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Dell's Adamo Goes After MacBook Air
MojoKid writes "Adamo, pronounced 'A-dahm-o,' means 'to fall in love with' in Latin. Dell is certainly hoping you'll fall in love with this notebook's looks as well as its functionality. The Adamo's chassis is milled from a single piece of aluminum and features precision detailing with a scalloped backlit keyboard. Even the fan holes, which are punched out squares, have an attractive modern design. The Adamo features a thin 0.65-inch profile and weighs four pounds. The new ultra-portable will also offer Intel Core 2 Duo processors and DDR3 memory (up to 4GB), a 13.4-inch 16:9 HD display and a 128GB SSD hard drive. Pricing starts at $1,999 with Vista Ultimate 64." The Dell infomercial spokesmodel (video at the bottom of the link) concludes, "Adamo resulted from the union of technology with pleasure for the style-conscious individualist." OK, so he's no Steve Jobs.
They must be crazy to be running that out in the current economic environment.
We'll see how mant they managed to sell...
What's the upcharge to NOT get Vista Ultimate 64 on that?
I think that's the question people want to know.
My one and a half year old vaio SZ weighs less than that (about 3 pounds) and isn't all that thick.
Might be a nice computer for all I know, but the design is rather ugly and heavyhanded. NIce for a Dell, but no Apple-killer from a beauty standpoint.
"Adamo resulted from the union of technology with pleasure...."
A laptop is not the first thing I thought of when seeing that phrase. Not that sort of laptop, at least.
...until the "with Vista Ultimate 64" part.
An Adamo without Vista is like chocolate cake without mustard.
Give me the computer without slathering it up with old smelly mayonnaise, please. Thanks.
(just to get this out of the way) Early adopters are reporting that the Adamo seems to severely dislike the Roomba unless it needs its room cleaned, and every so often wants to get a little too comfortable with that $4 latte you bought this morning.
Hopefully the screen resolution is higher than the macbook air. That would make it more attractive to me.
By straight looks the air is the clear winner. But honestly, neither is all that practical. The beauty of an ultra-light notebook is largely diluted when you add the weight of a bag, and all the other junk you carry with you. I'll take a slightly larger and heavier and more durable model for less money.
Sheldon
http://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=QUJqWc6seYk
How can they do this? How can this get out of the marketing department at Dell without someone getting fired, or sued, or a stop-payment notice put on their last paycheck at least?
Nice to see Dell get BACK to the High End. There was only the choice of Sun Microsystems left for awhile.
Could I maybe get it for $1000 without Vista?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
""Adamo, pronounced 'A-dahm-o,' means 'to fall in love with' in Latin."
phhh, as any fule knos, it really means 'I fall in love with' if they had wanted it to mean 'to fall in love with' it should be called 'adamare'
come on, this is a basic 1st conjugation verb with a preposition, basic stuff.
Dell's Adamo comes AFTER MacBook Air. There fixed that for ya!
Why bother
Dell Ad Exec #1: We need a foreign spokesman to give our product a refined cosmopolitan vibe. We can save some money by using an employee.
Exec #2: How about one of mexican janitors?
Exec #3: How about one of our indian support staff?
Dell Ad Exec #1: Ok, maybe not. I think my cock-tease secretary mentioned her boyfriend was European. That's close enough.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I find it funny to see an online ad for the Apple MacBook while entering a comment for story on the Dell Armadillio. :P
a a a a
because when women and men see leather it is leather. and a a a , it is (we have not seen Apple Air before) a product.
...a stunned silence fell upon the hall.
The web page list "Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium Edition SP1, 64-bit" not Vista Ultimate 64 for $1,999.
...I have a heightened sense of doubt with this product. It targets the Air well, but there isn't much that the laptop offers to make the Air's target audience REALLY want to get this. Coupled with the fact that it's not an Apple product makes it even more difficult. It's also pretty heavy for a laptop of this caliber.
I hope it does well, since it's a beautiful and a LOT more versatile than the overpriced sheet metal that is the Air.
