Buying a PC for Your Third-World Adventure

A reader of this blog asked “What PC should I buy that can survive the erratic electricity of a third-world residency?” The answer, of course, is “It depends how much you want to spend.” But having reliable computing in a less-developed setting need not break the bank.

Assumptions

You’re an average, modern computer user with professional (i.e., office), social, and personal computing needs preparing to reside outside a first-world power grid. You could be in the mountains of Columbia or Colorado, or, like me, at the end of a one-kilometer driveway. You need to be able to use your PC at any time, but not necessarily all the time. You have a budget.

My previous stories on this subject are here. Your problem is spotty power that can come and go at any moment, day or night, and be off for hours. Your collateral problem is poor power with spikes, low and high voltage, surges, and intermittent on/off cycles. These can and will destroy the unprotected PC power supply in short order.

Strategy

The strategy is to put as much inexpensive stored electricity (i.e., batteries) in front of the computer’s power supply as practical. Duh! The easiest implementation is to use a laptop, which comes with a built-in battery. Modern laptops have hours of self-contained power while you wait for the power grid, backup generator, or tomorrow’s sun to renew your power supply.

Still easy but more expensive choices are a desktop all-in-one (such as an Apple iMac) or a regular desktop. In both the desktop cases cases, you’ll want an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) which stores AC grid power in a battery and delivers it to your electronic devices.

With those assumptions and strategy in mind, here is a prioritized list of what to buy and why to buy it:

The Basics

• A laptop. Commercial grade (e.g., Dell XPS) has higher build quality than consumer grade (e.g., Dell Inspiron). You get what you pay for. Consider: 17″ screen-size as desktop replacement; SSD for reliability and speed. Your choice: Windows, Mac, even Chromebook.
• A high-quality surge protector to filter as much electrical grief as possible. Mandatory unless you use a UPS.
• A bigger and/or backup laptop battery. Greater off-grid time. More efficient than a UPS. Lowest cost when bought bundled with a new laptop.

The Upgrades

• A powerful UPS, where power is measured in volt-amps. Over 1,000VA is better. Below 500VA is probably pointless with a laptop. The UPS has receptacles for other electrical necessities, so it becomes your electrical hub. Also, all UPS systems have power quality circuitry so your PC will always get clean power. Also, PC applications and a USB connection to the UPS can automatically and safely shut any PC down before the UPS itself exhausts its batteries.
• A portable hard drive storage device to back up your PC. If this were me, it would rank in the Basics as a “must have”. The portable hard drives require no electrical power beyond a USB cable. With electricity (from your UPS), there are faster/greater capacity options.
• A USB 3.0 Hub for greater I/O connectivity. Your laptop or all-in-one will never have enough USB ports for the printers, backup storage, Bluetooth speakers, and mobile devices that need charging. Your choices are four or seven ports. Go with the powered seven-port hub. After all, everyone in your house (office) will want to leech off your clean power. Plan accordingly.

The Options

Here’s where the budget goes out the window, but your level of electricity paranoia is nobody else’s business:

• A secondary monitor scales your laptop’s screen to desktop size or becomes a second screen with more real estate.
• Backup generator sized to your home electricity load. Best purchased locally as you will require service eventually. Requires (clean) gasoline.
• Solar power generator requires solar panels, an AC inverter, and distribution hub. It can have its own battery for storage or use the UPS already in our specs. The money problem is a 300-400 watt solar installation can easily cost as much or more than our laptop computing device.
• The ultimate upgrade for this scenario is a Ford C-Max Energi plug-in hybrid car with internal 7.4 kWh batteries, 2 AC power outlets, USB charging, and 12-volt power. You can also drive it. $31,770 and up.

Is a Tablet an Alternative?

A tablet or a laptop/tablet (i.e., a two-in-one) is worth considering. Portable, mobile, self-contained cellular network option. Some have a desktop operating system. The keyboard and mouse can use easily rechargeable AA batteries. Device operating life often exceeds eight hours. Rechargeable from a small solar panel. Connects to Bluetooth peripherals and to a video monitor/TV via an HDMI cable.

Minimalist computing dramatically simplifies backup power requirements.

Consolidated electronics such as a tablet connected to the LCD monitor also used as a TV makes planning easier and redundancy less necessary.

The Network

Getting on the Internet has its own set of problems and costs. You’ll need local knowledge to make cost-effective decisions.

