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Waving Microsoft's Windows 10 stick won't help Intel's Gen 6 core

Especially when innovation meets market realities

Faster, longer battery life, chip-based security – innovation is alive and well in its sixth-generation Core chips, Intel claims, with the company officially launching its sixth-generation Core vPro processors on Tuesday, wrapped in a series of changes it claimed would inevitably drive sales.

Two and a half times the performance of a fifth-gen CPU-powered laptop, three times the battery life, and four times faster wake-up are the promises. Also, we're looking forward to Intel authenticate – multi-factor authentication that also works with PINs and biometrics in association with a smartphone.

If the phone strays further than a specified Blue-toothy connection distance from the i7 vPro machine in question, it locks you out. No more PCs going walkies in public places, mid-session documents, and data open to plunder.

PC makers are lining up behind the chips, claiming about 200 business PC designs – 160 for vPro and 30 ultra book designs. Machines are coming from Acer, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo and others in a variety of form factors – 2 in 1s, ultra books, and desktops, you name it.

The thrust is very much the business user, with Intel citing one Gartner analyst claiming the chips make PCs part of businesses’ "overall security solution" with users "more secure and productive than ever".

Innovation is still the industry’s muse: as a phrase it's over used, often mischaracterised, and its application frequently divorced from cold, hard market realities. Explaining recent years' falling PC sales and the eclipse of the PC by the tablet, vice president and general manager of Intel’s business client platform division, Tim Garrison, told The Register he believes the “innovation” on display now will shift boxes.

“Years ago we got in trouble [because] there wasn’t much innovation going into the PC. It was the same old PC we’d had for generations and people said ‘I don’t see a future here'," said Garrison. “Since then, with the sixth generation core, you see so much more innovation going on.”

However, the PC market's structural dynamics, which have blighted sales for the last few years, are still in place. PC makers, and those middlemen in the channel responsible for getting devices into the hands of buyers, remain saddled with a backlog of unsold PCs using old chips.

They’ve been stuck for a variety of reasons: consumers flocking to new tablets, businesses holding out on Windows XP and Windows 7 on old PCs, and OEMs and channel partners burned by buying big into Microsoft’s promises on Windows 8.

That was a version of Windows where Microsoft was playing the “innovation” card – innovation around the touch interface, which ultimately proved about as popular as John Lennon proclaiming the The Beatles were "more popular than Jesus".

Gartner this week reckoned 232 million traditional PCs would be shipped in 2016, equating to a 1.7 per cent drop on 2015. In the last quarter of 2015, 22.5 million PCs shipped into third-party sellers in EMEA, according to the research giant, a decline of 16.1 per cent year-on-year.

IDC in December reckoned on compound annual growth rate of one per cent over five years for portable PCs, and a decline of 2.5 per cent for desktops. That’s alarming for Intel, which relies on a cadence of PC sales of three years in notebooks and four for desktops to help drive sales.

Also, Intel has historically relied on new releases of Windows – businesses and consumers buy fresh PCs to cope with the system demands of Microsoft’s new OS.

“When people move to a new operating system they almost always do so on new hardware so it’s a benefit to us as well,” Garrison said on a trip to the UK. He estimated people are “excited” about Windows 10, released in July, a fact that will drive PCs sales and therefore mean business as usual.

“What you get from your old PC versus what you can buy is a significant cost for the business, plus the PC starts to wear out and break frequently,” Garrison said. But, if Gartner and IDC are correct, Windows 10 hasn’t so far (and won’t in the near future) do anything to prompt growing PC sales.

Microsoft hasn’t exactly helped by giving Windows 10 away for free to download – an offer that, at times, has seen Microsoft forcing Windows 10 on existing users. Worse, Microsoft has said there will be no new versions of Windows after Windows 10 – that it’ll be incremental updates, instead.

Garrison reckoned this won’t hurt PC sales, and the raw fact that the older a PC becomes the slower and cruddier it gets, will somehow prick the conscience of corporate IT purchasers. “Do we expect to see any change in the hardware purchase? The answer is 'no'. If they are on a three-year cycle we expect to see them still on a three-year cycle," he said.

Intel won’t admit it, but Microsoft will (or has), and the author of the Windows client seems to have recognised both the implications and the limitations of its “free” policy. Microsoft will refuse to release updates for Windows 7 PCs to take advantage of new chipsets from January 2020 and January 2023 for 8.1.

Whether it’s ignorance about ending support deadlines, lack of money to spend on new PCs, or just a willingness to gamble, Microsoft's dangling of the carrot hasn't forced them to upgrade in the past. It's unlikely to do so in the future. ®

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