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Following Sony, Samsung has stopped sales of its laptops in Europe

pcadvisor.co.uk

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Re: Following Sony, Samsung has stopped sales of its laptops in Europe

#11

Post by sliverstorm »

toyg wrote: post #7
scoofy wrote: post #3

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?

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 i…

HP also has a chunk of the corporate market, but of course they aren't Sony or Samsung who are the subject here.

Re: Following Sony, Samsung has stopped sales of its laptops in Europe

#12

Post by chx »

rurounijones wrote: post #8
georgemcbay wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aroun…

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?

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.

Re: Following Sony, Samsung has stopped sales of its laptops in Europe

#13

Post by tomw1808 »

toyg wrote: post #7
scoofy wrote: post #3

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?

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 i…

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.

Re: Following Sony, Samsung has stopped sales of its laptops in Europe

#14

Post by contingencies »

As this seems a reasonable place to pose the question: I've seen (eg. at meetups) people using bluetooth keyboards with tablets turned around on stands as sort of mini-laptops with shell access.

Has anyone here done this with a comfortable hardware configuration for nontrivial developments tasks? I guess what I really want are tablets that run proper (vs. Android) Linux, can perhaps handle occasionally running paravirt at not entirely painful speeds, and (I believe this is the killer standing in the way) have hardware with open source or reliable enough binary blob drivers that are therefore safe to frequently deploy very recent kernels to without losing wifi, sound, camera, GPS, GSM/CDMA, backlight control, etc.

Re: Following Sony, Samsung has stopped sales of its laptops in Europe

#16

Post by rch »

toyg wrote: post #7
scoofy wrote: post #3

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?

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 i…

One would think that there is at least some market for high end laptops. Whenever I look, I don't see much in the way of alternatives to the MPB though. That's partly because top of the line models are buried under a pile of 'deals' and other consumer junk.

Maybe there's an opportunity to put together a site that aggregates the top-shelf models from various manufactures with efficient filtering on features geared toward raw performance and build quality (shell materials, keyboard, etc.).

Re: Following Sony, Samsung has stopped sales of its laptops in Europe

#17

Post by jfoster »

hartror wrote: post #5

This happened in Australia as well and it really sucks. I run a 15" Series 9 machine and the only thing you can fairly compare it to is a Macbook Air. They're beautiful pieces of hardware somewhat let down by their crappy LCDs. I guess my next machine will be a Macbook.

Any idea when this happened in Australia? It's not mentioned in the article and I remember seeing Samsung laptops in stores as recently as a few months back, but they do indeed seem to be gone from samsung.com.au.

Re: Following Sony, Samsung has stopped sales of its laptops in Europe

#18

Post by tdicola »

scoofy wrote: post #3

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?

> 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.

Re: Following Sony, Samsung has stopped sales of its laptops in Europe

#19

Post by Silhouette »

tdicola wrote: post #18
scoofy wrote: post #3

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?

> 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.

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.

Re: Following Sony, Samsung has stopped sales of its laptops in Europe

#20

Post by Steko »

scoofy wrote: post #3

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?

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.
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