Following Sony, Samsung has stopped sales of its laptops in Europe

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/laptop/3573470/samsung-exits-laptop-market-including-chromebooks/

by benologist • 12 years ago

86 87 12 years ago

pcadvisor.co.uk

IBM• 12 years ago

This is the end game for smartphone OEMs as well.

scoofy• 12 years ago

Wait... what? I'm a bit confused here.

Can someone please explain why Samsung isn't selling laptops besides the article's dismissive "It's common knowledge that the PC market is in decline."

Is it that they are spinning off their laptop division, or is there is some other dominant manufacturer? Why on earth are laptops not selling?

georgemcbay• 12 years ago

PC sales (laptop and desktop) in general have been on the decline since 2010 or so and the margins in that market for players who aren't Apple are generally so low that the declines don't have to be that bad to really put a squeeze on manufacturers.

The iPad/Tablet market gets almost all the credit for this decline in the media but while I'm sure that's part of it I personally think the fact that we hit a point around 2010 where desktops and laptops were just plain good enough (truly good enough, not 640k good enough) for almost everything people normally do was as much or more of a factor than tablets. Short of having a machine die on you there are precious few reasons to run out and buy a new system anymore.

I'm a software developer, a hobby photographer who shoots in RAW and a gamer and even I haven't bought a new desktop or laptop in 4 years (and I used to be someone who would build an entirely new desktop system yearly with major upgrades 6 months in to boost it up).

rurounijones• 12 years ago

Agreed, the last great upgrade was the SSD. After that, for people using their laptops as non-intensive consumer devices, what else do they need?

wfjackson• 12 years ago

Lenovo is doing good and getting better.

http://www.cnet.com/news/lenovo-earnings-soar-on-solid-pc-sm...

toyg2• 12 years ago

Basically, in my experience, Dell and Lenovo now rule the corporate market, while the consumer market is now 1) smaller (since tablets and smartphones cannibalized some of it) and 2) clearly split between Apple and "everything else", where "everything else" runs on thin margins and is perceived as cheap and uncool. My anecdotal datapoint is that, in the last 5 years, I haven't seen anyone in my sector (finance / IT in the UK) using anything but Dell, Lenovo or Apple laptops (with the very occasional Sony Vaio, which Sony recently stopped selling).

On a larger scale, the rise of smartphones and tablets has clearly shrunk the traditional PC market, a market that already struggled with the end of Microsoft-led forced upgrades (that "good enough" level others mentioned; Microsoft used to periodically redefine what "good enough" was, but their products have substantially fossilized in the last decade). This doesn't mean PCs and laptops will go away for good; it's just that large margins are now elsewhere, so the industry is adapting.

sliverstorm• 12 years ago

HP also has a chunk of the corporate market, but of course they aren't Sony or Samsung who are the subject here.

tomw1808• 12 years ago

I recently saw a colleague with a surface pro (version 1) as a workstation, I was rubbing my eyes, because I couldn't believe that this is working.

That said, I'm now working (as a programmer, yes) from a Sony Vaio Multi-Flip 13". It has everything I ever wanted: Good resultion, sleek, quite remarkable performance for that tiny little thing, convertible, etc etc. It also "look good", as the apple devices do, and, in addition, you can flip it over to a tablet. Well... in theory the best thing that I ever had. In theory. The closing mechanism sometimes doesn't recognize a "is closed" properly and the notebook shuts down and comes up again in camera mode. I recently had to replace the keyboard, because the return key was broken, which is not easy with an ultrabook when warranty is over, since its soldered or brazed (or how you call that) with plastic pins. When I got it, I think I got a refurbished device, one key was stuck, and circumstances required that I open it myself and fix it and found the inside overwhelmingly full of fingerprints and screws in wrong places. I could continue like that and I am not alone. All these things, these little quality and qc glitches between an Apple device and "all the others" are (for me) the main reason why everyone runs to apple. They are producing just the best quality and for me as a consumer, its still affordable, and it even looks better and feels better. I am no friend of iOS, I grew up with windows and linux, which is no excuse not to buy an Apple, but I would still first look everywhere else for alternatives. So, that samsung is also shutting down is very sad, since they produces very nice models. A friend of mine has the older samsung series and has also quality glitches. Beside apple, it seems the market has realized it has to produce good quality, good looking and good functioning devices, but most of them are all show and no substance. For my understanding.

I was hoping they would slowly slowly introduce newer models, better processing, better overall quality. Instead they are shutting down. I'm sad.

rch• 12 years ago

One would think that there is at least some market for high end laptops. Whenever I look, I don't see much in the way of alternatives to the MPB though. That's partly because top of the line models are buried under a pile of 'deals' and other consumer junk.

