OK, but all you can say is that smaller computers cost more, not Macintoshes cost more. And I would fully agree with the "more compact tends to mean more expensive" thing, but you can't derive anything about the relative pricing of Apple hardware from that.
Something the size of a mac mini can be put in all sorts of places that my giant desktop computer can't. Stuff that small can often be mounted on the back of a monitor, for example. I'll grant you that the footprint is probably more important than the height, but the height is still relevant in terms of how tall of a shelf it can fit on.
Laptops, I find, even small ones, tend to require as much space as a large desktop and keyboard. I've got a full-sized keyboard and 27" monitor, and replacing that with a laptop wouldn't really save me much space, since it's still going to dominate the surface of my tiny desk. It would, admittedly, save me the giant box NEXT to the desk.
So, you're going to suggest to me a CPU that has about one third the performance, and imply that a case of similar size exists without actually suggesting one? That's not very convincing. If you want to do a proper comparison, you need to:
1) Replace the CPU with something roughly three times faster (e-450 versus i5-2467M) 2) Suggest an actual case that is roughly 85 cubic inches in size or smaller
The slot-loading mac mini had roughly the same volume as the newer optical-free ones. The original one was taller, but had a smaller footprint.
In short, the "mini-itx is many times larger" thing isn't changed by that.
You're also assuming that I need an optical drive in my desktop. I can probably count the number of times that I use an optical drive on a PC in a year on one hand. Movies? Those go in a bluray player. Games and software? That comes down the tubes. This is the kind of thing where a portable USB optical drive stock in a drawer somewhere that I pull out every few months is good enough.
An ION computer is a joke, mainly due to the Atom processor. Even the entry-level Mac Mini will wipe the floor with four or more ION machines.
The Alienware X51 was pretty interesting, except for two major flaws. At first glance, it does look like a nice option for those of us where space is a premium (yes, sometimes it DOES need to be tiny), but that is ruined by the non-flat top surface (prevents it from being placed under a monitor) and the lackluster GPU (max GTX 555). They use a custom graphics card form factor that vents externally, so there doesn't seem to be any reason to limit the GPU like they have unless they were unable or unwilling to ship the thing with a more powerful power supply. On that subject, the 330W PSU they put in the thing doesn't really look any smaller than the 500W PSU you can find in a high-end Shuttle XPC.
Who cares about size? People who are not rich and do not have giant houses to fit stuff in. People who DO care about size are those like me who live in tiny one-room apartments where space is at a premium and buying a DVD involves the value judgement of "can I fit another bookshelf?"
No, I am disagreeing with you. In your first post, you suggest that Mac hardware tends to have a 10% to 40% markup from, presumably, comparable PCs. In your reply, you're now claiming that the *form factor* has a markup. That's completely different. My 3 pound ultraportable laptop costs more than a 15 pound desktop replacement, but that doesn't tell you anything about the cost premium of my Toshiba ultraportable versus an ASUS ultraportable.
I'm not saying the form factor doesn't have a premium; it clearly does. I'm saying that the assertion that the basic desktop Macintosh has a premium over comparable PCs is completely unfounded, particularly since nobody can actually show me a comparable PC.
Put it this way: I live in a tiny, tiny apartment. Space is at a premium. Doing more in less space is valuable to me regardless of who makes my hardware. I don't own a mac, I've got a monster desktop PC in a P-183 case, and going that route a few years ago turned out to be a huge mistake.
Not even remotely close... Mini ITX will result in systems many *times* larger. The first Mini-ITX case on newegg (Foxconn RM233) is seven times the volume. Even Micro ITX is still going to be multiple times larger.
I'll repeat the challenge. Find me a PC that is as small with comparable specs for the same price or less. Because your first attempt is laughable.
Find me a PC as small as a Mac Mini with comparable specs for $599. Not "also small", not "almost as small, but still double the size", but "as small or smaller". You can't. I've asked people here before; I got a bunch of links to small PCs that were still three or four times larger than a Mac Mini.
People have this strange idea that macs are overpriced, but then when they try to get something comparable (not just in specs, but form factor), they quickly find that they're either paying more, or it doesn't exist at all.
That said, I'm still a PC user who hasn't owned a mac in almost twenty years.
