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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.
"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.
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?
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 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.
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?
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.
Going high end would mean them returning all support to the US and seeing how they can cram an E-IPS panel into a laptop form factor.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I hope it does well, since it's a beautiful and a LOT more versatile than the overpriced sheet metal that is the Air.
Really? I can run Windows on a MacBook Air. How well does an Adamo run OS X?
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
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 *
While I agree that 2GB being non-upgradable in the MacBook Air is an oversight, to be honest 2GB is still a fairly hefty amount of RAM. My old MacBook Pro has 2GB and rarely uses more than half of it under Leopard. In fact, Leopard on my old iBook G4 with 640MB works pretty well so 2GB is plenty for OS X. On the other hand, if you're talking about Vista then 2GB is a bit tight. It is funny when people compare specs between PCs and Macs and don't consider that the difference in performance between OS X and Vista can make a much bigger difference than whether one has 4GB or the other has 2GB.
I fully expect my MacBook Pro (just coming up to 3 years old) to serve me well for another few years at least before it needs to be replaced. Not one of my PC laptops has ever lasted me more than a year since I am very hard on my machines. As you say, I wouldn't trust Dell to be able to make a machine that can withstand the daily use my laptops get put through.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
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.
Really? I can run Windows on a MacBook Air. How well does an Adamo run OS X?
It'd probably run great if apple would allow it.
Especially if you did learn Latin at school... they nailed the British-public-school-latin-master perfectly. "HOW many Romans?"
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
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.
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That's ADMIRAL Adamo to you, nugget.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
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.
It so happens that some of us buy computers and other random IT related gadgets with a list of criteria where looks don't get the first place (not even close). Somehow I've even seen people being quite happy with non Apple hardware. It's possible they hadn't yet had their latte with nougat flavoured syrup though.
(not that I bothered to check the specs on that gizmo)
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Then you'd have the joys of fabricating individual cases, and matching them up / flashing the ethernet card :/
Sounds like a massive pain in the ass, and probably $100 per unit for something that only 0.01% of customers would find cool.
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
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.
Seriously, laptops still have ports on the back?
Ports on the side? The right side is where I keep my coffee, and a mouse that I try not to use. The left side is where I keep my pad, a calculator, a book or two or three, and an ashtray for when I get tired of whatever I'm doing. The back, on the other hand, is dead space, all the way across the table to the wall. Why not use the back?
What a PITA! I thought side or front ports were pretty standard now.
They, as are a lack of serial ports. If you want, I can bitch about that, too. ;-)
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
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.
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
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?
I understand your position. What I don't understand is there seems to be a false dichotomy with the anti-apple crowd. Making good stuff and marketing it well are not mutually exclusive. Just because Dell isn't good at marketing, doesn't mean their computers aren't any good, and just because Apple's marketing IS good, doesn't mean they don't make a good product. It's so freakin' cynical around these parts, I tell ya.