Businessweek reports on possible design changes in the PC world — in other words, PC manufacturers are creating prototypes of the types of products — such as integrated, one piece computers–that Apple has been offering since 1984.
And here’s an excuse for ugly computers from a Gateway official:
Says Gary Elsasser, Gateway’s (GTW ) vice-president for technology and platform development: “The reliability of the computer is the top priority. If necessary, we’ll sacrifice the form factor.”
In other words, why make the computer look nice if it’s just going to break down in 6 months anyway?
Apple’s computers are so notoriously reliable that many industry observers attribute their lack of market share to it — people don’t replace their Macs very often. There are people out there still using Macs from 10 years ago, amazingly enough. (And to those people, may I just say, “get a new one, you cheap bastard.”) I have a computer in my office — a PowerMac G3 333mhz — that runs OS X with decent speed, and was still being used up until last week. I don’t really need it any more, but it’ll probably find a new life as a file server soon.
Anyway, Apple manages to put a lot of thought into the form factor as well as reliability. From what I’ve seen of Gateway computers, they need to make reliability their top priority. Seriously.
They need to do anything they can to stay alive. They’ve already closed their Gateway stores and own E-machines… what more does one need to tell themselves to sell of any stock they have in Gateway?