models. A friend of mine has the older samsung series and has also quality glitches. Beside apple, it seems the market has realized it has to produce good quality, good looking and good functioning devices, but most of them are all show and no substance. For my understanding. I was hoping they would slowly slowly introduce newer models, better processing, better overall quality. Instead they are shutting down. I'm sad.

tdicola 12y ago

> Why on earth are laptops not selling? If someone had the answer to that question then Microsoft, Sony, Samsung, etc. would be much, much happier. The entire PC industry has been shrinking for the last few years, sometimes with double digit declines. Nobody wants a heavy, hot, loud, and crappy laptop when a tablet like an iPad can do everything that matters to most people (email and web) and then some.

Silhouette 12y ago
It doesn't help that (a) consumer Windows laptops have come so pre-loaded with junkware that they were just downright unpleasant (and often unreliable) to use, and (b) Microsoft dropped the ball so hard with Windows 8 that it fell through the earth's core and came out the other side. Compare the extremely unappealing offering that is Windows 8 on a junkware-laden laptop with the convenience of a tablet for everyday consumption/casual gaming uses or a much more polished MacBook Something for more serious users, and it hasn't really been a serious contest for several years now. Plenty of people already had a laptop that was good enough for what they needed anyway, and most people looking to buy something new have dramatically more appealing options than the kind of thing Sony or Samsung were selling.
Swizec 12y ago
> Nobody wants a heavy, hot, loud, and crappy laptop when a tablet like an iPad can do everything that matters to most people (email and web) and then some. Anecdotal counterevidence: My mum is almost 50 years old. She has never been computer savvy. All she ever does is read email and browse the internets. Barely browse the internets. She uses her TV cable far more than she does internet. Last year I bought her a tablet. One of those big fancy Galaxies with a stylus and everything. Not six months later she started begging me to get her a computer because "This tablet thing is just so useless. I can't type (she got an external keyboard too), I can't tell which app I'm in, what I'm trying to open, and it's just so damn small. I don't like using this stupid thing." She's been using it as her only computer regardless, but she's been complaining all along about how small it is, that she has to hold it up and a bunch of other things. This year I'm getting her a refurb MacBook Air. We'll see how that goes.

Steko 12y ago

The killer features ended up being battery life and connectivity, exactly the areas where a traditional wintel laptop struggled. In contrast its primary strength was the enormous windows app catalog and that's been heavily mitigated.

ulfw 12y ago

It's been going on for a few years. If you look at the level of performance improvements (intel chips have single to barely double digit percentage gains in performance per generation upgrade now, whereas they used to almost double in speed every two years) and at the installed base (good enough screens with good enough resolution, good enough SSDs or HDs with enough space) it just shows that the replacement rate obviously will go down. Back a few years ago you HAD to upgrade to keep up with innovation (audio files won't fit on a 40MB HDD, videos won't fit on a 1GB HDD, HD won't fit on a 32GB HDD etc, XP won't run on 512MB RAM, video compression/decompression will be better on a Pentium II than a 486 etc etc), but honestly what's the difference (to a non-developer casual end user) between say a gen 2 Core i Chip with 4GB of RAM and a 256GB HDD on a 14" 1400 px Screen compared to say a Haswell i5 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 15" 1920 px Screen machine. Nothing. Tablets are facing similar issues. What'll be the big difference between an iPad Air and this year's iPad Air 2?

rdtsc 12y ago
No doubt. Still using a 7 year old Core 2 <something> Thinkpad and it still works great. Resolution and speed are not a problem. Replaced the hard drive for a solid state, the fan at some point but otherwise I just don't see a good reason to spend another $1k or $2k on a new laptop.
- ekianjo 12y ago
  I just bought a Lenovo x220 which is about 2 years old, and it runs both Win7 and Linux Mint perfectly. Very fast, and I can even do SOME gaming with it. Best 200 USD purchase ever. There's no clear reason to upgrade laptops every year, until then I was using a 5 years old HP PC, which was working fine, too. Shutting down your PC line in Europe is stupid, though. Well, that's better for the other competitors, which will fill the gap.

Throwaway12830 12y ago

I agree with all the other posters, and believe performance and form factor have reached a point that makes frequent upgrades less common. However, I'll add one more point into the mix... Modern computer specifications are confusing. Back in the day it was extremely linear. Oh, your computer is 233 MHz, this new one is 300 MHz, or 450 MHz, or 1 GHz. It was like owning a Supersoaker 2000, and wanting the newly released 3000. Now, I have no idea what I even own. As someone else said, it's a dual-core something or other. There's no upgrade path, or direction for consumers to follow. If you walk into a store, it's quite confusing, and it's difficult to make sense of all the recent hardware, and I think it leaves people not knowing what they want to buy, or what's even considered an upgrade.

weego 12y ago
In the UK at least if you walk into a store you will find they have a confusing set of badly specced models of brands you probably shouldn't buy at prices you probably shouldn't pay. I give a lot of credit to Apple in keeping their line fairly straightforward (usually only devs or photo/video people need upgrades) otherwise everyone gets the same base model for one of a tiny number of variants. The prices across channels and concessions are always the same too.
lucaspiller 12y ago
The model numbers manufacturers have definitely don't help. A friend recently bought an Acer Aspire E1, of which there are about a million different combinations. The range she got has model numbers like E1-472P-XXXX, where the last four digits mean "whatever configuration of components we plucked out of a hat". Her's is Core i5 4200U, 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD - which I can't find anywhere online :D As another commenter said Apple has it right in that it's easy to say "this is the 2013 model". I bought a TV yesterday, and although they seem to have confusing model numbers too, at least the shop displayed them saying which was the latest models and it was easy to see the difference between them (apparently "dual core CPU" is a feature of TVs now). EDIT: Typos.
72deluxe 12y ago
It isn't that different though. You still look at clock speeds on the CPU, as well as the burst speed for what it can ramp up to. So that's the 233/300/450 comparison done. Then perhaps look at whether it is i3/i5/i7 - the higher ones are better. But then instead of just thinking that your processor is one CPU, count how many logical processors are in there: dual core, quad core etc. It's still the same - the higher numbers are better :-) Of course, other things to take into consideration (like it has always been) are FSB speed, RAM clock speeds, disk cache size, disk type, amount of RAM, GPU processing capability (use the same rules as the CPU - count the RAMDAC speed, the amount of RAM, the number of cores), and so on. I don't think it's changed that much. Just there are more brand names and model names on things now, perhaps?

dragonwriter 12y ago

They are still selling laptops, just not in Europe.

TheTaO 12y ago

Samsung wasn't a big laptop or PC seller anyways. I think they are more interested in selling (relatively) high margin devices that they can control and market (like phones and wearables). It's not that PC market is in decline, as others have pointed out, Samsung sees more money elsewhere.