I love PC's
and have done for a long time. But its serious crunch time. PC's today are in general at the low medium and ultrabook ends - just rehashed, warmed up shit. Its little wonder that people have tired of buying the same rehashed, reheated garbage ever x years. Some people say a PC is enough, but brutally I personally have not found it to be thus. Today if you wish to work on or study on the enterprise software levels (example, 16GB for exchange) then you start to reach a point where you need fantastic monster machines. And who provides these - not many options, and very little in the medium range. So, people more and more find tablets equal to rdiculous ultrabooks. And who can blame them. And on the server side, given the vast cost and nightmarish levels required for working on serious server level stuff (Hi Microsoft, welcome server 2012, powershell, windows 8, and..) its little wonder there is a run taking place to move cloudwards. And not to azure either.
AMD could save itself. It could simply up the spec on its motherboards and oem's (LAPTOPS). Why not put 4 dimm/simm slots on every laptop chipset. Guess what, I'd like a machine I can put a lot of ram in without a nightmare price?? Oh look, you've just created a bioundary layer where a PC is again bigger, badder and better than tablets.
I'll say this to every single PC vendor out there. You are not going to out tablet the ARM platform at tablet level, and certainly not on rediculous over priced garbage ultrabooks. If I want a thin mobile device with mobility at its core, I am not going to pay your price. End of. However, I still want the PC of tommorow. Something powerful - capable beyond the tablet or cloud. And I'm willing to pay good money for it. But its graphics, and its cpu and its storage and its memory must not just be another reheated hash of the last gen over and over and over. Yes, I want a 1TB drive, yes I want 16GB, yes, I actually want a decent GPU not just rehashed junk intel gfx. And if you don't want to build that machine, thats ok, I don't have to buy the crap you're shipping today thats junk. And by the figures no one else wants that stuff either.
The PC isn't going to win the war in mobility. And its not going to survive in the areas like battery life, convenience or light usage that the tablets rightly dominate in. The bulk of its software library isn't even built for that paradigm. Built the powerful PCs of tommorow and start doing it today. You will in either case have lower sales figures, but the powerful PC will always hav e its place, and the junk models won't.
People are dropping the PC - because the last 2-4 machines they bought were junk and they are reaching a tipping point where they don't want to have that complexity + junk again when simnplistic tablet platforms answer more of their desires.
Lastly - ultrabook - a huge nail in the coffin of PCs. Intel lost the plot on this. Its taken its quite marvellous Ivy bridge and sandy bridge lines, and crippled them in the worst chassis. With limited connectivity (Its a PC - PC's soul is plugging things into it, not removing the connectors) and heat induced crippled perf - one can only marvel at this dirge. At huge price as well.
In the meantime, PC gaming is screaming for a vendor to step in and bring it. The games are at a surperior level to consoles or tables - assuming the right hardware is applied. And the window to catch it right is now.
This failure is going to result in the death of a very large part of the PC industry. Thats going to bite all affected. Would be much better to attack the issues in a unified way. That way is not the ultrabooks.