Maybe there's an opportunity to put together a site that aggregates the top-shelf models from various manufactures with efficient filtering on features geared toward raw performance and build quality (shell materials, keyboard, etc.).

tn13• 12 years ago

Your experience is probably anecdotal. I have been using Surface Pro 3 and if that is not cool I am not sure what else could be.

iSnow2• 12 years ago

I work for one of the larger corporations on the planet and in a recent presentation it was announced that employees will have a choice between a laptop and a Surface. Quote "our sales people are looking positively old-fashioned visiting their customers with laptops".

So, expect the corporate computer market to take a nose-dive in the next years too, I guess.

tdicola• 12 years ago

Why on earth are laptops not selling?

If someone had the answer to that question then Microsoft, Sony, Samsung, etc. would be much, much happier. The entire PC industry has been shrinking for the last few years, sometimes with double digit declines. Nobody wants a heavy, hot, loud, and crappy laptop when a tablet like an iPad can do everything that matters to most people (email and web) and then some.

Silhouette2• 12 years ago

It doesn't help that (a) consumer Windows laptops have come so pre-loaded with junkware that they were just downright unpleasant (and often unreliable) to use, and (b) Microsoft dropped the ball so hard with Windows 8 that it fell through the earth's core and came out the other side.

Compare the extremely unappealing offering that is Windows 8 on a junkware-laden laptop with the convenience of a tablet for everyday consumption/casual gaming uses or a much more polished MacBook Something for more serious users, and it hasn't really been a serious contest for several years now. Plenty of people already had a laptop that was good enough for what they needed anyway, and most people looking to buy something new have dramatically more appealing options than the kind of thing Sony or Samsung were selling.

Swizec• 12 years ago

Nobody wants a heavy, hot, loud, and crappy laptop when a tablet like an iPad can do everything that matters to most people (email and web) and then some.

Anecdotal counterevidence:

My mum is almost 50 years old. She has never been computer savvy. All she ever does is read email and browse the internets. Barely browse the internets. She uses her TV cable far more than she does internet.

Last year I bought her a tablet. One of those big fancy Galaxies with a stylus and everything.

Not six months later she started begging me to get her a computer because "This tablet thing is just so useless. I can't type (she got an external keyboard too), I can't tell which app I'm in, what I'm trying to open, and it's just so damn small. I don't like using this stupid thing."

She's been using it as her only computer regardless, but she's been complaining all along about how small it is, that she has to hold it up and a bunch of other things. This year I'm getting her a refurb MacBook Air. We'll see how that goes.

Steko• 12 years ago

The killer features ended up being battery life and connectivity, exactly the areas where a traditional wintel laptop struggled. In contrast its primary strength was the enormous windows app catalog and that's been heavily mitigated.

ulfw• 12 years ago

It's been going on for a few years. If you look at the level of performance improvements (intel chips have single to barely double digit percentage gains in performance per generation upgrade now, whereas they used to almost double in speed every two years) and at the installed base (good enough screens with good enough resolution, good enough SSDs or HDs with enough space) it just shows that the replacement rate obviously will go down. Back a few years ago you HAD to upgrade to keep up with innovation (audio files won't fit on a 40MB HDD, videos won't fit on a 1GB HDD, HD won't fit on a 32GB HDD etc, XP won't run on 512MB RAM, video compression/decompression will be better on a Pentium II than a 486 etc etc), but honestly what's the difference (to a non-developer casual end user) between say a gen 2 Core i Chip with 4GB of RAM and a 256GB HDD on a 14" 1400 px Screen compared to say a Haswell i5 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 15" 1920 px Screen machine. Nothing.

Tablets are facing similar issues. What'll be the big difference between an iPad Air and this year's iPad Air 2?

rdtsc• 12 years ago

No doubt. Still using a 7 year old Core 2 <something> Thinkpad and it still works great. Resolution and speed are not a problem. Replaced the hard drive for a solid state, the fan at some point but otherwise I just don't see a good reason to spend another $1k or $2k on a new laptop.

Throwaway12830• 12 years ago

I agree with all the other posters, and believe performance and form factor have reached a point that makes frequent upgrades less common. However, I'll add one more point into the mix...

Modern computer specifications are confusing. Back in the day it was extremely linear. Oh, your computer is 233 MHz, this new one is 300 MHz, or 450 MHz, or 1 GHz. It was like owning a Supersoaker 2000, and wanting the newly released 3000.

