“Inspired” by Apple

HP Envy XT Touchsmart: I started a new job today, so didn’t really have any time to do anything new or different*. Helpfully, neither did HP.

*Before you moan, a touchscreen on a laptop is neither “new” nor “different”.

(image from The Verge)

Samsung Series 5 Ultra Touch Widows 8 ultrabook: Did I do this already? Even I don’t know anymore. It says something when Samsung’s products are derivative of their own output.

(image from The Verge)

Samsung Chromebook: SOUND THE “UNDERSTATEMENT OF THE YEAR” KLAXON, CAPTAIN!:

The design is not unlike a plastic, 11-inch MacBook Air.

Bottom Half Of The Internet worth reading on this one.

(submitted by Waly, image via Matt Buchanan, story at The Verge)

HP Spectre XT: Fish. Shooting. Barrel.

(Updated: This is even better.)

(image from Some Website, via He Of The Silver Star, Whom We Adore)

“Intel: ultrabook prices will drop to $699, 75 new designs already in the pipeline”

75 new designs. 75 new, badly made, poorly constructed, underpowered, overweight, rubbish trackpadded, designs. 75 new designs, subtly different from the ones that all the manufacturers announced at CES less than four months ago. 75 designs that obsolete the Ultrabooks that no-one bought four months ago.

75 new MacBook Air knock-offs, securing the life of this site just a little bit longer. I can’t wait.

(image from The Verge)

Gigabyte U2442V and U2442N: And so, as Jazzie B-fronted classic UK funkmongers Soul II Soul once sang, “Back to life, back to reality”. They also went on to sing, “However do you want me?”. If you’re here, I assume it’s because you want me to “Keep on keeping on”. That was by Curtis Mayfield, though, not Soul II Soul. So I’ll keep on “Doin’ the Doo”. That was by Betty Boo.

Anyway, back in the era when people bought scary looking circuit boards with terrifyingly brittle microchips on them, Gigabyte were a household name. Given that most of us couldn’t give a flying fig what motherboard our computer uses, or how many Us or Vs there are in its name, it makes sense that they should pivot* into copying Apple’s MacBook Air. What a relief. The business is saved. Great product names too. 

*If they’d been a VC-funded start-up, they’d be a photo-sharing social networking site by now, thus obeying “Patrick’s Law”.

(image from The Verge)

Dell XPS 13: Apart from when I am drunk, or eating cake, I am never happier than when a techblog takes a picture of the latest MacBook Air killer next to a MacBook Air (see also the HP Envy or some phone or other by Samsung) . Let joy be unconfounded!

(image from The Verge)

Netbook Navigator NAV13X Windows 7 Ultrabook: That moment when you are supposed to be curating a single-serve Tumblr every day and you forget, and instead go out for drinks and end up eating tasty burgers and drinking too much and then remember that you need to meet your own criteria of posting something everyday and you just hope that something comes along that you don’t really need to comment on because it is so obvious.

That.

(submitted by I Can’t Believe It’s Not Buddha and Hello New World (who should really rename his tumbler after the URL), image from Engadget)

Dell XPS 13: I don’t think it would take Hercule Poirot long to figure out that the original template for this new laptop, sorry ultrabook (or is it Ultrabook? Is it a brand name? Do we even care?) might have come from the pen of the dashing Sir Jonathan Ive, though that’s often the case with Poirot - we sit there shouting at the television for ninety minutes (“Can’t you see? It looks like a MacBook Air! Look at it!”) before the big reveal. No, this is more like Columbo - we find out “whodunnit” right at the start.

(I’m sorry, I’ve been watching Poirot on Netflix this evening- turns out it was his old mate Sir Charles all along who had to bump off Tolly Strange, who knew about his wife, who was in a sanatorium, and then kill his wife, so that he could marry Egg!)

(more pictures, including a handy side-by-side guide over on Gizmodo. This image from Engadget)