Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

computers get interesting

Computer makers have finally, in the past couple years, begun to follow Apple’s example of offering more aesthetically appealing computer hardware designs, to the point where now, according to a story in Business Week, the old “beige box” may be a thing of the past. (“Bye-Bye Boring Beige Box” - 06/08/04)

The focus on design didn’t come about by accident, or out of a desire to compete with Apple and its small but elite market share. With technological innovations of late not necessarily spurring higher sales, computer makers have turned to design as a means to differentiate themselves in a crowded market.

Frankly, I’m shocked that it’s taken them this long to go this route. There has been some experimentation with PC hardware design over the past few years, such as Sony’s distinctive VAIO designs when it entered the PC market in the late 1990s, but the “boring beige box” has, for the most part, been a staple since the computer entered the home market in the 1980s.

According to the Business Week article, one of the main factors limiting computer design innovation has been the heavy reliance on Windows/Intel and the technological requirements — such as certain types of internal cooling methods — dictated by widely-used computer configurations.

Over the years, PC makers have relied more and more on the Wintel team of Microsoft and Intel to set the design rules for what computers will do and how they’ll look. That has created gigantic economies of scale, since everyone gets to sell a few types of models to hundreds of millions of consumers. But it has confined creativity.

HEAT WAVE. Rather than fight the tide, most PC makers have gone right along with it. In large part, even designing next year’s garden-variety PC is hard enough, primarily because of one problem: heat. While former Intel Chairman Gordon Moore once famously predicted that chips would double in speed every 18 months, he forgot to mention they would also run much hotter.

That means PC designers must spend the bulk of their time just making sure new models work inside tried and true form factors, rather than on brainstorming new approaches. 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.”

New, more compact designs from Intel for the internal “guts” of a computer, “PCI Express,” are intended to allow individual computer makers greater freedom — and room — to design distinctive cases, as well as experiment with portable technologies to compete with PDAs and other devices and further push the boundaries of ubiquitous computing.