I suppose if I were just in search of controversy, I'd write a post to proclaim the death of the MID (mobile Internet device) category. My obituary for the Netbook earlier this week generated a ton of traffic; I suppose I could do that again. Certainly, the concept of a MID--a device midway in size and capability between smartphones and the smallest notebooks--is under tremendous pressure from both sides.
Customers have learned that with a well-engineered browser, the small displays on phones such as Apple's iPhone and T-Mobile's G1 "Google phone" are sufficient for most Internet applications (Web browsing, e-mail, chat, etc.). And as I described yesterday, small notebooks are quickly lifting themselves out of the "Netbook" ghetto, gaining performance and cutting power consumption to become reasonable alternatives for those times when a smartphone just isn't enough.
The tokidoki edition Fujitsu LifeBook U820 mini notebook.
(Credit: Fujitsu Computer Systems)But I think there's still a legitimate niche for MIDs and other miniature mobile PCs. As I've mentioned here before, I used to carry around a 1.5-pound computing gizmo along with a conventional laptop. It was an Apple Newton MessagePad 2100--officially a PDA, not a MID--but it was as close to a MID as the technology of the time allowed. It came with a Web browser, and for a while I had mine equipped with a Metricom Ricochet wireless modem, so I could access the Web and e-mail on the go.
It often seems to me that I would like to go back to that kind of device, rather than trying to make my iPhone and my laptop do the same jobs. In fact, I think my note-taking capability has actually declined with each new handheld platform I've adopted--the Newton was better than the Palm Treo, and the Treo was better than the iPhone. Today, when I attend conferences or want to scribble down some idea that can't be represented in a paragraph or two, I grab a Moleskine notebook (the pocket Sketchbook version).
My own experience is merely anecdotal evidence, however, and I know better than to rely on that. So what are the real markets for the MID?
Coincidentally, I think it works out to three E's: education, entertainment, and executive applications. All three areas lead to situations where a person might want access to more computing and communications resources than a smartphone can provide but won't necessarily want to carry around a notebook--or try to use one while standing--to get that.
The educational market for these small machines has yet to develop because current MIDs don't yet offer the right combination of small size, all-day battery life, and low price, but I believe they'll get there within the next year or so. People often talk about e-book readers as being the right answer for educational computing, but e-books are more about static content, and education is ideally an interactive process.
The entertainment focus was clearest with UMPCs (another dead category, though I'm hardly the first to point that out). UMPCs were marketed as "lifestyle" gizmos, as if many people were ever going to make a relatively bulky 7-inch display tablet PC with two-hour battery life part of their lifestyle. But in a smaller form factor--say a 5-inch display, a total weight under a pound, and battery life of at least five or six hours--a MID can fit this bill. As long as it's small enough (and rugged enough) to carry around in a purse or jacket pocket, and cheap enough to be written off to the entertainment budget like a Netflix subscription or a new TV, a MID could indeed become a lifestyle product.
The Viliv S5 Entertainment MID provides full PC compatibility in a PDA-size package.
(Credit: Yukyung Technologies)I saw a gizmo at CES that fit this definition pretty well, the Viliv S5 from Korean consumer-electronics maker Yukyung Technologies. Yukyung is one of many companies making portable video players, but its new offerings are quite distinctive.
The S5 is like a right-sized UMPC, with a 4.8-inch touch-screen display (800x480 or 1024x600 pixels, depending on model). It can play HD video, and it comes with Windows XP on a real hard disk, so there's no problem installing other software.
The S5's Intel Atom processor provides very good battery life: the company specifies six hours of movie playback. The device is about 6 x 3.3 x 1 inches in size--a lot smaller than my old Newton--and weighs less than 14 ounces.
There are also two 7-inch screen Viliv machines, the X70 slate-style tablet and the S7 convertible tablet. Both, amazingly, are still smaller than my old Newton.
Executives have always been the focus of some high-end handheld PC developers such as OQO, Sony, and Fujitsu.
Fujitsu didn't have any major updates to announce at CES for its LifeBook U820 series, though it was showing a model with case art from tokidoki, an Italian (but Japanese-inspired) lifestyle brand, and I got a chance to talk with a couple of PR people from Fujitsu about the U820 and other Fujitsu products.
