We certainly aren't tired of the
X-Slim 320 laptop from MSI, with its
Air-like form-factor in less expensive and slightly more practical packaging -- it's still many moons away from release, after all. Despite that, MSI felt the need to announce two new models to round out the still unreleased lineup: the 13.4-inch X340 and 15.6-inch X600. We don't know much about these two yet except that the X340 is slated be priced somewhere in the (wide) range of $699-$999 in the US, that both offer HDMI in addition to VGA output, both are Centrino 2-based, and that the X600 even has an eSATA port on top of its two USBs. We'll surely be seeing a lot more of this pair (plus the X320 as well) at CeBIT in just a few weeks, and are hoping that MSI will go ahead and maybe release one before introducing any more.
posted Feb 23rd 2009 7:41AM
sweet
Does it come with fingerprints included?
dude....thats such a pretty laptop !
A pretty good copy indeed.
Ripoff? Oh I know, that silver border around a black bezel? Jeeze, how could they rip off Asus' A8 series so blatantly.
Best part? HDMI! and omg ESATA!
great way of taking a concept and then improving on it. Its a breath of fresh *cough*AIR*cough* .
I just hope they have decent clock speeds...
@ Shaka
You might want to get that cough checked out, it sounds pretty nasty.
Get well soon.
No I just had to gasp for Air after seeing this.
Oh the esata and hdmi... who would of thought something so simple can make an engadgeteer so happy.
Thank god we are not force to have sex with so holeless Air anymore.
Simple people, simple pleasures...
It looks a lot better with the white keyboard. Apple should copy them. ;) Even a silver keyboard would be an improvement.
HDMI is good too, but I'm ok with display port as long as there are adapters.
they both look similar.
yeah, the left and the right one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU
They just following what Steve J's said. Give them a break.
I need to get some fresh Air
Ill take one in BLACK please!
They look.... familiar.
Booooyyyyy those look awfully familiar...
wonderful
MacBook rip off anyone?
Yeah, both are white and have a screen and a keyboard!
and a black frame around the screen and a silver frame around that.. cmon it seriouly looks like a macbook...
totally color scheme ripoff
Argot, you are a moron. Did you even compare them?? Its a freakin clone..
i tot apple has new products again when i saw the pics
Man.. the MBA comparisons will be asinine and they will be many.. let it GO people.
I definitely saw the picture before reading the headline and thought that Engadget for some reason posted a comparison review between the Macbook and the Macbook Pro. The resemblence is uncanny I must say.
I know that Apple's new design isn't the most unique design that they have had, and that there are a lot of products out there that look almost like it, but I mean-- this is an obvious take from Apple's design no doubt. If you have to take a good look at the picture to see the differences, then I think that there is reason to bitch about look-alike stuff. haha
Anyways, nice looking laptop! Would buy one if I wanted to have a windows computer due to their likeness. Haha. You can't dress up the shit inside enough to make me want it. (Windows)
Give it a few weeks from release, OSX86 will be locked and loaded for sure :)
they surelly spent lot of money in design research!!
they are sleek and sexy
And people wonder why people Apple charges a butt load of money for it's products. They actually pay their designers to come up with or at least attempt original form factors.
MSI and other companies once they see it's a success, just RIP it off and don't have to actually invest R&D. MacBook Air form factor is pretty original, those photos show its a pretty blatant rip. Not just the black screen and silver body, but the whole thinness of it.
And for people who actually are hating on Apple, sit down. Seriously if you're not a designer you don't how infuriating and sad it is to see your designs ripped off by other non-talented designers making money off it by selling it cheaper.
Apple still has a chance to shine this way: by using polycarbonate instead of aluminium, MSI's laptop will potentially suffer from a weaker structure and damaging its own brand.
I've been waiting for years for Apple's unibody solution which provides genuine strength at a light weight. This feature is still not found in other brands, I believe. (Sony's carbon-fibre gimmick doesn't count!)
"MacBook Air form factor is pretty original"
Yeah, no one created an ultra thin laptop before Apple *cough* Sony X505 *cough*
If you are really a designer you would know that the differences between a macbook and other laptops is so minor and down to very small details that calling it a design is laughable.