Now, I have no idea what I even own. As someone else said, it's a dual-core something or other. There's no upgrade path, or direction for consumers to follow. If you walk into a store, it's quite confusing, and it's difficult to make sense of all the recent hardware, and I think it leaves people not knowing what they want to buy, or what's even considered an upgrade.

weego• 12 years ago

In the UK at least if you walk into a store you will find they have a confusing set of badly specced models of brands you probably shouldn't buy at prices you probably shouldn't pay.

I give a lot of credit to Apple in keeping their line fairly straightforward (usually only devs or photo/video people need upgrades) otherwise everyone gets the same base model for one of a tiny number of variants. The prices across channels and concessions are always the same too.

lucaspiller• 12 years ago

The model numbers manufacturers have definitely don't help. A friend recently bought an Acer Aspire E1, of which there are about a million different combinations. The range she got has model numbers like E1-472P-XXXX, where the last four digits mean "whatever configuration of components we plucked out of a hat". Her's is Core i5 4200U, 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD - which I can't find anywhere online :D

As another commenter said Apple has it right in that it's easy to say "this is the 2013 model". I bought a TV yesterday, and although they seem to have confusing model numbers too, at least the shop displayed them saying which was the latest models and it was easy to see the difference between them (apparently "dual core CPU" is a feature of TVs now).

EDIT: Typos.

72deluxe6• 12 years ago

It isn't that different though. You still look at clock speeds on the CPU, as well as the burst speed for what it can ramp up to. So that's the 233/300/450 comparison done.

Then perhaps look at whether it is i3/i5/i7 - the higher ones are better.

But then instead of just thinking that your processor is one CPU, count how many logical processors are in there: dual core, quad core etc.

It's still the same - the higher numbers are better :-)

Of course, other things to take into consideration (like it has always been) are FSB speed, RAM clock speeds, disk cache size, disk type, amount of RAM, GPU processing capability (use the same rules as the CPU - count the RAMDAC speed, the amount of RAM, the number of cores), and so on.

I don't think it's changed that much. Just there are more brand names and model names on things now, perhaps?

dragonwriter2• 12 years ago

They are still selling laptops, just not in Europe.

TheTaO• 12 years ago

Samsung wasn't a big laptop or PC seller anyways. I think they are more interested in selling (relatively) high margin devices that they can control and market (like phones and wearables). It's not that PC market is in decline, as others have pointed out, Samsung sees more money elsewhere.

hartror2• 12 years ago

This happened in Australia as well and it really sucks. I run a 15" Series 9 machine and the only thing you can fairly compare it to is a Macbook Air. They're beautiful pieces of hardware somewhat let down by their crappy LCDs.

I guess my next machine will be a Macbook.

jfoster• 12 years ago

Any idea when this happened in Australia? It's not mentioned in the article and I remember seeing Samsung laptops in stores as recently as a few months back, but they do indeed seem to be gone from samsung.com.au.

hartror2• 12 years ago

In the past 3-6 months?

richardkeller• 12 years ago

Same thing in South Africa. Very unfortunate - Series 9 was pretty much the best available line of laptops available here.

pacaro• 12 years ago

I wonder if differences in implied warranty cut into margin in Europe.

It's not super clear what the actual standard is, but I know that (for example) a laptop that I had failed at about 13 months old because of a design flaw and in the US I was SOL, but other complainants with the same flaw in the UK had the motherboard replaced because the laptop was considered "not fit for purpose" which if I understand the Sale of Goods Act in the UK is good for 6 years after purchase — that could really eat into the margins in the hardware industry

Silhouette2• 12 years ago

The 6 year figure is an upper bound, and even if a device failed after 5 years the laws here in the UK wouldn't normally require a full refund of the original purchase price or anything so disproportionate.

However, there is a principle that essentially says something has to last for a reasonable length of time given what it was bought for. I think few would claim that a laptop costing hundreds of pounds and failing just over a year after purchase met that criterion, and that's what triggers the repair/replace/refund rules in the kind of situation you described.

ekux44• 12 years ago

Do these consumer protection laws apply to security updates or cloud/service-dependent features?

noinsight• 12 years ago

In the EU there's a mandatory warranty of 2 years for all electronics.

At least in Finland, the "not fit for purpose" stuff also applies in addition to that so if you can prove that your hardware failed "unreasonably soon" because it's somehow defective and not just due to "standard wear and tear", the manufacturer has to fix it. Of course it has to be a very valid reason for that to apply.

http://ec.europa.eu/consumers/ecc/consumer_topics/buying_goo...

chx2• 12 years ago

The Samsung Q30, that many of you might know as the Dell X1 was a subnotebook so far ahead of its time. It was 12", pretty decent 1280x800 resolution, 1.1kg, fanless, less than an inch thick at its thickest.

contingencies• 12 years ago

As this seems a reasonable place to pose the question: I've seen (eg. at meetups) people using bluetooth keyboards with tablets turned around on stands as sort of mini-laptops with shell access.