If you haven't watched the movie in the link, you absolutely have to. I don't know what Dell was thinking but it didn't come from the realm of sanity (and let me mention that the laptop itself looks pretty cool. It's just Dell marketing that is quite out there. Really, watch the movie). It is so amazingly over the top, it's like they took every bad Apple cliche and made it into a marketing movie. For your pleasure I took some of the best quotes from the movie:
"get ready to witness a true love story by Dell"
"machined aluminum"
"Adamo resulted from the union of technology with pleasure, for the style conscious individualist" (woahoah! Any guess what their target market is? Any? at all?)
"machined aluminum" (they seemed to be quite proud of that point)
"ultra-thin portable aphrodisiac" (oh yes, they actually said that!)
Adamo. For all your computer love needs. I guess.
Qxe4
will it run ubuntu without any huge issues?
...its so... what's the word... ugly! That's the word I was looking for. Is it really so hard to clone apples laptop design, when the apple machines are everywhere out in the open?
Sam has one liberty, which he sacrifices for one security. Can you tell me what Sam has now?
Who did they ODM this one off of to get this model? I don't believe Dell does any sort of design beyond finding a suitable ODM.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Modell (n): thin, fashionable, overpriced and only for those select few of the society whose vision often overlooks function for form.
this is just bling for the glitterati. like those diamond studded cell phones, they target a niche crowd that can afford to be extravagant. In these days of $300 netbooks (and weighing ~2 lbs), very few regular buyers would plunk down 2G for a laptop; Macbook Air was partly justified in its price point when it came out but it has lost its relevance in today's market, I find it hard to conceive Dell considering this a mainstream product.
My sig has been answered.
I'm glad to see that manufacturers are returning to the form factor that HP / Mitsubishi had in 1998 with the Omnibook Sojourn / Pedion: 0.65 inch thick, 12 inch display, full-sized keyboard, ultra light, decent battery life, fast (for the time) processor, elegant design, full-metal chassis (magnesium, back then), and so forth.
IMO, it is the perfect form factor, about the size and thickness of a pad of paper.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Apart from the obvious flaw "with Vista Ultimate" the basic problem is that Apple are shiny, Apple are cool, Apple are the sort of thing that people buy because its Apple.
This is basically like K-Mart trying to make a Nike Trainer, sure it looks similar, sure it appears to have similar specs... but you know what, if I'm spending that sort of cash on something I think I'll go for the brand.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
He's got to right?
I got modded overrated. Was my comment even rated before you modded me?
First we had Microsoft making efforts to change the look of their desktop to be something less "ugly" (a characterisation that even Bill Gates used) that took a wrong turn with XP but resulted in something reasonably coherent and possibly attractive in Vista (and its cousin, Vista SP1). Now we have Dell setting aside their traditional look (a make-it-up as-you-go-along aesthetic designed to appeal to one's inner ricer so those cheap-assed plastic/metal boxes with an in-your-face logo would actually sell) for something that actually looks like it was "designed".
Hell, based on the looks, I'd even consider buying one. Someone would first have to convince me that during assembly, the internals weren't selected from a grab bag of parts taken from a randomly changing supplier list, though.
So, kudos to Dell. But let's face it: the real credit belongs to Apple who forced everyone to adopt a higher standard.
Adamo. For all your computer love needs. I guess.
New slogan: "Adamo. There's a port for that."
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'd like an Air, but 2 gigs of RAM is grossly inadequate for a computer one intends to keep using for several years. On the other hand, I don't really trust Dell to make hardware to the relatively high standards of Apple...
Hey, Apple is the only one who offers "high-priced" laptops.
What is going on here?
I mean, I watched the promotional video and frankly the thing doesn't look particularly nice.
Of course, that might be a reaction to 4+ minutes of being told what a premium product it is, and how people will look at me when I'm using it, which basically made it sound like it's marketed to overpaid IT executives going through a midlife crisis.
