> It feels more solid in your hand<p>Something I learned soon after I launched my first hardware product:<p>People still have an instinctive physical relationship with products that must be the result of evolution making a connection with heavy or solid = more-food/safer/better or something like that.<p>I remember devoting a ton of time to making my first product as light as possible through sophisticated mechanical design and attention to component choices in the electronics.<p>During my first trade show in Europe, this Italian guy came by multiple times to look at the product. He asked for a price on his second visit. It was USD $8,000. The next day he came back one last time and asked: Why is it $8,000 if it is so light?<p>Absolutely blew my mind. Was not ready for that question at all. Upon return to the US I directed our sheet metal vendor to switch from aluminum to steel of the same gauge. We also added a small steel bar riveted to the inside to increase the weight a further. In all, I think we easily added about five pounds to the thing. Now it was "worth" $8,000.<p>Over the next three years sales and comments during sales presentations proved, in no uncertain terms, making it heavier had been exactly the right move. People would make comments when they picked up this damn paper-weight such as "wow, feels solid", "wow, lots of tech in there", "wow, I know why it cost so much now".<p>It was amazing to see how many times the moment the deal was done coincided with the instant they picked it up.<p>Amazing.
For the money, I'd rather get one of the Kangaroo mobile desktops. They're specced the same as the compute stick, but are $60 cheaper, or for $10 more, you can get a model with 4 gigs of ram and 64 gigs of storage. The detachable dock is a bit weird, but if you're going to be swapping it between two places could definitely prove useful.
I didn't expect it to be a hundred and fifty dollars; that's a little high for such a product with these specs in today's world of $10 to $20 "micro computers". It's a pretty awkward price point, given that it has a niche market but is being marketed as if it didn't..
I really love these little things. I use these as dumb terminals to RDP into virtual machines. It makes adding and replacing workstations very cheap and quick. Also more secure, where you can keep file sharing locked down to a internal private virtual network not exposing much of anything to the physical network. One thing I would love is an Ethernet port, but I know that it too much to ask.
I actually work daily on my Asus thin desktop (very similar specs). I run Ubuntu though. The fact that my mini pc makes almost zero noise is great and it does feel good to be a bit greener with the power savings. Funny thing is that I got the Asus to test webapps (I do mostly front-end). I use the browser's dev tools to emulate slower Internet connections but I don't know how to emulate slow processors/tiny RAM (maybe there is a way?). After a while I just never went back to my laptop, tweaked Ubuntu to make the Asus faster and more capable and ended up coding on it for good. Now, if my apps do well on the Asus they fly on 'average' hardware.
I used to love Engadget but with recent redesigns it had become too hard to navigate and find what you're looking for. A simple blog format was just fine in my opinion.
Buy a keyboard with integrated USB hub and ports. Then you can plug your rat into the keyboard without taking up valuable ports on the system.<p>This PC is a little weaksauce to be running Windows, but for typical Linux applications it's overkill. I don't know what its niche is, except as a terminal server or digital sign -- not exactly growth markets for home users.<p>Businesses will eat it up.
Ouch, this hurts. Bought a Compute Stinks in January. Slow as a steamboat. Slower than my 3 year old Celeron netbook. Now this thing comes out that looks half decent.