Has anyone here done this with a comfortable hardware configuration for nontrivial developments tasks? I guess what I really want are tablets that run proper (vs. Android) Linux, can perhaps handle occasionally running paravirt at not entirely painful speeds, and (I believe this is the killer standing in the way) have hardware with open source or reliable enough binary blob drivers that are therefore safe to frequently deploy very recent kernels to without losing wifi, sound, camera, GPS, GSM/CDMA, backlight control, etc.

ajcarpy2005• 12 years ago

It's beginning to seem a little weird when companies refer to either exiting or entering markets in various regions while remaining unchanged in others. Obviously this generally effects retail and not online sales.

ljosa• 12 years ago

So now it's ThinkPad or MacBook Pro. What is it like to run Linux on MacBook Pros these days? Does Ubuntu and other popular distributions install without much fiddling? Does any of the hardware not work with Linux?

Reebles• 12 years ago

I know that the web cams on new Macbook Pros do not work on linux, and there has been little to no progress on making them work.

darkstar999• 12 years ago

I'm a fan of linux and have never owned a Mac, but honestly if I had one I'd just stick with OSX. It's going to be a much better experience.

maximumoverload• 12 years ago

Well, this is an installation guide for the latest MacBook Pro, for the latest ubuntu.

I wouldn't call this "easy".

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro11-1/Saucy

It also has a fairly big section "Things that do not work (or fully work) yet".

Synaesthesia• 12 years ago

Virtualisation is actually a really nice way to run Linux on a Mac.

72deluxe6• 12 years ago

I second this. It means stuff typically just works (including that old chestnut hibernation), plus it means you can write OSX/iOS software still (which is why I bought one in the first place)

bluthru• 12 years ago

The battery life might be better if you virtualize linux instead.

ekianjo6• 12 years ago

"It's common knowledge that the PC market is in decline."

Mmm, not so much. Apart from what you hear from tablet makers. It's stagnant, but it's not in sharp decline.

Source: 2Q13 shipments : 75,700,902 VS 2Q14 shipments : 75,763,725

Yeah, it's "common knowledge" as they say, if you don't bother checking numbers.

https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2793921

jessedhillon4• 12 years ago

I think you're misunderstanding the term decline as used here. See the following link,

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/decliningindustry.asp

ekianjo6• 12 years ago

There's plenty of life in the PC platform. When you'll want to have high quality VR at home, it won't be on PS4 nor on Gear VR, it will be on a High specs PC with an Oculus or Valve headset. So not sure where you see this as an ongoing decline, when new uses are on the rise.

EDIT: besides, based on your link, it should be classified as Mature Phase and not Declining phase. See sales numbers.

yaeger• 12 years ago

All in all I feel that the market is basically seeking equilibrium.

For years, you had to buy at least a laptop if you wanted your mother to be able to use facebook to stay in touch with the family that maybe moved away. Even back then, for such a usecase a laptop was overkill. But it was still a sale for the vendor.

Now, phones and tablets cover these things very nicely so it is only logical that sales of laptops decline. What also helps explaining the lower sales is that quite frankly, for many many usecases where you might prefer a laptop over a tablet, a laptop from a couple of years ago is still very much sufficient to get the job done. There is simply no need to upgrade as frequently as we did in the past. Edge cases like heavy duty movie editing or rendering of course still require a more up to date machine, I imagine.

parag_c_mehta• 12 years ago

The advent of SSD has been redefining moment in PC history. Earlier when friends or relatives complained about slow PC, solution offered was add more "RAM" which was not possible as "RAM" always kept evolving with tie up to motherboards.

But now my first suggestion for them is to go for SSD, which instantly fixes their old "slow" PCs. Thus eliminating the need to buy a new PC/laptop.

ekianjo6• 12 years ago

Very true. SSD make a huge difference no matter your hardware, and certainly makes any old system look fresh as new.

hpaavola• 12 years ago

If you are looking for a Linux compatible laptop that is somewhat similar to MacBook Air, look for Asus Zenbook UX* line. Excellent display, good but not awesome battery life, fast hardware and really good keyboard for its size. I've bought two UX31A's, one for myself almost two years a go and one for my dad last Christmas. Everything else works straight away with Ubuntu other than ambient light sensor. I think there isn't any workarounds for that.

I got Lenovo X1 Carbon (2014, Touch) from work couple months ago and while it has better CPU, bigger SSD, more RAM and better GPU than my two year old Zenbook, it's just worse. The Zenbook lid can be opened with one hand, Lenovo requires both hands. Lenovo has too heavy display and too light keyboard part combined with too tight hinges, so when trying to open the lid with one hand, the whole computer lifts up from the table.

