Dell's Adamo Goes After MacBook Air 337
MojoKid writes "Adamo, pronounced 'A-dahm-o,' means 'to fall in love with' in Latin. Dell is certainly hoping you'll fall in love with this notebook's looks as well as its functionality. The Adamo's chassis is milled from a single piece of aluminum and features precision detailing with a scalloped backlit keyboard. Even the fan holes, which are punched out squares, have an attractive modern design. The Adamo features a thin 0.65-inch profile and weighs four pounds. The new ultra-portable will also offer Intel Core 2 Duo processors and DDR3 memory (up to 4GB), a 13.4-inch 16:9 HD display and a 128GB SSD hard drive. Pricing starts at $1,999 with Vista Ultimate 64." The Dell infomercial spokesmodel (video at the bottom of the link) concludes, "Adamo resulted from the union of technology with pleasure for the style-conscious individualist." OK, so he's no Steve Jobs.
Can you change the battery? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that's the question people want to know.
Four pounds? (Score:4, Interesting)
My one and a half year old vaio SZ weighs less than that (about 3 pounds) and isn't all that thick.
Holy mother of God, this is lame (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=QUJqWc6seYk [youtube.com]
How can they do this? How can this get out of the marketing department at Dell without someone getting fired, or sued, or a stop-payment notice put on their last paycheck at least?
But... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:poor latin (Score:4, Interesting)
In their defense, there is a long-standing tradition of confusing the "dictionary form" (i.e. first person singular) of a verb with the infinitive. Other examples of this phenomenon are the words audio and video which are commonly claimed to mean "to hear" and "to see".
niche market (Score:3, Interesting)
Modell (n): thin, fashionable, overpriced and only for those select few of the society whose vision often overlooks function for form.
this is just bling for the glitterati. like those diamond studded cell phones, they target a niche crowd that can afford to be extravagant. In these days of $300 netbooks (and weighing ~2 lbs), very few regular buyers would plunk down 2G for a laptop; Macbook Air was partly justified in its price point when it came out but it has lost its relevance in today's market, I find it hard to conceive Dell considering this a mainstream product.
Re:good, welcome BACK! (Score:2, Interesting)
Going high end would mean them returning all support to the US and seeing how they can cram an E-IPS panel into a laptop form factor.
Does anyone else thing that thing's kinda ugly? (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean, I watched the promotional video and frankly the thing doesn't look particularly nice.
Of course, that might be a reaction to 4+ minutes of being told what a premium product it is, and how people will look at me when I'm using it, which basically made it sound like it's marketed to overpaid IT executives going through a midlife crisis.
Not even Sony would try this (Score:5, Interesting)
Lately, I have been seeing TV commercials from Dell that say, using imagery, "stand in line to buy this and you will come out groovy and cool." Perhaps they are attempting to take a page from Apple's play-book, but the problem is that Apple's established image and Dell's established image are very different. You don't just pop up out of nowhere and say "hey! suddenly we're cool hipsters!" If Dell wants to become that, they will have to evolve their image, not manufacture it. And there has to be a LOT (and I mean excessively) of good will directed at the consumer before they will buy into it.
Dell is best known for business machines. What's more, Dell is nearly anti-consumer in that the care offered to consumers is a LOT less than care offered to businesses. They need to reverse this condition before people will ever think of Dell as anything else.
I have some ideas I hope Dell takes to heart, but they don't listen to people like me. But if Dell wants to REALLY get into the eye-candy end of things, offer up and electronic ink display on the back of the display that can be customized by the user. And with the interesting legal progress being made by the Mac-clone people, Dell ought to be preparing to blast out a Mac compatible of their own. Sure, don't market it that way... just put whatever is needed to make it Mac compatible in the machine and let hackers out there figure out the rest. (The Dell Mini9 is rather popular with people into Hackintoshes)
There are a lot of ways Dell could become what they seek to be, but simply jumping right out into the middle and saying "HEY! LOOK AT ME!" ain't gonna do it.
Re:Holy mother of God, this is lame (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, that's pretty crazy.
Compare to this:http://www.apple.com/macbook/the-new-macbook/
Dell even put a foreigner in front of a white background to talk about the design, except he's all out of focus. It's like a retarded copy made by amateurs, filled with marketing speak. "the union of technology with pleasure for the style-conscious individualist"? What the hell does that mean? It was "created to elicit desire and re-define the image of power"? "ultra-thin portable aphrodisiac"?
At best, it looks like it should be the rough draft that their marketing people mocked up as the pitch for some kind of ad. If Dell can't do better than this, then Apple deserves to own the reality distortion field.
Re:poor latin (Score:4, Interesting)
As sibling posts have noted, it's traditional to make a direct mapping between the English "dictionary" form, which is the infinitive, and the Latin "dictionary" form, which is the first person singular.
More puzzling to me is where they got the idea that it means "fall in love with". It means "love earnestly"; that's a perfectly acceptable meaning, so why not quote that one?
Also I wonder where the submitter got the idea that the pronunciation ought to be "a-dahm-o". That may be how Dell are pronouncing it, but in Latin the ictus is on the first syllable: "a-dah-mo". Both the first two syllables are short, guys.
Just for the sake of completeness, here's [uchicago.edu] the entry on adamo in the best (not most recent; best) Latin-English dictionary.
Re:Important distinction (Score:3, Interesting)