05/25, 4:00pm
Dell's Windows 8 enterprise tablet sports hardware keyboard
Leaked images have emerged purporting to show both photos and specs for two forthcoming Dell tablets running Windows 8. The images appeared yesterday on tech site Neowin, and apparently show the Dell Latitude 10 and XPS 12. Dell has already affirmed that the company will be one of the very first to release Windows 8 tablets, but these images appear to be the most concrete evidence to emerge to date with regard to features and capabilities for those offerings.
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05/25, 12:49pm
Toshiba follows Dell, Lenovo in exiting the netbook business in the US: exec
Toshiba won't bring any new netbooks to the US market, a company executive told Liliputing. This means that the NB510 netbook powered by Intel's Atom N2600 processor introduced at CES won't be sold in the US. Instead, Toshiba America will sell ultrabook computers, which are lighter and thinner, but also more expensive.
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05/23, 7:30pm
Consumer sales responsible for 33 percent drop in profits
Dell has announced its fiscal-year 2013 first-quarter results on Tuesday, as the continuing skid in profits continues. Quarterly revenue was down four percent from a year ago to $14.4 billion. Profit continues to fall and dropped a staggering 33 percent to $635 million. The consumer division continues to weigh down the company, with a revenue of $3 billion, a 12 percent decline year-over-year.
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05/22, 5:48pm
Latitude to include max 256GB SSD capacity
Dell is set to update its Latitude series, including an Ivy Bridge-equipped notebook, according to a rumor. Sources of Tweakers.net suggest the Latitude 6430u will be thinner than its predecessor, while bringing a choice between Intel's Core i3, i5, or i7 Ivy Bridge processors.
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05/22, 10:34am
HP leads in actual notebook share
Apple led the market in mobile PC shipments during the March quarter, at least when including the iPad, according to preliminary NPD data. The company shipped 17.2 million iPads and MacBooks, representing a 118 percent jump year-over-year, and 22.5 percent marketshare during Q1. About 80 percent of those units were iPads though, whereas the other top sellers succeeded on the basis of notebook shipments.
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05/11, 1:23pm
Baidu to name hardware partners for new Baidu Cloud OS next week
Chinese software giant Baidu, which also runs the country's largest search engine, will reveal a new smartphone partner next week, according to a recent report. The phone will run on Baidu's OS, likely to be called Baidu Cloud. The company has previously partnered with Dell to launch a phone running on the current OS, called Baidu Yi.
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05/04, 4:46pm
HP edges apple by 40,000 to climb back on top
According to new figures out from analyst firm Canalys, Q1 2012 saw Apple slip from the top spot in the client PC market. Thanks to a boost in shipments, former number one company HP retook its perch atop the market for at least one quarter. The report, though, may signal troubles ahead for PC manufacturers, as it suggests seismic trends at work in the marketplace.
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05/04, 10:21am
Dell to upgrade notebooks for free with similarly-priced Ivy Bridge
With Dell recently revealing that its three Alienware gaming notebooks were upgraded to Intel Ivy Bridge processors, those who ordered the PCs before the announcement may have felt slightly cheated. Dell has some good news, however, as it will upgrade the ordered notebooks to similarly-priced Ivy Bridge processors for free. This includes the M14x, M17x, and M18x.
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05/03, 8:52pm
Pending M14x, M17x, M18x laptop orders upgraded to Ivy Bridge
Boutique gaming PC manufacturer Alienware users with outstanding laptop orders were informed by email today that the placed order is being upgraded to Ivy Bridge processors at no extra cost. No further delay in the placed order is expected. The Ivy Bridge upgrade is exclusive to Alienware orders, and will not apply to parent company Dell's orders placed before the Ivy Bridge announcement.
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05/02, 3:26pm
New Ivy Bridge Dell desktop ranges ship in mid-May
In addition to making official the Special Edition 15R leaked earlier, along with the smaller 14R, Dell on Tuesday also announced XPS 8500 and Vostro 470 desktop PC families. Both feature Intel's third-generation Core-series processors, dubbed Ivy Bridge. Meant for gamers, graphics professionals, or movie editors, the XPS 8500 desktops are offered with either a 3.1GHz Quad Core i5 3450 or 3.4GHz Quad Core i7 3770.