The U820 is basically a complete convertible tablet PC squeezed into a 1.3-pound package: a 5.6-inch touch-screen LCD with 1,280x800-pixel resolution, a 1.6GHz Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, a 60GB or 120GB hard disk, Windows Vista Home Premium, and so on. It offers pretty much every kind of communication technology a person could ask for: Bluetooth, a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, optional AT&T wireless broadband, and even a GPS receiver.
From my perspective, the U820 is actually smaller than it needs to be, which is most apparent in the micro-sized keyboard, but it's an impressive technical accomplishment nonetheless.
For many people, the new Sony Vaio P-series (a CNET Best of CES award winner this year) may prove to be more practical, with its 87 percent-pitch keyboard and 8-inch widescreen LCD. But the Sony is beyond all but the largest pockets. Sony has made smaller machines in the past, such as the Vaio UX series, but these have been discontinued.
The OQO model 2+ brings better performance at a lower price than earlier OQO models.
(Credit: OQO, Inc.)OQO also made a big splash at the show with its new model 2+, an unprepossessing name for a product even more technically impressive than Fujitsu's. The new OQO machine has almost all the features of the U820, but in a considerably smaller, lighter package. There are some differences; the model 2+ has a lower screen resolution (800x480) but is available with a faster CPU and more RAM. Also, the OQO is available with an OLED (organic light-emitting diode) display that really looks fantastic, with high contrast and deep saturated colors.
The model 2+ is in the same enclosure as the older OQO model 2, hence the trivial name tweak, but there's another big difference from that older product: the 2+ has a starting price of just $999, $500 less than the starting price of the 2. And the base model of the 2+ is a much better system than the high-end model 2 configuration was.
Just as there were some ARM-based Netbooks at CES, there were also some ARM-based MIDs on display. With no clear advantages over smartphones except for display size, I don't think these products will attract customers. But that problem is CPU-specific; it doesn't apply to the more powerful x86-based products.
So okay, there's some good MID hardware out there. Unfortunately, that isn't enough. What MIDs need are lower prices, more rugged designs, and some MID-optimized software. The fact that Windows runs on these small displays doesn't mean that style of user interface is right for them. I know people at Microsoft who are working on this aspect of the problem; I hope they get the chance to bring their solutions to market, ideally in the Windows 7 time frame.
All in all, there's a lot of interesting activity in these smaller form factors. I think these tiny machines face a long uphill struggle to gain market share, but at least they have a unique and clearly defined product concept: a PC in a pocket.
Much coverage of this year's Consumer Electronics Show is full of references to new Netbooks introduced at the show. But in fact, there were hardly any Netbooks at all, and those that did appear went almost unmentioned.
The truth is, the Netbook is dead, and good riddance. The concept of the Netbook was based on a tragic misunderstanding: the belief that tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of people worldwide wanted a portable computer that was small, power-efficient, and (here's the misunderstanding) not good for much beyond accessing the Internet.
Asus's Eee PC T91 convertible tablet
(Credit: ASUSTeK Computer Inc.)That's where the "Net" in "Netbook" came from: the Web, e-mail, chat, maybe some VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol communications).
That's what the earliest Netbooks delivered, too--machines like the Eee PC 701 from Asus (which I described here) that came with slow single-core processors, small amounts of RAM, small liquid crystal displays, and tiny, slow flash drives. They were good enough for light Web browsing and e-mail--and not much more. They wouldn't run Windows XP with acceptable performance, never mind Windows Vista.
Well, nobody wanted those machines. Companies that tried to sell them saw unprecedented return rates. Asus, for its part, couldn't upgrade the Eee PC fast enough; current Eee PCs have faster processors, more memory, larger screens, and larger flash drives or real rotating hard disks.
At CES, Asus expanded its line of Eee PC systems to include the S101, S101H, 701, 701SD, 701SDX, 900, 900A, 900HA, 900HD, 900SD, 901, 901XP, 904HA, 904HD, 1000, 1000H, 1000HA, 1000HD, 1000HE, 1000HG, 1002HA, 1003HG, and 1004DN laptops; the T91 and T101H tablets; and multiple Eee Top desktops. (Seriously! Most of these model numbers are on Asus's Eee PC site; the others are from CES. And I may have missed some.)
Certainly, all of these Eee PC systems were clearly distinct from Asus' mainstream offerings: Celeron or (mostly) Atom processors, 10-inch or smaller displays (on the laptops), and smaller amounts of RAM and mass storage.
