This is big enough news that I think it deserves its own thread. HP is pulling out of the PC market and pulling the plug on WebOS. The catalyst seems to have been the total flop of the Touchpad. I think most of us saw this coming. Over the last decade HP became a garbage, bottom feeder brand. Their laptops sucked and even their printers, formerly the industry standard, became trash. I guess they're now going to focus on enterprise stuff. Who knows. Their future is uncertain, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if they're not around in a couple of years. http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/08/hp-washing-its-hands-of-webos-discontinues-tablets-pre-phones.ars http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/08/does-apotheker-need-an-apothecary-why-hp-is-exiting-the-pc-business.ars
That's a shame, I really enjoyed my Brazo based notebook and HP really had the only one worth buying. Even Llano isn't worth it because all the OEMs are pricing it to compete with the i3. If it were cheaper it'd been worth it. Anyway AMD should be ANGRY they just lost their biggest mobile computing supporter. I guess Toshiba might pick up the slack, but if prices don't go down (or performance doesn't spell out a CLEAR winner) my next notebook will be intel anyway. Mostly because of competition, everybody and their brother makes intel notebooks.
It's a shame, HP are the only company who offer a 1080p matte screen on a Llano laptop. I wouldn't buy a 15"+ laptop with some shitty 1366x768 screen, yet all manufacturers pretty much pimp them across anything but the high end market now.
Nope. Web OS is something HP only acquired about a year ago from buying Palm, and the CEO that engineered the deal left the company only about a month later. A lot of people predicted that HP's deal didn't make sense for HP at the time. The catalyst is that the declining PC market makes it harder to generate $$ from low margins. Low margins required constantly rising volume. IBM saw this coming years ago when they jettisoned their PC hardware business.
I can't find anywhere about the server side of things. I am working tomorrow with a guy who works for HP maintaining and repairing SAN equipment (although they are so short staffed now the is forced to do everything as they got rid of a lot of people). Some people seem to be saying they are going software only and other saying software and printers. HP make a lot of other gear including servers, SANs and switches and it seems a lot to just stop doing. There will be A LOT of companies out there with HP stuff populating all of their racks. We have a procurve zl series switch with a 'lifetime' warranty, I wonder what will happen to that? Damned thing wasn't cheap, list price was about £12,000 but I managed to get one for quite a bit under that. When I see him tomorrow I will ask if anything has been mentioned. Also know another guy who works for HP on the switch side of things, wonder if they are both a bit nervous now.
webos is such a tragic story. a perfect story on how you need balance. they had an awesome os going.. in all ways, it was overall better than android when it came out in summer 2009. but when palm released the pre, that thing had pretty mediocre hardware. the cpu itself was even underclocked. no one really bought it because of the mediocre hardware and horrible marketing so the app catalog really suffered. fast forward to hp acquisition.. hp didn't really do much. their hype on a new webos device suffered. hp veer? marketing towards females? and their hp pre hype was also an epic fail. their debug unlock code was the contra code for god sakes. i bet the engineers were really steamed at corporate. i'm really glad matias duarte ditched hp/palm for google's android team.
@alterego Their margins were low because in the last decade on the consumer side of things they had become a bottom feeder brand like Acer. Their PCs became unfixable plastic shitboxes made of the cheapest, trashiest parts, but they also sold them for a cheap price. You can thank Carly Fiorina for that. It's a shame because they used to make really high quality stuff back in the day. Apple actually got a lot of its ideas for its business model from old school HP.
Their printer drivers over the last 4-5 years are even worse, I am having to use 10 year old 4050 drivers for newer model printers just to get them to do as they are told and print from the correct trays. Perhaps software isn't their strongest suit either?
@Grim My wife bought an all in one printer from them a few years ago. The drivers for it were a bloated disaster. Why printer drivers need to be 700mb is beyond me. After about a year, the interface on it became totally unresponsive and there was no way to reset it, so it became an expensive paper weight. We now have an Epson Workforce which has worked really well for a few years now and has lightweight drivers.
The 'consumer' drivers are awful. I installed a wireless printer for someone a little while ago and the driver CD alone took about 15 minutes to install. It installs so much crap you just don't need and in the end couldn't find the printer. In the end I took it all off, installed the driver file and manually created a generic TCP/IP port and pointed it at that. You can't see the ink levels but I think they make that up half the time anyway. We have about 20 business orientated laserjet printers here (all cost £1200+ new with envelope feeders and duplex units) and you expect the drivers to work in a business environment. I spent half a day trying to get a 4250 with its new drivers to print automatically from tray 3 a few years ago. In the end i went back to the afore mentioned 4050 driver from around 10 years ago and it worked a treat.
Interesting side note about Web OS and the HP Touchpad... I've seen other articles saying that HP doesn't plan to walk away from Web OS itself, but may try to use it as a web based system, or perhaps license it.
I've heard nothing but good things about the OS itself. Maybe RIM should buy it. Haven't they been trying to figure out what they're going to do next for awhile?
RIM is starting to be a lost cause now too. They waited for too long to switch to the touch screen model. They're still pushing devices out, but no one really cares anymore.
I swore of HP printers many years ago. I've gone to Brother and have been very happy. I can buy ink off ebay for $3.
I don't like their desktop printers anymore, but their large format printers still seem quite good. We have an older DesignJet 5500 at work and it's a good printer, although it only has one use these days as we use Ecosolvent, Solvent, or UVSolvent for most of our uses (signs). The real problem as with most printers is the ink prices. With two of our other printers the same size (1600mm wide media max) we have switched to a custom bulk ink system and made our own profiles which IMO are better than the factory. The HP we still have to use cheap imitation refilled cartridges and just modify the ink balance in the standard profiles... not as effective at all. Anyhow their flatbed printers are pretty damn good also I hear. Just very expensive. We went with an a european alternative to save a few hundred grand. On the consumer side they have good hardware but poor value for inks and horrible drivers. I'd be curious to see what kind of revenue they've made on their flatbed printers however with so many moving away from screen printing.
So HP is slashing the prices on the touchpad to $99 for the 16GB and $149 for the 32GB version. I might snatch one of these up for that price zomg.