In Part 1 and Part 2 we looked at what designers are doing to make the desktop PC more contemporary and we looked at ways to clean up wires/cables while keeping your tower out of sight. In this segment, we will take a look at the finished system to see how it all works.
In order to see if this idea would work in real life I built a prototype 15’ cable. For the monitor I chose a nice touch-enabled display with a built-in USB hub, and the tower was a high-end gaming system with an Intel Core® i7 processor and dual graphics cards. The monitor and wireless keyboard/mouse were placed on a desk, and the tower was placed in an adjacent room. I then invited a colleague to come see my new “All-In-One” PC in action. After using it for several minutes he was impressed by its design and performance, but couldn’t see anything new about this All-In-One. It was only when I started listing off the system specifications (dual graphics, Core i7 processor, SSD RAID) that he began questioning how I could fit all of those components inside such a thin and sleek monitor. Success! I had achieved a stylish design without sacrificing any of the performance that I want out of my tower PC.
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My subsequent conversation with this colleague proved interesting as we discussed how this approach could be used to do more than just unclutter a single desktop. For example, a school’s computer lab (or a similar setup like an iCafe) could benefit from moving the tower away from the workspace to free up more table space – or even by storing the towers in a location secure from theft or tampering. The PCs could still have touch, gesture or voice input; the configuration options would not be limited by the fact that the compute components are safely locked away.
We also had some interesting conversations around using these cables with small form factors. An example for small business might be to mount a very small form factor PC, such as the Intel® Desktop Board NUC, on the back side of the desk (see figure 5) with a single cable running to the monitor. This would be another way to unclutter your office but without the need to find a storage location for a larger tower.
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One final example: consider the average doctor’s office. While it’s becoming common to store a patient’s medical records electronically, having a desktop PC in the examination room creates a cluttered and unprofessional look, and the myriad of wires could become a challenge to sanitize. Why not store the PC tower away in a cabinet and only place the monitor and I/O in the examination room? You get the idea.
Hopefully these examples have sparked some of your own ideas on how we can evolve the classic tower desktop, with all of its performance and flexibility advantages, into something that we can be proud to have sitting on our desks alongside our smartphone or tablet. What other ideas can you come up with?