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Vizio Plans To Undercut The Market For All-In-One PCs
TV maker Vizio is famous for undercutting competitors' prices on LCD TVs; now, the company has released word that it will introduce a new line of budget computers, and next week will be showing them off at CES. Bloomberg reports that the company won't yet disclose actual prices (the kind with numbers), but says instead only that they will be at a "price that just doesn’t seem possible." As the article mentions, the all-in-one desktop machines shown look a lot like Apple products; BetaNews has pictures, and ominously mentions Apple's tendency to sue over similar-looking products.
a local thrift store had a compaq pentium I machine that booted up to a 98 bluescreen and wanted 100$, and some dumb shit bought it. Meanwhile across town at the habitat for humanity reuse center (and this like 5 min away, ... small town) they were selling 2ghz p4 pizza boxes for 5 bucks each, and they sat there for months.
poor people for some reason often have a skewed vision of a good buy, that 100$ computer HAD to be good, and those 5$ computers were useless shit, point being its often better to direct them away from ripoff list cause they will plop down 600 bucks for that mac G4 that some douche thinks is still the sweetest thing on the planet
There is that minimal keyboard that looks like it would be hell to type on if you have any sort of speed. That's very Apple.
If you really think that the only thing that makes it similar-looking to Apple products is "rounded rectangles," then you're intentionally being obtuse for whatever reason. There comes a point where it's obvious that other companies are liberally borrowing from Jonathan Ive's design shop at Apple.
Vizio's PC concept looks like this. The keyboard looks just like Apple's flat keyboard introduced a few years ago, the trackpad is a clone of the Apple Trackpad, and though it's less of a copy than the others, the screen is certainly reminiscent of an iMac, especially taken as a whole with the rest of the components.
I'm not surprised at all that, with all the design work Apple puts into its products, it is going to try to protect that work from knockoffs. Not only is this taking advantage of design work done at Apple, but if the products turn out to be low-quality or problematic, their resemblance to existing Apple products ends up damaging Apple's brand as well. I realize Slashdot comments tend to have an Apple slant (to put it mildly), but come on, this is completely obvious "inspiration" from Apple.
I think what really goes on here is that some people just don't want to give Apple credit for anything, and they hate when people do credit them, so when comparisons between designs are pointed out, it pisses them off and they make snarky remarks about "rounded rectangles."
I think a big chunk of that is that even a 5 year old desktop is fast enough for most consumer tasks now, no?
The market is rather saturated with fast desktops, not like the leaps between 486 -> P1 > P2/3. There's less incentive to upgrade regularly.
Sent from my PDP-11
Looks like bonch needs to be more proactive in protecting his literary work. Overly Critical Guy is making a cheap knock off of his posts and selling it at a discount.
Either way, though, I'm not buying.