Assuming a controllable data budget, the easiest Internet on-ramp is to use your smartphone as a hotspot and connect your laptop via Bluetooth. You won’t find unlimited data plans in the third world, so this approach needs careful usage-based planning.

A conventional desktop or laptop setup will require a network access device(s) to the cable, wireless broadband, or satellite network. Plan to power-protect these devices too by plugging them into your UPS. However, that limits PC placement to being close to the network access point.

Follow @PeterSKastner on Twitter

Note: the products linked in this blog post are not endorsed by the author. The author has no financial ties to any product mentioned in this blog post.

 

Microsoft: Wrong Strategy, Right Implementation

Last fall, then Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced the company’s new strategy as the “devices and services” company. I choked on this and remained silent because after all, Ballmer was on the way to retirement and the company was clearly on a road to change. I’m not a heckler.

However, let’s look at the strategy on the surface. First, Microsoft is not “the devices company”. They get credit for the xBox game consoles, mass-market mice and keyboards, and …. nothing more. The Microsoft-developed tablets and phones over the years have made hardly a dent in their respective markets. The assets and knowledge base of the Nokia acquisition aren’t likely to move the dial much either. My fellow analysts all agree on this state of reality.

Likewise, Microsoft’s overall impact on IT services is minuscule in the case of enterprise IT, and approximately non-existent in the case of consumers. You don’t need a focus group to determine that Microsoft is not top-of-mind for computer services. Therefore, I conclude the Microsoft as the “devices and services company” is a failure waiting to happen. The reality does not match the words.

Nevertheless, I applaud what Microsoft has been doing of late in making its familiar technology available on the real devices people own and use. A couple of weeks ago, the Office Suite became free apps for the Apple iPad. This morning, I loaded Word into Google Chrome on my Mac — and later I’ll put it on a Chromebook. In the devices space, Google (Android) and Apple (iPad and iPhone) are Microsoft’s arch enemies.

Enemies or not, I am paying nothing for the Microsoft apps on Chrome. I’m also paying nothing to store my documents on Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage. Free lunch on the Internet is good. Of course there’s a caveat, which is that my docs can only be stored in Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud. But that’s a free-market tradeoff that I and many consumers will be willing to make.

If Microsoft keeps implementing an “any device” strategy like the iPad/Chrome offer described above, they’ll do well and buff some tarnish off the brand. And if the company gets around to describing its strategy as “we are the best applications for everyday use by business and consumers on any device”, they might get more applause — and attention. Follow me on Twitter @PeterSKastner

“My ISP is a Solar-Powered Drone.”

Google, the ad-driven search giant, and Facebook, the social connections giant, are fighting over airplane drone technology companies. What’s that all about?

Solar-powered drones would, when they’re ready for mass-market in the next five years, be able to fly for weeks or months. They can take 2D and 3D photos resulting in better and more up-to-date maps. And they could serve as aerial Internet connections. It’s the latter that got my attention because it threatens the status quo in developed nations and opens new markets in developing nations.

Aerial Internet Drones (AIDs) suggest a breakout technology that solves — or at least remediates — the “wireless everywhere” mantra of the past decade. In developed countries such as the United States, intractable wireless problems include inadequate wireless bandwidth in high device areas (e.g., mid-town New York) necessitating more cell towers and greater slices of the electromagnetic spectrum. Moreover, “poor wireless coverage meets not-in-my-neighborhood” and inadequate capital make it politically and economically difficult to add enough cell towers to guarantee wireless broadband such as LTE to build a superior wireless broadband network in suburban and rural areas.

In underdeveloped geographies, which represent attractive new markets for the global technology and wireless companies, inexpensive and inadequate mobile broadband infrastructure creates a chicken-and-the-egg problem.

So, the vision to solve both developing and developed wireless broadband demand is to put up a global network of drones that serve as radio relays for wireless Internet connections. AIDs would be a new form of Internet router, loitering around a more-or-less fixed point in the sky.

At the right altitude, an AID has better line-of-sight than a cell tower located over the hill. The AID theoretically offers greater geographic coverage and often better signal quality than today’s cell tower networks. At a cost of less than $10 million per equipped AID, my envelope calculations suggest AID network costs compare favorably with cell towers for comparable geographic coverage.

In developing areas such as Africa, an AID network is a solution to creating metro- and rural-area Internet wireless infrastructure rapidly and without the difficulties of building land-line-connected cell towers.

