In early June, after I came back from the industries premier display conference known as SID, I shared in my PC Mag column some of the significant developments I saw there in flexible displays. The two major players who were very vocal about their breakthrough flexible displays were Visionox and BOE. However, while I was … Continue reading Samsung Joins the Flexible Display Wars
Apple’s recent earnings call, where the company revealed its iPhone average selling price (ASP) for the second quarter grew to $724, stunned many industry watchers. And while it’s true that no other smartphone vendor is selling phones at near that price in the same volumes as Apple, the reality is that four of the top … Continue reading Rethinking Conventional Wisdom Around Hardware ASPs
Unless you have followed Intel for at least 10 years, you might not now know that at one point, Intel actually owned an Arm business. Up until 2006 Intel owned XScale, an ARM-based chipmaker that it sold that year for $600 million. Intel sold XScale because it wanted to double down on the x86 architecture … Continue reading Intel’s Battle with Arm
Last week the European Commission fined Google five billion dollars for breaching the E.U competition rules. Among other things, the European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager claimed that Google helped kill off competing OS forks that were developed, including Amazon’s Fire OS for smartphones. According to Vestager, Google told handset makers they couldn’t sell any … Continue reading Why the EU decision about Google does not change the future for an Amazon Phone
I recently wrote a piece in Insider entitled “A Glimpse at Future Displays” in which I shared some new technologies I saw at the SID Display Conference in May in Los Angeles. In this piece, I highlighted new displays in the works from Visonox, BOE, and E-Ink and shared how these types of foldable and … Continue reading New Challenges for Hardware With Flexible Displays
Microsoft just launched the Surface Go, a 10” Surface powered by the 7th Generation Intel Pentium Gold Processor, in a fanless design, offering 9 hours of battery, priced at $399. Size is always a difficult topic to discuss when it comes to tablets. The balance between how much screen real-estate you need to be productive … Continue reading Surface Go: Judging a Product by the Market
A few months ago, I wrote about Apple’s slight pivoting with iPad. We at Creative Strategies have had the opportunity to study tablets since their early inception when Microsoft introduced the tablet PC in 2001. The categories evolution went mainstream with Apple released the iPad and during that time we studied the rapid adoption of … Continue reading Apple’s Mac and iPad Conflict
The concept of Device as a Service (DaaS) has been gaining steam for a few years now, and my team at IDC has done extensive work around this topic. In fact, we’re currently wrapping up an extensive study on the subject that includes a massive multi-country survey of commercial adopters, intenders, and resistors, as well … Continue reading Answering the Critics of Device as a Service
Despite all the clichés about the challenges of change, the truth is that it can be difficult for people to accept impactful alterations to the way they do things. This is particularly true in the mode of interaction we have with technology-based products because many of the changes occur in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. … Continue reading The Changing Relationship Between People and Technology
Duplex is out for Public Testing This week at an event in Mountain View, Google demoed the public release of Duplex to a group of reporters. The demo took place at Oren’s Hummus Shop in Mountain View but no video recording was allowed so we have mostly an account of what happened through the reports’ … Continue reading News You might have missed: Week of June 29th, 2018
This week I attended PTC’s LiveWorx18 conference in Boston, where the company demonstrated some of the ways its customers are leveraging AR technology today. PTC is an interesting company because it has a wide range of solutions beyond AR, and it has done a good job of telling a story that shows how industry verticals … Continue reading PTC Demonstrates Augmented Reality’s Real-World Value
There are a number of interesting trends emerging around video games worth observing. On the heels of the gaming industries biggest show of the year, E3, I thought it would be a good time to outline the broader trends I see happening worth watching. Gen Z PC Gaming Growth This is one of the bigger … Continue reading A Gaming Renaissance