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05/02, 7:05am
Dell Inspiron 15R range revamped with Ivy Bridge
Dell’s Ivy Bridge upgrades continue to roll out with a Special Edition version of its Inspiron 15R surfacing on the company’s Australian website. The revised notebook is loaded with an Intel third-generation Core i7 ‘Ivy Bridge’ processor, specifically the i7-3612QM clocked at 2.10GHz wedded to an HM77 chipset. It also comes with an optional 15.6-inch 1080p display and a discrete AMD Radeon HD 7730M GPU with 2GB of VRAM. The namesake feature is its anodized aluminum Stealth Black honeycomb finish.
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04/30, 12:00pm
Alienware updates gaming notebook range
Alienware has officially revealed that it has updated its gaming notebook range with Intel's Ivy Bridge processors. This includes the M14x, M17x, and M18x, with the last one rumored to have received the update earlier. The leaked roadmap from earlier this year didn't mention the Ivy Bridge updates, however, though the new chips are finding their way into PCs from most other makers as well.
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04/28, 5:20pm
Apple and others reposition funds to minimize tax
Apple served as the example for a wider industry issue once more on Saturday through an investigation on Saturday. The iPhone maker was already known to be offshoring most of its income, but it's now known by the New York Times to have divisions across Europe, the British Virgin Islands, and elsewhere outside of the US to minimize how much it's taxed. Within the US itself, it has taken advantage of Nevada's absence of corporate tax to boost some of the gains that come into the US.
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04/23, 11:40am
Precision workstations get Xeon E5-2600 CPUs
Dell has just announced four newly updated Precision tower workstations for business professionals with Intel's 32nm, eight-core Xeon E5-2600 processors. Other than the new chip, the towers get an externally-removable power supply that doesn't require any tools. It is lockable and has a built-in handle that lights up green when it's functioning properly.
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04/20, 5:50pm
Apple's Prineville, Oregon plant gets tax break
Apple has reached an agreement with the town of Prineville and Crook County in return for the placement of its Oregon datacenter. The deal will give Apple a 15-year property tax exemption. In return, it will have to invest $250 million in its 160 acres of land and promise at least 35 jobs at 150 percent higher than the county average.
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04/18, 8:10am
Intel and MS hope iPad loses majority market share
Taiwan-area contract manufacturers claimed Wednesday that Intel and Microsoft have ambitious aims of reducing the iPad's dominance of tablets. The Digitimes contacts understood the Wintel combination wanted the iPad down from 70 percent share, as it has had in the past, to under 50 percent by mid-2013. For Intel, Lenovo's strength in its native China would be a key factor.
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04/17, 6:20pm
Alienware M18X R2 gets processor options and SSD
Further leaks have surfaced about the Alienware M18X R2, with more information on the new notebook from the computer builder. Details from Dell-Lab this time cover processor, hard drive, and RAM options, along with a commentary on the screen quality.
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04/17, 5:30pm
Intel Q1 2012 beats guidance but muted
Intel had relatively lackluster results that showed a dampened PC environment with most of its hope resting in the future. Its revenue was flat from year to year, at $12.9 billion. Intel hadn't divulged its exact PC Client group revenue in 2011 results, but it noted that the mostly desktop- and notebook-focused group's revenue was down seven percent from this past fall, to $8.5 billion.
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04/11, 5:05pm
IDC and Gartner give early Q1 2012 estimates
Both Gartner and IDC provided early estimates of winter 2012 market share that showed Apple making big strides in the US. The two gave the Mac a tentative share of 10 or 10.6 percent, in either case enough to put it in third place. Both saw rapidly falling Acer and Toshiba below Apple in share.
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04/06, 11:20am
Ivy Bridge mobile leaked early
Intel's Ivy Bridge has had its mobile side tested early in unofficial benchmarks. Bulgaria's Laptop.bg was given a reference notebook with the unreleased 2.3GHz, quad Core i7-3610QM and overall saw a clear performance edge over the current 2.2GHz Core i7-2670QM. In CPU tests for Cinebench 10 and 11, the difference was between eight and 22 percent, respectively.