They can eat their own dogfood on Macintosh and iPads just fine. Not only can you run Windows on a Mac, but Microsoft is a major publisher of both Macintosh and iOS software. On the Mac side, they've got a full Microsoft Office suite, Remote Desktop, Windows Live Messenger, etc. On the iOS side, they've got Windows Live Messenger, Bing, OneNote, Lync, Tag, My XBox Live, MSN, Halo Waypoint, Kinectimals, etc. Some of these cost money.
Heck, Microsoft seems to have more stuff in the iOS App Store than Apple does.
The problem is that the Star Trek reboot was still taking place in space, with space ships, on a trek, if you will...
If you take Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and make them aliens instead, you kind of just ditched half the title right there; they're no longer mutants, or turtles. For that matter, they may not qualify as teenagers, and can an alien really be a ninja?
If you take TMNT and change enough so that none of those letters can apply anymore, is it still TMNT?
The last time it happened, with WinME, Microsoft had the entire market and there was no credible opposition. Apple was still selling OS9 and hadn't released the iPod, and the tablet market didn't exist.
Today, tablets running non-Microsoft operating systems are cannibalizing the laptop market, Apple is the largest notebook manufacturer in the world, and OS X has a ~9% marketshare to Win7's ~37%. Microsoft has not been this vulnerable since the Windows 3.1 days, when Apple still had significant marketshare.
Indeed, which is why I assumed 30FPS and said that an iPhone would just about do a million (30/30=1). The point isn't necessarily the theoretical numbers; if you've got a theoretical performance of 500 million polys, that's enough for ~17 million per frame, and drop that down to practical and you're still over a million. And this console came out seven years ago. Is "a decade ago" an exaggeration? Perhaps, but the hardware we're doing it on today is seven years old.
We passed a million polygons on screen over a decade ago. Your telephone can just about do that today (the iPhone 4S does 30 million per second), modern game consoles that came out 7 years ago will do about ten times that (500 million per second on a 360), and a modern high-end PC probably does ten times that again.
In other words, we're at the point where we're using rasterization to push 100 million polygons, and raytracing is still so much slower that it's not even remotely practical to duplicate the same quality. Intel's latest attempts to do so have produced low-resolution low-quality results that still require a massive array of hardware. They're basically throwing eight PCs worth of hardware at the problem. About all the demos do is demonstrate that it's easier to calculate accurate reflection and refraction with raytracing.
In other words, you either mis-remembered Intel's estimate, or their estimate was laughably inaccurate.
Very little increase in cost? The cost of a very high budget AAA title from 20 years ago was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, while today, it's in the hundreds of millions of dollars. By what stretch of the imagination is that "very little increase"? You're talking about a three order of magnitude difference here. You can't get away with John Romero banging out a DooM level from start to finish in a day all by himself anymore.
This is no secret, a day doesn't go by that we don't see somebody from the game industry lamenting this fact.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that Moore's law stopped in 2004; the past 8 years have indeed seen Moore's law continue as always. If anything, we're ahead of the game.
Wikipedia has a chart going to 2011, showing us ahead of Moore's law:
If you want to do a simple comparison on a consumer part, the latest and greatest processor available in 2004 was the Prescott-based Pentium 4, with 125 million transistors.
If we follow the original law's 24 month period, we would expect to see processors with 2 billion transistors in 2012. In reality, the largest consumer Sandy Bridge Core processor features 2.27 billion transistors. Voila, Moore's law has held perfectly true between 2004 and 2012.
Now, the SNB-E chip that I'm using as a comparison is a high-end consumer part, but low-end parts are substantially smaller. Why the disparity? Well, a variety of reasons, but one of the main ones is the drive for lower and lower power usage. This is not because chips are getting hotter, but because people are demanding that they get cooler. If you want to compare two chips for the purposes of Moore's law, you'd want to take similar chips, in this case, both the Prescott and SNB-E that I compared are 130w TDP parts. In reality, consumers tend to pick less performance with less heat/power consumption than they do the same heat with more performance. Witness the rise of ARM SoCs...
Re:That's why I like the basic Kindle
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The eBook Backlash
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· Score: 1
They're rather larger, those eInk capsules, though. Refresh times on colour eInk are about a second. Maybe they will come down eventually, but they'd need to come down more than an order of magnitude to be useful for real-time stuff. Part of the long refresh times comes from having to invert the pixels to reset them to avoid ghosting. You can get substantially faster refresh times by skipping that, as stuff like the Kindle browser does, but at a large cost (the ghosting).
