January 24, 2008

January 24 Dealhack Market Report Now Live at Dealhack

• Dealhack Market Review - What did CES and Macworld tell us about this year’s technology trends?
• Lightning Round - a quick rundown of eight great deals.
• Dealhack Deal of the Week - our pick for the best deal featured in the last week.

Chris: A few winter clearance sales continue with the retail focus beginning to shift towards Valentine’s Day. Now is a good time to get your finances in order and begin to deal with tax preparation. Get deals on the boxed editions of Turbo Tax and TaxCut software or head online to prepare your return with the Turbo Tax hosted service. The 1040EZ version is completely free and all online editions include free Federal eFiling.
 
Michael: The first weeks of the year are always big ones for electronics fans with both the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and the Macworld Expo in San Francisco being sources of big announcements and many new product launches.
 
What’s worth noting from CES?
 
Chris: Well, this year the show was felt more evolutionary than revolutionary. We saw, of course, more huge TVs. This year, for example, Panasonic’s 150-inch plasma and Sharp’s 108 inch LCD TV. Now, at that size, it really only makes sense in very special applications. You know, you try to put that in your home and you just can’t get far enough away from it to be able to watch it like a television. But obviously they’re using it to show off their products and, back in the more realistic range of, you know, 30, 40, and 50-inch televisions.
 
But the technology is certainly moving ahead. One real standout though, much like at last year's show, was the OLED TVs. These are Organic Light Emitting Diode televisions, and the net effect of the technology is that it’s much brighter and the color is more vibrant in an incredibly thin form factor. The screen is very thin. That said, the technology is still very much under development and the televisions are incredibly expensive. For example, Sony was showing an 11-inch OLED TV and they were retailing it for about $1,800.
 
Samsung made a bit of a splash with some larger OLED televisions but it was quite funny; they were making a big deal about "no photographs, no photographs," trying to push people away, but people were taking picture all over, all the time. And they were showing a 27-inch OLED. It was beautiful, but it probably was worth $50,000. And that’s something that’s not quite ready for production. But I think if you look down a three- to five-year time range, you’ll be seeing those televisions. As much as the current crop of plasma and LCD TVs are much thinner than tube televisions, the transition to OLED stands to really be dramatic, and it really is like a picture hanging on the wall. So we’ll see if that really pans out and they can bring those costs down. Obviously, LCD production that took quite a few years to get to current levels.
 
Michael: What did you think about the image quality compared with, you know, LCD?
 
Chris: Well, it’s, it’s difficult to, to compare when you’re looking at it in the show environment. Because they use the most saturated scenes. It’s not really normal television...you know, scrolling photographs of flower beds and things like that, really cranked up color. That said, it was quite impressive and the OLEDs are undeniably bright. And provide really nice contrast. So you don’t have that kind of backlight haze that you get with some LCD and plasma televisions and it’s quite evenly lit. Now that said, the technology for those televisions is certainly improving. You know, for example, LCDs are now increasingly being lit or the high end models at least are being lit by LEDs which are much more energy efficient and can be spaced and positioned in a way that’s more even. So it’s a less obvious illumination. But that’ll improve and that will move down, further and further down the line into lower price models and, of course, as the OLED technology moves along, we’ll also see more of that.
 
Michael: One other question, are the OLED resolutions the same or do they offer a tighter resolution than LCD models?
 
Chris: Well, it’s basically the same resolution but when you start with an 11-inch television the pixel density is very, very high. But that’s more just a factor of what an HDTV signal provides. There, there are some other monitors. For example, Westinghouse was showing some very high resolution LCD models for like medical imaging and, and specialty applications. And I’m sure we’ll see that over time with OLEDs as well, the same, same type of progression where at first plasma was really the only technology that could handle the large screens at any kind of reasonable cost. Then that moved on into LCDs where now, obviously, LCDs larger than 100 inches are possible and obviously we’re gonna see the same kind of trend over time with the OLEDs as the manufacturing processes improve and the reliability of the production lines go up. They’re gonna be very expensive for quite a while, but you’ll at least have a realistic option in a couple of years of, okay, do you want to buy a 27-inch OLED or a 42 inch LCD or a 56-inch plasma that’ll be somewhere around the same price.
 
Some other things that were standout there, Samsung was showing a three-dimensional plasma TV display and it, basically the way it worked, if you just looked at the screen normally, it looked like a ghosted image but if you put on the special shutter glasses which would effectively cause you to only see out of one eye at any given instant it was quite an impressive display. Very, very straightforward, very easy, and not quite as headache-inducing as, as earlier generations of shutter glass-based 3-D technology. But that was one of the more interesting things and, of course, Microsoft was showing their Surface device. The Surface is, because of the structure, it’s now a tabletop display, but they’ve developed some innovative interfaces and it can recognize when your hand is on the surface and respond to it; as well as when you place certain items on it. For example, it has a built in bar code reader. It can also interact with your WIFI and they’re working on RFID interfaces. The net, the net effect of it is a different kind of way of interacting with a computer.
 
