Thanks for these. It seems like the industry is finally getting out of it’s collective Apple hard-on and developing some unique design languages. I’ve been really liking the direction of HP’s Spectre lineup.
The computer/speaker combo is really neat. I’d be curious to see how much influence Bang and Olufsen had on the design. It could make a great HTPC or NAS PC.
I’m not too sure about this Modular PC though. Price and size wise, it seems to get beat out by offerings like Intel’s NUC line. I’m not sure how much interest there is for the type of modules they have announced, especially in the business space.
As far as molecularity is concerned, I think USB-C with Thunderbolt (essentially PCI-e) will be the game changer. We’ve already seen a few devices like the Surface Book and the Razer Blade Stealth have external GPU units. As computationally heavy tasks are being done more and more by GPUs, I think it will make a lot of sense for people to have a small and portable tablet like device as their core unit and connect to a hub at their desk. This hub could have a powerful GPU, large backup or mass storage hard drive, connection to high speed network, and all their peripherals.
It’s really nice to see gaming hardware manufacturers accept that gaming has a wide user base. Conventional wisdom is that gaming is very much a boy thing even though studies have been showing that around 45% of console and PC gamers are actually women. However, much fewer women identify as “gamer”. The average age of gamers is also 31 y/o. While I think a lot of people enjoy the over the top aesthetics as part of the experience, especially in competitive realms, there seems to be a disconnect between the users and the available hardware.
As far as the PC is concerned, it seems like gaming and workstation machines are becoming one and the same. To that end, it seems like a lot of the workstation users are basically stuck using gaming oriented hardware just based on availability.
I’ve noticed Lian-Li and other manufacturers seem to be exploring different avenues in terms of style to a varying degree of success. What seems to be at the core of the issue is that there seems to be only a few actual case manufacturers. All of those large players are heavily invested in sheet metal stamping and pressing operations. With that in mind, it seems like the manufacturing process is driving the design much more than actual design intent.