First of all, the laptop is, "The stuff dreams are made of." I would love to have one if they didn't cost as much as a descent used car.
Second of all, the following is in response to the front page article entitled "The Real World"
Dear Ed,
I read your article about why anyone would want to buy these new technologies of Multi-core, x86-64, and SLI. I must say that i disagree. I understand where you are coming from as far as why an individual would want to buy such things when they do not understand half of the technology or capabilities. But it is usually not the individual the company is thinking about, its the businesses. I believe that Intel and others are primarily targeting business' with there new technologies. If it were all about the home user, it wouldn't be the Intel Developers Forum, it would be the Intel Fan Forum.
When you said people want it if it is "cheap" and "easy", I agree that people are not excited about these new technologies, if they even know what they are. But businesses are excited. Multi-core and x86-64 can increase productivity a lot at the workplace, as far as jobs that involve massive calculations or rendering jobs which the number of is growing all the time. I know of an architect that used to use an old Pentium box to render the very basic of 3D home walk thru video in which it took the computer about a couple weeks to create a simple short video of a 3D house. As the new technology comes out, he can now render a much better 3D video of a house in a lot less time and still be able to work on other sketches while his video is being rendered on the same computer. Rather than saying that x86-64 and multi-core, single dye is going to change your life. Say that this computer will increase productivity by 100%.
At home, people will have there Pentium 3 box that runs AOL and hopefully Firefox. But at work, they will have a dual-core Athlon 64 running XP 64-bit, with 2 Quadro cards running in SLI that can blow through there needed tasks in less than half the time, and look twice as good as there old Pentium 4 box running Windows 2000, with an MX440. This is exactly why JAK Films upgraded from there Apple content creation boxes to Opteron based boxes, they render faster and better than the past technology.
The future is not these technologies in every home, it’s these technologies in every workspace. Being able to compile massive amounts of code, pixels, and media, while seamlessly checking your email, browsing web sites, listening to media, and working on the next project. If you tell people that, they will want it. Even normal people stand back and say, “Wow, did that already finish!?” They just say that at work more than at home.
As far as Media Center PC’s go, they are hard for people to buy because there aren’t that many people that want to learn how to use this second computer as an all-in-one media center. But my kids will know what an all-in-one box is, how to use it, and wonder how we got along without it. I rip my personal collection of movies into AVI’s or MPEG’s and whenever I want to watch a movie, I scroll through my collection and double click the movie I want to watch rather than having to hunt through my DVD collection looking for a specific movie and loading into a DVD player that I have for to turn on. When I encode those movies, my old Athlon XP 2000+ ripped it overnight, my new Athlon 64 3200+ rips it faster than real time. And my computer isn’t disabled during this time.
I believe the generation of people today that are downloading music will love the idea of Media Center PC’s. Sure they could go to the store and buy there CD, but it is just faster, and easier to double click it. As technology prices fall, I think the new generation of families that understand what these computers will do, will buy a one computer that does everything for $1000, and not buy a nice DVD player, cable box, and a surround sound receiver.
They say that every generation has a culture shock effect on there parents. I believe the new culture shock is the convenience of tomorrow. My parents will see my home and be just as shocked as there parents were when they grew long hair and sang about sex and drugs. And there parents when they saw Elvis shake his hips on TV. My parents don’t dream of a wired home but I do. The standard person will not know their wired home works, they just know that they can put a DVD into the computer, and after it has been in there once, they can watch it whenever they want. With all due respect, technology companies are not targeting 40-50 year olds, they are targeting teen-30 year olds.
James Mcmanus