At this week’s Computex show in Taiwan Qualcomm announced the next generation of silicon for the Windows on Snapdragon platform. The new chip is called the Snapdragon 850, and rather than simply repurposing an existing high-end smartphone processor the company has cooked up a modified chip specifically for the Windows PC market. Qualcomm says the … Continue reading Qualcomm Announces New Snapdragon for PCs, Kills Partners’ Near-Term Prospects
Last month I had the privilege of attending Dell Technology World in Las Vegas where the overriding theme was Business Transformation. This term is being used a lot these days to explain the overall shift from a PC Centric IT world to one where the Cloud sits at the center of an IT universe, and … Continue reading Client Hardware and Business Transformation
I was going to title this post the Tablet’s fate, but we all know there isn’t a tablet market but an iPad market. So while this article will share some general points about the use of tablets as a whole, the broader focus and larger category questions are about the iPad. When looking at the … Continue reading The iPad’s Fate
I remember when Apple was near its bottom. Investors, pundits, analysts, and many commentators suggested that Sony should buy Apple. At the time, Sony was the biggest consumer electronics brand around and nearly every category the company entered had tremendous success. There was a culture of innovation, attention to detail with hardware design, and a … Continue reading The Foreshadowing of Sony’s Pivot
Microsoft rumored to be planning Low-Cost Tablet According to Bloomberg, Microsoft is rumored to be planning to add a low-end model to its Surface line. The new tablet line will feature a 10-inch screen and will be priced around $400. The tablets are expected to be about 20 percent lighter than the high-end models but … Continue reading News You might have missed, Week of May 18, 2018
Not a week goes by where some industry-related conversation I have with a major tech company does not include virtual assistants. When talking about these assistants like Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, and Cortana, I often have to remind folks that we are still in the very early days. One of the ways I’ve started doing … Continue reading The DOS Era of Virtual Assistants
While there are many interesting companies earnings to discuss, and we will hopefully get to all of them, Intel’s stood out to me the most. It is no secret my concern for Intel has been growing, but I remained cautiously optimistic up until this point. On the surface, most everything looks great. They just hired … Continue reading Disruption Targets Intel
There hasn’t been a lot of bright spots in the PC industry the last few years. With year-over-year shipment declines, things can often seem a little bleak. But one PC category enjoying strong growth is the convertible notebook. In 2017 the convertible category grew by 28% year over year at the worldwide level. Compare that … Continue reading Don’t Call it a Comeback: Convertibles Shine in Growth-Challenged PC Market
I recently got my hands on Google’s Pixel 2 Chromebook. I have wanted to use the Pixel 2 for some time and test it in my everyday computing workflows. There is so much to like about the Chromebook platform. It’s fast, fresh, and feels extremely modern. Much more modern than Windows or macOS/OS X. But … Continue reading Chromebooks, iPads, and the Desire for New Computing Platforms
One of the more inevitable technologies that will impact our lives in the next 5-10 years will be autonomous vehicles. And one of the ultimate virtues of these cars will be that you as a passenger will not have to actually drive the vehicle but could instead, lean back and read, watch a video, etc. … Continue reading Are Self-driving Cars Targets for Advertisers?
As I zoom out and think about Apple’s Education focused event from Tuesday, a few things stand out worth digging into. The education market itself is much more a software and services-centric market, from a solutions standpoint, than a hardware one. Yes, the cost is a factor, but it is not the only factor. Many … Continue reading Apple’s True Goal (and Underlying Strategy) For the Education Market
Like many of my tech friends who are over 55 but started in the world of technology when we were in our early 20’s or 30’s, technology is second nature to us. For those of us who grew up with tech, we often forget that the large majority of people in the US and around … Continue reading Don’t Forget the Baby Boomers When Creating and Marketing New Tech Products
One of the most important growth businesses for Apple has been their services division. It brings in about $7.5 billion a quarter now, and it could be a Fortune 100 business if it were ever spun off to be a business on its own. As I have been thinking about Apple’s services business over the … Continue reading Apple’s Programming and Content Challenge
