It’s a miracle of technology. First we start with a really fast CISC processor and an interrupt driven OS, a distributed communications system, and then add lots of memory to hide all that stuff so steaming things seem to run smoothly. Whatya think, pretty cool, hu?. It’s damn near as good as my 27-inch $700 TV. And that’s not all, for just $80 I can add a Logitech X-520 and get 5.1 sound.
Of course my $700 TV doesn’t have an 80GB hard drive, but it does offer Dolby 5.1, and the screen is almost 4X as big as my $2,300 TV, but size isn’t everything, is it?
Also, my $2,300 TV can surf the web, just like that $500 PC can, or my $200 mobile phone, so there you go, beat that.
And I don’t need to go buying any fancy game console like an Xbox360 because I can play game directly on my $2,300 TV.
I had to buy a TV tuner from AVerMedia for $70, whereas my $700 TV has two built in, so I can do PIP on it, but on my $2,300 TV I can watch TV and surf the web, so that’s pretty cool, huh? And I think I could add a ADS Tech USB tuner and do PIP too, I just haven’t tried it yet.
My $2.300 TV also has RW DVD in it, you won’t find that on my $700 TV.
By now you’ve got to be asking why would anyone in their right mind spend almost $2,500 for a 15-inch, or even a 17-inch TV, even if it can surf the web? And the answer is no one in their right mind would. So maybe the better question is why would anyone in their right mind even offer a 17-inch $2,500 TV?
Well I’ll tell you why, because Microsoft and Intel told them to. “It’ll be great,” they said, “trust me, have we ever led you wrong?”
So HP built one, Toshiba built one, and Alienware built one. And you can watch TV on them, or DVDs, and have time-shifted recording of TV, just like the real thing. But is that what you want to do with your hard earned $2,500? Especially when you can get a 27-inch LCD TV from Olevia for a third the price or less?
The thing is, all you can do with that Olevia TV is, well watch TV. But with the Media Center laptop you can watch TV, take it on the road, run Excel and Word, and play games, and watch TV or DVDs. It’s the Swiss Army knife of entertainment and productivity, and it can run on batteries; for a while.
Now is there some way to do an ROI on that? Not that I could work out. I mean the fact that I can watch TV or DVDs on my spiffy Compaq nw8240 is cool, but I’ve never done it, other than to test it to see if it actually worked. When I’m on long flights I do see people watching DVDs on their computer – but they’re mostly Apple computers with a gi-gundis screen. I have seen a couple of guys looking at DVDs on their HP or Dell laptops, and I guess that’s cool if the inflight stuff is boring or you’ve seen it. But then I wonder, if you’ve brought a DVD to watch, how is it that you have a DVD you haven’t watched yet?
So there we sit, me pounding away on Word at 38,000 feet and 580 MPH, and this dweb across the isle from me laughing his head off at Bowfinger, and the guy sitting next to him leaning over wishing he could hear the sound.
So he and I have $2,500 TVs, and he watches his, and when we get to the hotel, he’ll probably watch TV there too, or his laptop, or maybe both. Thinking about that I decided I gotta get a life. There’s TV and DVDs I’m missing. And if it takes $2,500 then so be it, Microsoft and Intel were right, if you built we will come. Now where did I put that Alien III disk?
