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More Computers w/ Integrated LCDs
An anonymous reader wrote in to send us an article that
talks about new machines with
integrated LCDs
(sorta like that NEC box we mentioned a few weeks ago). Apparently
vendors like GW2k are also following the trend to create
slimmer iMac type non-upgradable but super-simple boxes.
Personally I'm just obsessed with flat screens.
Yeah, but you got the specs wrong. It was $7500 in '97, but they blew them out for $2000 a pop in '98. I know because I had my mother buy one. They're beautiful machines, too. 12.1 LCD screen, kickass bose sound system, the subwoofer/power supply sat on the ground.. it really is cool. Runs LinuxPPC like a champ, too. But it was upgradable (you can put a G3 in it AND it has a PCI slot.. RAM too), and the keyboard was not wireless (altough it was leather trimmed!). Compaq recently came out with something that looks like it's inbred cousin.
-JonTalbain
Recently I saw a pressure sensitive tablet that was unique in that it had an embedded LCD screen. It was so cool that I was ejected from the building for drooling on the device. I believe it runs about US$3000, but I am probably wrong.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
Matrix-Orbital makes some little displays (which mount in an empty drive bay) to display some simple alpha-numeric stuff. Lm-sensors has I2C drivers for them for Linux. Pictures at their web site.
--Phil
Do you know of any place that has small touchscreens?
First of all, let me say that I would NOT buy one of these. But, what about those users out there who don't care about upgrading? Look at all of the Mac users that are still using B&W screens and other outdated technologies.
I heard on a radio program the other day that 80-some percent of all Macs ever made are still in use. Some people just don't need to have the latest machine. As long as it can run what they need, it is just fine. Not all people enjoy fixing up an older PC to make it run faster. Some would just rather buy a new machine that can do what they want.
I would not expect anyone who reads Slashdot to buy one of these. But, we all know someone who would.
Well, they were considering a Digital LCD (the LCDfx chip, as they called it) output on the V3 3500. That was cancelled because of the high cost of LCDs made the feature unnecessary, so they replaced it with a TV Tuner/Video-In instead.
I believe that SGI has a No9 video card
that they were marketing with their
lcd screen.
check:
SGI Announces Linux Support for Award-winning Silicon Graphics 1600SW Flat Panel Monitor
~Darkfell
My dad is getting one of those huge flat panel, mount on the wall LCD HDTV things.... pretty neet
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
now all these goodies you always begged for might be within your reach now if you have picked up a nice chunk of change. ;-) "Oooh... 32" LCD panel display.. I need one of those." ;-)
I'd send this to ask slashdot but I'd never see it again if I did.
I have thought that it would be neat to have a LCD display, instead of this big 17" monitor. Now that I am making some money, and could afford it, I am wondering which ones Linux supports?
What LCD displays does Linux support? I am thinking of 17" LCD 1024x768, 16bit color minimum.
Does anyone know if SGI machines have LCD's that work with Linux yet?
Only 'flamers' flame!
i totally agree with the "stupid" thing.
I was a fool, and on the very edge of the PowerPC's release, purchased a Performa 575 - a one-piece '040-based Mac with a 13" monitor, a motherboard that slides out of the case on rails, and a big slot where I'm supposed to put a "PowerPC Upgrade Card" that Apple made for two weeks and scrapped.
I never stopped regretting that decision, and now I can't buy an iMac 'cause of the same problem. no room to upgrade...at all. my current PC has no nubus slots, no PCI slots, and one SCSI port. and no room in the case for ANYTHING - more SIMMS, another HD...everything has to be external, because the case is too small. so I hate the one-piece computers with a passion; they're great for schools and families, but for people whose needs change as time passes, they just don't cut it.
now, LCD monitors are really expensive. I want one, but I want to be able to plug it into my blue g3 (ha!) or something. that way, if the monitor breaks or I decide I want a new box or something, the several hundred dollars that went into a 15, 16, or 17-inch active-matrix LCD screen won't go to waste when I get rid of my non-upgradeable, non-enhanceable little green box with flashing lights and super-clear monitor.
monitor you can hang on the wall? good.
monitor that cost a ton of money that you can't replace and can't keep when you get rid of the old computer? very, very bad.
vector
(...did he just say "make fuck?")
The Monorail was beautiful, albeit underpowered. Black, anodized aluminum case. Pretty cool as far as computers go.