Cellphone networks connect cell towers with land line connections to each other and to an Internet wired backhaul. An AID network needs to connect wirelessly to a) client cellphones and the Internet of Things and b) to a radio ground-station connected to an Internet wired backhaul. The radio ground-station is the crux of the difficulties I foresee.

The ground-station requires radio spectrum to communicate up to and down from the AID network. It represents a new demand on the over-burdened and highly political use of the electromagnetic spectrum. Where does the spectrum come from, whose ox is gored, and how are the skids greased?  Think lobbying.

Moreover, the incumbent cable and wireless ISPs (i.e., Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, Dish, et al) are not likely to give up their near monopolies on Internet access by devices, homes, and businesses without a knockdown, drag-out political fight followed by years of litigation.

Add citizen privacy related to drone picture taking to this highly volatile Internet-industrial-complex wireless food fight and you can expect great spectator sport. Although in developing countries, the issue will be described as “drone spying by the NSA”.

Like many, I would greatly appreciate and even pay more for better wireless coverage and higher wireless device bandwidth. First, Google and Facebook have to solve the real technology problems of getting the AIDs into the sky. Second, they have to muscle a (much needed) rethink of wireless spectrum use and the roles of future ISPs through the political sausage factory, and nail down the new spectrum they need. Combined, this is a heavy lift.

So, with a sigh of regret, I suspect it will be quite a while before I can say “My ISP is a Solar-Powered Drone.”

Follow me on Twitter @PeterSKastner.

Titan Aerospace/Associated Press

Google As “The Cross-Platform Apps Company”

A beta version of Google’s Chrome Browser now supports Chrome App Launcher. This opens up the Chrome Store apps to Windows, Linux, and Mac OS desktops plus Google Android and Apple iOS mobile phones and tablets. Not to mention Google’s Chrome OS. Cross-platform is good, users say, because they increasingly recognize the utility of apps and their data across the devices in their lives.

Google’s Chrome App Launcher

Common apps running on a familiar user interface and operating system across a wide variety of hardware platforms is an idea that crops up frequently in the history of the computer industry. Unix and Windows NT come immediately to mind. Google is apparently bringing the cross-platform idea back into play.

The Chrome browser runs on Android, Windows, Linux, and Mac OS and has more recently appeared on iOS. Bookmarks, tabs, settings are synchronized in Google’s cloud including Drive storage, and available to any device at any time. Chrome apps add much more than typical browser extensions. They are real apps, albeit with cloud and local data. Docs, Sheets, and Slides are the functional equivalent of Word, Excel, and Powerpoint in the Microsoft universe, and Pages, Numbers, and Keynote in the Apple Universe.

Chrome apps plus the already cross-platform Chrome browser give Google a wider breadth of platforms than the competition. As more data and usage is moved to the cloud (e.g., Office365), the benefits will become more apparent to cloud-migration users.

Perhaps my personal journey is illustrative. Like many professional users, I’ve followed Microsoft’s Office apps for generations. But over the past decade — Vista comes to mind — I started using a Mac. And I still have PCs. However, I never invested heavily in the Apple iWork office suite, using it for mostly Microsoft-compatible import and export or, lately, to make cross-platform .pdfs of finished documents or presentations. I have expertise and a software investment in Microsoft PC office apps and have no foreseeable intention to move to Microsoft Office 365.

Since more of my consumption and production is happening on tablets and even smartphones, I’m a good candidate to drop Apple iWork and move to Google apps. These appear on the Mac desktop and launch just like Mac apps. Or Windows apps.

Moreover, the mobile apps I use from the Chrome Store are all there too: WorkFlowy, TweetDeck, QuickBooks, and Evernote. It’s not just cloud office.

Let’s leave aside the issue of whether your data is secure in the cloud. That applies to all apps everywhere, and is worth pondering another day.

Being able to run a familiar, common set of apps across all the major hardware and OS platforms and time is a valuable competitive advantage.

I don’t see the technology industry yet recognizing that Google is quietly setting up to be the only supplier that can run the same apps on any broadly used platform.

Follow me on Twitter @peterskastner. Your comments are invited.

Apple’s Q2-2013: Q4 Anticipation

I’m on the road but wanted to update you on Apple’s second quarter.  Revenue was flat and profits were down compared to last year, while iPhone sales were up, and iPad and Mac sales were down. I expect the current third quarter to be constrained by anticipation of expected product announcements in September. Then, product supply issues will be unable to fully meet Q4 holiday demand for iPhone and iPad.