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04/02, 1:35pm
Dell buys Wyse to expand business cloud offerings
PC maker Dell on Monday revealed it has purchased thin client and desktop virtualization technology specialist Wyse Technologies. The acquisition will help Dell expand its cloud offering for enterprises. That market is growing rapidly across the globe, Dell believed in making the deal.
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03/29, 10:35am
Dell XPS 15 to get 3rd-gen Core and GeForce 600M
New leaks have pointed to the full-size Dell XPS 15 getting much slimmer along with its 2012 revamp. The Netherlands' Tweakers.net provided both a photo and claims that the mid-size notebook would fall from a very thick 1.5-inch body down to a more MacBook Pro-like 0.95 inches. Its new design should have a 15.6-inch, 1080p white LED-backlit display with edge-to-edge Gorilla Glass on top.
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03/28, 11:35pm
Dell exits another mobile category
Dell in a statement confirmed that it had backed out of smartphones in the US. At least at present, the Android-running Venue and Windows Phone-based Venue Pro had "run their course," PCWorld paraphrased a Dell representative as saying. There would be mobile devices later into 2012, but Dell was unclear if there would be more than tablets at the time.
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03/22, 10:50am
NVIDIA fills out GeForce 600M line
NVIDIA has paired up the GeForce GTX 680 launched Thursday with its first notebook graphics sharing the same Kepler architecture. The GeForce GT 640M LE, GT 640M, GT 650M, and GTX 660M all use the new 28-nanometer building process both to be smaller and cooler than their ancestors as well as up the core count and clock speeds. They peak at 384 cores on the 640M, 650M and 660M and up to either 735MHz or 850MHz on the 660M, depending on whether or not it's using GDDR5 or DDR3 memory.
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03/21, 6:15pm
Tweaks address early glitches
Dell has released several updated drivers for its XPS 13 ultrabook, addressing hardware issues that have affected the new device. A touchpad driver is designed for improved multi-touch functionality, including scrolling performance and palm recognition to avoid accidental input.
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03/20, 11:15pm
Windows 8 tablet rollout given rough outline
Microsoft's Windows 8 ARM tablet rollout has had a rough schedule possibly outlined in a rumor late Tuesday. Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo were said by Digitimes' part supplier contacts to be the ones hand-picked for the October release. The Nokia tablet might follow a month later, in November.
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03/20, 11:15am
AMD's Opteron 3200 web server chips start to ship
Chipmaker AMD has just detailed its new eight-core Opteron 3200-series CPUs, meant primarily for cloud and web hosting servers. Based on its current Bulldozer architecture, it can be had in four- or eight-core variants and is rated at 2.7GHz. A Turbo Core mode bumps the clock speed up to 3.7GHz, though only at half the active cores.
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03/19, 10:50am
Intel Xeon E5 may have seen shipment spikes
New rumors floated Monday have raised the prospect of a possible shortage of Xeon E5-2600 processors. Taiwanese server designers purportedly told Digitimes that there was 20 percent less supply of Intel's workstation chip than for brisk orders, leading contract PC builder Quanta to push Intel for more. Most top computer builders plan to use the E5, and interest had been "higher than expected," the tip indiciated.
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03/16, 4:05pm
Dell CCO Felice shrugs off iPad
Dell's chief commercial officer Steve Felice in a sweeping interview on Friday tried to downplay the effect of the iPad, and Apple as a whole, at work. He contended to Reuters that iPads and iPhones still raised "a lot of concerns" in the corporate world, where compatibility with the rest of the office, device management, and security might still be problems. Dell would be in the "best position to meet those," he said, although Felice didn't say how his company would be different from other Windows supporters.
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03/13, 9:55am
ChangeWave shows iPad consolidating in work world
A follow-up study through ChangeWave has shown that corporate uptake of iPads was only climbing higher in February despite more concerted attempts from Android makers. Of those hoping to buy tablets in the spring, he number of companies looking to buy the iPad shot from 77 percent in November to a new high of 84 percent just last month. Without exception, every Android tablet designer's share of tablet interest declined, with none crossing into double digits.