Sure it had its problems:
I think they should try the market out again given that active-matrix LCDs are so much cheaper, and they could probably use one of the many off the shelf NLX mainboards, and still have room for 2 PCI slots. They wouldn't have to waste a slot since Ethernet would be on the mainboard.
"Yeah well
Being only two or three inches thick, sometimes less along the top edge...
Where will I put all my plastic dinosaurs?
Posted by DonR:
Thats exactly the point. You buy an iMac, or any other integrated PC. After awhile, you want to get a newer monitor. Ack! *gasp!* Now you need to buy a new machine? Great. Apple, or whoever, will be there, to sell you a new machine for another thousand bucks.
---
Donald Roeber
Ok, this is not a new design. It's old hat. The first one I can think of by name is the anniversary mac. And I've been seeing PCs like this in the stores for years. Then why, I asked myself, would this constitute a news story?
Simple. It's not a news story, it's an advertisement for Gateway.
Excuse me while I try and brush the bitter taste out of my mouth.
Praise the Force Field! Praise the Laser Project! Slackware Loon #19830573
The Deseret news is hardly a "technical publication", it's just a tool of the LDS church
Where am I supposed to plug in my tape drive? Small and quiet are good attributes for a computer, but Real Computers (tm) can make Real Backups (sm).
Hands up everyone out there who wants to pay top dollar for a machine they can't upgrade? When these machines are comparable price-wise with today's vanilla boxes, they'll become viable. But until then? Nah.
Although I'd prefer a tower sitting under my desk and something like SGI's 21-inch flat panel screen. The custom case would make it pretty hard to upgrade most stuff, although it wouldn't be bad for the average user if the prices aren't too high. I believe there's some form-factor stuff for laptops that they might have used, and that could help keep them from jacking up the prices on upgrades.
And first post too!
...how these boxes are any different than buying a notebook and strapping a 15 pound weight on it?
this is not a form factor that we need!
what would be helpful, however, would be an Lcd screen with bays for drives (kind of like the old black IBM APTIVA with the popup drives)
--this would make a good client
------- Oh damn.... the Sigfile escaped... -Great OM
8M video, 18inch FPD, dual CPU upgradable, standard SCSI connector, 256MB, come with Linux and VMWare installed, 20GB harddrive ... well, Linux ready is also acceptable ...
I'd love to find a decent flat-panel display that can do 1280x1024 for less than the price of an entire computer (with 15" monitor). These things are absurdly expensive in Canada.
- chrish
Why bother? If you want a flat screen and don't want the ability to upgrade why not just get a laptop? At least the thing moves easily. I have to admit, I do have a 15.1" LCD on my 600Mhz Alpha box at home and I love it so I can see the attraction, but it also has a pretty sizeable tower case but that sits on the floor unobtrusively. I'm sure someone will buy these machines though, I wonder how long it will be before desktop size machines like this start
to appear with Windows CE on them?
Dr. Shane Sturrock - http://nova.bru.ed.ac.uk/~sss
Linux, a better WinNT than WinNT
BTW, it's just "Gateway" now. They officially dropped the 2000 part last summer. Just FYI....
If you want to make a small unit, partsexpress has some 4" video lcds for $140 iirc.
I ate my tag line.
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
Is it just me or is this whole idea absolutely stupid?
A monitor is the one part of a system which should really last a while (2-3 times the lifetime of your cpu), even longer than disk storage. The last thing i want in a "simple" non-upgradable box is a built in monitor.
A low-powered cheap computer targeted at entry level users means a computer which is looking to be replaced in 3 years. Why replace the monitor if it's not inadequate?
At least in an iMac, along with its PCI-less and fixed-CPU design is a cheap 15" CRT, which probably contributes about $150 (15%) of the price. In these models, like the NEC one, they're using a monitor I would actually want to use on my next computer, and it takes up a much more significant part of the price. Wasted.
You can't tell me that plugging a monitor into a case is just too complicated for newbies.
I'm not a smorgasbord.
I'l wait to buye something like this until it has a "touch-screen" like the Palm Pilot. I want the same Graffiti as on the Pilot, but to be able to write directly in the document, not just in a dedicated area. And I want no keyboard. Oh, upsi; thats a laptop morphed with a Palm Pilot!
