musicpyrite said:
Thats retarded.
What if the business-man's-on-the-go computer crapps out and he has to re-install the OS? Sure you could carry the external drive every where you go, but that defeats the purpose of the computer.
Oh god. People you are crapping on this thing simply because its a PC. If Apple made this youd be screaming revolutionary. OMG Apple did it again! Those PC pukes cant produce squat!
Here's a reality check for you folks. If a someone's computer craps on them on the go the average person wouldn't be installing the OS from scratch. Let me ask. How many of you carry your system CD's/DVD's with your PowerBook? Huh? Thought so. Heck since Windows has the registry reinstalling the OS would break just about every app on the system rendering it dead anyways until you load Office, Acrobat, etc back onto the system. So everyone raise their hand who carries their app CD's around with them. Anyone? Anyone at all? Heres a reality check for some folks. I manage an office of about 60 laptops. In my time as system administrator Ive had 1. Count em. 1 failure out of the office and that was a BSOD that was caused by a failed hard drive. Everything else has been a slow degradation in performance not a complete failure of the OS. More then enough time for the user to come in and allow me to backup their files. Dump a new ghost image on their system. Setup printers. Setup VPN remote login. Setup Peoplesoft. Setup their cust office templates. And copy their docs back down. All told takes about 1/2 hour to complete.
Oh and another point I would like to make. Many of these external driveless systems have Norton ghost type means of restoring the OS to its original state. Generally you hit one of the F keys. (In IBM's case its a blue button.) and restore the OS from there. But as I said it will not restore your apps unless the IT department replace the image with a custom rolled OS with all the critical apps in that "image". That's what we've started to do with our IBM's.
The reality is that A LOT of business users don't carry any other peripherals with them other then a power brick and sometimes a mouse. All of our 4 year old Dell CS X's at the company I work at (Along with the system I'm typing on.) have external drives and in just about every case they fall into nonuse. We replaced all 40 of these systems earlier this year with IBM laptops and in just about every case the drives were sitting in a cabinet covered with dust, the user lost the drives years ago, or they "claim" that they never got them in the first place. Only people who had presentations to complete or had reference material sent to them from clients needed these drives and in just about every case their they left them attached to their docking station. The plain fact is users would like to have the option of dragging that CD-ROM drive with them or not. Thats an extra half pound. Thats an extra 1/4 that many dont care for. These systems let the user choose if they want to that drive with them or not. I have users that fly between Minneapolis and Chicago (our home office.) at least twice a week and let me tell you losing even that amount of weight off their shoulder makes a difference.
That being said the system doesn't even come with an external optical drive by default. You can add a DVD RW drive for $400 which is asinine. I think Sony is cutting corners to slash prices on the system while still keeping the price high to rake in more of a profit. (I sometimes think Sony and Apple were cut from the same cloth their practices of pricing hardware and innovative designs seems eerily similar sometimes.)
Sony is trying to take advantage of the fact that this is one of the thinnest and lightest laptops without going totally into the sublaptop category. Something that this device hovers very close to. Its $3,000 for several reasons the biggest being the newness factor. You can bet that this will change by this fall.
I'm expecting more of these devices to show up as ULV Pentium M's get on the market. The M is the coolest CPU Intel has ever produced and its showing in these new design form factors.