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03/12, 6:50pm
Expected to sport Ivy Bridge Core i5 or i7 CPUs
Dell may be prepping an updated version of its mid-sized XPS 15 laptop. Dell-Lab has posted potential specs for the 15-inch XPS L521X. The blog has been fairly accurate in past Dell product information.
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03/12, 10:25am
NovelPoint tries to sue most PC builders
An unusually ambitious patent lawsuit filed late last week, and published Monday, is hoping to profit from the rest of the industry's work. Largely unknown NovelPoint Security LLC has sued 35 mostly major companies over two patents for a "method for limiting computer access to peripheral devices" and a "network security system allowing access" based on master tokens. The sweeping nature of the patent includes virtually every major PC and electronics builder, including Acer, Apple, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Panasonic, Samsung, Sony, and Toshiba.
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03/08, 1:00pm
Dell preps pro tablet for Windows 8 launch
Dell's namesake founder Michael Dell in an interview (video below) let slip that his company was planning to be one of the very first with a Windows 8 tablet. The company not only wanted to be in early but would have a tablet on sale "the exact day" Windows 8 was shipping, alluding for Bloomberg to a direct collaboration with Microsoft. The CEO was adamant that corporations wanted a tablet that could be locked down and run their legacy Windows apps.
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03/06, 5:00pm
Intel Xeon E5-2600 given official arrival
Intel ended one of the longest waits for one of its processors in recent memory on Tuesday by launching and detailing the Xeon E5-2600. Its mid-range server and workstation chip is a superset of the much newer Sandy Bridge-E architecture and can carry a full eight cores (up from six) and handle a much larger 768GB memory ceiling. The extra cores, along with a shrink from 45 to 32 nanometers and new AVX support, should make it about 80 percent faster than the Xeon 5600 it replaces.
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03/03, 1:25pm
Valve Steam Box would consolize PC gaming
Valve Software is entering the console race by developing its own hardware platform, new rumors brought up early Saturday. The approach outlined by The Verge would have typical PC hardware with a Core i7, 8GB of RAM, and NVIDIA graphics, but it would serve as a fixed platform for three to four years. Developers would then target their games to the system, which as expected would use Steam as its primary way to get games.
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03/02, 2:45pm
Apple tries to tout job benefit to US
Apple has reacted to concerns that it was offshoring too many jobs with a new Job Creation promo page on Friday. The iPhone maker contended that a total of 514,000 jobs were either directly created by Apple or depended heavily on it for support. While only 47,000 were core Apple employees, many of them retail, it believed 257,000 in various industries had jobs that depended significantly on Apple and another 210,000 in the iOS "app economy."
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02/28, 5:15pm
ARM server in Dell lab for 'over a year'
Speaking at an event in San Francisco, Forrest Norrod, general manager for Dell’s server solutions group hinted at the possiblity that an ARM-based server could be on the horizon. Norrod said Dell has had ARM systems in their lab "over a year," and said adding ARM processors to its lineup might be attractive to customers that with concerns about power consumption. He pointed out that Dell's lifecycle management system is independent of the CPU and fully capable of incorporating ARM processors.
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02/28, 4:05pm
Lenovo latest to stop carrying netbooks online
Lenovo on Friday stopped selling netbooks through its own website. The models that were depleted won't be replaced in the web store "in the near future," the computer maker's rep revealed. Whether the netbooks will continue to be sold in retail stores hasn't been detailed.
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02/27, 6:30pm
13-inch shows strong resemblance to MacBook Air
Dell has begun shipping its XPS 13 ultrabook. Dell unveiled the computer at CES in January. The device bears a strong resemblance to the Apple MacBook Air, albeit with a heavier body.
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02/27, 5:00pm
Michael Dell backs away from core PC business
Dell's namesake, CEO Michael Dell, made a symbolic statement at an enterprise launch event that his company wasn't really a PC builder. He argued to a San Francisco audience including Forbes that his company, which started off making custom PCs, was "not really a PC company" and instead that it was an "end-to-end IT company that really understands the needs of its customers." As an illustration of this, the introductions were focused not just on servers of all sizes but 10Gbps Ethernet equipment and networked storage.