But the fact is, they're all capable of much more than simple Web browsing. Asus specifically promotes the use of Windows XP Home with all of these machines, and it looks like they'd all run Vista as well, though perhaps without all the visual bells and whistles.
You wouldn't buy these machines to run Photoshop, edit high-definition videos, or play 3D games, but for most simpler purposes, they'd be fine.
In fact, as a cross-platform kind of guy myself, I'm thinking about getting one of those T91 tablets, when they go on the market later this year. I used to use a Motion tablet for meeting notes (with Microsoft Office OneNote, a great package) and PowerPoint presentations at Montalvo Systems, and I'd really like to do that again.
Small-screen laptops over the years. Foreground: a TRS-80 Model 100 (1983); rear, from left: an Apple PowerBook Duo 270c (1993), a Dauphin DTR-1 pen computer (1993), and an Asus Eee PC 701 (2007). From the author's collection.
(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)So what's left of the Netbook concept? Small displays? C'mon, we've had small displays since the dawn of mobile computing. There hasn't been a day since 1983 when you couldn't get a laptop with a small display.
So these new machines aren't merely Netbooks that are "evolving" or "overachieving". They're notebooks. And Moore's Law will ensure that these systems will eventually suffice for any fixed workload. (3D games get more demanding each year, so small notebooks will always be inadequate for bleeding-edge gaming.)
Actually, there were some true Netbooks at CES. What distinguished them from these other machines, which were merely called Netbooks?
Well, today, if you want to make a subnote with a few hundred MHz of processor power and really basic 2D/3D graphics, an x86 processor and chipset is the expensive way to get it. It's better to start with an ARM processor. Some of those are single chips with almost everything you need except RAM, and they'll save you up to $50 off the x86 alternatives.
Such Netbooks have been announced by several companies, including Pegatron, and LimePC. There's nothing wrong with these machines. I'm sure they'll do everything they're advertised to do.
But this still brings us back to that tragic misunderstanding: few people will buy an ARM-based Netbook priced at $199 to $299 when there are good x86-based notebooks starting at less than $400. Certainly not when the x86 machines can run Windows or a mainstream Linux distribution, provide far more CPU and GPU performance, and come in the same small sizes.
So that's that. The Netbook is dead. Long live the notebook.
In a way, this story is left over from CES 2008, where I attended a blogger party hosted by the Parnassus Group and sponsored by, among other companies, Virgin America, the US domestic airline counterpart to Virgin Atlantic.
The party was a lot of fun, and all the sponsors did extensive giveaways. I got a flight suit from Intel and Zero G, a private company that offers "weightless" (parabolic trajectory) flights. Alas, I didn't win a Zero G flight, but I did win a free flight on Virgin America. In fact, I think pretty much everyone at the party won one of these prizes-- apparently they gave away 80 flights.
A Virgin America A320 Airbus aircraft
(Credit: Virgin America)The free flight coupon, which was good for one round trip in the main cabin (that is, coach class) anywhere Virgin flies in the US, was valid through the end of May, so when Montalvo Systems shut down in early April I was able to spend some time planning a trip.
Although Virgin America flies to several West Coast destinations, I spend most of my time on this end of the country anyway. The two choices that seemed most attractive were New York and Washington, DC. Ultimately I decided I could have a better time in DC and not spend so much money, so that's where I went.
Buying the ticket on the Virgin America website was pretty easy once I figured out that the site requires customers to apply discount codes in advance rather than also accepting discount codes when paying for a flight.
I had to pay $21 in fees for the flight, and I chose to pay $25 extra for an exit-row seat, but the discount still amounted to $277.20. Normally I'd say such a meager amount wouldn't influence my posts here, but it's probably the case that I wouldn't be writing about Virgin America otherwise...
The airline charges $25 extra for "premium" seats at the bulkheads and exit rows in the main cabin. As a fairly tall guy, I like this idea-- it discourages people from taking these seats if they don't need them, and makes them more likely to be available for those of us who really need them.
I was able to get an exit-row seat on the return flight, but not on the flight out. The seat pitch in the main cabin is adequate for moderately tall people such as myself, but only barely. It's about like American Airlines, which is the airline I usually fly on.
Virgin America seems to have learned some valuable lessons from the success of JetBlue on these transcontinental flights. Virgin provides fairly comfortable leather seats in the main cabin and attractive leather massage chairs in first class. The airline's Airbus airplanes (my flights were on A320s) are attractively decorated inside with color-changing "mood lighting" (which remained set to blue and purple on my flights).
