It all started when Windows United, a German tech blog, claimed that it had a 'source' that said that HP would stop selling the Elite x3 in November this year. No link, no quote, just a 'source':
From 1 November, the HP Elite X3 will no longer be sold. In addition, the support is still to run until October 2018 - thus quite exactly 2 years after its market launch.
Then MSPU, WC and other Windows and Microsoft sites all picked up on this and went into the usual feeding frenzy on negative 'news'. Except that it wasn't news at all. It wasn't even true. It was all driven from one person's anonymous (and now proved not to be reliable) 'source'.
You can see where I'm going with this, can't you - one source is OK for a story if it's unimpeachable and hyperlinkable (e.g. a company press release), but for this sort of thing you have to have two independent sources that agree before you can start writing a word - that's how journalists have worked for decades.
So we had the FUD stories and then Windows Central managed to get a rebuttal out of HP (which was good of the company since it was only responding to rank speculation):
HP is always responding to customer feedback to deliver the best product experiences. We remain committed to our mobility strategy and vision and will sell the Elite x3 through 2019 while continuing to enhance our portfolio delivering multi-OS devices, accessories and workflow transformation solutions. Mobility is an exciting and rapidly evolving area, and HP will continue to explore ways to address our customers' mobile computing needs.
So there we are, the Elite x3 will be sold 'through 2019' and likely supported until 2021. Panic over.
Oh, and a reminder of my feature 'Fall Creators update' officially coming to Windows 10 Mobile, in which I show that the advancement of the Windows 10 'version' to '1709' means that we're looking at official support (meaning security fixes and patches as a minimum) running until at least September 2019 - tying in nicely with the timescales for the Elite x3 here.
