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You know when you go out and buy a new chunk of technology that a few months down the road there will be something better, something cheaper, something faster… it’s the way it is. And if you wait for that next, best thing – then you will wait forever. So last summer, when my wife said she would like a small, lightweight mini-PC for travelling, we did some research, found the options were severely limited, and bought a Vye. And that’s it in the picture on the left. Small! It’s sitting on a sheet of A4 paper in front of my Apple iMac keyboard so that gives you a good idea as to it’s size.
The big thing at the moment of course, is the much cheaper Asus Eee which is about the same size, is sexy silver and much cheaper but that wasn’t around last summer and anyway, the Eee has a pretty stupid name and comes with Linux whereas my wife has all the fun of using Windows XP.
But what I really want to talk about is the picture on the right. This is the power cable and transformer for the Vye. It takes up more bloody room than the computer.
The Vye can slip inside quite a small handbag. Hell, it can even fit inside the odd coat pocket. The power cable for the Vye needs a shopping trolley. Someone, somewhere, designed the Vye. It is far from beautiful but they put a lot of thought into making it as small as possible and as compact as possible. When it came to the power cable, they went and bought something off the shelf in Radio Shack. The power cord and transformer for my 17 inch Apple MacBook Pro – about 4 times the size of the Vye – can fold down to something like 7cms x 5cms x 2cms. It is a work of art. It too can be slipped into a very small pocket. It is also very lightweight whereas the Vye cable alone is probably enough to send your bags over the weight limit at the airport.
And that’s the point really isn’t it? You wouldn’t use the Vye on your desktop because it’s too small. It is a travelling tool and a pretty good one. And as you pull it out of its delivery box you think, wow – it’s perfect for travelling. And then you wonder why the box was so big for something so small. And then you find the power cable.
Years ago I bought a Psion 5mx – had it been developed with bluetooth and a colour screen I would never have needed to buy a Powerbook G4 12", it is 110mm x 160mm works beautifully and runs Epoc OS , which is now called Symbian – as used on Nokia and Ericsson – it runs on AA batteries – two per month – no power supply at all !
After buying the PB G4 5 years ago, and replacing it with a 15.4" MBP last year, I still appreciate the way Apple designed the power supply, childish I know.
Far from childish. Good industrial design seems to be so rare. This has been particularly true of the PC industry. Your average PC might be smaller than it once was but has hardly changed since the original IBM days. And cabling is a good example of that.
Whenever I am asked to do something with my wife’s Dell I take one look at all the cables plugged into the back of the thing and want to scream. Then there are the amount of power sockets needed….!
In a machine like the iMac, Apple may have compromised on upgradeability but couple it with a wireless keyboard and mouse and the thing has one, single cable.
The power block and cable for Apple laptops is really a thing of beauty. It’s one of those things you may well pay more for but very quickly come to appreciate when you take it on your travels.
Every single power cable for laptops (apart from apple’s, ofcourse) have been a peice of junk.
I’m oogling over an iMac, mainly because of it’s design. Heck, its probably as good as having a TV with front row and all.
PC manufacturers need to get good industrial design, or they will be left in the dust.
go for it. Think Mac. Go for it!
Just before you go for it…. have a look on apple.com to see the enormous price difference between the US and UK prices –
US Apple TV – $229
UK Apple TV – £199 = $395
US iMac ‘from’ – $1199
UK iMac ‘from’ – £799 = $1586
Don’t get me wrong I like mac’s but considering the price difference I would expect Mail to iCal scheduling to work with non-US dates – it doesn’t, or I would get an OS written in English as spoken in England, but I don’t.
Apple are better for hardware design,(except first generation, which always seems to have problems) which I will pay for on a laptop because there is no real option, but a desktop is different, I built my own pc a year ago and if you are prepared to pay Apple prices you can build an elegant pc, have a look at the Antec P180 case, Logitech Dinovo bluetooth keyboard, mouse and number pad.
The irony for me, was until owning a mac , I would always buy the bargain basement version, until I realised that having ‘nice and quiet’ pc bits improved the whole experience ( and I spend a lot of time working with my pc).
I just object to being ripped off by anybody.