perfect design thanks north amid sites doing courseworks flank Next to Microsoft at the apex, Intel has also done poorly in smartphones and tablets, though it is striving to catch up and in June unveiled a new chip that it hopes will bring new zip to PCs. Among the PC-makers, HP pondered quitting altogether in 2011, then sacked the chief executive who suggested it. Meg Whitman, his successor, chose to stay in, as well as pushing into services and software and shedding 27,000 jobs. She has plenty still to do: HP’s latest results, on August 21st, sent a share-price rally into reverse. At Dell, which is scrapping for much the same ground, Michael Dell, the founder and chief executive, still hopes to win a battle to take the company private. Of the leading PC-makers, Lenovo has coped best. Its home market, China, is slowing but growing, and it is selling plenty of smartphones.