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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

> If you want an ARM laptop, buy one.

You mean the one? Because there are only like 1 or 2 in the market. And their chips are like from 2013. That's why they are "slower". I want Snapdragon 820, or Exynos 8890, or a Cortex-A72-based one like Huawei Kirin 955 or Mediatek's Helio x30. And I want them this year, not in 2018. I don't want a dual core Cortex A15, or a quad-core Cortex A9, like what you get on the market right now.

If you look at Amazon like 8 out of 10 top Chromebooks have Atom Bay Trail "Celeron" chips. I don't know where you got the idea that there are "more popular ones" with Core i3 or higher. Were you thinking of Chromebook Pixel? That may be known by many but it's certainly not popular in sales.

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There have been a few attempts to sell ARM-based laptops, including Smartbooks (1) and the Microsoft Surface. They've all flopped horribly. This doesn't mean they can never be successful, but it does make PC manufacturers less likely to take the risk again.

Of course, users can always buy an ARM tablet and add a cheap keyboard/case combo.

They needn't necessarily be slow -- see the Apple iPad Pro, for example. However, most buyers are probably looking for something that costs less than a Windows 10 laptop, and you can now get Windows laptops or 2-in-1s for $199 or less. These also have almost-instant on and can run sandboxed smartphone-style apps, albeit only a few hundred thousand of them.

In sum, it could be tough to launch an ARM-format laptop (much more expensive than launching yet another Windows 10 laptop), and the margins would most likely be thin or negative.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartbook

I'm aware of the shortcomings of the ARM-based Windows notebooks. But they mostly failed because there are no great "universal" apps.

Chromebooks have no such issue, because for one they are "browser-based" so ISA-agnostic, and two, Android apps are also ISA-agnostic for the most part. In fact the majority of native apps were optimized for ARM, not x86, last I checked, so if anything it's Intel's hardware that could cause some issues with some apps on Play Store-enabled Chromebooks.

As for performance, Apple's A9X can beat Core M on many workloads. A9X is probably no more than $35. That Core M was $280 (that's what the OEMs pay when they bundle them in their devices, possibly with some light negotiation).

http://www.extremetech.com/mobile/221881-apples-a9x-goes-hea...

Actually they aren't only browser based. You can run native code:

Behold:

https://www.chromium.org/nativeclient/pnacl/introduction-to-...

It's an amazing & beautiful feat of engineering. I'm unclear about it's feature - I suspect webassembly may become a standards-based equivalent that makes NaCL and PNaCL unnecessary.

> I'm aware of the shortcomings of the ARM-based Windows notebooks. But they mostly failed because there are no great "universal" apps.

Smartbooks were not Windows notebooks. They still failed. Why the Surface RT failed is another matter, but the major reasons included (a) price and (b) the inability to run traditional Windows 32 software.

> That Core M was $280 (that's what the OEMs pay when they bundle them in their devices, possibly with some light negotiation).

Hard to know what OEMs pay for Intel chips, and unless you work for one, you probably don't. (Even if you do work for one, you probably don't.) However, it's not going to be $280 on a $599 selling price.

In fact, Intel listed the Core M with a "Recommended Customer Price" of $281. Selling them by the thousand to OEMs, I'd guess it might get half that, though I'd be interested in hard evidence to the contrary.

Looking on amazon.com, most Core M laptops seem to be heavily discounted, possibly because they don't seem to offer particularly good performance for the money. The Lenovo Core M Yoga that hit the UK market first (at the end of 2014) roughly halved in price within months....

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