Editorials

There has been an interesting shift in the market over the last few months as we watch another former AMD engineer/executive return to the fold. AMD has announced that Raja Koduri will be bringing his graphic expertise back to AMD. Koduri was preceded by Mark Papermaster and Jim Keller who both left Apple for AMD last year. These returns are interesting in that Apple was once seen as the company to work for and, according to many analysts, had an almost unlimited earning and growth potential. However, after the death of Steve Jobs Apple has slumped and the once loud predictions of Apple reaching $1,000 per share are long gone as the stock continues to drop.

One of the great arguments in the PC industry is always who (or what) is faster. We all want to know what CPU, GPU, HDD, SDD, etc., is the fastest. We might not be able to buy that particular product, but we want to know, and we will scour the internet in the hopes of finding out which is truly the king. In these cases, the issue is often settled by the smallest margin (1-2 frames per second) which might not even be noticeable to the average person. However, there is a new term that is being swapped out for speed, and that is responsiveness. Unfortunately, responsiveness is not the same as speed or power, but this term is being used very often. During a recent trip to a local box store it was used to push a system that while responsive, was actually quite slow when put it to the test.

Apple is continuing their divorce of Google as they are now rumored to be in talks to bring in another search partner. The parent in question is none other than Google rival Yahoo!. We are not sure what Apple hopes to accomplish by partnering up with a search company that has fallen as far as Yahoo has, but we are betting that some of it has to do with removing as much Google as possible. In the past year Apple has moved away from Google Maps and pulled YouTube as a pre-installed App.

The PC is dead, PC sales are declining, and we are entering the post PC era; these are all headlines that are getting pushed around the internet right now. These are the same headlines that we have heard every year around the same time and by the same people for the last 15 or so years. They are just as wrong now as they were then, at least mostly wrong. What has happened is that we have hit an interesting time in the market. This is a time when we have too many new and “cool” technologies that are not cheap to make, but no idea on how to implement them (or an OS that really takes advantage of them). This is not the first time we have seen this and it won’t be the last either and it also comes at a time when the market is flooded with companion devices that are being marketed as standalone products.