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The Answer to iMac Envy: NEC's Z1
Unit3 writes "Finally a real competitor to the iMac from a Wintel manufacturer: NEC's Z1 appears to not only outpower the iMac, but includes some very nice design and expandbility ideas that most of the iMac ripoffs these days are missing. "
At $2500 I'm not quite sure that its an iMac competitor, but
it has several other features that are quite tasty. Course it
has to run Linux... I still think I'd prefer a VAIO.
I'm not sure I agree there. Floppy disks *must* die, and they aren't going to die until companies kill them dead.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
"NEC" is just another word for "Packard Bell", at least in the USA.
In my experience their stuff has to be near the bottom in terms of product quality. And their computer is a 20th Anniversary Macintosh ripoff (Which itself is a ripoff of a Bose? CD player).
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Buy an imac. duh.
Reasons:
1. They're cheap. My office just picked up a first generation one for $600 even. Not bad.
2. If you're inclined, they run linux very well. Why force yourself to buy intel and pay MS taxes? PPCs run linux and, telnetting in, I'd bet $$$ that no one could tell the difference (though it might be a little faster).
3. It runs MacOS. At the very least, it's no worse than windows and has the advantage of not ginving money to MS or boosting their market share. One could go so far as to claim that it's a great productivity OS, but, if that's not your cup of tea, see #3. Also, MacOS is somewhat more robust than in the past. I have a month of uptime on this computer. Not bad for an OS previously reknowned for some spectacular crashing.
4. They're designed well. Little desktop realestate, easy to set up, and work well as smart terminals. Because they're so cheap, we bought one for everyone in the office. 10 mins of setup time each, and they work great.
To summarize, if you're a linux geek and have imac envy, you're an idiot or 'platform bigot.'
--Andrew Grossman
grossdog@dartmouth.edu
For the money, I'd buy separates and get Linux hardware compatibility, more memory, more hard drive and not have to pay Microsoft for all that software. If it's PC technology anyway, why not make it the standard platform, expandability and non-monopoly support. Assemble it yourself. You might even save a few sheckles.
If you want cool looking, proprietary and Linux compatibility, there's the NetWinder or Cobalt Qube. That way you are supporting companies which support the Linux effort, too. IMHO.
I'm on one of the blue PowerMacs. The box on the QuickCam Pro said it'd work with USB macs and PC's, so I thought I'd plunk down the dough for it (My brother had an older serial QuickCam which worked great).
It sucked big nuts. The video would show up way too bright even after I tried to adjust it manually. Also, the camera itself would get REALLY warm before the video signal would die. I tried testing it on a PC to see if it was a driver problem. On Windows, it worked a little better, but would still crap out after a couple minutes.
What I'm wondering now is... was it just an isolated defect of this one QuickCam, or is it a design flaw that affects all USB QuickCams? I'm gonna experiment some more after I get my USB hub from Outpost.com, and then decide whether to get my money back or exchange it for a new one...
Move along, there's nothing to see here...
Gateway's been offering a cool "slim" computer like this in Japan for a while already and is getting ready to introduce it in the US. Here's the C|Net News article for more information. Prices will range from $1999 to $2299, which is a little cheaper than the NEC and I think overall, it's probably a better computer coming from Gateway. Personally, I like how they fit the stuff in the side. "Cool" computers come and go and the NEC one doesn't seem to solve too many problems that exist.
My US$.02
1) The iMac is better
2) The iMac sucks
3) Who needs a beautiful machine anyway?
I think /. readers need to become more attuned to machine beauty. Your box doesn't have to be an ugly piece of crap.
What the iMac (and even more profoundly, the 20th Century Mac, which as one reader pointed out is the obvious inspiration for the Z1) did is break out of the mold for consumer boxes, for the first time making the machine something you wouldn't necessarily want to hide under the desk.
Other machines, like the sony VAIO slimline and my personal favorite the stunning Rock City, have made similar design efforts, but with the iMac, Apple made it commercially viable.
The only downside I can see is really crappy upgradeability on this box. It (and the VAIO) use PC card slots. No TNT-2's (or -3's...) to upgrade the damn thing's Q3 performance.
For that reason, the Rock City, which takes standard ATX motherboards, still has to take the cake...
\
They all share the bandwidth- and voltage too- depending on the design of the usb internals, you may *have* to get a hub anyways- a good example are those usb quickcams- they suck so much juice they can make your mouse/kb not work on macs...
they share something like 2.1 or 1.2 megabits/sec...
