I realise that the key reason behind all that preinstalled junk is to make a profit. After all, there are people who’ll spring for subscriptions because of antivirus nagware or purchase a full version of an application after playing around with the trial. For most of us though, we just plain take a mocking from Mac users as we hit the uninstall button over and over again.

All PC users suffer this process unless we jump through hoops like pleading with Dell or Toshiba during the ordering process, paying Sony off or—if you’re in the US—purchasing a cheap Walmart product. But now, we’ve finally got official agreement that the crapware doesn’t belong on our PCs and a place to purchase PCs with sparkly clean installs. This is an incredible move by Microsoft, and it must’ve taken quite some balls for someone to propose actually going through with it. Only trouble is that we’ll still see bloatware on PCs purchased from other retailers or through direct channels from makers.

So, dear Microsoft, you’re doing something wonderful in your retail stores, but it needs to go one step further. Please cajole everyone else to sell PCs without the crapware, too. Pretty please. [Electronista via Crunchgear]

I say this as a guy who was baptised into the tech world with a desktop; who still obsessively follows the latest PC components from Intel, Nvidia, ATI and the like; who has built, fixed or upgraded more towers than I care to remember; and who, until a few years ago, was an avid PC gamer. As someone who would be, by most measures, a desktop-PC kinda guy, I just can’t go on pretending there’s a future for them.

The State of the Industry
This is more than a hunch; a grim future is borne out by the numbers. A week ago, iSuppli issued a broad report on the state of the PC industry. The leading claim was predictable: The PC industry was experiencing lower-than-expected quarterly sales—down about 8% from the same time last year. This included laptops, and made sense, because the whole economy’s gone to hell, right? People aren’t buying computers.

Except that’s not quite what’s happening. In the same period, laptop shipments—already higher than desktop shipments on the whole—grew 10% over last year. Desktops were entirely to blame, dropping by an astounding 23%. That’s not decline—it’s free fall.

Stephen Baker, an analyst for industry watchers NPD, shared with me a wider picture of how retail PC sales break down. The way he put it made measuring the rise and fall of sales percentages seem dumb—there really aren’t any sales to lose: “In US retail, 80% of sales are notebooks now,” he said. “Start throwing in stuff like iMacs and all-in-ones”—which share more hardware DNA with laptops and netbooks than traditional desktops—”and it gets even higher.”

The Buyer’s Dilemma
To understand why this is happening doesn’t take anything more than a little empathy. Put yourself in the shoes of any number of potential consumers, be it kids, adults, techies, or luddites. In virtually any scenario, a laptop is the sensible buy.

Take my dad. Despite spending three decades in front of commercial jet instrument panels, his relationship with computers is, at best, strained. When he came to me a few months ago asking for advice about a laptop to replace his desktop, I assumed it was a just a whim, based on what he saw happening around him. It wasn’t, at all. As someone who uses a computer mostly for news, email, music, etc—like a significant part of the population—he was actually being intensely rational. A laptop would do everything he needs simply and wirelessly, with a negligible price difference from a functionally equivalent desktop. If he wants a monitor, keyboard and mouse, he can just attach them. Choosing a desktop PC wouldn’t just be a not-quite-as-good choice—it’d be a bad one.

The TradeoffsLet’s look at mainly stock examples taken (hastily) from Dell’s current product line. Their configurations could be tweaked and changed to make desktops look slightly better or slightly worse, but we chose them because they are typical budget-minded consumer choices. We are not talking about workstations, and we’re not talking about all-in-ones, because if anything, they are keeping this category alive. When it comes to pure household computer buying, you can hunt for deals all you want, but laptops and desktops are more closely paired than you might expect.

That’s not to say that there aren’t noticeable tradeoffs. Graphics performance, although I wasn’t specifically angling for that with these configurations, is generally better in a desktop. Likewise, hard drives—being that desktops use larger, cheaper 3.5-inch units—are faster and more capacious across the board. Greater amounts of RAM can be had for less in a desktop, the optical drives can be slightly faster, and the ports for those and other drives can be used for expansion.

