
HP Elite Slice - yitchelle
http://www8.hp.com/us/en/campaigns/elite-slice/overview.html
======
chx
This is 2016 [https://www.engadget.com/2016/09/01/hp-elite-slice-
modular-p...](https://www.engadget.com/2016/09/01/hp-elite-slice-modular-pc/)
what's the news?

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csours
I understand they want to make it look clean, but they show no cords at all in
most of the pictures. There's also no mention of battery life, so it must be
powered.

If they're going to lie about the cords, what else are they lying about? Also
$699?? WTF?

~~~
eropple
Defining "lying" as "doesn't have cords in promo images" is really really
weird. You don't see too many Dell ads with cords flying down to their towers
either.

~~~
tedunangst
There's a picture of a guy using it (with zero cords) to take a conference
call, which goes a bit beyond a flattering studio photo. It allegedly depicts
real world use.

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lewisl9029
I love the concept, but it's missing what's in my opinion the component that
would benefit most from modularity: dedicated graphics.

A significant portion of the target market would probably have no need for any
more graphics power than what comes with the processor, so not including it in
the base module makes a lot of sense. However, for many use cases, discrete
graphics is an absolute necessity, so not even offering it as an option in a
modular system targeted at the high-end market strikes me as an odd omission
(as far as I could tell, the system doesn't even have Thunderbolt 3, so it
can't support eGPUs through normal means either).

~~~
gogopuppygogo
The USB Type C interface should give them external graphics which would be a
better alternative than discrete graphics.

~~~
lewisl9029
USB Type C is only the connector specification, and it offers very little
guarantees about what protocols are actually supported through the connector.
External graphics would require a USB Type C port with support for Thunderbolt
3, which is an entirely separate specification from the USB 3.1 spec that's
usually the baseline for such ports, and offers 40 Gbit/s in bandwidth vs USB
3.1 Gen2's 10 Gbit/s (and Gen1, which is more commonly used, is only 5
Gbit/s).

I couldn't find any mentions of Thunderbolt in its specs, so I don't believe
external graphics is a possibility here.

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CommieBobDole
"HP Elite Slice is like no desktop you’ve ever seen"

Well, except for the Mac Mini, which it pretty much looks like.

~~~
happycube
Except for the 35W CPU's - so you can get a real quad-core i5/i7... but yeah,
I don't see it moving well at this price.

(at least Apple admits up front that they're dual cores, unlike almost every
other use of lie5/lie7's...)

~~~
shams93
Yeah it's also macosx maybe you want to write for ios, if you're stuck with
windows it's not going to help. Apple might be underpowered but you also don't
need to use an entire cpu core just to run constant virus protection.

~~~
wildrhythms
Just anecdotally, my 2013 dual-core i5 (1.3GHz) Macbook Air seems to run
smoother and faster than a majority of the "new" PC laptops I deal with. I'm
not sure if it's OS X or the hardware, but for a four year old machine I
wouldn't trade it for any new PC laptop.

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ZeroCool2u
Anyone else notice the vast majority of the photos show it on a desk without a
single cord coming out of the back?

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daturkel
This really confused me. Even if you power it from your monitor you've got to
plug it in. No shame in having one or two cords, so why fake the product
shots?

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43224gg252
They could have at least set up the shots to imply the cords were just hidden
behind a table or something.

~~~
wildrhythms
My thought was that one of the modules had a plug on the bottom so you could
run the cables through a hole in a wall/desk... but it looks like none of the
modules, not even the VESA mount, have anything like that.

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pan69
I love it that you can customise it to have FreeDOS instead of Windows:

[http://store.hp.com/us/en/ConfigureView?catalogId=10051&lang...](http://store.hp.com/us/en/ConfigureView?catalogId=10051&langId=-1&storeId=10151&urlLangId=&catEntryId=1406154&quantity=1)

Edit: PS, is there a way to get this thing in Australia? Their aussie website
is atrocious, can't for the live of me find the customise option for the
Slice...

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EduardoBautista
What advantage is there to having a FreeDOS PC?

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detaro
It's free, so you can wipe it and install whatever OS you want without paying
for a Windows license. And for the manufacturer the benefit is that it's clear
that it's barebones, so no support requests for the preinstalled OS.

I don't know why the alternative isn't "ship with empty disk" though. Maybe
some weird regulation, or to make it clearer to dealers and customers that it
isn't broken, just without an OS?

~~~
solatic
> I don't know why the alternative isn't "ship with empty disk" though

You can't ship a "computer" which doesn't do anything when you turn it on.
FreeDOS has just enough basic capability that HP can say "yeah this is a
functional computer out of the box" while having so little capability that its
installation implies a wink-wink understanding that the customer will install
his own OS that he'll take responsibility for.

~~~
detaro
In what sense "can't"? Legal requirement somewhere?

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dsr_
It's a NUC with a USB port on the bottom.

(see: Intel NUC, Gigabyte BRIX, AsRock BeeBox, etc...)

