Porsche Designs a Laptop

An anonymous reader writes "Cnet is reporting that BestBuy is selling a porsche designed widescreen ultra thin laptop the looks almost exactly like a Tibook. Sadly, it runs windows so no one will actually want to use one for real work, but it looks pretty cool for minesweeper. Ah, I guess that the TiBook is no longer a status symbol if you can run Windows on it. It has all the trimmings, like those "made for windows 2k stickers" that get the screen all nasty when you close it."

Misleading

[csnydermvpsoft]

Note that it is designed by Porsche Design GmbH, not the car company. This is a company founded by the car company's founder's grandson, and appears to have no connection, other than the name.

If I got that notebook, I'd just install Linux on it, so I might as well get a tiBook and put Linux ppc on it instead, since it looks nicer.

Did anyone read this bit?

[Drakin]

...Porsche Design GmbH, the Austrian firm founded by F.A. Porsche, grandson of the famous engineer.

As in, it's not designed by the world famous car designing company, but someone's who's of the same family, and I'm thinking cashing in on the reputation that Porsche brings in this venture.

Re:Widescreen Possible?

[csnydermvpsoft]

My Fujitsu Lifebook P-series has a 1280x768 widescreen display, which Windows worked with fine (when I used it).

Windows will work fine with any resolution that the video drivers support.

Re:Widescreen Possible?

[Enzondio]

I've run into this with a widescreen Plasma display. Windows can handle it if the video driver can handle it. We had a Matrox (don't recall exact model) card and drivers that did support the alternate dimensions of the widescreen display. Although I must admit it was somewhat of a pain in the ass to get it to work.

So just check with the video card maker and be sure they can support 16x9 before you buy the card or the display.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Pathetic

[jackjumper]

Uh this is from Porsche Designs GmbH which, like most design houses, needs to make money so they (gasp) design things for whomever pays them.

It is *not* the same as Porsche cars, although they do design very nice high end stuff.

Re:Useful for work

[DJ FirBee]

Both OSX and MacOS support full screen playback just fine on my TiBook. Troll.

Re:Pathetic

[modecx]

In all serriousness, I don't think Porche has reallly quite done it. They may have been aiming fot a PowerbookG4 look, but the dimensions just aren't there:

G4 specs From apple.com:
Size and weight
Height: 1.0 inch (2.6 cm)
Width: 13.4 inches (34.1 cm)
Depth: 9.5 inches (24.1 cm)
Weight: 5.4 pounds (2.45 kg) with battery
Titanium Case.

Porche book from cnet:
6.4 pounds
13.9 inches wide
10 inches deep
and 1.2 inches thick.
Case presumably made from magnesium alloy.

It's bigger, heavier, and just not as sexy, in my opinion. That said, it looks like enough, and also has some decent hardware. Might be better if it were fire engine red, though.

Re:risk offending Apple?

[dhovis]

Considering that Best Buy was/is the first retailer to sell iPods

You mean aside from CompUSA? And Fry's? and Apple themselves?

Anyway, I'm not convinced that this is quite to the level of a TiBook. It is 20% thicker, at least a pound heavier, and I haven't seen any info about battery life (which makes me think it will be very poor).

Until someone gets their hands on one to review, I'm not convinced. That C|Net writeup sounds like it was written by marketing people, not people who've used it.

Re:Ugly ?!

[esw]

> No 3D acceleration ?

Actually, according to PC Magazine [pcmag.com], it has GeForce4 420 Go graphics.

~Eric

Re:Other Porsche items

[Dylan2000]

I don't know anything about the history of this company, founded by the grandson of Porsche, but my bet is most of that cheap crap from the '80s was all made in Taiwan and then someone, somewhere, with the ability to sign the merchandising agreement just authorised them and got a fat payment. Kind of like Krusty the Clown.

What I do know is that this company works together with Siemens and they make some of the most kickass home appliances I've ever seen...
blender [siemensappliances.co.uk]
coffee machine [siemensappliances.co.uk]
kettle [siemensappliances.co.uk]

Brushed aluminium, stainless steel, These things look like TiBooks too, I even think they were out before the TiBook was and this laptop looks as much like them as it does the Apple machine.