But these tradeoffs aren’t nearly as pronounced as they once were, nor are they as consequential. On account of the huge demand and sales volume, newer mobile processors have become a hotbed for innovation, now rivaling most any desktop processor, and mobile graphics engines—though still markedly inferior to dedicated desktop cards—have improved vastly in recent years, to a point where most consumers are more than satisfied.

And if you really look out for them, there are some amazing deals to be had on new notebooks. (Look at Acer’s 15-inch, 2.1GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB DDR3 RAM laptop with 1GB GeForce GT130 graphics card and Blu-ray for $US750, and then try to build the equivalent in a desktop at the same price.)

The important takeaway here is that the performance sacrifice you make in owning laptop is minimal, and mitigated, or even outweighed, by its practical advantages. Want a bigger screen on your notebook? Hook it up your HDTV. Want more storage? Buy a cheap, stylish bus-powered external USB drive. Want to use your desktop on the toilet? Good freakin’ luck.

The Fall of the Gaming PC
But to say that the average user doesn’t have any reason to buy a hulking beige box isn’t that controversial, and even borders on obvious. The real, emotional, diehard support for the form factor is going to be found elsewhere anyway. I mean, hey, what about gamers? Have you ever tried to play Crysis on an Inspiron? Let’s jump back to the numbers.

Last year saw a huge 26% increase in game sales across platforms, powered mostly by Xbox 360, Wii and Nintendo DS sales, according to NPD. Breaking that number down, we see PC game sales down by 14%. That decrease barely even registered in the broader scheme of things, since total PC game sales amounted to just $US700m of the industry’s $US11b take. This year is looking even worse. You know what, let’s just call this one too: PC gaming? Also dead.

As the laptop is to my old man, the console is to the gamer. Just a few years ago, buying—or just as likely, building—a high-end gaming PC granted you access to a rich, unique section of the gaming world. Dropping a pile of cash for ATI’s Radeon 9800 to get that precious 128MB of VRAM was damn well worth it, since there was no other way to play your Half Life 2 and your Doom 3. PC titles were often demonstrably better than console games, and practically owned the concept of multiplayer gaming—a situation that’s changed, or even reversed, since all the major consoles now live online. We even spotted a prominent PC magazine editor (and friend of Giz) copping on Twitter to buying an Xbox game because it has multiplayer features the PC version doesn’t. Yes, things are different now.

NPD’s Baker sees it too: “Go back two years ago and think about all the buzz that someone like Falcon or Alienware or Voodoo was generating, and how much buzz they generate now, that might be a little bit telling.” He adds, “There’s considerably less interest in high powered gaming machines.” They’re luxury items in every sense, from their limited utility to their ridiculous price to their extremely low sales.

A Form Factor on Life Support
But no matter how irrational a choice the desktop tower is for the regular consumer, sales won’t hit zero anytime soon. As we’ve hinted, much of this can be explained by simple niche markets: Some businesses will always need powerful workstations; older folks will feel comfortable with a familiar form factor; some people will want a tower as a central file or media server; DIY types will insist on the economy and environmental benefit of desktop’s upgradeability; and a core contingent of diehard PC gamers, despite their drastically thinning ranks, will keep on building their LED-riddled, liquid-cooled megatowers until the day they die.

Baker sees another factor—less organic, more cynical—that’ll keep the numbers from bottoming too hard. “Desktops are a lot more profitable than notebooks for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that big shiny monitor, which has a nice margin attached to it. For the retailers, people tend to buy a lot more peripherals and accessories when they buy desktops than when they buy notebooks.” Even if the volumes are ultra-low and concept is bankrupt, retailers are going to keep bloated, price-inflated desktops and desktop accessories out there on the sales floor until they’ve drained every last dollar out of them.

