Dave Andrews
This fall, look for a wave of new PCs and Macs that integrate TV, stereo, and CD-ROM. At the fifteenth annual Computex Taipei exhibition, numerous vendors, including Acer, EliteGroup, Mitac, and Tatung (all from Taipei, Taiwan), showed PCs that typically integrate a 14- or 15-inch monitor, a 486- or Pentium-class CPU, a PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) bus, a TV receiver card, video in ports for VCRs, stereo, a dual- or quad-speed CD-ROM drive, 16-bit sound, integrated amplified stereo speakers, and, naturally, remote control. Apple, which already sells an "all-in-one Mac" for the education market, will release a system for the home this summer, the Performa 5200 CD series, which will include a PowerPC 603 processor running at 75 MHz.
Richard Chen, wh
o is the product marketing director for EliteGroup Computer Systems (Taipei and Fremont, CA), which developed the Vertos system (
see the figure
), says these all-in-one computers will appeal to people in homes with limited space (e.g., in Japan) and to college students who are living in small dormitory rooms. He also says the all-in-one systems (aka monoputers) should be sold as the second, not the first, TV someone buys. "If retailers try to sell these as if they were a TV, people would wonder why they should have to pay $2500."
Combining a TV, stereo, telephone answering machine, and other appliances in a PC presents a challenge for the interface designer, says Karen Steinwachs, group product manager at Epson (Torrance, CA), which plans to release a monoputer this fall. "It will be interesting to see how the GUI and the remote control converge," she says.
"Vendors will have to integrate PC functionality with the normal home/audio way of interacting with devices." She also
predicts that as all-in-one systems get 3-D graphics and 3-D sound, they will become even stronger competition to stand-alone games platforms such as Sega.
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EliteGroup's all-in-one PC typifies the type of machines you should see this fall.
Computer-TV Hybrids Invade the Den
