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HP Officially Announces 40g MP3 Stereo Component
jspectre writes "HP announced their new
de100c "digital entertainment center." Containing a 40g drive and a built in CDRW drive it will store "up to 750 CDs of music" or 9000 tracks. You can make your own playlists and burn them out to CDR/CDRW's. All of this for $999.99. No mention of any digital management controls on the device." I totally need a review model! I saw this thing at the last LinuxWorld and it looked good, but only really playing with it for a few weeks will let me know if it's better then the audiotron that I've been using in my home system.
The tech specs are here (pdf)
.....
in case anyone's curious
Everyone knows that the first CD players and DVD players cost nearly $1000 or more when they first came out. They come down when they become more popular, the manufacturing process becomes more standardized, and the demand is high enough to justify it.
As for your $300 CD jukebox, check out the specs on this toy -- internet connectivity, TV display, HomePNA broadcasting, and of course, a larger hard drive. Feature-wise, there's no comparison.
This must be really heavy equipment if it exerts a force causing a 40g acceleration!
<EMILY-LATELLA>
Ohh... you meant 40GB! That's very different! Never mind.
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Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
About 9 months ago I was on a focus group to review these things. It was supposed to be four sessions in four months or something, and then we got the device, but I was "dismissed" after the first session and told not to come back. I think I pissed them off by telling them that if this device wasn't open, it would be hacked.
They were very interested in how we would respond to advertising that was downloaded to it and played for us based on our music choices. The group said downloading concert info about the bands we liked was fine, most of the people didn't really mind more annoying ads, but I said that if there wasn't a way to opt out of the ads I would firewall its outgoing network connection.
They asked if it would be ok if the box reported back certain user preferences, and I said that would be fine if they were totally upfront about what information was sent. I told them that lying would just get them in trouble, because we would see every packet this thing sent over the wire, and would raise a stink about any unexplained ones.
I think the final insult is when they asked the price we would pay. Most of the other people said $1000 or $1200, but I said that I would pay $300, because had built similar devices for $300. That was a bit unfair, because $300 doesn't include the surplus and out of date computer pieces used from work, and their box was certainly nicer than what I had put together. At the time their box had a 20GB drive, and a CD burner, so it would have been more fair of me (on then prices) to have said $450-500.
The ironic thing is, that I have never needed my own home mp3 box (the ones I built were for friends), but just yesterday I started getting pieces together for one. I think it'll cost me $80-120. Of course I am using a surplus K6-2 (clocked down to 200Mhz, no fan!) scrounged from work. The $80-120 is for a 40-60GB 5400 hard disk. My box won't have CD-RW, modem, HomePNA, etc., but I don't want those things, why should I pay for them?
I think their main problem was they had tried to pack the room with people who were very into music, yet somewhat tech savy. Unfortunately I am very tech savy, and only somewhat into music, so instead of spending my time dreaming about the virtues of a 20GB CD changer (besides I already had the equivilant in my notebook) I spent my time dreaming about all of the evil things they would be doing with this box.