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Sexy Intel Computer Design Worth Big Bucks
An anonymous reader writes From a BBC article, "Intel is offering $1m in prizes to designers and manufacturers who can come up with sexier alternatives to the "big beige box".
The competition is open to PC designers and manufacturers worldwide and each company may submit up to five different designs.
The grand prize winner will receive $300,000 (£159,000) to enable the mass production of the system and $400,000 (£212,000) to co-market the design with Intel. The runner-up will receive up to $300,000 to help with manufacturing costs."
I hate looking at some gaudy colored box in some has-been trendy shade.
The only think worse, is when they have an odd shape so that a CD case slides off the top. If it is going to be ugly you might as well be able to stack stuff on it.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Are its machines not "sexy alternatives to the big, grey box?"
They run Intel processors, too.
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www.apple.com/store
just deposit the cash in my account, OK?
Is it really this hard? I went to a trade show about five years ago and saw funky PC designs from some division of Hyundai that were orange plastic pyramids and things of that sort... It's Not Hard, just get on with it. Hire a designer, fer cryin' out loud.
I am a leaf on the wind
If they want to give Apple an extra million bucks, why don't they just do it?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Apple has some good ideas on the boring concept of cases and they have been done well. I am expecting something that looks like a case, but has some extra features on the outside, both functional and visual. I hope this effort results in some serious advancement in how cases Work, Look, and Feel.
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
Really. Haven't there been these design challenges before. I seem to remember one from Microsoft when Win98SE came out. Same time of the Hot Wheels and Barbie PC.
What always happens is that some Alienware looking crap gets the attention but the Mac still wins for design.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
For a while, I was into case modding. I had my stepfather do the metal cutting and so on, because I'm an accountant; I don't know how to cut metal and if I can get others to do a better job for me for free then cool. I had him cut stylistic holes in the side panels and I installed neons and light cables etc. That was a couple of years ago though.
Now my PC is under my IKEA desk, so nobody sees the sides. I have a missing drive bay cover so you can see the coloured fans but thats it. Stylish PCs may be a big deal to some, but I lost that interest quite quickly.
Sure, your PC looks cool, but who really cares?
The Barbie PC: Proof that a curvy pink box can be less sexy than a plain beige box.
But then again, last time I brought this up, I was modded 'flamebait',
Y'all don't think that a rack-mount sequencer style PC (or console) case, together with rack-mount Hi-Fi (and other accessory) units would look the dog's nads?
I would have said it is Dell's wolf gray and black box that rules.
I would, and so would most married women.
Someone who can design on small, quite, and as few cords as possible would be a winner.
Mac Mini is a great design for 80% of computer users.
The remainder will build there own anyways.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
...stupid "get a Mac if you want curves" comments, and many being modded as insightful. Granted, there have been very few Intel based PCs that have been contenders to win design awards but I've seen a few that are easily as good looking as many believe the Mac to be. Dell's M2010 is far better looking than then notebooks being sold by Apple. The Sony RS Series and LS Series are great looking desktops, the LS being the all-in-one like the iMac. The Sony Digital Living System is a great looking media center PC. It's all a matter of taste.
One of my favorite comments was this one, "Hopefully we get some different options from this, but speaking generally, how much can you do different?" Ummm, perhaps you are a) not the target for PCs like this and b) are not creative enough to design an elegant, stylish PC case. I'm always amazed with this attitude from geeks given that they'd be extremely passionate if one we re to say something equally as inane as, "why spend billions of dollars to go to the Moon or Mars? They're just lifeless rocks with no interest to anyone."
That's really not the point.
I don't think Intel's looking for flashy. That would be like Volkswagen hiring a team ofricers to design their cars. Alienware's PCs are certainly flashy, and they certainly look like crap.
I think Intel wants something sophisticated and subdued. Apple's got this down perfectly with their aluminum enclosures, and it's pretty hard to deny the the G5, Mac Pro, and Mac Mini are damned sexy machines.
I simply don't get why dell can't just produce machines with clean lines and subdued colors. Minimalism is the easiest school of art to imitate.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Math is hard, so the Barbie PC uses the Pentium to guess at the answer in software.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
You may not give a shit about what your case looks like, but in the retail market where PC's sit on shelves the shoppers do care more about how their PC looks then really what it does.
Just recently I build a computer for a friends parents with a nice low profile Micro-ATX desktop/tower case and a 19" LCD monitor. It replaced a huge white box & 17" CRT on their desk and after some cabling cleanup it made their study look bigger and much nicer.
They were so impressed they showed it off to their friends, and within a week I had requests for 4 more.
People do care about the asthetics of what they buy when they want it for more then just basic functionality, the computer speed & jargon goes right over their head and they just want something that works well and looks good.
Anybody remember the last time intel came up with a sexy new desktop design
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
That is the real trick isn't it? Getting the smaller curvier ones to take all of your bits without drama...
We are all just people.
in my personal experience, almost all cases now come in black, grey, blue or a similar dark shade. I haven't seen a beige box in a long, long time.
shooting is not too good for my enemies
I think the problem may have to do with the fundamental concept of a computer being an exposed motherboard with a series of slots that house exposed cards. This goes all the way back 30 years to the first micro bus standard (S-100) through most subsequent computers.
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http://www.ixbt.com/mainboard/epox/8npa-sli/board
This is indeed a practical and economical solution to the idea of putting together and updating your computer. It's really a holdover from the hobbyist days and people have gotten used to it, but it's not really consumer-friendly.
The cartridge approach as used with videogame consoles is better.
I think Atari had the right idea with how it implemented expansion on the 800.
http://oldcomputers.net/pics/cartports3.JPG
The only exposed surfaces were the card edges and the slot. Then you just close the lid.
You see this kind of design approach applied currently to flash memory. If you follow the evolution of the MMC card up through SD and into MINI SD and MICRO SD adapters, imagine the same approach taken with bus specifications. Older cards could be used with newer bus specifications via adapter sleeves. But you'd standardize on a singular form-factor. When you open up your PC, all of the guts would be hidden behind the casing except for the mating surfaces for the cards. All cards would be enclosed.
I don't see this happening because computer technology is by definition transient, disposeable. So nobody wastes money on ergonomics like this. Bus standards change so frequently that you can't even keep your motherboard that long anymore let alone your cards. So you might not even swap cards that much for the lifecycle of the PC beyond the initial system setup.
What I'd really like to see is more effort spent on coming up with a universal backplane that would be more future-proof, maybe something more passive where the glue that binds everything together was itself a module you could swap out. That way maybe the underlying frame could last much longer before becoming obsolete.