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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude
cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

The Dell XPS m2010 video is my best performing in quite some time, possibly months, and the funny thing about this is that I almost didn't make it. When I saw the thing show up at the store I was prepared to just leave it there because I didn't think there was any meat on the bone, other than it being kind of a meme.

Once I realized that there were all these accessories that nobody knew about, I got pissed off about an interesting device having been lost to time, and by the time I was done writing the script I was so personally invested in the topic that I insisted on getting everything perfect, doing a bunch of rewrites and reshoots so the narrative would be spot on and say exactly what I intended, and it's paid off, people seem to love the video and all the comments are positive.

My favorite part is that quite a few people have replied saying that they owned these (or the very similarly intentioned HP dragon) and loved them and miss them, and that was a hunch that I had. I think a lot of people would jump to the conclusion that this was some sort of failure, but I don't think it was. I have no way of knowing how many they sold, but just statistically speaking, the fact that well over a dozen people have shown up in my comments about it suggests they were not all that rare, despite the absurd price tag. And nobody has said that they owned one and hated it, only that they knew people who owned them and they looked ridiculous from afar. I knew that this machine was for somebody, and it feels good having that vindicated.

I was talking to a friend yesterday, because he was watching this video and had a couple comments, and he said that he thought it was weird, having lived through this era and absolutely hating it at the time, now looking back on it fondly. And of course, there are a lot of just normal human aspects to that, regardless of subject matter, but I have a perspective on this that's unique to the computer liker

The fact is that at this time, virtually all of us PC enjoyers thought that stuff like this was, to just simply be blunt about it, for fucking dipshits. The only thing that mattered when it came to buying a computer was performance versus cost, and every one of us, by age 13, had learned that the best way to get bang for your buck, plus future expansion capability, and so on and so forth, was to buy a dumb beige box and then order parts from an online store known almost entirely to nerds for the lowest prices possible, after comparison shopping everything down to the dollar.

The idea of walking into a store and buying a pre-built computer made us want to vomit, and we openly mocked anybody who did this. The idea of buying a computer that could not have any imaginable component put into it, or that cost more than the sum of it's parts, was to us proof that someone was a fool, a grandma, a know nothing loser. So anything like this, we ignored or mocked.

There is a recurring, undying, and completely incorrect myth that the internet never forgets anything. This is not true. The internet never forgets anything... that tickles the fancy of permanently online people. Anything we give the nod to gets bucket-brigaded into the endless future by word of mouth, but anything that bores us - not offends, but just fails to entertain - gets memory holed.

Or, to put it more colloquially, the winners write the history. As the people in power, who shape the overall tone of the web at large, we ignored every weird piece of computer hardware in its heyday, we pooh poohed it all as boring shit, bait to make clueless lusers throw away their money. We rolled our eyes at built-in memory card readers, removable hard drive bays, literally anything that you could not buy at Fry's electronics was an embarrassing trap for parents to fall into. The only things we cared about were beige box, motherboard, CPU, GPU, hard drive - all had to be generic, and all had to be high performance. Everything else, we did not bother to put on our websites or post about on our forums.

This is essentially the basis of my YouTube channel. I focus on all the stuff that we - myself included - ignored when it was current. Several of these things I remember seeing when they were first sold, and I called them all wastes of money and went back to my beige box and my Radeon x1950. And in retrospect, knowing what I know now... I still don't want them. They're not for me, they never were.

But nerds like us are nonetheless best equipped to report on them. I have the relative expertise with computers to understand what it means that Dell made the decisions they made, and we are all now much more mature than we were back then, much better equipped to understand that people have lifestyles different than ours with different priorities. And so, as long as the story is framed to emphasize who it was for - as long as I make up a guy, as it were - we all have no trouble appreciating these things. And we realize how much creativity and ingenuity we ignored because it wasn't beige. And we regret not appreciating what we had while we had it.

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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

beige-alert
@beige-alert

I remember back at the time seeing some Computer Journalist thing where they took a couple of those size-category machines into a coffee shop to perch them on the tiniest coffee-shop tables they could find for the purpose of taking funny photos of them and straight up admitted that that's really not what those machines were for, they just though it would be hilarious. But also you just demonstrated that if you pick a slightly bigger table even that's not really all that hilariously silly. I didn't know about the multimedia aspect at the time (I really wasn't in the laptop market at all then) and that really makes it look like a more interesting idea.

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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

Yeah, I actually did pick a table that was smaller than I wanted, and I was surprised when it turned out that it fit a lot better than it looked like it would. It was quite reasonable, I can fully imagine someone actually using it like that, and it didn't even really look ridiculous.

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the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi
@the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi

I definitely would have been interested in one of these in college if I'd had the money, but nowadays we have some incredible infrastructure for streaming video content, and so I think my current strategy of 'decent laptop paired with fairly powerful remote desktop machine and realtime video encoding / media host' is what I'd much rather have for these kinds of jobs.