Virgin provides a high-quality multimedia entertainment system with a 9" touchscreen LCD at every seat. The system, called Red, carries 24 channels of live satellite TV (sourced from Dish Network), 20 channels of live satellite radio, a good variety of on-demand TV shows and music, movies, simple games, and even chat rooms. I checked frequently but never found anyone in the chat rooms on the way out; on the way back, this feature was disabled.
The system has menu options called "Read" and "Shop", but they were not active. It seems to me that unavailable options ought not to be displayed.
The Dish Network channels are standard definition, not HD, but are stretched to fill the widescreen LCDs, which I find annoying. The broadcasts didn't come through reliably; on both flights, there were long periods when some of the channels were experiencing trouble, even in level flight at our cruising altitude under a clear sky. Sharp turns caused the satellite receiver to fail entirely, but I suspect there's no good way to solve that problem. On the return flight, four of the channels (ESPN, ESPN Classic, BET, and BBC America) were carrying Dish informational programming instead of the intended content.
I was pleased to see that the music videos and some of the pre-recorded TV shows and movies are offered free of charge. For example, I found several of the TED Talks and an episode of Patrick Norton's Tekzilla (an old one-- episode 17 from January 2008).
When watching the pre-recorded content, there are pause, rewind, and fast-forward controls. These functions aren't available for the live broadcasts-- no in-air DVR yet, sorry.
I also appreciated the live flight map based on data from Google Maps, although it doesn't offer a satellite view or a really close-up view of the road maps. It seems to me that these features would be useful, but I suppose that providing them would require much more on-board storage. The map can pop up over whatever TV show you're watching, which makes it convenient to check the progress of the flight during commercials. There was an odd problem with this feature-- the black pixels on the map overlay were actually transparent, so legends on the map (city names, etc.) were intermittently illegible depending on the TV image. This function worked well on the flight to DC, but was not reliable on the flight back. Even after we landed at SFO, the system showed the airplane was a few miles southwest of the airport.
The system can also be used to order food, which seems like a great idea, assuming it doesn't run the cabin crew ragged. Some of the things you can order are free, like sodas, but most items are sold to generate additional revenue. Accordingly, "Eat" buttons are easy to find on the wired remote control and the on-screen menus.
Entrees-- salad and sandwich type stuff, no hot food-- were around $9; snacks were $1 to $2. These prices were competitive with those of airport shops, and it's certainly more convenient to get the food onboard-- but most airports offer more variety. A turkey-bacon wrap sandwich I ordered came without the expected accessories (napkin, mustard, etc.).
One of the most valuable features on board-- to me, at least-- was the provision of two 110V outlets for each set of three seats in the main cabin. (Presumably the folks in first class get one each.) Finally, there's a legal way to power and recharge my laptop in flight. The DC outlets found on some airlines won't charge a MacBook Pro, although they do let the machine operate without running down the battery further. Virgin's AC outlets are oriented horizontally, rather than the usual vertical arrangement in most wall outlets, which made for a fragile connection to the MacBook Pro's power adapter, which frequently fell out.
Virgin America also offers Ethernet and USB jacks at each seat, but these are currently useless. When I hooked up to the Ethernet jack, my laptop detected the connection, but didn't receive an IP address, so there was no way to communicate over it. I can imagine this feature could be useful for business travelers who need to collaborate on some project during the flight, but until a DHCP server is provided, even peer-to-peer networking will likely not work.
The USB jack, allegedly provided to allow customers to recharge cellphones, iPods, and other USB devices (and, according to the on-board Welcome guide, to hook up a full-size keyboard for the in-flight entertainment system, an amusing notion), didn't even provide power.
Bottom line-- the electronics and the in-air food ordering are fun, but not enough to make a difference for me. I will certainly consider Virgin America for future travel, but I'll continue to choose airlines based on price, schedule, and compatibility with my existing frequent-flyer miles, as I've always done.
Coming up next, a few museum reviews! I spent most of my time in DC doing the usual touristy stuff, and I ran across a chunk of ENIAC, the world's first general-purpose digital computer, in an unexpected place...
