Media Center PCs: Picking the Right One North Las Vegas NV

Posted by : Rob Enderle

Media center PCs are the next step in PC/CE (consumer electronics) convergence and they are the hot thing in personal computers this holiday season. However, there are a lot of choices this year and picking the right system has never been more difficult.

Not long ago this wasn’t the case; virtually everyone was building desktop PCs using many of the same components, throwing on the usual Microsoft software. The result showed promise but clearly had a long way to go. What was interesting was that Apple, which traditionally has led in initiatives like this, wasn’t even in the game—and still isn’t.

The belief was that these machines would be used instead of TVs for small apartments or dorms and also be the primary PC in those situations. However, we learned over the last year that the initial belief that people would be using these the same as they would a PC was wrong. It turned out that people were integrating (or trying to integrate) these products with their existing audio-video (A/V) equipment and the tower designs were less than satisfactory in this regard. Even folks wanting to use them as intended complained of the set-up time and complexity of a traditional PC. As a result, this year, there are two new form factors for these machines: The all-in-one and the stereo component classes are what is new this year.

The all-in-one products, led by Sony and Gateway put the media center capability in the same pack...

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