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HP Builds One Desktop PC Around a Speaker, Another Modular PC In Slices (arstechnica.com) 78

Posted by BeauHD from the slice-and-dice dept.
An anonymous reader writes from a report via Ars Technica: HP has announced today two new desktop PCs: HP Elite Slice and Pavilion Wave. The HP Elite Slice is a modular machine, with USB Type-C for power and I/O. The base unit contains all the core guts of the PC -- up to a 35W Core i7-6700T processor, up to 32GB of RAM, up to 512GB NVMe storage, gigabit Ethernet, 802.11ac Wi-Fi and several ports. The top cover of the main unit is modular, while the bottom of the unit contains a special connector that can allow for additional modules to be stacked. HP has an audio module that includes speakers and a microphone array, and an optical drive module. It should be available later this month, starting at $699. The Pavilion Wave on the other hand combines a PC and a speaker in a 10.3 inch tall triangular box. As for specs, it features a 35W processor, up to an i7 processor, up to 16GB RAM, with up to 1TB SSD or 2TB HDD. An AMD R9 M470 is optional. In addition to the speaker, the Wave features a microphone array for Cortana support.
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HP Builds One Desktop PC Around a Speaker, Another Modular PC In Slices More

HP Builds One Desktop PC Around a Speaker, Another Modular PC In Slices

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  • Well, USB C until (Score:4, Interesting)

    by John Smith ( 4340437 ) on Thursday September 01, 2016 @09:05AM (#52807359)
    Somebody uses a dodgy cable and the power supply explodes. That's the current issue with USB-C.

  • I might be interested... (Score:3)

    by unixisc ( 2429386 ) on Thursday September 01, 2016 @09:05AM (#52807367)
    ...in something like this that comes pre-installed w/ SteamOS
    • Unless you're going to only play older games one ones that aren't very graphically intensive at low resolutions, I don't think this would work well unless they also sell a module with a discreet GPU. Otherwise you'll just be using the integrated Intel graphics, which aren't going to cut it for a lot of games. It would still make a nice HTPC box though as it's got an HDMI port on it according to HP's site.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by I4ko ( 695382 )
      Newegg were having a sale yesterday on Alienware Steam Machine (Alpha with SteamOS) for 319. It was 329 the day before with a free BT speaker

    • I agree with you.

      I'm not interested until the manufacturer puts a sticker on the box (or its balls on the table) certifying full Linux support: hardware well integrated, all features supported, especially graphics and powersaving and so on.

      • I'm not interested until the manufacturer puts a sticker on the box (or its balls on the table) certifying full Linux support: hardware well integrated, all features supported, especially graphics and powersaving and so on.

        Obviously the loss of you, and the approximately 31 other people worldwide that have the same opinion, will bankrupt HP.

        In all seriousness, you and your brethren are not the target market.

    • From the article:

      The HP Elite Slice is a corporate-oriented machine

      They don't really care if you're interested or not. While I'm sure that they'd be happy to sell you one of these, you're not the target market.

  • Oh, what a brilliant idea (Score:3)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Thursday September 01, 2016 @09:08AM (#52807375) Homepage Journal

    Just what I need, another vibration source inside my PC.

    I like the modular stack idea, but it's completely and totally worthless to me if it's not an industry standard. That in turn is going to limit the hardware to having a rectangular footprint.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by known_coward_69 ( 4151743 )

      so? buy it once and keep it for years until the next computer. i have a 6 year old macbook pro that works just fine and the only thing i put in there was new RAM and new hard drive which is pretty standard across all computers.

      • so? buy it once and keep it for years until the next computer. i have a 6 year old macbook pro that works just fine and the only thing i put in there was new RAM and new hard drive which is pretty standard across all computers.

        So why does my PC need to be modular if I'm not going to be messing with it? It's just a way to make a SFF system more complicated, expensive, and failure-prone.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      Well, with SSD, I don't necessarily have a problem with vibration. However the concept doesn't exactly excite me. Particualrly since it's general purpose, windows oriented means that headless interaction is going to be woefully limited, making that microphone array less intriguing.

      Other vendors have done the stacking and it's not caught on, probably because of what you say in part, but for another there's relatively little they've thought to do with it. I can add what is not going to be much better than

    • I'm somewhat less concerned about the vibration, and more concerned about how they're protecting the computer from that speaker's big damned magnet.

      • With solid state, you really don't have to worry much about magnets.
        and
        Vibrations

        • With solid state, you really don't have to worry much about magnets.
          and
          Vibrations

          I worry about vibrations with connectors, and with solder joints. The latter problem is possibly worse now with lead-free solder but it was always a problem.

    • Is vibration for computers still a problem in the 21st century.

      Back in the 1980's and and 1990's a lot of components were manually soldered on or held together by friction from the connectors.

      Today most of these components are embedded, and what isn't are usually rather solidly connected.

      • Is vibration for computers still a problem in the 21st century.

        Sure. Particularly if you have rotating platter hard drives. It also depends on the intensity of the vibrations. Material fatigue is still a thing last I checked and there are mounting considerations. Granted it's usually not as much of a problem as it once was but it is a consideration. However, I doubt any speaker would be likely to cause problems at volumes that would not induce instead deafness.