Yes, it is faster to update Pearl displays in full-on monochrome mode, as the guys you mentioned did, but that's not terribly useful (or anything special or new). The resolution on these displays isn't high enough that you can forsake antialiased font rendering yet.
Re:That's why I like the basic Kindle
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The eBook Backlash
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· Score: 1
6" e-readers are not really designed for journals or magazines anyhow. That's the sort of thing the 9.7" Kindle DX is better at, both because of the larger size (6" -> 9.7") and the higher resolution (800x600 -> 1200x824).
In terms of the quality of printed text, eInk readers have generally surpassed paperback print quality already (higher contrast ratios anyhow). The only place that you might argue they're not quite there yet is DPI, and that'll improve over time (eInk has already showed off significantly higher resolution displays). If they improve the contrast ratio, I expect it will surpass the quality of higher and higher quality print.
Colour is coming this year. Worthwhile colour isn't. I love eInk's pearl displays, but Triton, their first colour display, is garbage. The 10:1 contrast ratio on monochrome e-Ink is fine, and better than paperback books (which I believe are 8:1). But their Triton (colour) displays merely stick some colour filters on top of existing eInk pearl displays to produce an RGBW display, and those contrast ratios are just not high enough for that to work.
You compromise the monochrome image quality, and the colours are incredibly muted anyhow. Taking a look at Triton products (even Hanvon products) should illustrate how useless it is:
I think that eventually we'll get this right (perhaps when they make the stuff with actual coloured capsules rather than colour filters), but for now, monochrome is where it's at.
eARCs are priced at $15, but the reader normally knows what they're getting into. You realize that in exchange for getting the book months before it's released, you pay more, get a copy with mistakes, and don't get the final version for free when it comes out. But readers have the choice here; they can either pay more to get the unedited copy early, or they can just wait for the release date and pay $6.
It's actually even cheaper to get their eBooks through the webscriptions thing, but since that's basically a subscription to every book Baen publishes, you probably need to read a lot more than the one or two books a month that I do to make it worth it.
Baen has proven (and by this, I mean they have sales numbers proving it) that eBook piracy is so not a problem that it actually increases sales. Hence why Baen gives away many of their books for free (free library) and indirectly (distribute-freely license on their CD ISOs).
In terms of published authors, they make a lot more money from an eBook sale than a paperback sale, so as long as they see eBooks as replacing paperbacks and not hardcovers (which make far more money than either), they don't seem to mind for the most part.
Re:That's why I like the basic Kindle
on
The eBook Backlash
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· Score: 1
Holding down the Kindle's "next page" button will go forward a single page, no matter how long you hold it down for. At least, this is the case on the Kindle 3.
Depends on the publisher. Macmillan? Yeah. I paid $16 for the latest eBook in a series by a popular scifi author. Baen? No. They never charge more than $6 for a brand new book, and settle down to $4 or $0 in the long run.
Re:That's why I like the basic Kindle
on
The eBook Backlash
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· Score: 4, Informative
We'll probably eventually get decent colour out of e-ink, although I doubt the refresh rate will ever be fast enough for real-time motion. The whole "physically moving around ink capsules" probably would prevent that sort of thing. And you know what? That's fine. I don't need fast refresh rates on my e-reader, just fast enough to make page turns workable. The current speeds are good enough, although I wouldn't complain if they got bumped up anyhow.
I'm much happier reading on my Kindle 3 than a "real" book, particularly when comparing to a hardcover. My kindle is a fraction the weight and size of a hardcover. I can slip my kindle into a pocket or backpack, while a good sized hardcover is not nearly as portable. My kindle is also far easier to read in bed than a hardcover.
The advantages are less when comparing to paperbacks, but there are still size advantages there, not to mention durability; a lot of my older paperbacks are pretty worn out from re-reading, while an eBook (particularly a DRM-free one from Baen) will never wear out.
If you're willing to crack open the system, sure. But it *IS* possible to lock down a system sufficiently that you can't do anything to the system in software. Not necessarily with Windows, but if you're running an OS that doesn't let you do much, and the BIOS is locked, then you're not going to accomplish anything without cracking the thing open.
