First, the “news”: Digitimes is reporting that Asustek is considering a merger of their PC and notebook – really netbook – divisions. This means the two divisions will work as one cohesive unit which means lots of people will probably get fired. Fair enough.
Now what does this mean in the macro sense? Since the early 2000s, PC and laptop hardware has been converging. Open a barebones PC case and you’ll basically find a laptop motherboard hanging out in the middle of a huge box. I remember an entire year or two around 2002 when laptop mobo manufacturers were stuffing their wares into smaller and smaller boxes until you basically had a PC the size of a cigarette case.
With the fall of the desktop PC as a marketable mass-market device – face it: only the very young and the very old really need them and the rest of us, if we’re forced to use them at school or at work, do so under protest – and the rise of the laptop/netbook as a viable alternative, even for some gamers, it makes sense to trim fat by making the merger official.
I suspect more manufacturers are going to go this route, treating laptops and desktops as two parts of the same silo. If it has a processor, memory, and a keyboard, it’s basically in the same genus and species, if not the same order, as every other thing with a processor, memory, and a keyboard.
What think you?