Also, Zenbooks have normal keyboards. I hate the keyboard on X1 Carbon. Instead of normal function keys, there's are adaptive touch keyboard thingy that tries to figure out what kind of special buttons should be shown in there with each program, but it just fails. And feels like... well it does not have real buttons, so I can't feel a thing while using it.

Also, delete button is in the upper right corner in X1 Carbon. And backspace is on the left hand side of it. And that makes no sense. Backspace is used way more often than delete, so it should be easier to hit. And upper right corner is easier to hit than almost upper right corner.

And Zenbooks have normal arrow keys that are not too crowded. Lenovo decided to put page up and down right next to up arrow. When ever I accidentally hit page up or down instead of up arrow, I feel like I'm totally lost.

And almost forgot, Zenbooks have good touch pads, X1 Carbon touch pad moves up and down, so it's like a huge button. Really annoying when you just move your thumb on it and accidentally press too hard, so it registers a mouse click even tough you did not raise your finger.

So, in short Asus Zenbook UX* laptops pack awesome hardware, work with Linux pretty much perfectly and have really good build quality.

allegory3• 12 years ago

Or just buy an older ThinkPad X201 / X220 / T410 with 1440x900 display and get a new 9-cell battery.

The things are really cheap, have a proper keyboard, are bomb proof, every part is replaceable for minimal cost, they are 100% supported by all operating systems, have excellent docking support and you can just sling them in your bag. Mine lives down the back of the sofa cushions when not in use.

I knackered the headphone port on mine from overuse. 5 mins on ebay, £7 spent, new board installed in 5 mins with a Philips screwdriver and the service manual.

For every day tasks, I use an i5 X201 with 8Gb of RAM and a Samsung 840 Pro and it's no different to the stacked HP Z620 I have in the office to use. If I need more power then I use that remotely.

Totally awesome machine and I paid virtually nothing for it.

PC tech is moving so slowly now it's a better investment to buy two older machines so you have a backup unit than one new one if you ask me.

tonyedgecombe2• 12 years ago

I just bought a second hand X240 and am really pleased with it, the only thing it lacks for me is a backlit keyboard.

Fuxy3• 12 years ago

There's hacks and patches on Arch Linux for getting all sensors working I believe.

I have the Asus Zenbook UX301LA see 'helpful links' at the bottom for your model.

I would argue their not the best with Linux since they have a lot of fancy sensors that don't work out of the box but their quality is excellent.

[1]https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ASUS_UX301LA

[2]https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ASUS_Zenbook_Prime_UX31...

irv• 12 years ago

Yes, I have the 2013 model of the X1 carbon and it's about perfect for me (running Debian). But I have no idea why they ruined the keyboard on the latest model.

prithvitheprime• 12 years ago

Sony is just forcing most of the persons to buy windows anyway. Its their downfall in Europe. But as we can see the growth of tablets; its going to be end of the road. It don't think Samsung will be back on manufacturing laptops again in Europe. Like places in India still Samsung, Sony, Dell, Lenovo are still competitors; even they are now realizing the dead line for laptops

voteapathy• 12 years ago

In a similar vein, I feel that there's a sense that consumers feel tablets are "vaguely better." By this, I mean a number of things. For example, laptops often by and large are still sold with hard disc drives instead of solid state, and therefore tablets are actually a faster experience. tablet and smartphone UIs do a 'better job' at handling errors; by this I mean keeping redundant error message pop-ups to a minimum and attempting to more elegantly kill an app. An app store is a simple and safer place to download new software than the awful method Windows had going through the 90's and 00's of venturing out and downloading mysterious programs (which in it of itself has greatly damaged the Windows reputation).

I guess my point is that these issues are not inherently solved due to the tablet form factor, but rather better UI and more pointed hardware directed toward consumer use cases.

dalore2• 12 years ago

I literally just bought the Samsung chromebook. Should I return it and get another chromebook?

dragonwriter2• 12 years ago

Why would the fact that Samsung is no longer selling Chromebooks in Europe make you want to return the Chromebook you already purchased?

dalore2• 12 years ago

Well if Samsung don't want to sell more of them, there must be something wrong with it.

MarkMc• 12 years ago

I thought Chromebooks were selling like hot cakes, then I asked the guy in Officeworks if they sold them and he said, "We used to, but not any more". And now Samsung are pulling their Chromebooks out of Europe.

Are Chromebooks overhyped?

Following Sony, Samsung has stopped sales of its laptops in Europe

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