As soon as you're talking about soldering things onto the bus between the laptop's keyboard and controllers, you're no longer worried about the *employee* doing that, but somebody else who might steal the laptop.
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OK, but all you can say is that smaller computers cost more, not Macintoshes cost more. And I would fully agree with the "more compact tends to mean more expensive" thing, but you can't derive anything about the relative pricing of Apple hardware from that.
Something the size of a mac mini can be put in all sorts of places that my giant desktop computer can't. Stuff that small can often be mounted on the back of a monitor, for example. I'll grant you that the footprint is probably more important than the height, but the height is still relevant in terms of how tall of a shelf it can fit on.
Laptops, I find, even small ones, tend to require as much space as a large desktop and keyboard. I've got a full-sized keyboard and 27" monitor, and replacing that with a laptop wouldn't really save me much space, since it's still going to dominate the surface of my tiny desk. It would, admittedly, save me the giant box NEXT to the desk.
So, you're going to suggest to me a CPU that has about one third the performance, and imply that a case of similar size exists without actually suggesting one? That's not very convincing. If you want to do a proper comparison, you need to:
1) Replace the CPU with something roughly three times faster (e-450 versus i5-2467M)
2) Suggest an actual case that is roughly 85 cubic inches in size or smaller
The slot-loading mac mini had roughly the same volume as the newer optical-free ones. The original one was taller, but had a smaller footprint.
In short, the "mini-itx is many times larger" thing isn't changed by that.
You're also assuming that I need an optical drive in my desktop. I can probably count the number of times that I use an optical drive on a PC in a year on one hand. Movies? Those go in a bluray player. Games and software? That comes down the tubes. This is the kind of thing where a portable USB optical drive stock in a drawer somewhere that I pull out every few months is good enough.
An ION computer is a joke, mainly due to the Atom processor. Even the entry-level Mac Mini will wipe the floor with four or more ION machines.
The Alienware X51 was pretty interesting, except for two major flaws. At first glance, it does look like a nice option for those of us where space is a premium (yes, sometimes it DOES need to be tiny), but that is ruined by the non-flat top surface (prevents it from being placed under a monitor) and the lackluster GPU (max GTX 555). They use a custom graphics card form factor that vents externally, so there doesn't seem to be any reason to limit the GPU like they have unless they were unable or unwilling to ship the thing with a more powerful power supply. On that subject, the 330W PSU they put in the thing doesn't really look any smaller than the 500W PSU you can find in a high-end Shuttle XPC.
Who cares about size? People who are not rich and do not have giant houses to fit stuff in. People who DO care about size are those like me who live in tiny one-room apartments where space is at a premium and buying a DVD involves the value judgement of "can I fit another bookshelf?"
No, I am disagreeing with you. In your first post, you suggest that Mac hardware tends to have a 10% to 40% markup from, presumably, comparable PCs. In your reply, you're now claiming that the *form factor* has a markup. That's completely different. My 3 pound ultraportable laptop costs more than a 15 pound desktop replacement, but that doesn't tell you anything about the cost premium of my Toshiba ultraportable versus an ASUS ultraportable.
I'm not saying the form factor doesn't have a premium; it clearly does. I'm saying that the assertion that the basic desktop Macintosh has a premium over comparable PCs is completely unfounded, particularly since nobody can actually show me a comparable PC.
Put it this way: I live in a tiny, tiny apartment. Space is at a premium. Doing more in less space is valuable to me regardless of who makes my hardware. I don't own a mac, I've got a monster desktop PC in a P-183 case, and going that route a few years ago turned out to be a huge mistake.
Not even remotely close... Mini ITX will result in systems many *times* larger. The first Mini-ITX case on newegg (Foxconn RM233) is seven times the volume. Even Micro ITX is still going to be multiple times larger.
I'll repeat the challenge. Find me a PC that is as small with comparable specs for the same price or less. Because your first attempt is laughable.
Find me a PC as small as a Mac Mini with comparable specs for $599. Not "also small", not "almost as small, but still double the size", but "as small or smaller". You can't. I've asked people here before; I got a bunch of links to small PCs that were still three or four times larger than a Mac Mini.
People have this strange idea that macs are overpriced, but then when they try to get something comparable (not just in specs, but form factor), they quickly find that they're either paying more, or it doesn't exist at all.
That said, I'm still a PC user who hasn't owned a mac in almost twenty years.
