“When it comes to design, rival Apple gets most of the ink, but Microsoft wants to demonstrate that PCs running Windows can turn heads, too,” Steve Hamm and Jay Greene report for BusinessWeek.
MacDailyNews Take: Stomachs, yes. Heads, no. Unless they’re trying to turn them towards Apple Macs.
Hamm and Greene report, “‘There’s a new bar being set,’ says Dave Fester, general manager of PC product marketing at Microsoft. ‘The market is pushing computer makers to do this.'”
MacDailyNews Take: Not “the market,” Mr. Fester, Apple.
Hamm and Greene report, “PC makers are focusing as never before on turning utilitarian machines into fashion statements.”
MacDailyNews Take: And, yet, the PC box assemblers are stuck with Windows, which is your father’s OS. Only Apple Macs are OS-unlimited and can run Apple’s Mac OS X, Apple’s award-winning Mac-only apps such as iLife, Linux, and also slum it with Windows if necessary.
Hamm and Greene report, “Lenovo Group, the world’s No. 3 PC maker, is using the Vegas show to promote… three splashy notebooks—super-svelte and colorful, with textured covers that make them easy to grip… Hewlett-Packard, the leading consumer PC brand, will hawk such new models as its Blackbird 002, a black-clad desktop gaming PC whose insides, with a copper-piped liquid cooling system, are as pleasing to the eye as the exterior via an easy-to-open side cover… Even Dell has become style- conscious. Last year it brought out new consumer PCs that came in a choice of eight colors, including bubble-gum pink, yellow, green, and red.”
MacDailyNews Take: And you turn them on and what do you get? Windows Vista. A chrome-plated turd is still a turd. We prefer the minimalist, decidedly non-flashy aesthetic of Apple’s design master Jonathan Ive over garish colors, meaningless neon lights, unnecessary angles, pointless curves (ha, ha), etc.
Hamm and Greene report, “Until recently, PCs were viewed by many in the industry as low-margin commodities. What changed? Apple proved with its flashy iPods, iPhones, and MacBook laptops that design really matters to consumers.”
MacDailyNews Take: Actually, guys, we and most of the many Mac users that we hear from buy Apple Macs for the OS and software, just like we and most iPod and iPhone owners buy iPods and iPhones because of their intuitive software design and user interfaces. Apple’s external product designs are just elegant icing on masterfully-baked cakes.
Hamm and Greene report, “ASUSTeK Computer has taken the automobile analogy to its logical conclusion, producing a laptop specifically for racing fans. Its Lamborghini VX2 notebooks, with their shiny black or yellow covers and Lamborghini logos, even make vroom-vroom engine sounds when they boot up. The price: up to $3,300.”
MacDailyNews Take: The cluelessness astounds. At least the 27 cheesy stickers that these box assemblers are hell-bent on plastering all over their cases will make some sense this time. Get it? It’s a race car!
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As usual, PC box assemblers don’t get it. They stuck themselves to Microsoft Windows and now — to take the automobile analogy to its real logical conclusion — they’re resigned to painting the outside of their products in order to try to hide what’s rusting inside. Taking your products to Earl Scheib while continuing to preload the same old awful Windows along with mounds of crapware just isn’t going to cut it with today’s increasing tech literate consumers.