I forgot to add the one thing the Adamo is missing - Rich Corinthian Leather wristpads. Only then would it be a true union of technology with pleasure.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So it costs more than the Air, but has a crappier chipset. It does have more ports, which is good, and unlike the Air it can hold 4GB of RAM. It's also a little bigger, a little heavier, and it has way less processor in it. Plus it comes with Vista - though it's at least the x64 edition, it still will have that much more in driver compatibility issues as a result, and it's still only a Home edition. For that kind of coin, you'd think they would at least provide Ultimate.
And how again is this Dell's MacBook Air killer? The best thing I can say about it so far is it's a little better-looking than most Dell laptops. But I think they're going to sell about 3 of these.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I read your comment "I had no idea that some people would go to such lengths to generate something that is just such a completely and utterly useless, pointless waste of space and time." and thought it was spot on to describe the Adamo.
Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
...when Apple was releasing their latest 15in macbooks. Even with the European guy that is hard to understand. Same focus on machined aluminum and how stylish it is. However Apple also stated how 'green' its production was and the new feature with the touchpad mouse.
FYI-After having been given the new macbook for work(I didn't pay for it), I will admit they are nice machines but I have yet to pick up any women. For some reason I don't expect this machine to be any different.
Looking at the back view picture, it looks like the holes could be interpreted as code. Each column is a nibble, with the low end bits being on top. A hole is a 1, and no hole is a 0.
So, on the right side, starting with the fist hole and going right, you get 2014A14B6BDF, and it just repeats with F's. This happens to be 12 nibbles, the size of a MAC Address. I looked this up for the associated vendor, but there is none.
Anyways, it'd be cool and rather geeky to have the MAC Address of the notebook's ethernet card (rather than wireless card, which may be a security concern) encoded in the holes on the back. It wouldn't be like a fading effect any more, but it'd be oh-so geeky.
The version without vista will more likely be around $2499.99 :)
I hardly see how this competes with the Mac Air. The average thickness is greater. It is slower, and only comes with the home software. Unless you are willing to pay more than a Macbook Air, you will have to live with a very slow machine that does not have enough memory for Vista. For the machine that works, the cost is $2700. Of course some will say how wonderful all the extra ports are, and the built in mobile broad band is a plus.
But really, how much extra is one going to pay for a Dell. For Apple the markup is ok. Everyone expects to pay extra for an Apple. But for a dell?
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Lately, I have been seeing TV commercials from Dell that say, using imagery, "stand in line to buy this and you will come out groovy and cool." Perhaps they are attempting to take a page from Apple's play-book, but the problem is that Apple's established image and Dell's established image are very different. You don't just pop up out of nowhere and say "hey! suddenly we're cool hipsters!" If Dell wants to become that, they will have to evolve their image, not manufacture it. And there has to be a LOT (and I mean excessively) of good will directed at the consumer before they will buy into it.
Dell is best known for business machines. What's more, Dell is nearly anti-consumer in that the care offered to consumers is a LOT less than care offered to businesses. They need to reverse this condition before people will ever think of Dell as anything else.
I have some ideas I hope Dell takes to heart, but they don't listen to people like me. But if Dell wants to REALLY get into the eye-candy end of things, offer up and electronic ink display on the back of the display that can be customized by the user. And with the interesting legal progress being made by the Mac-clone people, Dell ought to be preparing to blast out a Mac compatible of their own. Sure, don't market it that way... just put whatever is needed to make it Mac compatible in the machine and let hackers out there figure out the rest. (The Dell Mini9 is rather popular with people into Hackintoshes)
There are a lot of ways Dell could become what they seek to be, but simply jumping right out into the middle and saying "HEY! LOOK AT ME!" ain't gonna do it.
Once you turn your Adamo on your qickly back in the office staring at the same screen youre used to. Apple has software thats cool but all Dell has is Windows. Despite all the efforts by MS Vista is still just XP with some spitshine ontop. Until Dell can do something different with the software they will never be able to compete with apple.
HTTP/1.1 400
So if you're going to need to boot a Linux Live DVD on it, are you going to need an eSATA optical drive, or can it boot from a USB drive?