They can eat their own dogfood on Macintosh and iPads just fine. Not only can you run Windows on a Mac, but Microsoft is a major publisher of both Macintosh and iOS software. On the Mac side, they've got a full Microsoft Office suite, Remote Desktop, Windows Live Messenger, etc. On the iOS side, they've got Windows Live Messenger, Bing, OneNote, Lync, Tag, My XBox Live, MSN, Halo Waypoint, Kinectimals, etc. Some of these cost money.
Heck, Microsoft seems to have more stuff in the iOS App Store than Apple does.
The problem is that the Star Trek reboot was still taking place in space, with space ships, on a trek, if you will...
If you take Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and make them aliens instead, you kind of just ditched half the title right there; they're no longer mutants, or turtles. For that matter, they may not qualify as teenagers, and can an alien really be a ninja?
If you take TMNT and change enough so that none of those letters can apply anymore, is it still TMNT?
The last time it happened, with WinME, Microsoft had the entire market and there was no credible opposition. Apple was still selling OS9 and hadn't released the iPod, and the tablet market didn't exist.
Today, tablets running non-Microsoft operating systems are cannibalizing the laptop market, Apple is the largest notebook manufacturer in the world, and OS X has a ~9% marketshare to Win7's ~37%. Microsoft has not been this vulnerable since the Windows 3.1 days, when Apple still had significant marketshare.
Indeed, which is why I assumed 30FPS and said that an iPhone would just about do a million (30/30=1). The point isn't necessarily the theoretical numbers; if you've got a theoretical performance of 500 million polys, that's enough for ~17 million per frame, and drop that down to practical and you're still over a million. And this console came out seven years ago. Is "a decade ago" an exaggeration? Perhaps, but the hardware we're doing it on today is seven years old.
We passed a million polygons on screen over a decade ago. Your telephone can just about do that today (the iPhone 4S does 30 million per second), modern game consoles that came out 7 years ago will do about ten times that (500 million per second on a 360), and a modern high-end PC probably does ten times that again.
In other words, we're at the point where we're using rasterization to push 100 million polygons, and raytracing is still so much slower that it's not even remotely practical to duplicate the same quality. Intel's latest attempts to do so have produced low-resolution low-quality results that still require a massive array of hardware. They're basically throwing eight PCs worth of hardware at the problem. About all the demos do is demonstrate that it's easier to calculate accurate reflection and refraction with raytracing.
In other words, you either mis-remembered Intel's estimate, or their estimate was laughably inaccurate.
Very little increase in cost? The cost of a very high budget AAA title from 20 years ago was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, while today, it's in the hundreds of millions of dollars. By what stretch of the imagination is that "very little increase"? You're talking about a three order of magnitude difference here. You can't get away with John Romero banging out a DooM level from start to finish in a day all by himself anymore.
This is no secret, a day doesn't go by that we don't see somebody from the game industry lamenting this fact.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that Moore's law stopped in 2004; the past 8 years have indeed seen Moore's law continue as always. If anything, we're ahead of the game.
Wikipedia has a chart going to 2011, showing us ahead of Moore's law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Transistor_Count_and_Moore's_Law_-_2011.svg
If you want to do a simple comparison on a consumer part, the latest and greatest processor available in 2004 was the Prescott-based Pentium 4, with 125 million transistors.
If we follow the original law's 24 month period, we would expect to see processors with 2 billion transistors in 2012. In reality, the largest consumer Sandy Bridge Core processor features 2.27 billion transistors. Voila, Moore's law has held perfectly true between 2004 and 2012.
Now, the SNB-E chip that I'm using as a comparison is a high-end consumer part, but low-end parts are substantially smaller. Why the disparity? Well, a variety of reasons, but one of the main ones is the drive for lower and lower power usage. This is not because chips are getting hotter, but because people are demanding that they get cooler. If you want to compare two chips for the purposes of Moore's law, you'd want to take similar chips, in this case, both the Prescott and SNB-E that I compared are 130w TDP parts. In reality, consumers tend to pick less performance with less heat/power consumption than they do the same heat with more performance. Witness the rise of ARM SoCs...