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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

Oh yes, what I mean though is that if I put myself in the shoes of a 2006 version of me, knowing everything I know now and having had all the same experiences, but just not having access to the modern technological solutions, I'd still just have a beige box and some janky ass system for playing MP4's manually in Windows Media player. Like at the time I made fun of products like this, but even though I no longer mock them, they're still not for me just conceptually. I want more control, I want more flexibility, etc.

And the criticism I'm making is just that, because us nerds were all obsessed with control and flexibility, we weren't even willing to contemplate potential value of these products for somebody not ourselves. To their credit, the magazine reviewers of the era, who are almost certainly all beige box users themselves, gave these computers fairly good reviews from the perspective of the market segments they were intended for. If you'd put me in the hot seat at CNET in 2006 and asked me to review a laptops gaming functionality, I would have laughed you out of the room and said anyone who games on a laptop deserves what they get. From a perspective, I would have been right, but it's only the perspective of somebody who is unwilling to accept anything less than the best possible experience available, and is willing to shape their life around it.

I spent my teens and twenties huddled in a dark room in front of a purpose-built entertainment machine, absolutely focused on the monitor image and ignoring everything else. Other people are not willing or able to operate in that kind of tunnel vision, and are willing to make significant compromises to the experience in order to live their lives the way they want to, and I now know that there's nothing wrong with that.

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ctrl-salt-del
@ctrl-salt-del

Not to bravely defend nerds to nerds, but I feel like a lot of the reason machines of this "category" got a short shrift from "computer people" is because a lot of them were actually crap, even measured against the metric of "is this a good computer solution for the ordinary person". This particular example succeeds, but if you were to line it up on a roulette wheel with everything else on the market and ask what kind of computer I would bet on being worth its asking price, I would take "boring tower PC" over "laptop packaged in a gimmick case" every time.

Like, you could have become a connoisseur of all of these weird form factor machines, but unless you were one of these people getting paid to review consumer hardware, that effort was almost certainly better spent doing... well, stuff with beige boxes, for the most part.

(None of that, of course, at all affects my willingness to watch you talk about those machines--I really appreciate the way you look at and talk about these designs and talk about their practicality, or lack thereof.)

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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

We would have to get more specific in order to pick this nit successfully, but it's probably simpler just to say that I'm not saying we were wrong, per se, yet an awful lot of people are finding it shocking how much variety was in the market that they didn't notice at the time. And it's simply that we were deliberately not paying attention, scrolling past all the e3 coverage of stuff that could, in fact, have been good for someone to get to the motherboards and graphics cards.

And since we're the people who remember this stuff for each other, it didnt get remembered, and now we're all looking back and going "okay, maybe it sucked, maybe it wasn't anything we would have wanted... but it was nice that it was at least there."

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the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi
@the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi

I totally admit that I'm coming from this from a specific perspective of being the guy who, to the degree he even had a computer of his own and not just The Dell Family Box, was getting either a laptop for school-related reasons or some kind of prebuilt because there was no room to properly do A Computer Assembly Project. My first computer purchase outside of academia, which I probably mentioned to you, was that liquidated Z440; the first machine I assembled was the one I'm using right now built from salvaging everything when that machine's system board died. I totally admit that sometimes I just want to spend the money on something where I can reasonably believe every component actually does work together, something that allows me to spend less than half an hour from box opening to system start.

I would say, like, "I think if they made machines in this kind of form factor now, with an emphasis on having the ability to stick a custom GPU in there, they'd still have a market for them" but I also think that, like, every mobile computer should have an oculink port to support an eGPU and any soldered main system RAM should be socketed as e-waste prevention measures. In that sense devices like these feel more like a conversation piece than a bold vision of future computing.

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aune
@aune

I remember this thing back in the day. As much as I thought it was ridiculous, it was also the coolest thing I had ever seen. The audacity of releasing it. That gorgeous (at the time) screen. I'd seen one in person and even my "biege boxes are great" loving ass wanted one.

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antimu0n
@antimu0n

Watched the video after reading this post, I had never heard or read about this thing back in the day. Fascinating.
And yeah my first thought was also "this doesn't seem any sillier than today's gaming laptops".
I can't look at it and not think it was a response to the Intel iMacs that came out around that time and were hot shit. I mean generally multimedia was the hype of the day right, so a device like this "what if we combine an all-in-one with a multimedia laptop" entirely makes sense.

Nice seeing something that was innovative in the true sense of the word.

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metricconversion
@metricconversion

You nailed what your channel is so succinctly. It’s what tech tangents, and serial port, and so many others does so well also. Shit that was never for us, shit that was always in our periphery but never in our sight.

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