Tag Archives: Hardware

Lack of Laptop Focus

I’m in the hunt for a new spare/traveling laptop at work after our old Dell Latitude D820 finally died.  I loved that Dell but it had it’s faults, primarily it’s desktop worthy weight which my boss hated (she actually preferred to use a lighter nine year old Thinkpad because the D820 was so heavy).

Typically for work I’ve been buying HP laptops, but the giant (heavy) model of Elitebook that I prefer can be hard to come by (with a flash drive), but since my boss is concerned with weight I was eyeballing the MacBook Air as well.  I figured I’d check out both sites and I have to say that I don’t get the sales strategies for Windows resellers.  It’s enough if you just look at the URLs for HP and Apple:

HP’s Laptop and Tablet page: http://shopping1.hp.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/WW-USSMBPublicStore-Site/en_US/-/USD/ViewStandardCatalog-Browse?CatalogCategoryID=kWIQ7EN5dVcAAAEtGpgoSe36&hiderightpanel=true

Apple’s: http://www.apple.com/mac/

But a screenshot tells the tale as well, Apple:

applescreen

HP: hpscreen

If you open up the gaudy HP page you’ll see that they list 157 different models of Tablets/Laptops and in order to keep consumer confusion at it’s peak, no effort is made by HP to relate the differences of the models in a form that makes sense (one wonders if it’s even possible though, to be fair).  Does this product-diareha strategy work?