“‘We have said think it over. Think twice‘, Wang is quoted as saying, ‘It will create a huge negative impact for the ecosystem and other brands may take a negative reaction. It is not something you are good at so please think twice.’ Wang went on to suggest that if Microsoft moves ahead with its tablet plans, the Taiwan-based Acer might replace the software giant as a partner. ‘If Microsoft is going to do hardware business, what should we do? Should we still rely on Microsoft, or should we find other alternatives?’, he is quoted as saying.” Or, you could just build stuff that doesn’t suck. Just a suggestion, Acer.
C’mon microsoft you gonna take that? Call Acer’s girlfriend a skank.
History tells us that could end [Breaking] bad.
“I ain’t no skank”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSu7u7HtSnc
Edited 2012-08-07 14:40 UTC
Release a Linux laptop that doesn’t suck. That’ll show ’em.
How would a linux laptop be different from let’s say a Windows laptop? Besides a different OS
I’m thinking that they could build a laptop out of components that have open source, Linux-friendly drivers, for one.
I’ll give you an example. This very nice Toshiba laptop I’m typing this on is excellent under Windows 7, which it was built for, but I have had the hardest time finding a Linux distro that will recognize all of the hardware on it. The best I’ve done is Mint, but even then I have to jump through a dozen hoops just to get video working. I wouldn’t own this machine if I hadn’t gotten it for such a fantastic deal (basically free), and the few things I need Linux for can be done in a VM for now.
Given that every major component manufacturer writes Windows drivers by default, and Acer is making such a stink about not liking Microsoft anymore, I don’t see why they wouldn’t put the effort into a 100% Linux-friendly laptop. They could still fall back on Windows if it flops in the F/OSS community.
Just a different crappy OS.
Exactly. I can only imagine what kind of bloatware they would load Linux down with. Plus, remember Linpus (yuck, what an awful name) that shipped with the Aspire netbooks? Outdated, unstable, and horrifically slow. I guess, with those qualities, it did fit with Acer’s usual drill, but there’s no way I would ever trust them to get Linux right when they can’t even do Windows. Linux is flaky enough for desktop use already (X.org, I blame you) and there is just so very much more to screw up when doing an OEM Linux.
Agreed! They must start shipping Linux laptops.
Full with all those nice Windows utilities from Acer ported to GNU/Linux.
If that’s the worst they can do, I can imagine Microsoft quoting the Joker: “you have nothing, nothing to threaten me with”.
Things worked out great for the Joker in the end, right?
That’s why it’s called fiction.
For a moment I thought “Think Twice” was Acer’s new marketing slogan.
Would have made an interesting court case.
Unlikely to be in any way interesting (or long) – a century-long usage of “core” motto would be mentioned, also pointing out how longer slogans incorporating it were safe, and the hypothetical court case would be immediately thrown out…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_(IBM)
Imagine how would MeeGo be now after iterations of the product and traction among other vendors?
There was already broad hardware support by companies like intel, amd and nvidia. If only they had not sold out to Microsoft…
Acer have a “Aspire” Netbook with MeeGo interface, and a Distro from hell that sucks hard…
The problem isn’t just Linux. The vendors choose the worst distro on the world every time they sell a product without a Windows OEM Key.
My Aspire came with Linpus Linux and it had no GUI. In the box there was a little manual explaining that “nothing worked in Linux” and attached to it a CD containing WinXP drivers.
So fu** you, Acer.
The same way as Android.
We would have
– MeeGo Acer
– MeeGo Asus
– MeeGo HP
– MeeGo Dell
– …
each one of them with the right set of utilities and specific OEM UI to provide you the right user experience.
Uncertain, the future is..
hmm… I dont remember a single company really having the cojones to stand up to Microsoft in the long run… Sounds merely as a marketing stunt to me.
Hope I^A'm wrong though.
Edit: grammar.
Edited 2012-08-07 12:45 UTC
Last time there was a really big effort by hardware manufacturers to shake the Microsoft shackles was when Asus released their early netbooks with a Linux OS.
They saw a way to produce dirt cheap computers with low cost hardware and zero cost OS, and they took it.
Microsoft countered by picking their WinXP master copy out of the trash and giving it to the netbook makers for virtually zero cost (plus possibly a suggestion that their copies of the regular desktop versions of Windows might get more expensive if they didn’t take it), and thus ended the foray into Linux.
