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Boxee Box Pre-Orders Start At $229
Engadget is reporting that Boxee is taking pre-orders at $229 for their set-top box that is utterly guaranteed to not fit into any stereo component rack you might have. They also have switched chipsets from the Tegra 2 to the CE4100. I'm not sure about this thing, but I'd sure like to play with one as I lust for the day when every piece of media I have can be played from a single device. I suspect it'll never happen.
Why oh why would they make it so fiendishly hard to place one of these things? Is it really aesthetically pleasing to have to dedicate the whole cabinet under your TV (if you even have one) to this awkward device?
I for one want to see more devices that stay 100% out-of-the-fucking-way. Let me hide it in a low profile cabinet. Let me mount it BEHIND my TV if I want. I bought the TV to look at the TV... I bought your device, TO KEEP LOOKING AT THE TV. Sigh.
The case is a box, with one corner lopped so it sits at an angle (hence the part in the summary about how it won't fit in a rack.). As if this weren't enough to make it call attention to itself, the default color scheme is carbon and acid green.
The design is meant to sell to people who want to show off how they have one, and create consumer envy as a way of moving more units. The problem is, some customers will be turned off by that - for example, they want a device that blends with the others in their viewing room. The color scheme makes this effect worse - after a certain point, the Boxee Box is already distinctive, and has caught the attention of that market share that values gadgets standing out from the crowd - so more distinction will only cost them customers. Acid green is a color that came into style briefly a few years ago, and is now dated to the people who have strong interior decorator modes and really care about such trends - using it this late in the trend cycle comes off a little like making the device in the customer's choice of Almond, Harvest Gold or Avocado.
If they had kept the price under 200$, all that might have flown, with sales to the college dorm crowd and the general youth market, but with the new price point, the design is aimed at a slightly older demographic, one that will actually care about this sort of thing.
As final proof that the Boxee Box isn't going to sell well, I'd buy one, even at the new price. It triggers geeklust in me. The very last tech-thing I bought was a Doctor Who Sonic Screwdriver replica (Matt Smith version). Does that sound like a real market exists?
Who is John Cabal?
I'm sure "they" asked for 3 designs. So the designer did just that.
1st) Designer pretentious wank, (The one he loved).
2nd) Standard Corporate Beige (the one they'll pick).
3rd) An awful one (they'll never want this one).
Management/"they" didn't like the pretentious one; but didn't want to be seen playing safe with the 2nd one. So what could they pick? The 3rd mental design.
Never design a "they'll never want this one" - They always want that one..
It's a box right? You don't want it sitting slanted to one side?? Turn it on its side. NOW it'll fit into your AV Cabinet.
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
Taco has this thing about emerging media player technology where he establishes a nearly impossible set of requirements and then denegrates each new hardware release because it does not meet each and every one of them.
For whatever reason it appears he builds a media catalog consisting of as many disparate file formats, sizes, bitrates, pixel depths, containers, and codecs as he possibly can then salts them out across spinning hard drives, thumb drives, burned CDs, DVDs, Blu-Rays, 3.5" floppies, SSDs, and Firewire interface Zip drives, all attached to a network, some segments of which are token ring, via a smattering of obscure operating systems. He complains when no one builds a device that caters to his specific blend of geekery. This thing won't upsample a full duplex ogg vorbis DVD rip in NTSC to 1080p and simultaneously serve it to my laptop and video ipod running rockbox? Think I'll wait to buy.
You'd think he would have learned his lesson with audio, but he did not.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State