    • Just what I need, another vibration source inside my PC.

      What's wrong with a vibration source in your PC? It's not like you have any moving parts like those pre-2010 machines right?

      No seriously a small little speaker is absolutely nothing compared to what many PCs actually have to deal with.

  • Yay (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Another hip "all in one" like, irreparable, overpriced, soon to be discontinued piece of crap from HP. My desktop is modular enough thank you.

    • Not the target market.

      From the article, this is intended for corporate customers; customers who don't need or care about typical desktop modularity.

    • Well, there was a MacMini and a stackable accessory HD or two in this century.

      Stackables may make some small sense when there are a lot of discrete components & functionality.

      Today, the functional pieces are being reduced. The "motherboard" inside a laptop today is really really small.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Misagon ( 1135 )

      The Sun SPARCstation IPX was introduced in 1991, and precedes the Acord RISC PC (1994).
      If you wanted an external SCSI harddrive or CD-ROM or tape-drive, you put it into an external enclosure which had the same footprint and styling as the base unit so that you could put them in a nice stack.
      You daisy-chained them with SCSI cables, but each unit had its own power supply.

      Of course, stacking HiFi components is even older.

  • Let's face it, companies like HP need a way to differentiate themselves from the myriad of assemble-it-yourself boxes out there. They are (or at least have been) an engineering powerhouse. Let your designers do cool stuff and you'll end up with better designers and more loyal customers.

    For the first time in a long time I am beginning to feel like the big companies of yesteryear like Microsoft and HP are moving in the right direction. It has been a while and it is probably a lesson in "necessity breeds in

    • Know what I'd like to have?

      A computer with a full-bore group of legacy-to-modern interfaces. Video, VGA, displayport, Serial, ethernet, parallel, firewire, USB of every flavor, 8" and 5" floppy controller and bays, stiffies, all sizes of hard drive bays, various card slot types, and so on. Something I could plug damn near anything into and pull up legacy data, operate legacy devices, etc.

      Not going to get it, of course -- it'd be expensive, and the market would be minimal... but that's what I'd like to have.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Yvan256 ( 722131 )

        Well some companies still make USB floppy drives, there's USB-to-almost-anything adapters available and for the rest I'm sure a hacker friend could build something custom for you. All you need to do after that is install everything into a custom case.

      • I believe that it's actually still possible to build a massive frankenputer with all of those things, using only COTS components. You can bridge PCI to ISA all the way into a sidecar enclosure. You can get a board with both PCI-E and PCI-X, or at least it was easy enough until recently; you could always bridge PCI-E out and get at least PCI if not PCI-X. And you should still be able to find 8-bit ISA interfaces for 8" floppies, etc.

        The thing is, you don't actually want that. You really, really don't. Why no

  • As documented in the book, AppleDesign [https://amzn.com/1888001259], Apple's Industrial Design Group prototyped just such machines in the mid-to-late-80s and early-90s. Too bad that Apple has failed to use its own in-house design history for inspiration. I really expected to eventually see a Mac mini that incorporated the stacking concept, instead they basically emasculated it.

    With "cloud computing", the Internet of Things, and concepts like the Intel NUC and Arduino and Raspberry Pi already upon us, modul

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jedidiah ( 1196 )

      Computing is much less about computation than it is the interesting stuff that you accumulate and create.

      The cloud isn't magically piping in MIPS to your local terminal and that's a very important distinction.

  • Anyway, I think they're relatively clever ideas aesthetically.
    Of course with modularization the devil's in the details in terms of connectivity, reliability, and performance. And, also, there's the whole "the point of a desktop is INTERNAL modularity and replaceability - ie video cards, etc" thing which this then violates in it's way, apparently compelling any future upgrades to come from HP and not the PC ecosystem.

  • In addition to the speaker, the Wave features a microphone array for Cortana support.

    You spoiled it.

  • Look! It's a 1990's Sun Microsystems computer, reborn!

  • Acer announced their stackable Revo Build [acer.com] about a year ago, around the same concept.
    Unlike the HP system, the Acer system is user-extendable.
    Acer was also first (of HP and Acer) with a inductive charging top...

    But it is basically like a NUC... with a not very fast CPU, no discrete GPU, no RAM expansion etc.

    • Acer announced their stackable Revo Build about a year ago, around the same concept.

      I first heard about the Acer stackable before they had designed the inductive charging top. That seemed like a very good idea. They also tout the ability to stack up to 3 storage modules on top of the main module, which seems like an extremely good idea, and I don't see why HP doesn't seem to have a storage module.

      Unfortunately, Acer's idea died on the vine. The modules are nowhere to be found. They released base units, only one of which survives on Amazon, and there are no modules for sale anywhere. O

  • So Moore's law has finally come to an end? Now they're just tinkering with the cup holders.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

      More like rearranging the deck chairs on the Itanic. (HP still hasn't officially given up on it.)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Agripa ( 139780 )

      Cup holders have been largely deprecated and replaced with USB Flash drives which make terrible cup holders.

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