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@CES, Las Vegas - What are the opposite of small, cheap, modestly powered netbooks for the masses?
How about big, expensive, high-end PCs for gamers?
If netbook sales are going to grow 80 per cent in 2009, according to Consumer Electronics Association forecasts, as consumers become more budget-conscious in a recession, does this mean sales of $4,000 to 6,000 PCs will plummet?
Not if they cost less than $2,000, says Rahul Sood, founder of HP acquisition VoodooPC and now chief technology officer of its global gaming business.
At least that’s the hope with the HP Firebird with Voodoo DNA, launched this week at the Consumer Electronics Show.
The Firebird is an advance on the previous generation Blackbird. It has smaller components, enabling cost savings, and is greener, more efficient and far quieter with its external power supply.
For a $1,799 price tag (monitor extra), it still features three graphics processors, a quad-core CPU, two hard drives, 4 gigabytes of memory and liquid cooling.
This is a niche product, but Mr Sood told me he hopes Firebird will appeal to those engaged in content creation and entry-level PC users who want a step up in performance, as well as to the main target market of hard-core gamers.
“It’s quite a substantial drop in price and we’re offering something very different from the high-end gas-guzzling systems,” he said.
“This is an experiment, it’s coming in when the market is very difficult, but we believe there’s enough innovation here to attract people.”
Firebird is not to be confused with f1r3fly, a high-end notebook for gamers that HP is showing at CES but is not releasing as a product.
As Mr Sood explains on his blog:
“So, why aren’t we launching the f1r3fly? There are many reasons: a combination of the economy, customer buying patterns, technology changes, and our goal to scale globally has changed the way we develop products.”
There is also the fact that it has two screens and weighs 13 pounds, suggesting this particular notebook was never going to fly.
David Gelles, Joseph Menn, Chris Nuttall and Richard Waters in the FT's San Francisco bureau upload their views - plus tech insights from writers in New York, London and Tokyo
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