In a business where the current tech is almost obsolete before it hits the store shelves, how important is it for Alienware to be able to claim supremacy with their new “Area 51″ line? (What happens when they run out of cute alien-oriented product names?)
These are nice machines, but is pure horsepower the be-all and end-all? True, Alienware’s stock-in-trade is computing power, but what about thermal management, power consumption and battery life, system durability, and the other factors that help determine the true benefit of a laptop?
The most powerful 17-inch notebook ever?
The most powerful 15.4 notebook that’s ever been thought of?
It was with that kind of unbridled enthusiasm that Alienware Corp., makers of musclebound gamers’ notebook and desktop computers, rolled out its latest high-powered efforts at a New York press conference on Monday (Nov. 19).
According to Alienware, a subsidiary of PC giant Dell Corp., in addition to powerful processors and fast hard drives, the new Area-51 m17x 17-inch notebook and Area-51 m15x 15.4-inch notebook offer graphics performance far above that offered by any other current notebook.
The specifications for the sleekly designed Area-51 units seem to bear out some of his enthusiasm. Both come with Intel Corp.’s Core 2 Extreme processors, Blu-Ray optical disk burners and up to to 4 gigabytes of system memory.
We should create a new “transportable” category and recognize desktop-replacement “laptops” as an additional computing device category. Even if it these two machines are currently the bragging champions, how soon before they are knocked off their throne?