You’ll see plenty of desktop towers for years to come, in megamarts if not in people’s homes. You’ll still hear news about the latest, greatest graphics cards, desktop processors and the like. Enthusiasts and fansites will stay as enthusiastic and fanatical as they’ve ever been. These, though, are lagging indicators, trailing behind a dead (or maybe more accurately, undead) computing ideal that the computer-using public has pretty much finished abandoning.

Think about it: Carriers like Sprint, Verizon and AT&T regularly charge between $US8 and $US10 per month for GPS apps. Gokivo is just a made-for-iPhone version of Verizon’s not-so-great VZ Navigator. Why did you expect an updated and hopefully improved version of that would cost less?

TomTom, TeleNav and Navigon are all expected to be launching their own turn-by-turn navi apps for iPhone before the year is out, and it would be a shock to me if they went any less than $US10-per-month.

The question is, are they worth it?

Because we’re talking turn-by-turn navi apps, the numbers are easy to break down. Not only do we know what carriers charge already, but we know, for instance, that TomTom still lists its PDA software (supports Dell Axim, Sony Clie and Palm Zire, among other extinct devices) for $US99.95—without free map updates. At the same time, we know that even the cheapest decent portable navigators, like the Garmin Nuvi 250, cost $US128 on sale—also without free map updates.

These apps, by definition, don’t come with maps loaded into the phone—they download the most recent ones from a server which the software maker pays for the right to use on an ongoing basis. So add to that the cost of licensing instantly up-to-date (Nokia-owned) Navteq or (TomTom-owned) Tele Atlas map databases, and you see why no navi can just be a $US15 one-time app. As Gokivo’s creators, Networks In Motion, say on their blog:

It takes a lot of work and money to deliver all these features and functionality that’s included in a turn-by-turn navigation app; and unlike product with maps on the device, we are updating maps and search indexes constantly.

This is just one category, but there are many that will need higher pricing or persistent subscription fees to keep them going. This isn’t about The Man—Apple or AT&T or “Macho Man” Randy Savage. It’s about developers, and it’s rough for them when they want to distribute flagship software over a platform that’s used to distributing 99-cent iFarts. The transition must come. I hate to say it, but the iTunes App Store needs more advanced software, and if that means higher costs then, for the sake of the iPhone OS’s continued growth and viability, I say we get behind it.

This isn’t to say Networks In Motion unveiled the pricing strategy in the most graceful way. But what they did to was make the first move. I think everybody in the navigation category was hoping someone else would go first, and Gokivo drew the short straw.

Now come the next questions, like how many devices you can load the software onto. After all, if the download is $US100, and you put it on two iPhones, isn’t it more like $US50 each?

Then there’s the line, “Some argue Chrome’s languishing figures could be bolstered if it were pre-installed in computers.” Now, I don’t pretend to speak for Google at all, but considering they have 10 million active users worldwide after just 100 days, I don’t think they’d be describing Chrome as languishing. Seriously, I thought The Australian was meant to be objective.The simple fact is that browser choice varies depending on who a website’s target audience is. I can tell you that for Giz AU, 44% of you guys use Firefox, 38% use IE, 11% are on Safari and 4% are on Chrome, although I expect that figure to jump up a bit when Google release a Mac version (lots of you use Macs). So the whole premise of Google’s browser “failing to shine” is completely flawed based upon the figures Australian IT are sprouting.

The bottom line: Looking at Google’s own global figures is a much more accurate way of discerning Chrome’s success than using Fairfax and News Ltd sites, even if Google won’t share local figures. Because no matter how successful your site is, there’s still an inherent skew by the type of visitor that comes to your website.

[Australian IT]

It’s not the plastic. I like plastic fine. And painting with other colours, that’s ok, too. It’s just that the overriding reason for painting a plastic device silver is to make it look like metal. It’s stupid! And it needs to stop as surely as wooden panels on station wagons needed to stop 30 years ago and why tofurky is a totally unacceptable replacement for either turkey or tofu.

