Hasta La Gadget!

Intel just posted decidedly mixed results for the second quarter. While it largely matched its outlook from the first quarter with $12.8 billion in revenue and a healthy net profit of $2 billion, it also saw sharp year-over-year drops in revenue from some of its core divisions. The PC Client Group, which makes the brunt of Intel’s processors, saw its revenue decline 7.5 percent; the Other Intel Architecture Group, which primarily handles mobile chips, faced a 15 percent drop. Intel hasn’t explained the dip, although there are a pair of major factors at work. In addition to facing a very rough PC market, the company only launched its Haswell architecture late in the quarter — there hasn’t been much time for customers to buy the new chips. Intel says there’s “strong acceptance” from early Haswell customers, however, and its outlook for the current quarter is slightly rosier as a result — it expects to make the same $13.5 billion in revenue that we saw a year ago.

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops, Intel

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Source: Intel

Ray Ozzie may have left Microsoft back in October 2010, having directly focused a lot of the company’s recent efforts on cloud connectivity, but he’s now got a new job. Ozzie will be joining HP CEO Meg Whitman on the company’s board. Increasing the board size to twelve, he will join James Skinner, currently the chairman of Walgreens and former CEO of McDonald’s and former CEO of Liberty Media Robert Bennett. The influential former MS software chief, who succeeded Bill Gates in the position back in 2006, will join groups looking into human resources, compensation and governance — some pretty important spheres. HP isn’t done, however, and will apparently be hunting down yet more directors in the next few months.

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops, Microsoft, HP

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Source: HP

If you were looking for a bounce-back in the PC market after a sobering first quarter… well, keep looking. Both Gartner and IDC estimate that shipments fell about 11 percent year-over-year in the second quarter. The two analyst groups blame the decline on sluggish uptake in a few regions, most notably China and Europe, as well as a market that favors tablets over low-end computers. It’s easy to agree after seeing the numbers. Taiwanese PC makers like Acer and ASUS faced steep yearly declines as they switched their attention toward tablets and Ultrabooks, while even top-seated Lenovo took a small bruising.

There’s a silver lining to this cloud, however. Dell, HP and Lenovo all fared much better in the US than they have in recent quarters. Gartner and IDC attribute the resurgence to the corporate world, where the end of Windows XP support in 2014 may be pushing some upgrades to PCs running at least Windows 7. It’s not quite the broader recovery that vendors are hoping for, but it may have to suffice when any help from Windows 8.1 and OS X Mavericks is months away.

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops, Apple, ASUS, HP, Dell, Acer, Lenovo

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Source: Gartner, IDC

While the non-final build of Opera’s new browser for PC and Mac was simply called “Next,” today it’s chosen the more formal title of Opera 15 for its official release. There aren’t any features of note that we hadn’t seen in the desktop preview of the WebKit-based software (or should we call it Blink-based?), but to jog your memory, it sports a fresh design, a Discover feature for catching up on the latest news and a tweaked Speed Dial menu for quick access to your favorite corners of the internet. Also, the web-clipping Stash feature, predictive address-cum-search bar, new download manager and “Off-Road mode” for extra compression on lousy connections are all included in the final version. We ran a quick SunSpider benchmark on the Mac build of Opera 15, in which it scored 167ms, compared with 171ms in Chrome. If you’re not already allied to one of the many competing browsers and feel like giving Opera 15 a try, head to the source below for the download links.

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops, Internet, Software

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Via: SlashGear

Source: Opera (1) (download), (2)

Now that Linux Mint 15 is available, it’s only fair that we get a new MintBox to match. The CompuLab and Linux Mint teams won’t disappoint us on that front: they’ve just previewed the MintBox 2, a big upgrade to their open source mini PC. The new version drops AMD processors in favor of an Intel Core i5 that’s reportedly four times faster than the AMD T56 in the MintBox Pro. The refresh also doubles the storage to 500GB while adding a second gigabit Ethernet jack for server duties. CompuLab and Linux Mint haven’t said how soon they expect the MintBox 2 to ship, but they’re expecting a $599 price at Amazon.

Filed under: Desktops

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Via: FanlessTech

Source: Linux Mint Blog