back to article Misery at Acer: 'Breaking even this year is impossible'

Acer has announced its first-ever quarterly loss as a veritable vortex of inventory backlogs, internal reshuffling, sluggish PC demand and runaway iPad popularity chewed through its profits. The Taiwanese firm's Q2 loss after tax was NT$6.8bn ($236m), according to its preliminary results, which came from "$150m in sales …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Backlogs eh?

    My trusty aspire one is being held together with gaffa tape, might have to keep an eye out...

  2. proto-robbie
    Pirate

    y.a.f.t.

    Didn't jump quickly enough onto the fad-wagon. However, now that neat little tablets from China can be bought for £70 or less, it may be that none of these companies will survive for long.

  3. Jacqui

    backdoors

    Perhaps if they stopped whipping windows boxen littered with insanely exploitable backdoors people could buy thier stuff without having to worry how many hidden security holes it has?

    My last Acer was a well made laptop and it put others at work to shame but I had to remove two acer specifc DLLs and some COM objects that provides system level command shell access

    instigated by a very simple bit of code in any web page.

    Even worse these blatant backdoors were ingnored by all but Clamwin - evidently Acer register thier backdoors with the AV vendors who ensure thier security holes do not get highlighted to the end users.

    IMHO Acer and security are mutually exclusive.

    1. asdf
      FAIL

      yep

      Its also just a coincidence they were one of the first companies to use and one of the biggest proponents of Green Dam. It is mildly concerting to know your computer maker will sell its and your soul to get in good with the Chinese Commie party.

  4. asdf

    where are all the netbook fanbois now

    Intel hasn't figured out that couch computers should not be warm to the touch and require a fan.

  5. JEDIDIAH
    Linux

    The problem solver's dilemma.

    They sell cheap gear that's more durable than Apple kit. A guy can only buy so many net tops. The market gets saturated after awhile. If gear is reliable, it just makes it that much longer until your customers have to buy something else again.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Why bother buying a new one?

      Posted using my 2 year old acer netbook that could just use a new battery (did well to last this long with my usage pattern). £20 on ebay for a new battery (with higher capacity than the factory one), or £200 for a brand new netbook that... has the same specs as my current one? hmm, tough choice

  6. alcopops
    Happy

    Crap Support Service

    Just spent the whole day being palmed from one Acer department to the other. Nobody can tell me how I can return a faulty battery I purchased for a client. Acer are top of my shitlist of toxic brands I would never purchase, if they go under never to resurface again I wouldn't be too distressed.

    1. GrumpyOldBloke

      Crap Support Service

      Yup, still waiting for Acer to honour a cash back deal on an 8.9" Aspire One. Never buy the brand again.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Netbook fanboi here :)

    I've had my Asus netbook (running Linux) for a year and a half. Still good as new. One with a 1024x768 display and solid state disk would be tempting, though... certainly more so than a tablet/smartphone.

  8. Mr Floppy

    like all the rest

    They missed the boat on the netbooks. They all thought about the form factor but not the software, or how the software would would work on such a small form factor. Then they put back harddrives, Windows XP, increase the form factor a little more and increased the weight, all with an underpowered CPU, it just didn't work anymore. What these companies should take away from this is that it isn't just about the hardware. Some software/OS support would go a long way

    Posted from an eeepc 701 running puppy 5, with a modded touchscreen.

  9. hahnchen
    Linux

    Want to improve margins?

    Stop paying for Windows licenses in your consumer devices. Right now, you try and make that back up by installing trial crapware that no one wants onto the machines.

    Stick Ubuntu on there, stick libreOffice on there, and get some Google cash for installing Chrome as the default browser.

    1. Armando 123

      Here there be letter characters

      It improves your margin per unit, sure, but how many units are you going to move? I develop on Linux, but I think we all know the relative demands for Linux vs Windows.

      1. hahnchen

        letters and digits

        I don't actually use Linux, and previously, I would have dicked over this notion too.

        But we're at a point now, where the browser has superceded native applications. My most used applications all live on the web.

        System builders used to make money selling crapware for Windows, there was no way to do that on Linux platforms - but now there is - Google are willing to pay for installations.

        When the world's biggest PC manufacturer want to exit the space due to the tiny margins on offer, something drastic needs to change. At this year's LinuxCon, the phrase "year of the linux desktop" became a bit of an in-joke - http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/08/no-year-of-the-linux-desktop-after-2-decades-linuxcon-keynote-so-what.ars - but this is theirs for the taking.

  10. Armando 123

    One trick pony

    Acer struck me as vulnerable. They were yet another player in the thin-margin PC field, with MS' OS "quality" being a big factor in their market's health and their product. Then they accelerated to the bottom with the netbook, which while it had even thinner margins, allowed them to get the cream off the first skim.

    Once the iPad came along and people preferred iPads over netbooks, the writing was on the wall.

  11. Alan Firminger

    What about that overproduction ????

    Was it six months ago this site told us about excess Acers being shipped to Europe. Watch out for deals. I never saw any.

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