I think the first applications we’re gonna see are more in the point of sale, you know, in a store where they’ll use it to help you pick out products. But over time, certainly the, the target is in the home and, and be something that you can interact with. As the technology improves, it won’t be so bulky that it needs to be a table. But it will begin to be something that you could mount on a desk or a table or possibly even mount on the wall. It uses cameras to actually pick up...you can’t see the cameras, they’re hidden from you, but it actually can sense as you bring something down on the table, including your hand and recognize that and recognize the gestures.
 
And then one other thing which we mentioned in the wrap-up last year from CES took another big incremental step and that’s solid-state drives. So solid-state drives, we’ve talked about here on the podcast various times in the past, but they are essentially replacements for spinning disc hard drives. They’re flash memory but of a persistent type, so it works very much like a hard drive, and that’s what it looks like to your computer but, in fact, there is no spinning disc and it is much faster. So we’re seeing larger capacities and some improvements in performance, but still very expensive.
 
Michael: Okay, well, what about Macworld?
 
Chris: Well, obviously the big announcement from Macworld this year is the launch of the MacBook Air. This is definitely an interesting product. You know, Apple has gained a lot of ground in recent years and so this comparison is perhaps not apt but it definitely reminded me of the Mac Cube from some years ago. A product that at first glance is really cool, but when you start looking deeply, it definitely has some flaws that for some folks might be deal killers.
 
It’s undeniably thin. It’s a super ultra-light portable, comes with a 13-inch screen. It, incidentally, has a solid-state drive option but it is very expensive. But the way that they approached it was as a model that has no replaceable battery, has no optical drive (you can connect an external one but that costs extra). It also doesn’t have Ethernet, which is just shocking to me. The only way you can connect (or the way it’s designed to connect...) is only over a wireless network. And well, obviously, it’s nice to have the flexibility of high performance wireless, but it’s surprising that they completely require you to do that.
 
And it only has a single USB port. So I think, you know, the future generations are gonna be hopefully improved. We need some built-in wide area networking like EVDO connection would be very valuable there. Perhaps Ethernet and certainly more ports.
 
Michael: Well if they’re using the solid state drive, and the capacities were pretty low, then that is an indication that they are expecting this to be used with the cloud. So wouldn’t it be nice to have more ways to access the Internet?
 
Chris: Yeah, well Apple is certain willing to dictate the way its customers must use their equipment and sometimes that’s good and it helped drive technologies forward. Obviously, the early adoption of FireWire, which incidentally they’ve really turned away from, although they still support it in the high-end systems...but FireWire adoption, dropping the floppy drive in earlier, iMacs some years ago. Those have had some positive effect in just moving things forward but you know, you are paying a price...
 
And paying a high price for it, so it’ll be interesting to see how that moves along and how those technologies move. Obviously there’s wide rumors this week that the MacBook Pro models will adopt the same kind of touch-sensitive pad that was announced as part of the MacBook Air. So we’ll see how those things evolve.
 
A couple of other interesting things that were announced at the show, and obviously I'm just talking on what Apple did..there was a lot of other interesting stuff for Mac users at the show. But Apple launched the Time Capsule, which is essentially network-attached storage. It works well with Leopard’s Time Machine backup application. So you can drop this (especially if you’re an owner of a handful of Macs), you drop this into your network, you point your time machine software at it, and it will automatically back up all of your Macs or whatever information you’ve told it to back up in, in a central place and on an automatic schedule. So it’s a slick product and you pay a bit of a premium again but it works seamlessly and that’s a nice advantage. And, of course, they updated the Apple TV, including support for movie rentals, from the iTunes Store, new software for the iPhone, and also the iPod Touch. Interestingly to get that new software on the iPod Touch you have to pay $20. So that’s a bit of a disappointment. They have some complicated explanation that invokes Sarbanes-Oxley as the reason for why they need to charge to recognize the investment cost but, nonetheless, if you want it you got to pay for it. But that, as we’ll see, leads to some interesting discount options too. But overall it was interesting.
 
It’ll be interesting to see what kind of volume they move in terms of the MacBook Air and also how those technologies move down through the chain, but several of the other Macs are due for an update, so we’ll see what we get from them as well.

Jan 24 03:02 AM in Announcements

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• Sharp Aquos 37-inch 1080p LCD HDTV $800 Shipped at Buy
• Series2 TiVo DVR only $50 & TiVo HD $180 Shipped at TiVo
• Vostro 200 Mini Tower & 22-inch Widescreen LCD $494 at Dell
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• Kingston 4GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive $15 Shipped at Buy
• Save an Extra 17% off Refurbished PCs at Dell Financial Services
• Save $300 to $900 off: MacBook Pro Notebooks at Apple Store