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I know it's sounds... it IS stupid, but... it's a thought.
On that note, I (like you) still lust after that hunka Mac that I keep getting advertisements about. The recent commercials are kicking butt and taking names for sure.
If Mac does something amazing, please let me know, I am on the edge of trying out something like that.
You touched on the Media Center idea ... do you think we'll ever see something like a hybrid iMac / Tivo / Plasma display? I think it'd be pretty awesome to be able to plug a brand new plasma display and have all the hardware built in the back (like the iMac) that gives me a nice easy UI (like the Tivo) to get all the DVR goodness in one package. Then you literally could just mount it on the wall and not have to have a little component rack nearby with all the hardware and wires.
The Chinese will figure out how to remove a few more cents from the distribution channel and will eat Dell's market share away. Lenovo will spend billions in the American market over next few years.
You just bought a house, a BMW, and a HDTV. Why not try paying off some debt with that money?
Do yourself a favor and calculate how much interest you'll be saving by paying off your mortgage early, or paying off your TV splurge, or that new BMW, or your credit cards, or whatever else you have that you're paying down. You will be shocked at how much money that $2500 will save you in interest payments.
Have you thought about your retirement? Do you have at least $500K socked away (NOT in an overpriced Bay Area house) that is earning interest so that you can retire safely? What about a college fund for the kiddo? Stop and think before you spend, spend, spend.
If you'd like some reading fodder for your next trip or weekend, I strongly recommend The Millionaire Next Door. Read it and you will see how America's real millionaires live. Hint: Debt-free!
In the meantime, take it easy and start making sure you have enough money to retire and live a comfortable, debt-free lifestyle. That will be way more important for your future than a big-screen TV or a new BMW. And, by having a retirement plan, you'll actually be able to enjoy all that money you're spending, instead of spending 8-10 hours a day in the office.
http://configure.euro.dell.com/dellstore/config...
Just like you wanted it, complete with Windows Media Center Edition. Maybe Dell doesn't have enough customer demand to offer such a machine in the US?
A friend of mine has it and the screen is pretty good. You really have a lot of screen real estate, even though the display could be brighter. The WLAN module does seem to have its problems, though.
So far, we've been using HP in place of the Dells, and over the past year have seen increased HP hardware sales, at the expense of our Dell sales...
Which is fine... hardware margins are terrible in general... but I'm not sure why Dell isn't even trying to complete...
A couple of things of note here:
1. Be sure to get a dedicated graphics card with >128 megs of RAM. Dell have the 256 Meg Quadro and 512 Meg Quadro. Don’t get the integrated graphics.
2. 1920x1200 on a 15.4 inch screen cries out for running in hi DPI. It makes everything so much easier to read plus also makes (to my older eyes) everything readable again
3. HD DVD on a 1920x1200 screen is a wonderful thing to behold too. The picture quality is astonishing. Of course Dell have gone the Blu Ray route but Toshiba will happily sell you a 1920x1200 laptop with an HD DVD drive in it along with Media center installed http://www.toshibadirect.com/td/b2c/pdet.to?poi...
I asked Michael Dell himself (speaking at the Rotman business school) about this very subject a about two years ago and pointed out Intel's failures with P4 and the long stagnation in performance/clockspeed we've seen in the CPU market (relieved only just now with the coming core2 architecture) and how strategically he could grow his business against these conditions esp. given the all-intel position at the time.
Dell visibly blanched a little the question and recovered by saying these periods of transition happen all the time in the semiconductor industry, wait for next year and dual core pentium 4's that will fuel the industry he said. Nope not quite looking at poor Dell's recent stock performance.
finally though, it looks like the turnaround could be in sight for dell inc.
if only they could design themselves out of those damn grey boxes.
Funny, when I go to play a DVD on the system, I have to reduce the resolution from the native 1900 X 1200 to 1280 X 1024 or I get an error form the DVD player software. maybe I just need to find better DVD software (I have tried WinDVD and PowerDVD) or maybe the graphics chipset (NVIDIA) doesn't have enough oomph!
These guys make the hottest laptop and I mean this literally. I own two of them and they serve as heaters during winters.
-av
though i think more and more of trading it in for a sleek little macbook...
http://theheadlemur.typepad.com/ravinglunacy/20...
unresolved issues no doubt
Also, where do you get 1080p content on a notebook? No one has high definition DVD yet for notebooks. I see trailers at 1080p but that isn't really very compelling.
http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdet...
A sign of things to come?
Sony also offers killer models with these resolutions and Blu-ray if you want that to (can get with or without)
http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfin...
Now do I want someone to offer similar res laptop with a 21" display - definitely! We're getting there but its taking time.
and
"Dell is blowing it by not featuring HD resolution on its home user laptop page."
I know you are a Tablet PC junkie and that HD is your new addiction but I think Dell realises both items are niche of a niche right now; and like MS they've always been about the lowest common denominator.
I dig Dell though; we got a couple of servers made by Dell with 4-hr on site which has worked out well so far and a LOT of notebooks and dekstops. Cheap, cheerful and butt-ugly.
Then again, it is a tool. I don't need a hammer with frills or bells or whistles. I need one that works and is affordable.
Of course it's subjective, but the new Thumper box that Jonathan Schwartz refers to as a "thing of beauty" on his blog seems to me to have undergone a severe bruising with the ugly stick. Still, at least they haven't grafted great lumps of purple plastic all over it.
Perhaps we IT staffers are not meant to be swayed as much by design as the consumer market; perhaps we are meant to relish racks of industrial-looking macho equipment. But I'm not so sure. We like "cool" don't we? You just look at those Xserves and Xserve Raids and you want one.