There was only one product at CES 2008 that I couldn't wait to get--a new model of safe from the Sentry Safe company. I even tried to buy one from Sentry's website one evening while I was still in Las Vegas, but that turned out to be impossible; it has to be shipped by truck freight, so I had to place the order with Sentry over the phone to make those arrangements.
The Sentry QE5541 Fire-Safe offers commercial-grade protection for computer media at a price low enough for home computer users.
(Credit: Sentry Safe)I ordered the safe when I got back home, and it arrived here last week--a good bit sooner than the company predicted. I've got it all set up and it's all working. I'm very happy with it.
I got the QE5541, the largest model in a new line of six fire- and water-resistant safes designed to protect CDs, DVDs, flash drives, iPods, etc. from fires lasting up to two hours at temperatures up to 1,850° F.
And the really cool thing is that it'll also protect a 2.5" USB hard drive...while the drive is operating and connected to a computer outside the safe via a USB passthrough in the safe door. So for the first time, your backups can be continuously protected, even if you're not around.
If you're like most people, you don't even make regular backups of your personal computer. Most people who lose digital family photos, electronic book manuscripts, and disk files containing critical financial records to house fires don't make backups, either. But the worst thing must be to have a full set of backups get burned up along with your computer.
It's never happened to me, but I try to learn from my own mistakes before I make them. During 2007, I nearly placed an order for the Phoenix Datacare 2025 Media Safe, which is available from the Keystone Safe Company and other Internet vendors. The 2025 is another fire- and water-resistant safe designed to protect computer media. It has an internal volume of 1.22 cubic feet and costs $1,579 from Keystone. Compared with other safes I considered, the Phoenix was a pretty good deal.
Sentry's QE5541, by comparison, has an internal volume of 2.0 cubic feet and costs $519.99. Freight costs for both safes are similar, around $75 for basic delivery. So the Sentry safe is a really great deal.
And then there's that USB connection. That's unique. It makes the Sentry safe useful in a way the Phoenix safe could never be. I can stick a USB-powered hard disk inside--there's a pocket for it on the door--and run my nightly backups, or Apple's Time Machine software, without having to remember to move the disk drive into the safe after the backup finishes.
There are some limitations. The disk drive has to be a 2.5" USB-powered model because there's no separate power pass-through on the safe, just the USB connection. In my testing, a new Western Digital Passport 320GB drive worked fine but some older USB-powered drives didn't. Even the Passport didn't work unless I hooked up the second power connector on the USB cable Sentry provides to hook up the safe to a computer.
The problem is that USB ports provide +5V DC power and USB-powered hard drives require +5V DC power. That may sound more like a solution than a problem, but the USB specification also requires that power-hungry USB peripherals such as hard drives be connected to a USB port through just one cable. On the Sentry safe, there are effectively three cables: one outside the safe, one inside the safe, and one buried in the door of the safe to bring the USB connection through.
The resistance of all that extra wire and the extra connectors causes a voltage drop that could interfere with proper operation of the hard drive. I tested the power inside the safe with the hard drive running using a special USB cable I built for testing purposes some years ago. The final voltage was only barely in spec with the Passport and significantly lower with those older drives. But Sentry provides high-quality cables and connectors, and I think it should be reliable as long as you're using the provided cables and a good hard drive.
There's another consequence of this issue: there isn't enough power coming into the safe to run more than one hard drive. You'd need a hub in the safe, but bus-powered USB hubs don't provide enough power for USB hard drives anyway. I was able to use a bus-powered hub to hook up several flash drives just for testing purposes, but there's little practical value to that. I'd like to see Sentry offer a model that can support one or more full-size (3.5") drives, but in that situation, heating could be a problem; a fire safe has to be well-insulated, so even the ten watts or so produced by a 3.5" hard drive might be too much.
(I have my own solution to that problem, which I hope to discuss with Sentry at some point.)
I said earlier that the QE5541 is one of six new safes from Sentry, but that's an oversimplification. Two of these models, the QA0002 and QA0004, are actually just hard drives permanently sealed in a protective safe-like case. They're like big, heavy, virtually indestructible external USB-powered hard drives. Unfortunately, they're also just 80GB and 160GB drives based on Maxtor mechanisms, well behind today's state of the art in USB-powered drives. And at $339.99 for the 160GB model, they're expensive, too.
Sentry provides an interesting service for these two models. From the Web page: "If your Sentry Safe hard drive experiences fire or water damage, we will attempt to recover your data free of charge and send you a new unit." That's a good deal.