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Thlom
HP decided to interrupt my customer experience by asking me about my
experience 30 seconds after I opened the page. No thanks.

~~~
SAI_Peregrinus
This sort of thing always gets on my nerves. Plenty of sellers do it on Amazon
(almost always before the product has even arrived), many apps do it, etc. I
always leave a negative review in such cases.

"<company name> sent a nag asking for a review/rating. As the product hasn't
arrived yet / just got installed 10 seconds ago, I can only rate what I've
seen of it: no product whatsoever. 1 star! If they'd waited a week or two I
might actually have a positive opinion about <product name> to write here."

If they ask later on instead (after at least a week of use) I'll instead leave
an actual review of the product.

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polygot
"Protect, detect, and recover from malicious BIOS attacks using HP Sure Start
with Dynamic Protection - the industry’s first self-healing BIOS that monitors
and corrects BIOS corruption in real-time"

In the footnote, it says that it corrects BIOS corruption every 15 minutes.
I'd be interested to see how this works and what technology they are using.
What happens if my BIOS is corrupted within the 15 minute window and I reboot?

~~~
The_Sponge
This implies that the bios can be corrupted - the bios shouldn't accept
unsigned updates (without an in bios flag being switched first), even from a
root-level user on the OS.

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bitL
OK, so a 2x more expensive NUC with emphasis on design and HP-specific
modularity. I think Intel planned custom lids as well and MSI Cubi has a
storage expander, so HP probably took cues from them. I personally like these
super mini PCs, for office work you don't need anything else these days.

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Shivetya
one thousand plus days of Apple not updating the Mac Mini while holding firm
to their price and HP reinvents it? The value isn't in the components, it is
in the integration and software.

This is the space Apple should have been in long ago but they dropped the ball
with the desktop market three years ago and only seem to have moved after
being goaded, nigh embarrassed about the state of their offerings.

While this HP is not useful to me I do appreciate what they have done.

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lostmsu
ASUS gives you barebones much cheaper. Just buy RAM + hard drive and you are
good to go.

[https://www.asus.com/us/Mini-PCs/VivoMini-
Products/](https://www.asus.com/us/Mini-PCs/VivoMini-Products/)

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grenoire
I am really interested in a consumer-clean modular desktop concept. Sometimes
I feel like there needs to be something that will save the layman from the
tablet virus.

~~~
GuiA
What is the "tablet virus", and why does the layman need to be saved from it?

~~~
grenoire
The tablet virus is the idea that tablet computers can replace desktops.

I, personally, don't disagree [tablets] can cover a good portion of the
layman's usecases; yet it is important to teach (to) and have people realise
the strengths of the freedom desktops give them.

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0xbear
I hope Apple updates Mac mini in response. It's over 3 years old now. About
time it got kaby lake and USB C treatment.

~~~
krylon
If Apple updated the Mac Mini (I, too, hope they get their act together), it
would not be in response to the HP announcement. The two machines are meant
for different customer groups, I think.

~~~
0xbear
Apple tends to be pretty high end as of late. So they could chuck a decent GPU
and a quad core CPU in there, raising the price, of course. I'd buy one. My
mini is something like 5 years old at this point.

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normalocity
Meh. The best use of desktop-style computing these days, in my opinion, is if
I can easily covert them to a commodity Linux box later. It's the only way to
reliably extend the useful life of old hardware other than selling/donating it
to someone who can make use of it.

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peterwwillis
If it had a network switch add-on, a really good projector add-on, and really
good microphones/speakers, this could be a great meeting room pc. But it just
looks like a dumb terminal replacement for corporations. (Though I don't know
why you would pick one instead of a cheap business laptop?)

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thesmok
Is there any mini desktops with built-in PSU? All these NUC-like things are
smaller than Mac Mini but their dirty secret is a big ugly power brick under
the table.

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rocky1138
Linux support?

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sergiotapia
It looks beautiful! I would buy one of these for my parents, keep it out of
the way. Taped to the back of the monitor?

~~~
revelation
There is a VESA mount adapter

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neilalexander
There are JPEG compression artefacts all over this page. Horrific.

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Roritharr
Why is this trending? I saw one in the shop just last week, they aren't
exactly new.

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internalfx
Looks kinda like a NUC

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joshmn
Would make for a good Hackintosh, presumably.

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anon49124
Not going to buy anything from HP until they boycott and divest from Israeli
apartheid military and government contracts.

PS: I'm half-Jewish, atheist.

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darawk
HP thinks its people now?

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martijn_himself
This looks hilariously ugly compared to the now three-year-old Mac mini.

HP just does not seem to be able to get industrial design right.

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Scarbutt
isn't that highly subjective?

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martijn_himself
It is. This design may appeal to people who like cheap routers and 80's gold
watches.

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mtgx
"Powerful PC" \- probably uses Core M, a giveaway being that they don't
mention exactly what processor they're using. It's also the reason Intel will
soon rebrand Core M to "Core i5", because everyone knew Core M sucked. So
their solution is to make people _believe_ it's a more powerful chip. Because
feels > reals (marketing 101, I suppose).

~~~
JadeNB
> "Powerful PC" \- probably uses Core M, a giveaway being that they don't
> mention exactly what processor they're using.

They make you go through many clicks to get there, but the "Tech Specs" on the
HP site say that it's an i3-6100T (for the Core i3, anyway).

