HP vs Apple Computers – Choosing Between The Odd Couple

nonlinearpost by Stu Brown

HP is approaching the professional video market with enhanced products across their entire line. Apple is approaching it with one product that looks like it has just landed from the future. Which one is more likely to succeed?

‘When the cat is away, the mice will play’, well it makes sense if you see the cat as Apple and the mice as companies like HP and Dell. Apple has arguably been absent from the pro side of video hardware for a couple of years and this year’s Mac Pro launch has created more questions than answers from a heavy-hearted user base. HP can hardly be aligned to the size of a mouse, they make some beautiful workstations and have now made them even better.

At a Conference in New York in September, the ‘M’ word (Mac) was whispered a few times by the HP hierachy but everyone knew who they were aiming these new products at. They were keen to say that they weren’t giving up the pro market, the insinuation was that Apple were. So what are these new products? The mobile products, Z Books, are perhaps more innovative than the uprated workstations.

There are three of them, an UltraBook 14inch, a 15inch and a 17inch. The 15 and 17inch Z Books have Thunderbolt 2 included and some generous expansion options. There is also the choice of having DreamColor, HP’s colour controlled protocol as part of the set-up which promises consistent colour through to distribution and final screening. The new products are thinner than before and perhaps most importantly lighter. Inside are fourth generation Intel Haswell dual- and quad core processors and new graphics tech from NVIDIA and AMD, including the newly announced Keplar-based products from NVIDIA. The Z Book 14inch also comes with the option of a touch-enabled panel. The 15inch has an option for 3,200 x 1,800 pixels display.

The Z Workstations have also had a major upgrade which concentrated on faster CPUs, faster memory and the introduction of Thunderbolt 2 across the entire range. The HP Z 420, 620 and 820 have all been updated to include the latest Intel Xeon E5-1600v2 and E5-2600v2 families of processors, also called Ivy Bridge, as well as new memory running 16 percent faster . The Thunderbolt ports are second generation which promise to increase data transfer up to four times faster than USB 3 and with the ability to connect multiple devices. read more...

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