They're rather larger, those eInk capsules, though. Refresh times on colour eInk are about a second. Maybe they will come down eventually, but they'd need to come down more than an order of magnitude to be useful for real-time stuff. Part of the long refresh times comes from having to invert the pixels to reset them to avoid ghosting. You can get substantially faster refresh times by skipping that, as stuff like the Kindle browser does, but at a large cost (the ghosting).
Yes, it is faster to update Pearl displays in full-on monochrome mode, as the guys you mentioned did, but that's not terribly useful (or anything special or new). The resolution on these displays isn't high enough that you can forsake antialiased font rendering yet.
6" e-readers are not really designed for journals or magazines anyhow. That's the sort of thing the 9.7" Kindle DX is better at, both because of the larger size (6" -> 9.7") and the higher resolution (800x600 -> 1200x824).
In terms of the quality of printed text, eInk readers have generally surpassed paperback print quality already (higher contrast ratios anyhow). The only place that you might argue they're not quite there yet is DPI, and that'll improve over time (eInk has already showed off significantly higher resolution displays). If they improve the contrast ratio, I expect it will surpass the quality of higher and higher quality print.
Colour is coming this year. Worthwhile colour isn't. I love eInk's pearl displays, but Triton, their first colour display, is garbage. The 10:1 contrast ratio on monochrome e-Ink is fine, and better than paperback books (which I believe are 8:1). But their Triton (colour) displays merely stick some colour filters on top of existing eInk pearl displays to produce an RGBW display, and those contrast ratios are just not high enough for that to work.
You compromise the monochrome image quality, and the colours are incredibly muted anyhow. Taking a look at Triton products (even Hanvon products) should illustrate how useless it is:
http://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/e-ink-triton-wins-innovation-of-the-year-award/
I think that eventually we'll get this right (perhaps when they make the stuff with actual coloured capsules rather than colour filters), but for now, monochrome is where it's at.
eARCs are priced at $15, but the reader normally knows what they're getting into. You realize that in exchange for getting the book months before it's released, you pay more, get a copy with mistakes, and don't get the final version for free when it comes out. But readers have the choice here; they can either pay more to get the unedited copy early, or they can just wait for the release date and pay $6.
It's actually even cheaper to get their eBooks through the webscriptions thing, but since that's basically a subscription to every book Baen publishes, you probably need to read a lot more than the one or two books a month that I do to make it worth it.
Baen has proven (and by this, I mean they have sales numbers proving it) that eBook piracy is so not a problem that it actually increases sales. Hence why Baen gives away many of their books for free (free library) and indirectly (distribute-freely license on their CD ISOs).
In terms of published authors, they make a lot more money from an eBook sale than a paperback sale, so as long as they see eBooks as replacing paperbacks and not hardcovers (which make far more money than either), they don't seem to mind for the most part.
Holding down the Kindle's "next page" button will go forward a single page, no matter how long you hold it down for. At least, this is the case on the Kindle 3.
Depends on the publisher. Macmillan? Yeah. I paid $16 for the latest eBook in a series by a popular scifi author. Baen? No. They never charge more than $6 for a brand new book, and settle down to $4 or $0 in the long run.
We'll probably eventually get decent colour out of e-ink, although I doubt the refresh rate will ever be fast enough for real-time motion. The whole "physically moving around ink capsules" probably would prevent that sort of thing. And you know what? That's fine. I don't need fast refresh rates on my e-reader, just fast enough to make page turns workable. The current speeds are good enough, although I wouldn't complain if they got bumped up anyhow.
I'm much happier reading on my Kindle 3 than a "real" book, particularly when comparing to a hardcover. My kindle is a fraction the weight and size of a hardcover. I can slip my kindle into a pocket or backpack, while a good sized hardcover is not nearly as portable. My kindle is also far easier to read in bed than a hardcover.
The advantages are less when comparing to paperbacks, but there are still size advantages there, not to mention durability; a lot of my older paperbacks are pretty worn out from re-reading, while an eBook (particularly a DRM-free one from Baen) will never wear out.
If you're willing to crack open the system, sure. But it *IS* possible to lock down a system sufficiently that you can't do anything to the system in software. Not necessarily with Windows, but if you're running an OS that doesn't let you do much, and the BIOS is locked, then you're not going to accomplish anything without cracking the thing open.
As soon as you're talking about soldering things onto the bus between the laptop's keyboard and controllers, you're no longer worried about the *employee* doing that, but somebody else who might steal the laptop.