The netbooks quite underpowered, and even an old OS like XP didn’t work that well for them. The initial public enthusiasm for the format started to fizzle, manufacturers responded by increasing the specs until they were really just filling the bottom end of the laptop market, and thus ended the concept of netbooks.
This is also the reason we still have to support IE6 and IE7. Microsoft was forced to extend the lifespan of XP specifically because of this action. They were willing to make us all suffer IE6 for an extra three years, just to stop Linux making any inroads.
In the meanwhile, of course, they were busy taking their eye off the ball in the mobile market, where the really interesting action was happening.
For a company with a significant amount of market share, it makes Microsoft seem rather insecure, considering the amount of market share they could lose to Linux netbooks, would likely be negligible.
You know there is another side to that story which is that those early Linux netbooks had support issues.
Ubuntu broke a Dell netbook that had Ubuntu pre-installed. But I realize many of you are in denial of the 6 month update n break problem.
Changing distros won’t matter, it’s just the nature of Linux. Dell would have to create and support their own distro which includes hiring a team of developers to deal with kernel churn while insuring compatibility.
Linux is not designed as a fail-safe desktop OS and Linus doesn’t give a f*** about success on the desktop.
Linux can somehow compete with Windows on the server by those same OEMs that Linux fans claims are part of some ebil M$ conspiracy.
The harsh reality is the desktop Linux is not free. There is no license fee but it still comes with a lot of costs. XP was much better for granny and cheaper. Linux is dead on the desktop and it’s too late for any revival. Android is the future of consumer Linux.
The OS wasn’t zero cost to Asus, Xandros was definately getting something out of it. And in return for a quite poor Linux variant, which definitely worked worse than XP.
But, somewhere in there, you nearly said that – yes – it was most likely again just another way to get better deals out of MS. That was what Asus saw.
Nonsense. IE6 is virtually unused for quite some time by general population – which you would realize if you’d just look, once in a while, at general web browsing stats.
IE6 did hold out much longer in corporate settings who don’t bother to upgrade, but that’s separate from MS …hell, Microsoft would probably love if corps upgraded earlier (instead of sitting on XP and its default browser for so long, many of them just now upgrading to 7)
I know I am massively in the minority and that my Sister’s Acer laptops have both died early.
However my Acer Liquid is still going strong and it’s only because I want more power that it will be replaced. It is far from worn out.
One of the best devices they ever made.
As if Acer (and other OEMs) hasn’t already released products that rely upon non-Microsoft OSes (eg. IconiaTab A-series). Acer has done little more than complain with every Microsoft initiative, ignore best practices, and fight every attempt to have a baseline of expected platform performance and quality for end-users.
With partners like Acer, MS should think twice about continuing to let them crap all over their brand.
Edited 2012-08-07 13:43 UTC
Acer normally do a terrible job when it comes to things like ACPI compliance, I had to force linux to use a DSDT image with Fedora Core 4 as the one in the hardware was very Windows Specific.
Lenovo and Dell Laptops I haven’t experienced anything similar.
Generally their quality control is a bit rubbish. My mates girlfriend’s Laptop was overheating with VISTA, he took it apart to find that the thermal paste hadn’t been applied properly … worked fine after thermal paste had been applied properly … I seen quite a few examples.
While my D430 dell is getting long in the tooth, it works well and is sturdy.
Edited 2012-08-07 15:13 UTC
Not disagreeing, but to be fair…
This may be indicative of their presence as a Windows OEM. In other words, they had no interest in meeting standards because if it “Just Works” for Windows then that was good enough. It may even be possible that they were encouraged in this attitude.
A foray out of the Magic Kingdom may result in a different view towards things like ACPI.
Well Dell is pretty big Windows partner as well, and my D430 worked fine even though it was Windows Vista certified.
In any case, the shoddy workman-ship … is totally independent of whether they are a Microsoft Partner or not.
Crap bios/dsdt etc. etc. can always be replaced as they are just software on a ROM. However mistakes like the thermal paste not being applied properly, inexcusable … never should have gotten past QA.
I tend to buy “business” orientated notebooks these days now … less pain even though they are more expensive.
Some companies will do it properly and others will take short-cuts. Dell for the most part don’t (especially on those machines they sell to “business”) and Lenovo/IBM have traditionally been pretty solid.
