
PC market flat, as Surface becomes a top-5 computer brand in the US - petethomas
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/pc-market-flat-as-surface-becomes-a-top-5-computer-brand-in-the-us/
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yayana
It's interesting to see how much difficulty they are having defining a PC.

I.e. if half of otherwise identical Asus machines are excluded based on
chromeOs then Asus has a better than stated position on hardware volume but
not Microsoft licenses. OsX has an entirely different situation and luckily
easy to separate yourself but is included..

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gaspoweredcat
id actually argue that a chromebook is less a "PC" than a surface myself,
while i see the point in the cheapo chromebooks as long battery life web
browsers i dont get the point of premium chromebooks like the pixel etc, why
would you need an i5 or i7 to run apps that can comfortably run on CPUs of
half that power

not that im a fan of things like the surface either, i see why theyre useful
for designers and such but to me a laptop needs a decent keyboard and the
surface keyboard cover just isnt

but maybe im just old fashioned as i dont even see the point of a non
convertible laptop with a touchscreen, reaching over the keyboard to press
something feels much more awkward and less intuitive than just using the
touchpad

personally id be tempted to just separate the markets by OS as that is likely
the deciding factor before anything else, eg no matter how powerful the
hardware you wouldnt buy a chromebook as a gaming machine as there arent the
games for it.

yes OsX may be more general purpose than ChromeOS but to me it still has a
specific market, if youre buying a mac you either need it for a specific app
or youre not doing anything particularly important (web browsing, document
writing, video watching) and just want something fashionable (or youre used to
the OS and dont want to change)

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pcdoodle
Good luck maintaining a fleet of this junk. Want to get your data from a non
booting machine? Gotta break the screen! Batteries can't be replaced with
breaking the screen either. Defiantly not a "business class" machine you can
swap parts to keep your fleet going... Try fumbling around with one for more
than an hour, garbage!

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tonyztan
On the flip side, they are tamper resistant. It would be incredibly difficult
for someone to tamper with a Surface tablet siting in a hotel room without
leaving marks. This is probably good for travel with a corporate device.

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HammerJack
Do you really think anyone short of a state agency is going to break into your
hotel room and attempt to install malicious hardware? Since I assume you'd
have drive encryption in such a hostile environment?

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tonyztan
Full disk encryption does not protect against hardware keyloggers, but
obviously tampered hardware (broken screen) could lead to the user not
entering the passphrase.

Also, this is not for my threat model, but it could be appropriate for certain
corporate travelers or journalists.

