RE: Zips in laptops
Miles,
I'm just back home from PC Expo in NYC, and
I don't think your guess about the timing of
laptop Zip appearances squares very well with
what I saw there. At the Iomega booth, I saw
both an IBM ThinkPad and an Apple PowerBook
actually running internal Zip drives. They
were VST units, and the demonstrator was a
VST employee working the Iomega booth. He
said the units he was running there weren't
prototypes, they were actual early production
units, which was the same for the one ThinkPad
over at the IBM booth that was also running
a VST-produced laptop Zip. He was using them
to play full-screen video clips, by the way,
which says something about the speed of the
little buggers. He said that Iomega was
making the innards in Roy, then VST was
packaging them. They're the 15mm versions.
He said, with emphatic certainty, that they
will ship in September 1997, and that VST was
ramping them up bigtime right now. He
opened up one of the laptops and snapped
the drive out for me to show me how it looked,
and the guy over at the IBM booth had one lying
on the counter, too. They certainly looked
like production units to me (in stark contrast
to the n.hand demos, which were obviously fakes
except for the one working drive they had under
clear acrylic so you could see the read-write
head hopping around). After seeing these
working laptop Zips, I'm much more confident
that they'll be on the street in less than
three months, and will be in quantity very,
very fast. Q4 should be fun.
The word at the Iomega booth on the n.hand was
that they were working on the power requirements
for it and that, because of that, it's not going
to appear in OEMs until first half of 1998.
More on PC Expo tomorrow. At the moment, I
need some sleep. Monday was a proposal deadline
for me, and I got to the USPS all-night facility
at the airport at 11:59:45 p.m. That gives you
some idea what my week's been like (except, of
course, for the fate of certain of my equity
holdings <grin>).
Cheers, Tom |
