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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

#21

Post by ulfw »

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?

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?

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

#22

Post by Silhouette »

pacaro wrote: post #6

I wonder if differences in implied warranty cut into margin in Europe. It's not super clear what the actual standard is, but I know that (for example) a laptop that I had failed at about 13 months old because of a design flaw and in the US I was SOL, but other complainants with the same flaw in the UK had the motherboard replaced because the laptop was considered "not fit for purpose" which if I understand the Sale o…

The 6 year figure is an upper bound, and even if a device failed after 5 years the laws here in the UK wouldn't normally require a full refund of the original purchase price or anything so disproportionate.

However, there is a principle that essentially says something has to last for a reasonable length of time given what it was bought for. I think few would claim that a laptop costing hundreds of pounds and failing just over a year after purchase met that criterion, and that's what triggers the repair/replace/refund rules in the kind of situation you described.

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

#23

Post by rdtsc »

ulfw wrote: post #21
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?

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 obv…

No doubt. Still using a 7 year old Core 2 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.

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

#25

Post by hartror »

jfoster wrote: post #17
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.

In the past 3-6 months?

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

#26

Post by Reebles »

ljosa wrote: post #24

So now it's ThinkPad or MacBook Pro. What is it like to run Linux on MacBook Pros these days? Does Ubuntu and other popular distributions install without much fiddling? Does any of the hardware not work with Linux?

I know that the web cams on new Macbook Pros do not work on linux, and there has been little to no progress on making them work.

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

#27

Post by darkstar999 »

ljosa wrote: post #24

So now it's ThinkPad or MacBook Pro. What is it like to run Linux on MacBook Pros these days? Does Ubuntu and other popular distributions install without much fiddling? Does any of the hardware not work with Linux?

I'm a fan of linux and have never owned a Mac, but honestly if I had one I'd just stick with OSX. It's going to be a much better experience.

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

#28

Post by tn13 »

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…

Your experience is probably anecdotal. I have been using Surface Pro 3 and if that is not cool I am not sure what else could be.

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

#29

Post by ekux44 »

pacaro wrote: post #6

I wonder if differences in implied warranty cut into margin in Europe. It's not super clear what the actual standard is, but I know that (for example) a laptop that I had failed at about 13 months old because of a design flaw and in the US I was SOL, but other complainants with the same flaw in the UK had the motherboard replaced because the laptop was considered "not fit for purpose" which if I understand the Sale o…

Do these consumer protection laws apply to security updates or cloud/service-dependent features?

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

#30

Post by Throwaway12830 »

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?

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.

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