Are there Vista drivers for using another Mac's optical drive wirelessly, or just drivers for a Mac to use a Windows system's optical drive?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
It means Romans go home!
One of the best parts of the 'Life of Brian' IMHO
"Adamo, pronounced 'A-dahm-o,' means 'to fall in love with' in Latin.
Actually, since this is a Latin word, it would be pronounced more like "ah-DAH-mo", with the emphasis on the second syllable and a softer 'a' sound.
And before anyone jumps on me for that, make sure you learned real Latin and not the crap the Catholics use, it's not the same.
While I appreciate that there are those who want Portable Power (and nice form), I am really looking forward to the ARM-based laptops, such as the ~$200 one that Pegatron was talking about back in January. Why would I need a laptop like the Adamo? O_o
Perhaps if I were a constant traveling computer-user... doing some sort of heavy computing?
Not to pick nits over their use of Latin, but adamo is basically never used in that form in Classical Latin, and I've never seen it used that way in Medieval Latin either. Anyways, the infinitive would be adamare, but what the hell. On top of it, as a professional developer who uses a Macbook Air as my main development box (do a lot of embedded development, and one USB port is all I need it turns out), this box just doesn't meet my pretentious latte drinking needs. I mean, look at the fucking piece of shit's screen hinge! When I program in my boxers or in the nude I'm likely to singe my nads or get pubes stuck in those tiny holes! For Shame Dell, for shame! Nonne werpa inter column est?
Why don't they just completely rip off the MacBook Air, to the extent that they can do so while avoiding legal trouble?
If you're offering obvious competition for the Air, and your design skills aren't as good as Apple's, you might as well just copy their design. It would be blatant competition, but it would be anyway.
Using Intel's 4500 series? OK, so graphics are not its forte.
It actually cost more than the Air and gives less power? Processor speeds are lackluster as well.
You just have to hate Apple to buy this over the Air. I am not a fanboi of Apple, I do have an iMac (7600gt variety) and a Touch, but damn I always thought Apple notebooks overpriced cases with average internals...
So what happened? What are they truly aiming at? This new laptop of theirs is practically a sales pitch for the Air.
Now, if it started at 1299 then it might be worth looking at...
Sorry, but I really don't understand how this shipped at its price point, especially with such a weak feature set compared to its obvious competition. Slower processors, 1/3rd the speed in graphics, oh I will just stop there.
Oh, Blu-Ray, well it has something at least I cannot do on an Apple...
Great, I am going to have to check myself in at Apple's Fanboi Anonymous group after posting this.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
thin, nice stylish laptop, and it's expensive.
Remember that next time you whine about Apples prices.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That's ADMIRAL Adamo to you, nugget.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
will it run linux?
I can't seem to find any information on that
You speak London? I speak London very best.
Wow, not only does the infomercial go SPLAT!
This thing is heeeeaaaaaavvvy at 4lbs (I thought @4lbs they included the DVD combo drive) and sort of starts with a high price compared to the $1799.00 MacBook Air which weighs in at a svelte 3lbs.
Apple FTW!
...at least your expense will be worth something, can run OSX and has the optical drive included.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Name this thing Adama, put it on sale on Friday and you've got yourself a geek tie in of epic proportions.
Macbook Air is half concept machine with smaller and weaker CPU while it is not clearly a Netbook.
What Apple trusts while designing, shipping air is this: 0.01 CPU load while idling. A massively optimised system that won't even run on non SSE CPUs. Zero tolerance to old/depreciated frameworks, even Apple Finder gets a slap from OS X saying "This functionality is depreciated".
It is the OS and people know how OS X works so they buy Macbook Air. It is not just (or even) Logo. Sony had/have way better machines than Apple regarding hardware and features but they run Windows along with all the 3rd party crap they added.
I guess Dell wasted their money.
Apple is still the only computer maker that understands the value of integrated hardware and software design. No piecemeal computer kit thrown together by others will ever quite match the integrated holistic approach of Apple products.