What we might be seeing here is a new business model in the hardware industry.
Previously, as all wintel boxes were pretty much the same, profit margins had to be pretty low. Raise your price by $100, and the consumer will buy a similar box from someone else.
But with the iMac, the Z1, the Palm V, and the funky-looking prototypes that are coming out, manufacturers are giving consumers a reason to spend an extra $100: differently shaped plastic. Before, they only had "latest" and "fastest" to achieve the "wow" factor, but everyone else can sell the latest and fastest too. Only you can sell a case you've copyrighted. And, if I'm reading the Z1's specs right, you can bilk the hell out of the customer for it.
We might even be entering a time like the '50s of Big Iron. At the time most U.S. auto profit came out of large, overpriced cars that people didn't really need. If this _is_ the beginning of a trend of cute, chic, overpriced computers that people don't really need...
...well, suffice to say that despite all the iMac's comparisons to the VW beetle, within their respective industries they would be absolute opposites.
-crazy uncle dave
The 20th Annies were sold out as of about three years ago. My brother got one of the last handful, at about $2000 (original price was a preposterous $7000).
But it's true! 31337 WaReZ hackerZ and gamerZ d00dZ!
You know how there's a certain amount of bandwidth on USB ports? If your computer has 2 ports, are they bandwidth-independent of each other, or does heavy traffic on one affect the other?
Damn, maybe that explains why my USB QuickCam was on the blitz! My mouse and keyboard were running fine, but the QuickCam would overheat and get crappy-ass video! My brother had an old serial-port QuickCam from the old days and it had better performance than the QuickCam Pro I just bought... Ok, I will try it with a powered hub.
The iMacs are on a different speed scale, with a 66mhz bus and SO-DIMMs instead of SDRAM. Benchmarks I've seen of the 333mhz iMac showed that it was still slightly slower than the 300mzh Powermac.
In other words, all your doing is sharing the bandwith among four ports instead of two. It still helps in reducing the need for a hub, but that's it.
--
Timur Tabi
Remove "nospam_" from email address
It has an LCD screen. AFAIK, those still aren't cheap. Not that that makes this thing worth the price, but that would explain where at least some of the price comes from.
Anyone who thinks this competes with an iMac is a moron. It costs twice as much!!! Would you compare a $20,000 Honda Accord with a $40,000 Porche?!?!? No, of course not! Would you blame someone for choosing the Accord over the Porche?!?! No, of course not!
When will you people realize that the iMac is a great computer, it just wasn't intended for the typical Slashdot reader! And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that! I bet that for 90% of the people who read Slashdot, the iMac is a great computer for their significant others.
--
Timur Tabi
Remove "nospam_" from email address
Yup. I am one of those 90%.
/. 90% as well. Gimme emacs, gimp and apache on an iMac, and I'm not sure what else I'd need.
And, like everybody else around here, I'm a tinkerer. I've run linux for web development, as a router, and as a desktop. I've tried GeoWorks, OS/2, most of the Windows flavors, and BeOS on PPC. I've used Slackware, RedHat, Debian, SuSE, and Caldera. I helped administer a FreeBSD server in a library. I buy or assemble a computer every few months then usually sell it after I get bored.
But nothing has proven of any lasting value until I got an iMac at home (well, okay, that FreeBSD box was pretty solid). It takes care of a lot of things that bug me: it's small, quiet, doesn't demand a lot of maintenance, makes good use of the ADSL line and it runs Netscape Communicator without a hitch for hours on end. Most Linux boxes won't even do the last part.
If it had a bit more room for more pixels and ran a terminal window with bash, it'd serve the needs of a good chunk of that
Sure, Apple is greedy and pushes silly proprietary ideas too far. But when they get the hardware right, it's damn impressive to see. Nobody else seems to understand the idea of a home Internet appliance. Give 'em some credit.
Why oops? I read what you wrote and could easily see the typo. I would hope that the other folks that view this site would also recognize this "typo." Some other people will also point out your 55 KBits/s -> 5.5KBytes/sec glitch (hey!, close enough for government work!). Big F*cking Deal! Your other points about the VAIO are well recieved. I don't know anybody else with this beast, so I welcome hands on comments about it.
/. and other net sites. Visualize vulture circling overhead, ready to pounce on any mistake. (Probably circuling this post :-))
Your oops is unfortunately required by