I see by way of REGHARDWARE [1]that Dell is now picthing their XPS series laptops at the mainstream.
This is no surprise; yesterday’s game machines, while they are starting to show signs of age in terms of being able to play today’s games correctly, still make a hell of a desktop, or a laptop. One of my servers here at Casa De Bit, these days, is an old hacker special rigged for performance with gaming programs of the day. A PII/400 runnig at around 700MHz. (Yes, overclocked, and and the variable speed cooling fans on the proc sound like a B29 taking off when pushed by network needs)
So I suppose it’s no big surprise, the Dell should try to position their XPS line at the meanstream SOHO user. frankly, you see, even with newer machines, the lines between the needs of gamers, and the needs of business users, particularly given the needs of Vista. are growing thinner the time. (What, after all, is Vista but an XP backend with graphics that would make most gaming machines cringe?)
(OK, OK, I suppose I’ve started a holy war with that one. )
Still, the point remains that Vista requires a number of graphics enhancements that until recently were found only on gaming machines. And of course, as all the readers of this site now, the technology has been getting faster, exponentially. Meaning that this transition from “bleeding edge” to “mainstream” for a given system design, is moving faster all the time.
Most Americans have more computing power on their desktops than the entire day of most third world countries did just a few short years ago. I marvel at this, just a bit. But I wonder, how long it’s going to be before the Federal government steps in to regulate such matters . In the interest of fairness, of course. (snort)