TiJuicer?

So don't judge Porsche designs by those plastic gas station sunglasses, cause they make some awesome stuff!

Re:Misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

The article also says it's a Best Buy computer. The notebook was made by vpr Matrix.

Here's their web site [vprmatrix.com]

And here's images of their products. [vprmatrix.com]

And their site states that their whole line is designed by F.A. Porche. Apparently they do all sorts of this stuff, and have even done a monitor for Samsung.

I think they're ugly, and this story is definately not news.

People, read the damn article... and pay attention

[Gruneun]

Porsche Design GmbH, the Austrian firm founded by F.A. Porsche, grandson of the famous engineer

This is not designed by Porsche (the car company responsible for some incredible cars), but rather Porsche Design [porsche-design.com] the design company founded by a not-nearly-as-famous grandson. The only car-related work was a start-up project designing a plant that built 911's, not the car itself.

Re:IDEO does most of apples Industrial Design

[Woodie]

While it's nice to think it's Apple who has "certain attention to detail", you might want to check that Apple hired IDEO to do a lot of their design work. So really, it's just that Apple was smart enough to hire a _good_ industrial design firm.

Re:Porsche Crest?

[Kranfer]

It is a VPR Matrix notebook which is why there is no Porsche notebook. No offense to you but geeze everyone, we all have went over this.. the porsche company that did this is NOT the car company. The car company would probably put out the laptop as looking as some sort of bubble or something since most cars are looking like that. Although a bubble like laptop... interesting concept... hmmmm

Re:moderating

[John Harrison]

What you think Alan Greenspan doesn't use Excel??????

I have no idea what Alan uses personally, but I can tell you that the Fed uses IBM's IMS [ibm.com] to keep track of where all the green pieces of paper are going.

The Comparison

[Equuleus42]

I know this is comparing apples to oranges (or something like that), but here goes:

BestBuy price: $2,399
Apple's price: $2,499

BestBuy size: 1.2 x 10 x 13.9"
Apple's size: 1.0 x 9.5 x 13.4"

BestBuy weight: 6.4 pounds
Apple's weight: 5.4 pounds

BestBuy case: Silver-magnesium
Apple's case: Titanium

BestBuy battery life: 3 hours 15 minutes
Apple's battery life: 4 hours (realistically)

BestBuy CPU: 2GHz Pentium 4-M
Apple's CPU: 667MHz PowerPC G4

BestBuy RAM: 512MB DDR SDRAM
Apple's RAM: 256MB SDRAM

BestBuy HD: 40GB hard drive
Apple's HD: 30GB IBM hard drive

BestBuy wireless: Integrated 802.11b
Apple's wireless: 802.11b ready

Bestbuy video card: Unknown
Apple's video card: ATI Mobility Radeon 7500, 32MB

Bestbuy video out: S-Video-out
Apple's video out: DVI/VGA/S-video

Bestbuy Ethernet: Probably 10/100 Apple's Ethernet: Gigabit Ethernet

Bestbuy external ports: 2 Firewire, 2 USB
Apple's external ports: 1 Firewire, 2 USB

Shared items:
BestBuy and Apple LCD: 15.2-inch LCD, 1280x854 max
Bestbuy and Apple's modem: 56k
BestBuy and Apple optical: CD-RW/DVD drive

It doesn't have to...

[incripshin]

Sadly, it runs windows

Well, you can always install Linux/BSD on it. And just cause it doesn't run Mac OS X doesn't mean it's a bad laptop. Think about it: How can a company come out with a good looking laptop that looks like a TiBook and not running Mac OS X without getting ridiculed (sorry on the spelling)? They then have two choices:

• A relatively unpopular (with the general public, that is) *nix OS
• Windows, a relatively popular OS, on it

Just because it looks like a TiBook doesn't mean it has to be one.

Incripshin

in other news... BMW makes a skateboard!

[SethJohnson]

Not to be outdone in whoring a corporate icon, BMW is marketing a

skateboard [popularmechanics.com].

This waste of engineering is a little different than the laptop in that it looks like it was actually designed by the car company, and not a family member.

Seth

Re:What's the big deal that it comes with windows?

