Last week Apple released a new version of their Mac Pro with the eight core model available from £2,499 which if you add a few options as I did can be as expensive as £8,259!!! This would be one fast machine, with 16GB of RAM, 4TB of raw storage and two 30″ screens!
So if you were going to buy one what would you use it for? Such a beasty would be perfect for graphic manipulation, video editing, video encoding.
Hold on.
How often do you do that?
Not that often?
Wouldn’t an iMac be a better choice? You can get a 20″ iMac for £949.
Wait.
Do you do any video or audio editing? Do you manipulate images much on your computer?
What do you use your computer for?
A bit of word processing, checking e-mail, Twitter, Facebook and Jaiku…
A simple netbook would probably be the answer, spending £199 rather than £8000!
Of course I am not alone thinking like this, Wired has a wonderful article on the rise of the netbook.
The Wired article reminds us:
When Asustek launched the Eee PC in fall 2007, it sold out the entire 350,000-unit inventory in a few months. Eee PCs weren’t bought by people in poor countries but by middle-class consumers in western Europe and the US, people who wanted a second laptop to carry in a handbag for peeking at YouTube or Facebook wherever they were. Soon the major PC brands—Dell, HP, Lenovo—were scrambling to catch up.
The article goes on…
Most of the time, we do almost nothing. Our most common tasks—email, Web surfing, watching streamed videos—require very little processing power. Only a few people, like graphic designers and hardcore gamers, actually need heavy-duty hardware.
At the end of the day most of us, most of our learners do not need a powerful computer, we need something that allows us to do word processing (or blogging), e-mail, social networking, watching a web video, and general web surfing.
Though I suspect most e-learning people have a netbook as their second (or third) computer.
Thanks to Andy Black for blogging about the Wired article.
Last November we recorded a podcast on the impact of the Asus EeePC and other netbooks and you might want to listen to that.
Photo source.
