giant dancing chipmunk

I’m sure the buzz has reached out past SXSW for enough folks to have taken a glance at Dell’s new adamo laptop. From the elegant sound track to the vogue appearance of adamo’s web site, you would think you’re getting a laptop worth complimenting BMW’s Nieman Marcuss 7-series. Dell commits that this machine’s style, craftmanship, and performance is so tempting that “you’ll fall in love.” Unfortunately the Adamo falls short.

I’m not alone nor am I the first in bringing this to light but there’s a few factors for folks to consider which paints a grimmer picture. Dell has grown year over year based on it’s leverage, market position (small business), and visceral partnerships with Intel and Microsoft. Crucial for Dell’s current revenue operations, Adamo ignores Dell’s assets in favor of aesthetics. Indeed, the adamo is profound; it’s black and white presentation is a shadow over Dell’s lack of focus on their industry, engineering, and customer.

So let me first put up these factstimates to keep things in context:

• Leverage: Dell took on > $1bn in debt last year; six times that of 1q08
• Market Position: HP is kicking Dell’s ass with server sales and Apple is turning the industry upside down
• Microsoft/Intel: Intel is giving Apple chips before Dell and Apple’s OS is slowly gaining momentum at the cost of Dell’s cash incentives from Microsoft

As the PC industry dries up and laptops peak, being replaced by mobile devices, netbooks, and non-msft OS, Dell is spending who knows how much money on marketing the Adamo and trying to create a ‘luxury’ image akin to Rolls Royce or Bentley.

Despite the fact that you can’t create prestige over night, even if you could, it’s obvious that the Adamo was an expensive device to engineer and the parts are costly; how can this be sustainable? Such an imbalance might be considered an R&D cost but not so with the Adamo. In it’s most recent iteration the MacBook Air was given a beefier video card making it useful for gamers (why else would a ‘road warrior’ need ‘power’?) yet the Adamo is stuck with an Intel GPU which is OK but won’t do much more than power Vista’s gpu-hungry GUI. Speaking of Vista, the machine comes w/4GB of RAM which is now standard on PCs but is really the equivalent of 2GB to a mac or linux simply because Vista uses the other 2GB. I get it, building fast hardware is difficult and expensive and Dell has to make money somehow. But why then, did they add multimedia start/stop/pause/play buttons to the face panel of the machine? The machine doesn’t even come with a DVD/CD player! You’re going to have to have the laptop open, have windows running, and have an audio application running to use the buttons. Moreover, the Dell already has an FN button on the keyboard so Dell could have re-purposed the function keys rather than adding additional hardware, firmware, and software that’s required to power the face panel buttons. Dell can argue usability here but for a device that’s supposed to be thin, light, and fashionable, the cost is simply not justified.

Dell could have knocked a home run with the Adamo by making it simple, fashionable, light and practical – yet they failed. I’m sorry Dell, but you just aren’t a luxury brand and that bandwagon will likely be over for PC before you’ll make a dent.

Here are reviews I discovered which contain additional technical information and opinions about Adamo:
Dell Adamo Luxury Laptop [ctv.ca]
Dell’s Adamo Imitates MacBook Air’s Price, Not Its Profile [wired.com]
Dell’s Adamo Laptop: Too Sexy for the Times? [seekingalpha.com]