HP aims to take on MacBook Air with "Envy"

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Hewlett Packard showed off several new products today, including its new "Envy" sub-brand which will be competing with Apple's MacBook Air and Dell's Adamo.

Starting at $1699 - nearly $200 more than both the MacBook Air and Adamo - the Envy 13 features a 1.86GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SL9400 processor, 3GB of RAM, 512MB ATi Mobility Radeon HD 4330 graphics processor and a 250GB hard drive. The Envy 13, which comes with an external 8X DVD-RW as standard, measures 12.6" x 8.5" x 0.8" and weighs around 3.74 pounds. Its extended-life battery is expected to last up to 18 hours, thanks to onboard technology that throttles the GPU and "downgrades" to the integrated Intel GPU for simpler tasks.

Hewlett Packard has not released much information about the Envy 13's bigger brother, the Envy 15, but according to the company's press release it will include a "future Core i7 processor", support for up to 16GB of RAM, a 1GB ATi Mobility Radeon HD 4830 and support for up to 2 solid state hard drives. With a starting price of $1799, the Envy 15's features sound impressive, although the battery life is much lower compared to the Envy 13 at only 7 hours.

The company also showed off the ProBook 5310m, which it claims to be the "World's thinnest full-performance notebook". With a starting price of $699, the 5310m measures 0.9" at its thickest point, weighs around 3.7 pounds.

Both the Envy 13 and Envy 15 are expected to be available in the United States on October 18th. The ProBook 5310m is already available in Asia with Windows Vista, but it will be available Worldwide with Windows 7 on October 22nd.
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Source: HP aims to take on MacBook Air with "Envy"
 

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I can't see it taking on the Air, and although more expensive, it's no different in price to buying an air with the apple external superdrive.

I'm still struggling to see the point of these devices until ssd's and the like become more affordable, it seems that manufacturers so desperately want to do the whole 'Air' thing, which lets face it, with PC users doing what they do and being who they are (as opposed to mac users, who don't as a rule game or fiddle with OS's) doesn't really work.

It seems almost contradictory, lets make it as thin and minimalist as possible, but yet we still need all of this functionality and ports. I read the comments made over the article, but I don't think that the posters really got into the head of a mac user, and thus the product will always be found wanting cost for cost in comparison to your average pc.
Yet to the mac user, Air works because of all the things that it's lacking. An oxymoron? yes.

Also, as PC users, do we expect to pay these sort of (apple) prices for our hardware?
 

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yeah its looks in a way like the air, maybe hp will sell windows and apple in future;)
 

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yes, after all they're already running an EFI bios ;)
 

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I'm getting kinda sick of these 3 GB RAM laptops. None of them run in dual channel (that I've seen) and you end up getting worse performance.
 

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Exactly Kaze, its almost as if they all saw apple doing it and thought - Ahhh there must be a market for these things; when the reality is that Apple know that if they release something then there is a very high probability that their existing customer base will blndly go forth and purchase!

I think also manufactuers have to rething portable computing, as now we have these 3gb things / netbooks / laptops / laptop replacement for desktop(18"+) yet they all have their compromises, and all of them sacrifice something due to their form factor.
Apple can get away with it because an apple customer would rather just buy a new machine with the functionality they need over upgrading a component - it's just not the done thing in the mac community.

Lets take the old cube - a true prosumer mac, effectively a mini itx sized board, like the mini, but with the ability to install gpu of your choice (as far as mac gpu's went) and if it were interl the cpu. - never sold as popular as iMac, despite being more versatile. But versatility means opening cases and swapping stuff.

But I digress...

What sort of person actually are these things targeted at? and if they are going to release a 15" then what makes it different (optical drive aside) to a normal laptop when they get SSD's in them and become thinner?
 

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saverio said:
What sort of person actually are these things targeted at? and if they are going to release a 15" then what makes it different (optical drive aside) to a normal laptop when they get SSD's in them and become thinner?
Click to expand...
They are targeted at people like my friend, who doesn't get computers at all. He likes the small portable computers that look kinda sexy.

In my opinion, I hate them. You touch that thing wrong and it will snap in half. Or its super smoothness will cause you to drop it, or you will sit on it and crush it.
My laptop is a 17" desktop replacement with a full KB and numberpad. Then again, that is the kind of laptop I like. Therefore, these are not targeted to me.

~Lordbob
 

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:) I sure like the sound of thin laptops. As long as they do what I need I'm happy. Although I do think we're getting ahead of are times since the Macbook air requires some sort of external disk drive.
 

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