Silver painted gadgets started in the mobile phone world, and 8 years ago were thought of as a premium finish to those in design circles. “Blame Motorola or Casio,” say some designers I talked to about the trend. Now the “tin man” treatment is reserved for the cheapest devices while the best get done up in real metal. I’m still confused as to why this was a good idea in the first place, and why companies, even some high-end brands, still maintain the facade. (I’m totally looking at you, Pentax, Canon, Dell and Sony.)

First off, it’s insulting to buyer intelligence. Are makers trying to fool us into thinking a device is aluminium or magnesium or stainless steel when its actually a light piece of bent polymer? Maybe from 10 feet away, they’d think that we couldn’t tell the difference, and they’d be right. Visually. Allan Chochinov from Core77, says:

Painting plastic objects so that they appear metallic is a fudge of course—and often convincingly so. But the lie becomes apparent soon enough; at the corners or wherever there’s any kind of friction, the paint wears away to reveal the true plastic.

Industrial designers talk about the virtues of an “honesty of materials” in design practice, and when that honesty is expressed in the final product it’s really great—but rare. With the almost-suffocating cost constraints and real pressure to pump things out quickly, the artifice is just too irresistible.

Yes, the methods of turning a hunk of plastic into a shiny thing is getting better, so these piece-o-craps look better than ever close up. But contextually, they’re not fooling anyone with half a brain. Everyone, everyone, EVERYONE knows that when they see a huge silver TV, even from 30 feet away, it’s probably not made of metal but rather coated with Pantone 877c. And that overly curvy designs are likely plastic sprayed with paint. And mainstream gadgets, like PSPs and DVD players made in China, well, those things are too chintzy to ever get the full metal treatment. They’re not worth their weight in metal.

Which brings us to cost. Yes, like most commercial compromises made in the world, plastic made to look like metal for the most part comes down to saving dollars in manufacturing. Cormac Eubanks, a principal engineer from Frog design told me:

As a raw material metal (aluminium or zinc alloy) is many times more expensive than the same volume of material in plastic. In processing metal, parts need to be die cast, stamped, or (if money is no object) machined. Then one needs to finish them with brushing, tumbling and/or bead blasting. Lastly metal parts need to go through a plating or anodise process to prevent corrosion and oxidation over time. All these finishing steps add considerable additional cost. Painting plastic on the other hand can be inexpensively injection moulded and painted silver in large volumes in a repeatable way.

Secondly, painting polymers to look metallic is insulting to plastic, which isn’t hard and cold like metal, but has its own wonderful qualities and implications. Like translucency, as shown in Zune’s cornershot multilayered finish and Samsung’s red-tinted LCD TV bezels. And resiliency, flexibility, strength and lightness of weight. Or if you like, some plastics can be heavy and stiff, since there are so many ways to make it. Plastic can also insulate from heat and electricity, and when it’s really cold, plastic won’t stick to your hand like a piece of metal does. It can also be easily shaped into radical forms without having to be moved through an extensive finishing and forming process. Those qualities are totally undersold when a machine’s plastic casing is passed off as being made from metal.

Leaving material qualities behind, I’m sure there’s an aesthetic appeal here, too. At least in the minds of tacky Vegas-brained marketers. And maybe at first, the appeal works on those too stupid to catch the drift that they are being had. But as anyone who’s owned a silver painted device knows, within months, if not weeks of heavy use, the thin veneer soon gives way to the gray/white/black plastic underneath. Which would have been fine and beautiful in the first place, had it not been covered up. Worn out silver coloured plastic is uglier than the late Tammy Faye Bakker’s make-up job after a tearful sermon. The Wii in white looks just as nice as it would in aluminium, to me. And because the colour is solid, it’ll look good no matter how often it gets scratched.

Eubanks says that companies should be “true to the material. That means making plastic look like plastic, metal like metal and rubber like rubber. Honesty with materials means you are being honest with your customers.”

I can agree with that. And look forward to the day silver-painted gadgets are no longer made.