You could have said that Apple has mastered lock-in while appearing to be open.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
thought it might possibly be useful to see the actual website for the product http://www.adamobydell.co.uk/
If the Macbook Air ran Windows, it wouldn't sell enough to pay for the design work... let alone the actual hardware.
It's the software, Stupid. Dell: you want some of Apple's margins? Get your fecal matter conglomerated and put OS X on your hardware. If you can't beg, buy, or borrow, then hire some people with clue and WRITE the equivalent. Use GNUstep, and maybe you'll even be able to finagle software compatibility with OS X as well. But you can't fold, spindle, or mutilate hardware and produce a Mac, because it's not the hardware that makes it a Mac. ESPECIALLY not the hardware. :(
that Apple subnotebooks (alo applies to smartphones) seem to be the absolute standard, even on slashdot. IBM/Lenovo, Toshiba and Sony have/had always an broad range of small form-factors available (especially at $1999) which are beaten by the macbook Air only if you accept tho measure the "thickness" of a triangle
y'all have too much money.
I hope it comes with better customer service than Dell'snormal 1-800-stick-pins-in-my-eyeballs-and-make-me-cry.
Apple seems to understand the relationship between premium products and good customer support.
Stop butchering Latin. It's already dead.
adamo
The Apple is, after all, a good piece of hardware with good software. They should ship this with a real operating system. I simply will not purchase ANYTHING running Vista period. They might just as well put MS-DOS on it.
......starts at $1,999 with Vista Ultimate 64."
How do you say nowadays: FAIL
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I actually think it looks better than most macs. but I'm not in the market for any notebooks right now, never mind a two grand status symbol.
ivan
Like to brew? Want to talk about it? Brattlebrew: groups.yahoo.com/group/brattlebrew
We (my small, 2-person business) sold our our MacBook to buy an AirBook.
Just for travel.
Weight, for us, was/is really important.
I really like the appearance of the new DELL Adamo.
But:
1. 1 pound (.45Kg) heavier! Not what I seek in a travel computer.
2. More money. Oh, I know it has a SSD, but who cares? A regular, old-fashioned, spinning disk is "good enough" for me.
3. Slower CPU! Slower than my slow AirBook is just not acceptable.
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
Maybe it's a bit of a reach, but as soon as I saw mention of Adamo, I though Awesom-O. They should absolutely run Cartman as their spokesman for this...
For those not in the know: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWESOM-O
Here's a legit pic (NFW): http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2c/802_image_14.jpg
It's just a standard laptop but without hard disk nor optical drive.
All laptops could be lighter, and substantially thinner, if they dumped these basic internal components.
I, for one, don't need 128GB of internal storage. Other networked devices or USB2 external drives can serve that purpose.
Hopefully these models will dramatically drive down the price of internal SSD for the average consumer, e.g. for netbooks.
For the person that uses their computer's optical drive sparingly, why not? Hopefully 'netbook' makers will corner this market too, so that Dell and Apple can't charge extortionate prices for something that basically amounts to just removing the standard drives. I'd be content with 32GB, though I don't run Vista or OS X!
that i bought online on boxing day.
jerks.
don't buy dell.
...a whitebox laptop parts manufacturer to build some really nice machined aluminum cases. It would be extra cool if you could send them a pattern to acid-etch onto the case. What else does this thing offer? It looks like the "edge to edge" monitor has 2/3s of an inch of black on 3 sides! MacBook Airs aren't the greatest specs but they do feel like kind of a miracle when you pick them up and use them. Its the super smooth featureless surface thing. Adamo looks really nice but it's price point and default to Vista just makes me wonder whether there's a planet of fashionistas somewhere that has never heard of a Mac.
Every rule has more than one consequence.
Yes it is.
Well at least now we know what Hank Paulson is doing with his free time.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Anyone else notice the ram, while DDR3, is only 800mhz? What about the 1066mhz of the DDR3 apple uses? Is there even an advantage to DDR3 over DDR2 at 800mhz?
