Hey, we all knew good and well
VidaBox was sparing no luxury when crafting the CableCARD-ready, HD DVD / Blu-ray supporting HTPC it affectionately dubs the
Magnum, but even the well prepared may be a tad taken aback by the price. While the vendor's website still requests that you swallow a chill pill and calmly call for any
pricing inquiries, AudioJunkies has apparently done us all the favor. Wrapped up in what appears to be OrigenAE's oh-so-sexy
aluminum chassis, the VidaBox Magnum reportedly
starts at a dollar under eight grand, and while we're sure the base configuration is more than plenty, why not throw in an extra stick of RAM and a few terabytes of HDD space to ensure your next media PC costs more than a new Kia Rio?
posted Jun 22nd 2007 10:22AM
I think I'd rather get a big-ass table for two g's more.
The site says that the screen is a "motorized 1080p touchscreen." A 7'' touchscreen at 1920 x 1080 is funny, pointless, and most likely more than $1500 of the total cost.
12" screen? My dongle is bigger than that :-/
soo i gotta choose between a pc or a car
R & D is a pretty darn expensive undertaking -- industrial design, prototyping, product testing, regulatory certifications, engineering changes, hard tooling ... When you are Dell, HP, Sony, or Apple, selling a quintrillion units a year and buying components in hundred-thousand part batches, then it’s easy for you to recoup your costs at bargain basement prices. if you’ve got a phat recurrent revenue pipe, like printer ink or video game licensing, you can even sell your hardware at a loss and still clean up!
Yet, although the Dells of this world have put out some pretty dang good product, they do not regularly press the envelope in design and innovation. Even when they do occasionally venture into the super-cool-super-risky-next-gen zone, the tasty little fruits of their labor are no substitute for the kind of cutting edge innovation that constantly comes out of small, young, feisty operations with big fuzzy dreams.
Anyway, I'm sure VidaBox is itchin' for the day it can sell its little flip front media monster for $799, but they are going to have to move a truckload of machines at $7999 before they get there. I applaud their moxie.
thermaltake's LANBOX can house a computer of similar power with their 7" motorized touch-screen LCD for less than $1500 total (LCD is $350).
but that one is still pretty cool.
Actually, for a serious HTPC a full-HD capable internal screen is absolutely briliant - almost required, in fact, if you're going to have a screen on the HTPC at all. Why? Because you can only run Windows in "mirrored mode" if both screens (and in this case the first screen is the one on the computer and the second is either a full-HD TV or projector) are running the same resolution. Mirrored mode is the only sane way to do it, to have the same controls and same video on both screens.
Anyway, the OrigenAE case is available by itself for somewhere around a grand with motorized screen and all. You still need to add the internals, but that shouldn't be too bad - and then you have what almost has to be one of the coolest and most usable HTPC's around. Great for playing music etc and controlling it on the HTPC screen, no need to fire up the projector or TV just for that, for instance.