I prefer the old one by far, because it is shaped with both impressive lines and curves, like any nice modern automobile, but more importantly, it feels both smooth and slightly “edgy” in the hand. The modern Nano leaves with the impression that its shape is a result of a very simple manufacturing system, not really designed to fit a person’s hand first and foremost. I picture it being made by taking a long piece of aluminium, extruding/cutting out the middle to form an oval, and cutting off the proper lengths. The corners end up being very sharp, and putting it in my pocket, I can feel my pants wearing down, and while holding it in my hands, its definitely poking into my palms in a not nice way. And you never get over the jarring feeling when holding it in your hands. The curved screen is neat, but it picks up glare. And not just regular glare but glare like that in a funhouse mirror, which is slightly more distracting than regular glare. I’m sure its cheaper to make the case, but I prefer the case of the old one better. I even like holding the fat Nano in portrait better to watch videos. So why not buy an older one? Because the new one has a far superior menu system and you can shuffle to the next song by shaking it. Design goes beyond just the form factor. [iPod Nano Review]

As you may be aware, I’m a Windows guy. I’m not diehard about it, however. When the time comes for me to get a new laptop in the next year or so, I’ll be open to switching, making me Apple’s target market. But there’s one big reason that is holding me back from making that switch: price. Apple’s laptops are expensive as hell, and the prices aren’t justified.

Update: We have edited this post to reflect the real hardware/price comparison between the Dell and the Apple laptops. The bottom line: They are not comparable. Our apologies for the mistakes in the original article. –J.D.

Let’s just look at the 13-inch MacBook that was just announced, for example. For $1,300, it comes with a 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive. Over at Dell, I can grab an Inspiron 13 laptop with a 13.3-inch screen, a 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo, 3GB of RAM and a 250GB hard drive. For $750. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s a $550 difference, and the specs are better on the cheaper Dell.

Update:

Actually, the specs on the Dell are not better, as reader Giz James Topoleski pointed out. In fact, the MacBook seems like a much better machine than the Dell except for the 1GB of extra RAM and larger hard drive.

• The Dell uses Intel graphics instead of the much better NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, which is currently unavailable in any other computer.
• The Dell uses a 802.11g Mini-Card as oposed to the MacBook’s Wireless N card.
• While it has 3GB of Shared Dual Channel DDR2 RAM at 667MHz, the 2GB of RAM in the MacBook is 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM.
• The Dell has an Intel Core 2 Duo T5750 with 667MHz bus and 2MB cache as opposed to the Intel Core 2 Duo with 3MB on chip and 1066 MHz bus on the MacBook.
• The Dell has no Bluetooth by default.
• There’s no HD video output on the Dell and no option for one.
• There’s no gigabit Eithernet.

So as you can see, the price difference is quite reasonable, and that’s without counting on things like the multi-touch no-button glass trackpad or the iLife multimedia suite, both things not included in the Dell. It’s like comparing last year’s car model with this year’s.

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And it’s not like Apple is offering anything great for my $550. You have a fancy new manufacturing process, awesome. Your trackpads are glass. OK. I’d rather have $550 and a plastic trackpad, thanks. I’m not sold on no physical buttons anyways. (Update: The whole trackpad is a physical button. –J.D.)

Apple has always put a price premium on its products, and people pay it, which is great for them. But for people who aren’t already on the Apple bandwagon and for people who aren’t having their computers bought for them by rich parents, like the college kids who snap up these laptops every August, there’s no incentive to switch.

Maybe Leopard is way better than Vista. I don’t know, I haven’t extensively used either. But when the time comes to buy a new computer that comes loaded with one or the other, one thing is going to make my decision for me, and it isn’t shiny glass things or funny commercials. It’s the price. And I don’t think I’m alone on that one.

Note: While this last point may be arguable, it’s certainly not the case of the MacBook. Even while the MacBook has less storage space and memory than the Dell, it seems competitively priced looking at the technologies including in the package. –J.D.