For all the joking about how Apple is for effete fashion victims, the biggest difference I noticed from the Dell video is that the Apple video focuses almost entirely on functional design. In the Apple video, they don't say they use aluminum because it's sexy, they say it's used to provide rigidity for light weight. Instead of a fancy apartment we see industrial manufacturing. There's no spokesmodel (all the speakers are staff/management at Apple), and the only model is seen only for a few seconds at the end. There's no talk of fashion or aphrodisiac or etched patterns for looks.
I think Dell is totally misreading the market if they think there is going to a big demand for the Adamo based just on how hot and fashionable it looks. That's especially true now...I think conspicuous consumption went out as a life goal for most people about 6 months ago. And even if people are willing to spend that much on a notebook, the way to get to their pocketbooks is to focus on the high-end quality of the product. It's the same reason people buy $450 Gore-Tex coats to walk their dog, or $55,000 SUVs to drive the kids to school.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Pricing starts at $1,999 with Vista Ultimate 64.
Everything about it sounded so wonderful until the admission of this terrible crime, and I'm not talking about the price.
Every time a sealed device (iPhone, Air) comes up someone likes you brings up the external battery.
Such a pointless question though. Who cares when an external power pack the a laptop can run from takes the same amount of space as the spare battery would have? The ONLY time you ever need one of these things is really long air travel, when you're in steerage without a plug. Even when traveling in the deepest heart of Africa I didn't need a spare battery because I just charged off the car we were traveling with (and yes in fact I did need a laptop it was not just some electronic toy I could not live without).
As for replacing it, since you do that once every few years I can't see that as a serious concern.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I just watched the video, and between the rocking (probably why the focus was shot) and monochromatic delivery I kept expecting him to say "I'm an excellent designer" in a Hoffman voice.
I wouldn't fare any better either, which is why I'm not in front of a camera... screen the technical people before you let the world see them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I forgot to add the one thing the Adamo is missing - Rich Corinthian Leather
From the video link others have posted, at 2:18:
"When you see metal, it's real metal, when you see leather, it's real leather".
!
Looking at the case, I can't see leather anywhere - which means it is INSIDE. Wow man, that is premium.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How are they stopping you?
There is a veritable industry getting OSX to run on generic hardware. As long as you don't actually market a box with OSX installed you won't hear from Apple.
When you include dells one pound gold brick power supply, the adamo is 5 pounds, equal to a normal macbook including power For $2500 the macbook has 2.4ghz with 4gb ram, dvd drive and 256gb ssd harddrive plus osx, backlit display, magsafe and isight Tell me again why i should use dell trying vista 64 without graphics card?
Your username is retarded and your comment was atrocious. The punishment fits the crime. That's the sort of dumb shit you post anonymously like I'm doing here.
Nah! Heaviers than Air can't work!
You'll also receive 24/7 access to Dell's best trained technicians ...
yeah. woohoo
Intel Q9000 has about the same TDP as my Core 2 Duo, this is a super-expensive machine, and they're not even offering a Quad-Core? They really are copying Apple! (Where's my fucking Quad-Core MBP, Apple? You really DON'T want to sell laptops to the competent, do you?)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm not saying that Apple, as a company, focuses solely on functional design. In addition to function, it's pretty obvious and well-known that they really, really care how their products look and are positioned in the marketplace. Steve Jobs recently canceled a new Apple store in New York because he did not like the neighborhood for instance.
They're just not stupid enough to make that the focus of their marketing videos.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
They're trying to create a high-end design for the aesthetically conscious, but stamp what
has to be the most uninspired corporate logo of the last 50 years on their product, in
stainless steel no less. I'd rather by a netbook from maytag, if they made one.
How narcissistic do you have to be? You're going to name the company after yourself
and the logo is your last name, but the 'E' is rotated a few degrees.
What graphic design genius came up with that?
And it runs Vista!
This Sig does not Exist.
Only Dell could miss the boat like this. Apple products are popular and taking increasing market share because they work. Yeah, they're elegant and beautifully designed, but, most of all, they free us from the tyranny of broken Microsoft software. Dell doesn't get it, and, as others have posted here, empty style doesn't sell these days. We've had several pieces of Dell hardware and it's crap, so now they have a crappy laptop that looks sort of cool. Great.