Still, what do I know? I've never designed a bit of equipment in my life. And at least Sun are making a lot of noise about reducing energy consumption, so good on them for that. If making nice-looking boxes uses more energy and resources then I guess we'd better stick with the ugly ones. Ho hum.
Result: A real talking-point in Starbucks and an original work of art that I can unclip and frame when the laptop is obsolete.
The screen is wonderful. I can't go back to fuzzy old screens. But there is a downside: I have to enlarge fonts 154% to set the same dimensions as a standard screen, and unfortunately far too many websites don't allow for this.
Result: many ugly, unreadable websites, but one singularly beautiful laptop cover. Far more impressive than an illuminated apple!
I recently got back to editing video, my profession prior to becoming a code monkey. A few things about what you're talking about here...
First of all, the "i" in 1080i refers to interlaced, which I'm sure you know. Computer monitors, and really all LCD's, are progressive scanning devices. No LCD does interlaced video, as it's deinterlaced in software or hardware before it's displayed. So it's not really correct to refer to a computer monitor as being "1080i," but rather just 1080. Or 1920x1080.
Second, despite Sony's stupidity in forcing 1080i on the world, you're not really getting any more data out of that picture than you are a 720p image. The bandwidth required for 1080/60i and 720/60p is identical. On a small screen, basically anything 20" or smaller, the human eye can't perceive much difference between the two in terms of overall data in any given frame. ESPN and FOX use 720/60p for sports, and that in fact results in a cleaner picture with more fluid motion than 1080/60i ever could.
Bottom line here, I have a MacBook Pro, I edit HD using Final Cut Pro, and if you look at the 720p trailers on Apple's site, you'll see what I mean in terms of 1080 not being critical.
I'm a bit of car nazi in that I think talking on your mobile while driving is dangerous but I don't think any one would argue that watching a DVD while driving is just asking for an accident.
Get the Mac and use the most advanced OS around. Or tri-boot with OSX, Linux, or Windows. See if the Dell can do that.
David: watching a DVD while driving is illegal and dangerous. But, my 12-year-old son sits in the back seat with headphones while watching a DVD.
Plus it's just better all around too. Text is better on such a screen and you can fit more in (if your eyes are good enough to look at small icons and text).
For example, I have 37" Westinghouse LCD as my primary TV. If I feed 720p into it via component cables, the TV translates it into 1080p, the TV's native resolution. It looks pretty good. When my DVR computer running BeyondTV outputs via 1920x1080 DVI, the software doing the upscaling, it looks AMAZING. Whatever BeyondTV does to upscale, whether it be something they roll or something through the video hardware and drivers, it does it better than the chip inside the TV.
I like high resolution screens too. My Dell, which I don't use much anymore, has that obscene resolution on a 15" screen, but it doesn't have the CPU balls to playback HD at full frame rate.
That said, the 17" MacBook Pro does more than 1080p. :) And it's still just an inch thick.
By the way, I did Channel 9 (approx 700 hours of video content) on Windows and it didn't give me many troubles. Not sure what you're talking about. My camera worked with XP the first time out of the box.
Resolution is more important to me than the OS, by the way, but that's just me.
After years of screwing around with Avid on Windows machines, I finally said screw it when I couldn't get any product to talk to my cameras correctly and efficiently edit HD (or more specifically, DVCPRO HD). I bought a MacBook Pro, Final Cut Pro, and I've been having a great time ever since. A few quirks in getting sequence settings to match certain HD flavors, but other than that, it just plain works.
I don't get religious about operating systems either... but OS X is vastly superior in my brief experience to anything in Windows short of developing .NET applications (what I do in my day job). Try to make Windows find and install my networked HP printer, or take my camera photos and organize (and publish) them the way iPhoto does. Not a chance.
I mean, why is ITunes winning huge? Because people don't want to listen to music on a PC. Without the Ipod, Realplayer and Itunes probably aren't THAT much better than WMP. But the Ipod IS much better than the other hardware.
And don't cry for Dell, they are doing the squeezing. Their only problem is that HP and Compaq can now match their prices, and people would rather buy a laptop in person than based on a small picture on a website. Lord knows Dell can't possibly serve high resolution pictures for purchase online.
"I find it very suspicious that a comment I took great pain to post yesterday to make you aware of a specific customer service issue never made it past moderation. Censoring reasonable complaints—if that’s what happened—will harm your credibility rather than help it. You need to understand a couple of things about customers like me. It is assuredly not in our own best interest to have an antagonistic relationship with Dell because we need you. But, that also means we aren’t going away."
This is a serious question, not a bash or argument just for the sake of it.
Seriously, I see "early" bloggers and podcasters acting like they invented the world and it amazes me how much like the old media that attitude is. Isn't that exactly what you people were railing against with blogs and podcasts?
Don't take yourselves so seriously. 20 years from now, no one will remember most of you. Actually, the way kids are today, no one will remember ANY of you.
Ahh, I see your angle now. But editing on the road is great on the run with either system, but when you do the major or final edits in studio, you'll probably be on an external monitor anyways, no?
You may not like it, but then you're back to looking at OSs or some other differentiating design of the notebooks.
Oh dang, did I go way off topic or what, sorry.
Um,oh yeah! Dell has been using UXGA and WUXGA screens for years, nothing new, still have them even in Inspirons, most people hate them, icons too small and web sites are tiny. I love them.
Media Center?? Dude, did you like work for Microsoft or something? MCE is too close to ME and I have a feeling it will go EOL about as fast.
... the main reason most people USE the mac... why can't the linux/windows hardcores figure this out?
(I typically use an external keyboard, so this is only a problem sometimes.)