Dell XPS One vs iMac - it's all in the software

by Stan Beer

Sunday, 18 November 2007

Page 1 of 2 ! There's no question that the era of the all-in-one PC is upon us now that Dell has announced its answer to the Apple iMac. While reviewers wax lyrical about the fantastic sleek design of Dell's XPS One and compare the hardware to that of the iMac, the most important question has been largely ignored. What happens when you turn it on? An all-in-one by its very nature answers a primal scream from home users that are simply fed up with the clutter of technology in their lives. They certainly don't want heavy boxes with Wires spewing out the back and creating an unholy tangled mess on the floor under their desks. Above all, however, what they want is to simply plug in their computer, turn it on and for everything to just work - in other words plug-and-play. It's a fairly indisputable fact that plug-and-play is what you get with the iMac when you turn it on - that's the currency Apple has traded on for more than two decades. So what will you get when you turn on the Dell XPS One? Er ahem! The XPS One may have a 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, an (underpowered) ATI GPU, 2GB RAM, a built-in camera, speakers, even a Blu-ray player, and a nifty wireless keyboard and mouse, all neatly packaged up with a spiffy (less than HD quality) 20 inch monitor. It may even come with a 2-year warranty and a 15 month anti-virus subscription. The XPS One hardware package is definitely pretty impressive. However, when it's all said and done, it's still just a Windows Vista PC with some Adobe software thrown in to compete with the functionality provided by Apple's iLife multimedia suite. For some users mired in the Windows world, this may not matter. For others it will. One major advantage that Windows PCs have over Macs in the home entertainment space, where the XPS One is supposed to sit squarely, is games. PC games abound on store shelves and are very popular among some gamers who shun the consoles. Unfortunately, for reasons best known to Dell, the XPS One, comes with an underpowered 128MB graphics processor, which excludes this unit as an option for serious gamers. For Dell, this is a pity, because it was potentially an area of advantageous differentiation the XPS One would have had over the iMac. So what is the real differentiator between the two systems? << First page <   1 2 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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