After having just watched a Colbert Report talking about meat grown in a pitri dish, and after hearing people comparing this to the MBA, the word that comes to mind is "shmaptop".
--dant
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
In the long term you'll gain the same weight again or even more.
From the comments on the article that's linked from the OP:
By rox0r on Mar 17, 2009
I'm confused. Does anyone remember what the percentage of solid state the drive was?
I can't remember if they said it was 90% or 100% solid state drive. Because i'm not getting it if it is under 75% solid state.
I mean, SRSLY, why go to all the work machining the aluminum if the drive is going to be anything less than 100% solid state?
LOL! What does a 90% solid state drive look like anyway? I hope it was a joke post because it sure did make snot fly out my nose when I read it and laughed!
How is this comparable to a Macbook Air? It weighs nearly half a kilo more which means it is closer to a Macbook than a Macbook Air. Oh, and it costs more than either a Macbook or Macbook Air. OK, it's pretty, but even by being copy cats Dell hasn't really got into the same league as Apple. Even if I wanted to run Windows I'd rather pick up one of the Apples.
There is a reason they are using DDR3 SODIMMS over DDR2 SODIMMs, DDR3 uses less power consumption which means less heat, greater battery life and longer life of the part. Hot IC's are more likely to fail sooner then cooler parts, look at high performance RAM and "normal" RAM. You'll see that most of the time the IC's on the performance RAM modules are overclocked and require better cooling to get the same life from them as the none overclocked without cooling solutions on them.
-->Amount of RAM
Yeah sure 2Gb of RAM is plenty for most out there but with the price of RAM dropping each time a new manufacturing process comes out to make the IC's small price drops, and does having more RAM and being able to increase the RAM after purchase a bad thing? Not at all, its a good thing in fact
-->The IGP cores
Intel is lacking here but how many have the money here for a thin Blu-Ray disk player to watch there HD movies or even play a half decent game on there MacBook Airs? If you do game on your MacBook Air or ultra portables your using the wrong platform. Ultra portables are meant to last as long as possible in the smallest foot print possible.
-->Processors
Dell could do better here yes but again it comes to heat output and battery life under RL usage and lower speed the CPU the less heat and longer your battery is going to last. Want to do CS3 or CS4 get a larger 15" inch if you want to do that work.
-->HDD Drive Options. Well duh the Dell will cost more the MacBook Air?! It has a 128GB SSD as standard while the Air uses a standard rotating media based HDD unless your get the better unit.
-->Thickness
Thinner your notebook the less options you are going to have for a good cooling solution, or if you can make a good cooling solution for the size its going to be expensive. And even then surface area counts, more surface are the more area for heat to be radiated from the cooling solution. Who cares if it can fit in a envelop? I want to know how cool it will be under a moderate amount of usage. And don't tell me the frame is a huge heat sink because its aluminum, because do you want a hot piece of monolithic aluminum sending that heat into your thighs? I don't
-->Reliability
Well since we know Apple does not make there own parts anymore and outsource all there motherboards from one of thee manufactures reliability is about the same when it comes to how well made those motherboards are. Dell probably buys from the very same supplier as Apple does, only difference is the layout of the motherboard to fit the case they want it in. So t would be safe to say Apples die as often as a Dell, Asus, MSI and HP.
And now for my thought of the Dell fashion notebook, I don't really care and I think Dell does not really care either as they cater to business for the most part that don't care if its pretty. Its a nitch market for them and nothing more since there are more profitable markets where they are firmly entrenched. This Adamo is like a little pet project they did on the side.
This is a bit ironic that Dell would be leading the charge back towards premium products when they forcing premium brands like IBM, HP and Sony down to their level for the past few years.
Stop thinking about price and start thinking about "best value" for the money. I'm sticking with my macs but I think the era of the "cheap" computer is coming to an end and we will start to see slower upgrade cycles. You should be factoring in longevity of the product when making a purchase decision.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.