I am quite excited by the Microsoft Surface itself, I might be an early adopter … first computer product I have been excited about in a long time.
Edited 2012-08-08 18:09 UTC
Well dear Acer, see, Asus have partned with Google and launched a sucefull product called Nexus 7 running Android.
Stop crying and move out!
While I do agree that the surface is a piece of shit, Acer telling another company “this is not something you are good at” is hilarious.
Acer, the company who can’t even put their own laptops together properly. Bad airflow, improperly applied thermal paste, disconnected fans, 1.8-inch year-old hard drives, internals taped together, motherboards die in six months, bloatware up the ass and out the mouth for good measure? That Acer? They have the sheer balls to tell another company (at this point it doesn’t matter which company) that they don’t know what they’re doing. Lol. Just, lol. Pot, meet kettle. And yes, for the record, all of the issues listed above I have personally seen and had to repair. I agree with another poster that “Think Twice” is dead on as a marketing slogan for Acer. There was a time when they made decent quality machines, but that was ten years ago. Everything they produce now is put together from bottom-of-the-barrell rejects and held together with spit and tape.
What really kills me about two of the Acer laptops I’ve worked on in the past is their unwillingness to let go of old technology. Both laptops were released in late 2009, yet they still had Vista instead of 7 and the WiFi card was in a mini-PCI, not mini-PCIe slot. Some time during the production of that particular model, they changed the boards to use a mini-PCIe slot instead. Given that the old, outdated PCI cards are twice as expensive as the newer PCIe cards, not to mention that PCIe for laptops has been around since 2005, it makes absolutely no sense to me that they continued to produce such garbage.
On top of that, I also saw a lot of the same build quality issues you mentioned. In fact, one of the laptops I worked on had a dead motherboard within eight months of purchase, and Acer refused to honor their own 1-year warranty. I ended up finding a newer revision board and a matching PCIe WiFi card for less than it would have cost just to ship the unit to their repair center in China if they had been willing to honor the warranty.
What’s the problem, Acer? Use Linux distro instead. Too outside of the box? Not really. Even better, invest couple of millions in developing ARM port of Haiku with multitouch tablet functionality. It’s not that hard, especially for hosting HTML5+JS applications. WebKit works on Haiku already
Add some fancy touch-based shell, few drivers, easy wireless setup applet, then spread your wings and fly. After that you can advertise your new tablet not as “SlowPad”, but as “(Multi)MediaPad”. See what I just did there?
Cheap hardware filled with crapware.
God knows how many people switched to Mac because they thought Windows was the problem and not their $350 Acer that came with one core and 50 programs running in the background.
LOL. Microsoft and Windows itself does a good enough job giving Windows a bad name.
Yep, I know one personally who did just that, and now will never switch back to Windows. As a side-effect, I got a free laptop. An awful heap of crap it was, with Vista, a Core Solo and 512MB RAM. It’s amazing how they could sell a machine like that and keep a straight face. Have to say though, it does reasonably well as a “living room” laptop with Lubuntu on it!
“the Taiwan-based Acer might replace the software giant as a partner. ‘”
Yeah, right. And replace them with what? As long as Linux keeps breaking compatibility with existing apps (courtesy of X.org and PulseAudio), the Linux kernel breaks compatibility with existing drivers every 6 months, and X.org breaks compatibility with graphics cards, Linux doesn’t stand a chance on the Desktop.
This is the dark secret of Linux: The dudes behind X.org, PulseAudio and the Linux kernel don’t care about what gets broken. And Shuttleworth and the other downstream dudes can’t tell upstream “maintain API stability for X years or you are fired” because they don’t have control over upstream, as they still haven’t managed to make money out of selling support for the desktop. Linux works on servers and supercomputers where everything is headless (no graphics or audio) and hardware is standardized, but Linux doesn’t work on the desktop because upstream doesn’t get paid by Desktop Linux and don’t care about Desktop Linux’s needs.
Windows on the other hand maintains API (apps) and ABI/driver model (drivers) stability for at least 6 years. Not perfect IMO, but much better than Linux’s six months.
Everytime an OEM talks about “providing alternatives to Windows” it’s always a negotiating tactic to get from Microsoft whatever they want that time. It may work for one more year, but eventually Microsoft will stop paying attention.
Edited 2012-08-08 18:47 UTC