Intel Corporation Message Board

Haswell is doomed to failure with the fading PC market and the inability of Microsoft to provide a usable tablet experience. Merrifield is going to sell a few million units in Intel reference designs through operators like Orange only to obsoleted soon after by Apple's A7. Baytrail is going to beg Samsung to replace Exynos in their flagship tablets. Beyond that its going to join Merrifield and Intel's reference designs. If you cut through the hype, there not much change here, it's business as usual.

Windows-based tablets haven’t been big successes so far, whether they use the desktop-centric Windows 8 or the tablet-centric Windows RT. iMore’s Rene Ritchie does some sharp analysis of Microsoft’s latest marketing campaign and concludes that the company simply does not understand why people are buying tablets in the first place. Essentially, Microsoft doesn’t get that its central criticism of the iPad — that is, that it’s more of a toy that can’t be used for doing serious work — is precisely why consumers are drawn to it in the first place. Simply put, consumers have PCs at their offices if they want to do work. When they’re at home, they want to play around with their tablets instead; they like having toys.

When you take this into consideration, says Ritchie, it’s clear that any attempt to bring core Windows functionality to tablets is doomed to failure.

“For years mainstream customers have felt alienated by desktop operating systems,” Ritchie writes. “They’ve struggled with their archaic file systems and confusing windows management, their intermediated control schemes and their sheer complexity. And those frustrations are the last thing those mainstream customers want on mobile. They want to pick up a device that they can understand… They want their apps, they want their media, and they want it without all the inhuman bulls*** traditional computing platforms like Windows (and OS X for that matter) have been forcing on them for decades. They want iPads.”

But all is not lost in the tablet space for Microsoft: Ritchie says that the company already has experience in creating a popular, intuitive operating system with its Xbox gaming console. If Microsoft were to make a tablet that took more cues from the Xbox and had gaming capabilities that put the iPad to shame, then it could have a winner on its hands

ARM is strongly rooted in mobile and at the low power end of the microprocessor market. That means its got all its weight on on foot in the paint and it can pivot from here if needed. Intel will likely challenge it in low power, but it can equally make inroads at the higher power end of the market. It's not going away anytime soon. It's staying power is what gives Intel nightmares. None of Intel's previous competitors had this vantage point when looking at Intel.