Retailer Planning Laptops With Intel Core i7 Chips 142
An anonymous reader writes "The Canadian PC retailer Eurocom is planning to ship a 12-pound laptop with Intel's Core i7 chip, which might go down well with deep-pocketed geeks. The Core i7 was designed with desktop computers and servers in mind; later members of the Nehalem chip family are planned to address portables. The 17" notebook's price, not yet announced, will certainly be in excess of $5,000."
Desktop Replacement (Score:5, Insightful)
Whatever happened to the 'desktop replacement' designation for mobile but not lightweight platforms?
This reminds me of the first laptop I ever owned:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_SX-64 [wikipedia.org].
Re:Just plain silly (Score:5, Insightful)
At my company *everyone* has a laptop. The battery just needs to last long enough that I can make it to the meeting rooms and back. 'Mobile' computers have more use than just using them away from power for long periods of time. You can sit at another desk, on a whim go out on location with all your files, etc.
I'd love something like this for Matlab processing.
And weight isn't an issue because we all have laptop bags or backpacks. A 20 lb laptop would still be lighter than the books I carried in college.
Re:Just plain silly (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with this design is that the i7 chips put out 130 watts TDP. Even if this laptop has a battery, it's going to last less than an hour.
Depending on who you are, that might not matter. Believe it or not, but there's a market for "portable" in the "movable" sense meaning that you unhook it at one location and plug it in at another location. The alternative isn't a laptop, it's a box, monitor, keyboard and so on. Having it all rolled up into one box is a lot easier than the alternative, and the ability to open the lid and check something or bring it to a meeting for half an hour's demo without plugging in is just bonus. My dream work laptop has a quad core cpu, min. 4GB ram, min. >200GB SSD and hardware support for virtualization and virtualized IO. I don't even care if it has a working battery or not, in fact my last one I used for a long time even though the battery was bad and would last seconds.
Re:PC architecture is not ready! (Score:2, Insightful)
The PC architecture? Your laptop motherboard chipset with a cheap integrated SATA controller maybe. Nothing about the PC architecture limits you from designing a laptop with a PCIe 8x connected dedicated SATA/SAS controller.
Of course, if it's all from the same hard drive and you're using rotating media, it's the media that is fault not the PC bus architecture responsible for your slow down. The PC architecture is approaching 30 years of scalability.
Re:Just plain silly (Score:4, Insightful)
An all-in-one doesn't fold up in a handy package that protects the screen and input devices, nor does it include a keyboard and pointing device. Desktop replacements do have legitimate uses.
Re:Crazy talk (Score:2, Insightful)
Going really into off-topic territory, but how would you know the birth control pill has failed right away in order to take the other one?
Re:Just plain silly (Score:3, Insightful)
Several reasons I could think of:
- on my back it's not easily reachable (think being able to fetch PDA, phone, wallet, passport or agenda)
- but much more easily reachable by others
- company doesn't supply a backpack
- when you wear a suit or any other business-like attire, you ruin the jacket with a backpack