Why I had reservations about switching to a PC before this week
I don’t mean to sound shallow or oblivious to facts, but one of the main reasons that I haven’t given a PC a chance in my life was that most of the ones I found were downright ugly – both in name and design.
Let me show you a perfect example of what I mean. This laptop is the HP ENVY 15t-3200. Yep, the ENVY 15t-3200. For me, branding like this is just ridiculous. Personally, I can’t see a point to numbers that don’t explicitly say what they mean from the get-go. I will grant you the fact that it’s not hard to figure out what the numbers mean – it’s a 15-inch ENVY laptop with an Intel 3200-series processor inside the base model – but I still find them clunky and, frankly, unnecessary.
Other manufacturers can figure out naming schemes that make sense. Look at Apple and its MacBook Pro line, or Microsoft and its recently-announced Surface line of tablets. Those are incredibly easy names to remember; ENVY 15t-3200, not so much.
On top of the bad name, this particular HP ENVY notebook also suffers from a horrible design. At first blush, it may look like a MacBook Pro – but then the red Beats branding makes itself apparent. That strip of red goes around the entire keyboard, and there’s three Beats logos that are visible from the front.
Imagine an ENVY 15t-3200 without that red. It would look very attractive, right? Unfortunately, the red is there to stay.
This absurd branding isn’t unique to just HP, either. Just about every PC manufacturer puts some sort of branding on their products, whether it be in the form of stickers, branding like HP’s Beats stuff, or something else entirely.
I appreciate a beautifully designed product. For the longest time, I just couldn’t find anything with an Apple-like clean design, meaning no stickers or unnecessary branding. Thankfully, there are now PC manufacturers out there that don’t hide their designs with Intel or Windows 7 stickers.
There’s still the issue of naming schemes, but they seem to be getting better. Dell in particular does a great job with names; just today, the company unveiled revised XPS 14 and XPS 15 laptops. XPS is Dell’s performance brand, and the numbers only represent screen size. So, there are 14- and 15-inch performance laptops in Dell’s lineup. Simple.
I hope other manufacturers can start to steer clear from branding and naming issues. These aren’t deal breakers for me, but would appreciate my $1,500-ish laptop to be designed well and give me a sense of pride whenever I carry it around. Thank goodness there are PCs like that for me.
What are your thoughts on PC naming conventions and looks? Are they just not important to you? Or do you, like me, like attractive technology?
