My apple: Dell launched Mac look-alike notebook

Today Dell launched their latest notebook in the Middle East, the Adamo. It is a very thin, sleek, and cool looking notebook computer, for a PC that is. When I first saw it this afternoon I thought, “they sure borrowed a lot from Apple”. That’s easy to think since the MacBook Air came out over a year ago and the new MacBook and MacBook Pro Aluminum Unibody about nine months ago now or thereabouts.

Dell’s Adamo has similar unibody design, they even showed a video of how it was made, much like the video by Apple after the unibody MacBook was introduced. It has similar brushed metal surface we recognize from Apple and even in small details there is a big resemblance to Apple products.

That may or may not be a coincidence, I can’t accuse Dell of copying Apple but it is a bit curious, don’t you think?

So compared to Apple’s notebooks the Adamo is nothing special but compared to it’s rivals in the PC world it’s a beauty. And I can admit, even though my heart is firmly in the Apple camp, that I think the Adamo is a good looking computer. Dell has really done a great effort to come up with a new design, too bad so much feels so much like Apple. Something else that struck me when I first saw the Adamo, and this is good for Apple designers and bad for Dell designers, is “wow, they made the Powerbook G4 Titanium“.

Seriously, that thought wasn’t that far off, was it?

Kidding aside, it’s pleasing to see that Apple has such a lead in design that it takes Dell over a year to bring something out that has at least a hope in rivaling Apple’s product on design. And another interesting aspect of the Adamo is the price. You can get almost two MacBook (alu) for the price of one Adamo or one MacBook Air and some change. When has that been true in known computer history? So does this mean that the old argument that “well, I’ll buy a PC because it’s cheaper” now is out the window? What an interesting proposition that creates.

When I talked at the press event today to a couple of ladies from Dell and their PR agency they asked what they could do to convince me to switch to a Dell. I said, “well you could start by putting Mac OS X on it”. They laughed and said they couldn’t do much about that. I told them that many of their customers get a Dell mini just to put Mac OS X on it and they were like “really?” The premise of perhaps being able to run Mac OS X on the Adamo titillates me for sure but it’s one heck of a price to pay just to create a hackintosh.

Finally, I’m very excited that PC manufactures are starting to pay more attention to design and come out with computers that are appealing to look at and that can in terms of design even rival Apple’s computers. They have a long way to go though still but this means that Apple needs to pay attention and sharpen up their designs a bit more. One thing is for sure, if Dell tries to open up what is in essence a new PC notebook segment both in terms of style and price, others are sure to follow.

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