But then I'm sure the designer of Sony's VAIO laptops were pretty pissed off to see that chicklet style keyboard appear in Apple's products.
Apple steals every bit as much as everyone else, originality in laptop form factors is like originality in car design, there is nothing new under the sun.
@Jacob
True. But Apple respected the design. No one is going to say OMG Apple cloned Sony's X505. No one is ever going to mistake one for the other for a second.
MSI could have done the same and tried to improved the stylings of AIR and take it to another level beyond hardware changes. Imagine if they did though, you'd have far superior design to AIR and hardware changes to boot.
Let me get this right, producer B rips of a design of producer A but.. respects it
Producer C rips of producer B and then it becomes a blatant copy?
Or.. the neatest of all, producer D makes a mobile in a generic form but obviously its a blatant copy of producer B (not realizing that producer E had already something like that in the shops wayyyy before B was even ready to present the product)...
C'mon they all produce something thats generic, you want a flat laptop... guess what it tends to be a laptop with a keyboard a screen and its flat. Apple didn't patent the silver nor did they patent the shiney white or whatever else there is around. What is interesting is that this laptop is half of the price with better options. The only thing MSI could suffer from in this case is maybe porer quality, yet that isn't something I've seen before from MSI so i seriously doubt that is going to happen either.
I totally understand… but man I love Ikea
These also won't, I believe, include apple tax and may actually
be affordable to the average user.
Don't get me wrong I love the new macbook line and I think that
it's a beautiful piece of design, but it hurts how much it costs.
@WolfC4ke: Since when were Apple machines unaffordable? It looks like a lot of people can buy them.
I saw them at the CES, and did think they looked like the MacBook Air bar the plastic and the extra USB port/s (as said in the article). MSI really is becoming a threat to laptop manufacturers.
Becoming a threat ? MSI was formed in 1984 and has been making laptops on an OEM/ODM basis for about as long as anyone else.
major, not that they haven't been making laptops for a while, just that only now are they stepping up their game.
personally, i'm liking what i see from msi in the laptop department more and more.
except the u120.
but in all seriousness, i definitely wouldn't mind the x600 with ssd.
Macbook Air thin without the Macbook Air price. This is really nice.
I think that rather depends on how gutless this is, performance wise. While I'd like to see a MacBook Air for less and with better performance, something tells me that these aren't it. Mind you, if you don't need performance then maybe this is what you've been waiting for.
Amen to that. Plus you get a product that you actually fully own without Apple's psychotic EULA. Wipe out the default OS and get Mint or Ubuntu or something running on there, and you have an affordable, compact, more-powerful-than-atom laptop. Sign me up.
Take that Cupertino!
So it looks like a MBA has a very similar hardware spec, more USB ports, eSATA and HDMI.
So why does the MBA cost so much again ?
because of aluminium and probably much better hardware as well as R&D costs which MSI did not face... hope this is enough to answer your question... oh yeah, btw the guys from cupertino have a pretty nice profit margin shipping with their laptops :)
My guess would be that the MacBook Air has something approaching laptop specifications rather than netbook specifications (i.e. reasonable C2D processor, DDR3 memory and a reasonable graphics chipset). Compared against similar thin-n-light laptops the MacBook Air is not badly priced, although you will still pay a premium.
Now, if it can install the OSX86 hacks without any hiccups or issues, you've just scored an extra 1000 points in my book.
I think it's funny that everyone is like OMG rip off or that looks like the Air. What do you think a super skinny laptop is gonna look like? it is either going to have a flat box like shape similar to the Dell Adamo/Voodoo Envy or it is going to have the rounded sharp edge like the Air. There aren't a whole lot of options to change design ques other than color.
I am just happy that this isn't going to cost an unspecified body part to afford.
I tend to agree with this. There's only so much you can do with a design so I'm not going to describe these as "rip offs" or anything of the such. Whether I'd want to actually pay money for one, however, is an entirely different question until we see a specification sheet and reviews.