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02/23, 10:05am
HP tops notebook-only charts
Apple was the lead mobile PC vendor in the fourth quarter of 2011 and the rest of the year, at least when including tablets, an NPD DisplaySearch report shows. The company shipped just under 23.4 million MacBooks and iPads in the fourth quarter, and more than 62.8 million for the entire year. NPD observes, though, that almost 80 percent of Apple's numbers were iPads, estimated at 18.7 million in Q4, and 48.4 million for the whole year.
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02/21, 10:45pm
Samsung climbs ranks to take third
Lenovo has climbed to the top of Rescuecom's computer reliability ratings for the beginning of 2012, achieving a significantly higher score than its competitors. Apple has fallen to fourth in the lineup, despite maintaining a stronger rating in past years and achieving a surge in overall market share, with a score that is just over half of Lenovo's rating.
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02/21, 4:45pm
Dell touts record enterprise but masks PC trouble
Dell on Tuesday reported results that it touted as producing records but which signaled continued problems in its mainstay home PC business. Although its revenue was up two percent from winter a year ago to just over $16 billion, its profit was down 18 percent to $764 million. The largest drag was in the consumer group, where its revenue dipped two percent to $3.2 billion and it saw an extremely sharp 43 percent drop in operating income to $39 million.
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02/17, 10:15am
Foxconn institutes third recent pay raise
Foxconn on Friday significantly raised pay for its floor workers in China for the third time in about one and a half years. An entry-level factory worker in Foxconn's main facilities at Shenzhen would now get between 16 to 25 percent more pay per month depending on whether or not the person passed a technical test. The pay would be equivalent to 1,800 yuan ($286) base or 2,200 yuan ($349) with the certification.
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02/15, 5:50pm
Dell DLP projectors 3D ready
Dell has quietly launched two new projectors. The 1420X and 1430X both carry a native resolution of 1024x768 and a contrast ratio of 2,400:1. The 1420X puts out 2,700 lumens of brightness, while the 1430X is slightly more powerful, providing 3,200 lumens.
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02/14, 11:20pm
Alienware M18X R2 gets more graphics option
More leaks have surfacesd around the upcoming Alienware M18X R2 that have outlined its potential graphics power. The two higher-end graphics cores, the as-yet unannounced Radeon HD 7970M and GeForce GTX 675M, will both be available in twin-chip setups for very high-end systems if Dell-Lab's historically accurate tips are right. A GeForce GTX 660M would occupy the bottom and might be the only graphics without a dual-chip option in the 18-inch gaming notebook.
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02/13, 11:30am
NPD says Apple top US tech brand
Apple now represents about a fifth of all technology sales in the US, new NPD data showed Monday. By the end of 2011, 19 percent of revenue in the US was related to an Apple product. The company was now the top company selling technology in the US, topping HP, Samsung, Sony, and Dell even when the others could include their sales from all categories.
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02/13, 9:55am
Apple volunteers for wide audits of factories
Apple on Monday took the step of asking the Fair Labor Association to orchestrate "special voluntary audits" of its last-stage suppliers. The investigations, which include Foxconn plants in Chengdu and Shenzhen, began the same day. They include both interviews with "thousands" of workers over conditions as well as inspections and document reviews.
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02/12, 12:15am
We review Dell's smaller XPS performance notebook
The 13- to 14-inch notebook screen size is currently one of the hottest areas of competition right now: it's where Apple, HP, and others start off their higher-end models. Dell has certainly been one of the most active in this space and has brought its high-end XPS line to that space through the 14z. We'll check in our Dell XPS 14z review whether the 13-inch MacBook Pro, the Sony VAIO S, or comparable rivals will feel the strain.
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02/07, 9:35am
Garnter paints bleak picture for Windows in Europe
New Gartner data breaking down European computer market share has shown poor results for almost every computer builder outside of Apple. Continent-wide, both market leader HP as well as Acer, Dell, and Toshiba were all dropping market share. Only ASUS (up 1.5 points) increased share based solely on its own merits among the top five; Lenovo's gain was inflated by its acquiring Medion last June.
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