“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.
What are Windows box designers to do? No more extra holes to put their blinking LED lights and multitude of buttons that duplicates functionality. Stickers, oh no, what about all those millions of stickers they have printed? What to do??? LOL
MDN is wrong about one thing: “PC box assemblers don’t get it. They stuck themselves to Microsoft Windows…”
Many of those PC box assemblers would switch to Mac OS in a heartbeat… if Apple would let them. But Apple makes its money on the hardware side, so it can’t have other people producing Mac OS computers.
In the mean time, more and more PC box assemblers are offering Linux boxes in addition to their Windows boxes.
One might pause to wonder, in a generally more pleasant and fragrant universe, what possibly would have happened if Microsoft actually had the balls to innovate and evolve- if it weren’t the ‘grab ’em and stab ’em’ business rapist it’s always been and actually had become a software company, putting out efficient and lean OS’s for a variety of uses and customer bases, instead of, well, you know the instead of….
Yest again MDN gets it wrong
“Not “the market,” Mr. Fester, Apple.”
Not Apple. The fact that case modders has been around for ages.
Nobody cares, dipstick. The basement dwellers putting neon USB strobes in their ugly plexiglass boxes didn’t force the PC manufacturers to update their designs, Apple’s award winning designs forced box makers to update their machines.
“case modders”. Snort!
Wasn’t Rusty Windows the guy that cheated off the Beaver and got caught?
I had a case modder over for dinner once. I left him alone only for a few minutes. Now all of my lamps are blue strobes and my goldfish are constipated.
I liked it better last year, when MacWorld and CES took place the same week, and Apple was totally upstaging the industry-wide CES and stealing the scene for more media coverage.
Oh crap. And my vintage comics collection is gone too.
Said it before, say it again-
YOU CAN’T POLISH A TURD!
turd |tərd|
noun vulgar slang
a lump of excrement.
• a person regarded as obnoxious or contemptible.
I wouldn’t touch one of those fugly ass PC’s with a 3.048 meter pole. Apple manufacturers don’t have time to make pretty little cases like the Redmond Women’s Club. Keeping up with Apple’s powerful and user-friendly innovations absorb much of the R & D effort for Apple manufacturers.
Besides, computers are tools, not some fashion accessory for pretentious and smug tech illiterates. It doesn’t matter what they look like as long as they don’t run Microsoft.
As a Apple enthusiast a nifty logo on from a high performance car builder is more than enough for me. If the Apple’s here at work weren’t on lease I slap an ‘Orange County Choppers’ sticker and a ‘Yosemite Sam Back Off’ sticker on mine. That would be badass. And an ‘Oakley Thermonuclear Protection’ sticker.
Your potential. Our Blunder.™
It doesn’t matter if any of these PCs were solid gold, came from outer space and completely made me forget women – the moment I remember that they are running Microsoft Windows – I’m putting the credit card BACK into my wallet.
for the post of Jan 08, 08 – 01:47 pm:
it frightens to think that we belong to the same species.
please, visit some art museums once in a while and try to get out your finger of the ass.
how can anyone compare modders with style and disign?
Mr. Fester is this dweebs name. What an appropriate moniker his parents passed down to him!
Like putting a golf cart motor in a NASCAR shell. Then as long as you don’t try to use it for it’s intended purpose–it looks GREAT!
Steve Ballmer’s PC is cooled by flying chairs and a dangling tongue.
“I think the PC makers *should* develop their own OSs. The tools to do so are out there, as Apple has proven.”
This isn’t a horrible idea but Dell has taken a slightly different path and offers Ubuntu (with DVD playback capability) as an option to XP and Vista. Even if other computer manufacturers don’t want to create their own OS this is a viable alternative because of the developer support that seems to be growing more an more.
I should say though, that personally, I use a Macintosh at home and would still choose a Macintosh over a dell with Ubuntu if I were in the market for a new computer. But Ubuntu is a good option for those who for whatever reason don’t want a Mac.
Brand new make-up.
Same old tart underneath.