Where are the cool PC designs?
It’s a little scary how many times I think of writing something and Long has a similar post about the same time. This time it’s on Vista hardware. Like him, I’m somewhat disappointed that we’re still seeing beige boxes or identikit laptops coming to market but be stumbled across some cool looking prototypes by Carbon Design. The only problem with them? They’re still prototypes. If they’d come out 6 months ago people may have ooohed and ahhed but now they’d just say “it’s an iMac ripoff”.
There are some efforts to cool up laptops such as the ThinkPad Reserve but my personal view is that’s a bit of a lackluster effort and $5k to boot. I can get a leather case for my existing laptop which by the way is perhaps the coolest PC laptop currently available – the Sony TZ12. It has a solid state drive, chicklet keyboard, CD/DVD, webcam, 2gb RAM, carbon lid and 7 hours of battery life. My MacBook Pro is left in its wake with the exception of the backlit keyboard.
Meanwhile, we’re running the NextGen PC Design competition though the website seems unable to accept entries. We’ve run these things before and get amazing submissions but what happens to them then? I’d love to know…we held a similar competition back here with some great winning entries. I don’t see them in my local PC store though….or online :(
Similarly HP and MTV have a competition running “that challenges young people to express their interests in a design for a new limited edition notebook computer”. They say,
“What’s really cool is that the winner will be invited to attend the MTV Europe Music Awards in Munich, Germany, and travel to several HP sites, including Tokyo and Houston, to witness his or her design as it makes its way through the notebook development process”
actually what would be really cool is to see this for sale on HP’s site and for the design to be more than just cosmetic. It’s a start though as was last years $1m prized offered by Intel for a Cool Viiv PC Design. Though I don’t remember seeing this become available. There are some attempts are cooler design such as the Acer Ferrari, Asus Lamborghini, the Giles Deacon model from Asus and Lenovo’s Olympic design. All of these are more cosmetic than true design though. Why can’t we get someone like
My question then is when is one company going to really take Apple on in the design stakes and create a PC that is talked about. Sony have promised but never quite delivered – though the TZ12 gets many admiring looks and questions – but it’s going to take something more.
One step in the right direction though is the Dell Vostro line. They listened to customer feedback and stripped all the trialware off their machines. Watch this make a HUGE different to performance and satisfaction with machines.
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