[gl4ss]

as sucky it is, that's the deal with almost every laptop that's non-apple.

what i fail to see, is how this is news for geeks, more like news for yuppies who want a laptop to go with their porsche watch and porsche suv.

Re:The Comparison

[Rastor]

Bestbuy video card: Unknown
Apple's video card: ATI Mobility Radeon 7500, 32MB

Bestbuy video out: S-Video-out
Apple's video out: DVI/VGA/S-video

Actually, that should read:

Bestbuy video card: nVidia GeForce4 420 Go, 32MB
Apple's video card: ATI Mobility Radeon 7500, 32MB

Bestbuy video out: VGA/S-Video
Apple's video out: DVI/VGA/S-video

Source: Best Buy [bestbuy.com]

Re:Pathetic

[Zeinfeld]

I expect Mac rip-offs from companies like Compaq and eMachines. But Porche? It's bad enough that they've designed a laptop for Best Buy. (What business is Porche in, anyhow?) But to just blatently rip off the TiBook design is pathetic

Porche were in the designer PC business long before apple. They did the design for the 'Turbo Pet' back in the early 80s. The design did not sell too well because CBM failled to move up to 16 bit and got crushed by the IBM Pc.

Porche has always been an outsourced design studion that builds cars on the side. They have also designed bikes and such. They do a lot of design work for VW and other auto makers, their main competitors are folk like Pininfarina in Italy.

Some advantages of the TiBook get overlooked.....

[jerkyjunkmail]

The thing I think most people over look with the TiBook(and other Apple hardware) are all the hardware tricks like:

1.) target disk mode(the ability to boot up in a external hard drive mode) and be directly attach to a another computer via firewire as an external hard drive. That's a much faster way to transfer GBs of files between computers than over a network.
2.) being able to directly hook up to another computer via ethernet with either a straight through OR cross-over cable
3.) somewhat hot-swappable batteries(you only have to put it to sleep and you have about 2-3 minutes to switch the batteries),
4.) better battery life than any Intel laptops I've dealt with
5.) the first laptops, even though the switches are still a little pricey but getting close to affordable by the every man, with gigabit ethernet stock.

I don't know of any Intel laptops capable of all(or even most) of those things.

As far as PC laptops go it looks pretty nice especially if it supports, Linux/FreeBSD/OpenBSD well but once you touch and feel it it could have a cheap feel like some PC laptops like Toshiba.

Re:Not even that great...

[Andy Dodd]

If you got yours back in Oct 2000, you don't know what you're missing. Back then, the standard UXGA was the only one available. (The USUXGA wasn't available in Aug 2001 either).

The UXGA screen is pretty nice. The UltraSharp UXGA is simply amazing.

Desktop LCDs are usually pretty decent, except for the (usually) lower resolutions. I have a 17" MAG LCD, while it only does 1280x1024, it makes up for it by having the brightest screen I've ever used (Brighter than even my old Trinitron-tube monitor) and wonderful viewing angle (Beats even the UltraSharp, which is quite difficult...)

Not Even Close

[Anonymous Coward]

My titanium powerbook beats the pants off that Best Buy thing.

My Tibook is %20 thinner, %18 lighter (1 lbs. lighter... what the heck are they doing with all that weight? Cooling systems?), not to mention my machine is titanium, superior to magnesium.

Also my Tibook has a powered, 6pin firewire port where the Best Buy model has unpowered 4 pin firewire (which means carrying a powerbrick [simpletech.com] for your firewire devices and cable adaptors).

Im guessing the battery life of my 'book is substantially better too.

Then comes aesthetics...overall the Tibook is clearly a sexier machine, but specifically compare the back of the Titanium Powerbook [apple.com] to the back of this machine.

The article also doesnt mention what kind of video chip is driving the Best Buy laptop. I wouldnt be surprised if it were inferior.

What!? No Digital Video Out? Where's the DVI port? That's the whole reason I waited to buy the 2002 Titanium Powerbook!

I'm really glad Best Buy wasted all that space to cram in a paralell port! Wow, now that's a selling point!

And last and most important...the Best Buy machine doesn't run MacOS X Jaguar 10.2