Thursday, August 21, 2014

'Puter Tablets < $35?

This esplains my refusal to become a latest technology fan boy; things usually get cheaper in price if not actually "better."

"Better" constitutes a value judgment; people who just read email or chat can use bare bones lower price systems.  Parents already stretching budgets to feed their childen, pay rent, and utilities may value a lower price gadget rather than a $500 Apple I-thingy.

Chinese factory owners can apparently operate on smaller profit margins, calculating making only a dollar on each adds up to a whole pile of $ if they sell a billion, god bless their price warring ways.

Face it, Steve Jobs jobbed people by creating a need and marketing an over priced product, successful partly due to Windows exorbitant price and general crappiness.

[IDG News Service - Generic Android tablets with 7-inch screens and quad-core chips that deliver decent performance could soon sell for under $35.

Tablets with low-resolution screens are already selling for $45 on Amazon, many of which have single- or dual-core processors from a Chinese chip company called Allwinner.

But the prices could fall under $35 when Allwinner ships its "fully formed" quad-core A33 chip for only $4, said analyst firm Linley Group in a newsletter this week.

The chip's quad-core processors will deliver better performance than older chips, and be capable of supporting 1280 x 800 displays, the analyst group said. The chip is based on ARM's Cortex-A7 design and has a Mali-400MP2 GPU, which is capable of rendering high-definition video.

The cheap tablets will likely come from no-name vendors in China, and won't offer the bells and whistles of Samsung or Apple tablets, but they could increase price pressure on brand names like HP and Acer, which have entry-level tablets priced around $100.

They'll be most suited to first-time buyers or users who aren't picky about hardware or software but certainly not power users, said Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research. That's because they'll likely have limited memory, storage and fewer ports than more expensive devices.]  emphasis added 'cause some days love me some capitalism!

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