Tuesday, April 23, 2002 |
19:24 - Gateway's introduces... a TiBook
http://www.gateway.com/products/notebooks/p4.asp?seg=hm
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Kris and I can't find any consistent dimensions or specifications on these pages, but one thing's for sure: this is one big laptop.
Whether the 15.7" (in the "Product Tour" pop-up window) or the 15" (on the main page) figure for the screen is correct, it's a standard 4:3 screen, so it's massive. And judging by the thickness of the machine on the side views, it's got to be at least 1.5" thick-- maybe even 2". Talk about the Mother of All Laptops.
But what gets us is the motherboard layout. Go to the "Product Tour" and run your mouse around the various sides. Look-- every single side has ports and slots and controls. PCMCIA, optical drive, audio plugs, and FireWire are on the left; USB and "multimedia drive" are on the right; audio controls are on the front; and the back has video, network, parallel and serial ports. Plug everything in and this machine would look like a big cilia-encased paramecium.
That's for the bigger model, the 600L. Now look at the smaller one, the 450L. This one has ports and bays all over the place too-- but in all different places. It's a totally different motherboard layout. No wonder Gateway is hemorrhaging money, if they can't streamline their designs any better than this.
As if I needed to point this out: the Apple laptops cluster all their ports together in one place. The TiBook has all the ports in the back, the slot-loading optical drive in the front, and the PCMCIA slot on the left. The iBook has the drive bay and power on the right and everything else on the left. It may be a nightmare to put back together, but it's certainly a lot neater.
And I'm still not sure what the point is of all the PC makers insisting on having both a DVD drive and a CD-RW, or a DVD-RW and a CD-ROM, or just two optical drives of any kind. "Well, it's so you can rip... from one to another... easi..ly. Or something..."
Hey, good luck to 'em. The way things are looking, they're going to need it.
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