Sentry's $99.99 QA0110 is designed to protect up to 100 CDs or DVDs, but doesn't have a USB pass-through, so I don't find this model particularly attractive.
The QE5541 I bought has a smaller sibling, the QE4531, with 1.2 cubic feet of interior space plus the USB passthrough. If I bought the Papa Bear model, the QE4531 is for Mama Bear.
The remaining model, then, would be Baby Bear's--the QA0121, which can hold 60 optical disks plus a standard 2.5" USB-powered hard drive like the Passport. I think this one will be "just right" for most people, and at a price of $169.99, it's a lot more affordable than the big models. The one downside to the QA0121 is that the fire protection is only good for 30 minutes at 1,550° F. That's probably adequate for most residential fires, but you should think about how long it's likely to take for your local fire department to respond, how soon they can get to your home office, and what the construction of your house is like.
I wanted the extra protection and security of the QE5541, however, so that's what I bought. Sentry said it would take 3 to 5 weeks to arrive, but it got here in just ten days. It was delivered to my driveway in a big cardboard box with a small forklift-type wood pallet on the bottom; it was up to me to get it up the front steps and into the house. I was prepared for that, but if you need inside delivery, be sure to ask for it. (Sentry didn't mention that service when I placed my order, but it's a routine add-on from most shipping companies.)
Once I had the safe inside and located where I wanted it, I drilled a couple of holes through the bottom of the safe as directed in Sentry's documentation so I could use the provided lag screws to secure the safe to the floor. This procedure is easy enough, but if you want to do the same you'll need a drill with the right bit, plus a suitable tool for driving in the lag screws.
Then it was just a matter of installing the batteries for the electronic lock, testing the combination a few times (the safe comes with one predefined combination; you can set more), and hooking up the hard drive.
I've moved in all my backup media, some old external hard drives I'm not using, original install disks for my commercial software, and three complete older laptops. (The product page mentions "protects up to 72 CDs and DVDs" but this refers only to the capacity of a removable shelf provided with the safe. The safe will actually hold hundreds of DVDs on spindles or in the Maxell Double Slimline jewel cases I use.) I feel a lot better knowing that these items are now much more likely to survive a house fire.
If I have a fire, I'll post here about how well the safe works. But I hope I never have to make good on that promise!
Warner Bros. Entertainment may have cast the deciding vote in the Blu-ray vs. HD DVD format war, announcing yesterday-- just before the big Consumer Electronics Show opens in Las Vegas-- that Warner will support Blu-ray exclusively starting in June 2008.
The CES 2008 tote bag, sponsored by Toshiba for HD DVD
(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)I'm at CES, where I've just left the CES Unveiled press event. Although there was a lot of cool stuff in the various booths providing a sneak peek of the CES show floor (all 1.8 million square feet of it)--and I'll be covering some of this cool stuff in future blog posts-- the topic of the evening was the Warner announcement and what it means for the HD DVD camp.
Opinions are mixed as to the immediate effect of the announcement. Some believe the DVD Forum (which manages the HD DVD format) and its member companies should just give up now and accept the inevitable victory of Blu-ray. Others want to wait to see how Blu-ray and HD DVD player and title sales go following the Christmas season, which was fairly successful for both formats. This group argues that if HD DVD titles continue to sell well, perhaps the HD DVD format can hang on and maybe...maybe...eventually triumph.
But Warner is today one of the bigger suppliers of HD DVD titles, and all that ends on May 31 when the company stops distributing in that format. This decision sets a deadline for HD DVD supporters. If they can't show a path to victory by then, they probably never will.
Personally I'm expecting to hear Apple announce its support for Blu-ray in the new Mac Pro and MacBook products coming at MacWorld Expo in 10 days. Actually I expected Apple to throw its weight behind Blu-ray during 2007, but I'm still pretty sure it'll happen.
If Blu-ray wins the format war, Apple will probably gain an edge in the PC war as well, since Microsoft is one of the major supporters of HD DVD. But it's mostly an image thing; Microsoft is only committed to HD DVD for Xbox 360 and not so much for the PC. Shifting the support of the Windows division to Blu-ray would be no big deal, since both formats have virtually identical technical requirements.
Another consequence of a Blu-ray victory--the CES 2008 tote bag, sponsored by Toshiba on behalf of the HD DVD format, is likely to become something of a collector's item...
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