It sure looks like Apple has managed to compress a year’s worth of  opportunities into three or four months. Think how much smoother things might be if product came forth across the entire twelve months of the year.

The text below was supplied by Apple PR. While I cannot vouch for its accuracy, I have no reason at all to dispute it. It’s a useful condensation of the numbers.

This afternoon Apple announced third quarter results, including record June quarter iPhone sales and our highest ever Education revenue. You can find our earnings press release here and a replay of the call with Tim Cook and Peter Oppenheimer is available here. 

Overall:
– Apple reported quarterly revenue of $35.3 billion and net profit of $6.9 billion, compared to $35 billion and $8.8 billion, respectively, a year ago

– Gross margin was 36.9%, compared with 42.8% in the year-ago quarter

– International sales accounted for 57% of total quarterly revenue

– Apple generated $7.8 billion in cash and has returned $18.8 billion in cash to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases

iPhone:
– Apple sold 31.2 million iPhones, up from 26 million in the year-ago quarter

– iPhone leads in customer satisfaction and loyalty, according to numerous third-party research firms, including J.D. Power & Associates, ChangeWave and Kantar

– Apple reduced iPhone inventory by 600,000 units in the quarter

– iPhone remains strong in the enterprise, and has captured 62.5% of the US commercial market, according to IDC

iPad:
– Apple sold 14.6 million iPads in the quarter, compared with 17 million in the year-ago quarter

– iPad faced a tough June comparison, as the first iPad with a Retina display was launched in the year-ago quarter and we ramped up inventory

– iPad channel inventory was reduced by 700,000 units, making sell-through down just 3% year-over-year

– iPad usage share remains incredibly high, and grew to 84.3% last month, according to Chitika

Mac:

– Apple sold 3.8 million Macs, down from 4 million in the year-ago quarter

– The updated MacBook Air line was launched at WWDC in June, making it available for just three weeks of the quarter.

– The Mac was though down 7% but again outperformed the market, which contracted 11%, according to IDC

– We look forward to the launch OS X Mavericks this fall and of the all new Mac Pro later this year

Music/Services:

– iTunes, software and services together generated $4 billion in quarterly revenue

– We now have more than 320 million iCloud accounts and 240 million Game Center accounts

– There are more than 900,000 apps in the App Store, with more than 375,000 designed specifically for iPad

– Customers have downloaded more than 50 billion apps

– Apple has paid more than $11 billion to developers, half of which was earned in the last four quarters

Education:

– Our education division experienced its highest ever quarterly revenue

– 1.1 million iPads were sold in education, and the Mac experienced strong sales as well

– Maine’s statewide education technology program saw 94% of the state’s elementary and high schools choosing Apple products

– The first phase of Los Angeles Unified School District’s plan to provide 660,000 students with a tablet was approved, resulting in an initial $30 million iPad sale

Retail:

– Apple retail stores generated $4.1 billion in revenue, about equal to a year ago

– iPhone saw strong growth in sales of our own retail stores

– MacBook Air had its most successful Retail launch to date

– We opened six new stores across five countries and now have 408 stores, 156 outside the US

Apple iPads

Peak Technology or Technology Peak?

The theory of peak oil — the point at which the Earth’s oil supply begins to dwindle — was a hot and debatable topic last decade. There are lots of signs that we are at a technology demand peak. Is this permanent, or how will we get past this peak?

The last-decade argument that oil production had permanently peaked proved to be laughably incorrect. Hydraulic fracturing  (“fracking”) technology developed in the United States changed the slope of the oil production curve upwards. This analyst has no intention becoming a laughing stock by suggesting that digital technology innovation has peaked. Far from it. However, few things in nature are a straight line; it certainly appears that digital technology adoption — demand — has slowed. We are in a trough and can’t foresee the other side.

One good place to look for demand forecasts is the stock market.

Smart Phones and Tablets
Last month, both gadget profit-leaders Samsung and Apple both took hits based on slower growth forecasts. “Pretty much everyone who can afford a smartphone or tablet has one, so where does the profit growth come from?” was the story line. Good question.

This month, AT&T and T-Mobile announced they would lease customers smartphones instead of selling them outright with a carrier discount. The phones and tablets coming off lease will be re-sold into the burgeoning used gadget market. It’s now too easy to get new-enough gadget technology in the used market. After all, your last-year’s hardware can still run this year’s free, new software upgrade.

