HEXUS.channel confirms: Abit to leave mobo business!

[Steve]

Competitive pressures lead abit to refocus on consumer electronic devices. Warranties to be honoured.

Please Digg to share this sad news for enthusiasts.

Full story: http://channel.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=15225

[tiggerai]

NO NO NO NO NO...

*cry*

This is a sad day

I'm gonna have to buy a new motherboard now... for futureproofing purposes... damnit.

[Taz]

Very sad news indeed. My IP-35 Pro is easily the very best motherboard i've ever bought and any future system that I built would have been based on an Abit motherboard.

[staffsMike]

I think I will try DFI next in protest.

[llololloy]

That does suck. Hadn't used abit for years (not since early athlonxp days) until I got my dark raider and it's fab. Twas the reason that when I upgraded my mediapc I chose abit again. I'd been using mostly asus prior to that.
Guess I'll have to do more reading.
Seems odd though, as apart from motherboards i've never seen anything else abit branded. How can starting in a new market be more cost effective than streamlining your current operations?

[Blitzen]

Hi-Hooooooo
Hi-Hooooooo

its off to ASUS we go!

[GSte]

Ooooooooooooohhhhhhhh bowlox.... Abit have consistently been the most dependable boards I have used.......b I can't bring myself to buy Gigabyte because of the colourblind designers, Asus can and do die quite often with no customer support, Foxconn...meh... sad, sad news.

[TAKTAK]

I think I will try DFI next in protest.

i actually wanted to try a DFI board for a while but it just reminds me of carpets

pity about abit TBH, they were making major traction into removing market dominance from ASUS

[Agent]

Abit or no Abit, its still going to be a while before I buy another half-finished-no-idea-when-a-working-BIOS-ASUS-board

[Saracen]

....

Seems odd though, as apart from motherboards i've never seen anything else abit branded. How can starting in a new market be more cost effective than streamlining your current operations?

Easily.

Firstly, it doesn't have to have been branded Abit to have come from the same company. In fact, many companies deliberately brand different types of products that appeal to different target markets differently. Did Ford rebrand Jaguars as Fords? Nope. Think about why not.

Secondly, motherboards, and especially motherboards aimed at tuners, tweakers and overclockers, are a specialist and dwindling market. So, all the development and marketing costs are going on products with a limited market. Now consider consumer products, like photo frames. The technology is, in many ways, much simpler so development costs may well be much lower per product, let alone per unit sold. But think about the size of market. It's vast.

The PC market is not what it used to be. Increasingly, new generations of PCs are about either keeping up with the most demanding games, or about trying to artificially create a market by trying to pretend that a new PC will do something one several years old won't, and with the obvious exception of demanding games (at high settings) and a few specialist applications, it's simply not true.

Most average users use their PC for a some WP, browsing the web, doing their banking and/or shopping, booking their holidays, emailing relatives, maybe basic editing and then printing a few photos, and so on. I've got (amongst others) a 2GHz P4 (with 256MB RAM) here that's about 6 or 7 years old, and it'll do all that perfectly well. For that matter, it's got a fair bit more power than any of that actually needs.

So, increasingly, there's little reason for the mass market to buy specialist boards, or to build their own machine. These days, for most people, it's almost as cheap and certainly far easier to pop down to your high street store, whether it be PC Word, John Lewis or Sainsbury, and buy a Dell, HP or whatever, over the counter. And of course, if you do that, you won't get specialist boards like Abit were so good at, but you know, the vast majority of the PC buying public will neither know that, nor notice, nor care if they did.

We, of course, are enthusiasts and tend to be a bit more discriminating than that. But we're a small, and shrinking, minority.

And that, I rather imagine, is why ABit have decided their future lies elsewhere. And, I'm sorry to say, they're probably right.

[dangel]

Sad to see them go, had many good Abit boards over the years.

[Clunk]

It's BUFF I feel sorry for.

He'll be wandering the streets, shouting at traffic, wearing nothing but an electronic photo frame and a tin foil hat.

[ackrite26]

It's BUFF I feel sorry for.

He'll be wandering the streets, shouting at traffic, wearing nothing but an electronic photo frame and a tin foil hat.

[Steve]

LOL yeah I bought my last motherboard off BUFF... I'm using it now, in fact (still).

[2Cold Scorpio]

Abit or no Abit, its still going to be a while before I buy another half-finished-no-idea-when-a-working-BIOS-ASUS-board

Amen, sir!

Sad to see Abit go, I love my IP-35 Pro board, and was hoping those rumors weren't true. I s'pose I'll be looking at eVGA or Gigabyte for my next mobo for the i7... Funny part is, originally, I was gonan get an eVGA board (the 680i) until they became impossible to find, so I started looking elsewhere and settled on Abit's IP-35 Pro. Now I love the blasted thing, and was hoping to get an Abit X58 board... Ah well, that's how things go.

'Tis a sad, sad day...

[Agent]

It's BUFF I feel sorry for.

He'll be wandering the streets, shouting at traffic, wearing nothing but an electronic photo frame and a tin foil hat.

BUFF has a woolly hat. I've seen it