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
Seems like there was an Apple machine -- 20th anniversary Macintosh? -- that they tried this with. Integrated flat screen, built in CD-ROM, huge price tag, no upgrades wireless keyboard. Perhaps the Macs were a big hit in Japan, too. Ah, well, at least it opens up the possibility of having a snazzy Linux box without having to install LinuxPPC on an iMac. This at least gives me a glimmer of hope that computer manufacturers (other than Apple and a few other assorted whackos) are begining to consider industrial design as well as functionality in their desktop machines. Now if they can just put functionality _and_ design together...
what you didn't notice that the Gateway was upgradable to "2560 megs" of ram. Uhh yeah, right.
6.4 gigabite hard drive
from a "technical" publication?
This sig left unintentionally blank.
Try NCR. They do all that touch screen stuff, but I don't know how much it would run, or if they have product that small. Just do a search for touch screen and you should find a bunch of companies that deal with these products.
I ate my tag line.
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
Is it just me, or do I like the idea of nice LCD (or any other super thin display technology) screens, yet completely hate the ultra-proprietary, 100% incompatible and non-upgradeable designs everyone is creating?
Even Intel insists we are stupid therefore we don't need internal slots/bays... 6 Miles of Firewire and USB cable surrounding your nice little box...
What sort of work is required to get one of these things to work w/ X? Is there a special video driver, or is it just plug and go? How about using it w/ a 3D accelerated card, like a TNT2?
Thanks
I never thought I'd see the day that /. links to a Deseret News article. I avoid that paper at all costs, and here it is again haunting me. On topic, the only thing we ever upgrade is memory around here. Maybe a new HD, but we generally throw the old one out, or use it in some other unfortunate machine. If it had a bunch of DIMM slots, I think I'd buy it. Monty
I read these sorts of articles and I wonder which is going to "win" - the ultimate portable or the ubiquity of access. By that I mean this - what do we really want? Do we want to carry around a wonderful machine with a great display, superfast processor and tons of memory? (You're all saying yes?) OR do we want acccess to a great machine everywhere we go? I liken it to the Library of Congress argument: do you want the library of congress on your desktop or do you want access to the library of congress from your desktop?
I admit that they are advantages to carrying a portable machine, but for a great many such a device is unneccessary if we could access shared computing resources from work, home, school, etc.
To carry around a machine does grant independence, but at the price of maintaining the machine. The vendor's current answer to that question is to provide low-end, non-upgradeable machines and consumer leasing agreements. But if you take away the machine, you exchange that problem for one of guaranteed access/QOS and a heavier emphasis on standard protocols (to allow for the transfer of information).
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 4th Ed., Vol 2
The intent of these systems were to be cheap and user friendly; perhaps the first commercially available computer "appliance"? They were portable, very easy to set up, and completely non-user serviceable. The idea was to send the entire unit back to Monorail (or an authorized service center, I'm sure) for upgrades / maintenance. The other selling point to these were that they were cheap. They sold for just under $1,000 (US).
That $1,000 price tag is the main stumbling point. These things came out before the huge sub-1,000 dollar craze. But although they hit the market first, they were quickly inundated by "white box" competitors all selling cheap PCs. And these computers were standard systems. There was no "sealed box" mentality, proprietary hardware, or strange "Is this really a computer?" look. Also, Monorail's LCD screen was fairly horrid. Their product just didn't compete.
Of course, there's other aspects to this story. Monorail apparently had issues with production and marketing that also caused them to take hits in the industry. At the least, they were able to salvage relationships with major outlets like CompUSA.
If you head to a local CompUSA or look at their web site, you'll see Monorail is still in business. Their current products? "White box" PCs like everyone else. Hmmmm.
Once upon a time, a big, fat corporation by the name of IBM presented the PS/2 E. This machine sorta looked like the one in the article, however the CPU was contained in its own slim desktop case. It was expandable using PCMCIA cards, which is infinitely better than having no expandability whatsoever. The flat panel display could be replaced with a regular CRT, if need be. However, many of you might have never heard of this machine, which says much about its success.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
Having actually played with one of these, I have to say it has a fantastic screen. Probably one of the best I've ever seen. Watching a DVD on it was really cool. The only thing I would have wanted would be a SBLive card in there for surround sound.
Now, the system can be upgraded some. It takes laptop harddrives and memory, usb is there for external upgrades also. I personally would still go with a full tower and a top o' the line 21" monitor, but this is still a pretty cool machine.
Yes, this isn't really meant for home users, but it's great for people who have limited space.
--
Ty
alSeen@narnia.net