On the surface, it appears that the global market for $600 smartphones and tablets is at or close to saturation — a peak.

Desktop and Notebook PCs
The stock market is not treating traditional technology makers very well. H-P is coming back from a near-death experience. Its stock is half what it was two years ago. Dell wants to go private so it can restructure and deal with market forces that are crushing margins and profits. Even staid and predictable IBM has lost its mojo over the past five quarters. Microsoft missed.

These technology makers are dealing with PCs, the data center, and services. They are not major players in the smartphone/gadget market. Their focus is on doing what they used to do more efficiently. That strategy is not working.

The desktop and notebook PC markets are almost all replacement units in developed countries. Macro-economics has dramatically slowed emerging market growth in formerly hot places like Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC). The new customers are being added more slowly and at higher costs, and existing customers have increasingly voted to not upgrade as frequently. My 2008 Apple MacBook Air, cutting edge and quite expensive at the time, is still adequate for road trips. My Sandy Bridge Generation-1 Ultrabook has adequate battery life. There’s no compelling reason, most buyers tell us, to accelerate the PC replacement cycle.

Well, one temporary accelerator is the support demise next year for Windows XP. With auditors and consultants screaming about liability issues, non-profits and government are rolling in new PCs to replace their ten-year old kit. Thank goodness. But seriously, ten-year old PCs have been getting the job done, as defined by user management.

Note also that a new PC likely means a user-training upgrade to Windows 8. Both consumers and businesses are avoiding this upgrade more or less like the plague. There is no swell of press optimism that Windows 8.1 this fall will be the trick. PC replacement is a pain already, so few want to jump on an OS generation change as well.

Data Center
The data center market shows some points of light. Public cloud data centers by the big boys like Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon are growing like gangbusters. High Performance Computing, where ever more complex models consume as many teraflops as one can afford to throw at the problem. Recent press reports suggest that “national security” is a growing technology consumer. [understatement]

However, enterprise data centers, driven by cautious corporate management, are growing more slowly than five years ago; this market outsizes the points of light. Moreover, the latest generation of server technology really does support more users and apps than the gear being replaced. With headcount down and fewer new enterprise apps, fewer racks are now getting the computing workload done. (Storage, of course, is growing logarithmically). We also expect a growing trend towards “open computing” servers, a trend that will suck hardware margin and services revenue from the big server-technology makers.

Navigating From the Trough
So, mobile gadgets, traditional PCs, and the data center — the three legs of the digital technology stool — are all growing more slowly than in the recent past. This is the “technology demand peak” as we see it. We are presently past the peak and into the trough.

How deep is the trough and how long will it last? LOL. If we knew that, we could comfortably retire! Really, there are roughly a couple of trillion dollars in market cap at stake here. If the digital tech market growth remains anemic beyond another twelve months, then there will be too many tech players and too few chairs when the music stops. Any market observer can see that.

Our own view is that it will take a number of technology innovations that will propel replacement demand and drive new markets. The solution is new tech, not better-faster-smaller old tech. Where’s the digital equivalent of fracking? (Actually, fracking would not be possible without a lot of newly invented, computer-based technology.)

First, the global macro-economic slowdown is likely to resolve itself positively, perhaps soon. We don’t buy the global depression arguments. There are billions of potential middle-class new computer consumers and the data center backend to support them.

Next, mobile gadgets and PCs are on the verge of exciting new user interfaces. Things like holographic 3D displays — you are in the picture, and keyboards projected on any flat surface. Conference-room projection capabilities in every smartphone. New users interfaces, shared with PCs and notebooks, that are based on perceptual computing, the (wo)man-machine interface that recognizes voice, gestures, and eye movement, for starters.

Big data and the cloud are data-center conversation pieces. But these technologies are really toddlers, at best. Data-sifting technologies like the grandson of Hadoop will enable more real-time enterprise intelligence and wisdom. HPC has limits only of money available to invest. Traditional data centers will re-plumb with faster I/O, distributed computing, and the scale-up and scale-down capacity of an electric utility — while needing less from the electrical utility.

We don’t have all the answers, but are convinced it will take an industry kick in the pants to get us towards the next peak. More of the same is not a recipe for a solution. We are in a temporary downturn, not just past peak technology.

Your thoughts and comments are welcome.

Photo Credit: Eugene Richards