Intel Corp (INTC)

[biosbob]

the most innovative era in PC client form factor development that we have ever seen.

Possibly true. But I think over the last ten years smart phone and tablet development has moved more quickly PC development. If I were a more clever writer I would come up with a PC analogy to the old Moore's law of telecom that says bandwidth doubles every 50 years whether people need it or not.

At the time of Windows XP launch, the smart phone and tablet business essentially didn't exist, and Android and IOS didn't exist. XP became the world's most popular operating system by some measures. Fast forward to today. Aging XP is still one of the most popular PC operating systems. New Windows OS cost (to OEMs) has increased steadily, as has disk and memory requirements. This 'Windows tax' makes a low end PC more expensive than a low end tablet.

A mid range tablet has a similar or higher resolution display than a more costly mid range notebook. I think the reason, other than to offset the Windows tax, is that Microsoft has not fixed its 20 year old problem with handling high resolution displays, especially small ones where DPI scaling is needed. I really think Apple is promoting the trend of absurdly high panel DPI because they know PC hardware will follow, and Microsoft cannot handle it.

PC notebook touch screen adoption seems to have peeked at 11-14%, or something like that. Apparently the 'must have' Windows 8 works so well with a mouse pad that users don't want the $25-40 cost adder for touch screen.

Tablets often include handy hardware gadgets such as GPS and gyroscope. I wonder how Android support for these devices came about. I can only imagine (exaggerating):
Android tablet designer: "Hey look, we can buy GPS modules for only $3 each". He calls the vendor and orders samples. "Hey software guy, I am sending you a new toy, integrate it and submit Android patches so that we can use it in our next design".

PC notebook designer: "Crap. Customers are pressuring us for GPS support. Schedule a meeting with our PM and an architect". A week later the GPS kickoff meeting is held and action items are assigned. A new meeting is scheduled so that marketing can be included. Marketing agrees to do a cost feasibility study. Six months later, the project is approved. The architect makes a proposed schedule:

 1) Contact legal and get the three way NDA work started        3 months 
 2) UEFI BIOS support (target UDK 2015)                        12 months 
 3) ACPI support (try to make ACPI 6.0 cutoff)                 18 months 
 4) Windows driver (target Windows 10)                          6 months 
 5) Target roll out: Windows 10                            April 1, 2016