HP Chairman Poses With Apple MacBook Air
Reuters recently ran an Interview with Ray Lane, HP's executive chairman, which discusses his role as a possible "agent of change" at HP. Two pictures are part of the article - one with his Fisker Karma sports sedan and another picture in which he is pictured in his home in front of his notebook. That notebook is not an HP model; it clearly is Apple's MacBook Air.
Sure, Lane is also a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and he is free to choose any product to work with, but, in this case, it may be rather unfortunate for Lane to pose with a MacBook Air. The title of the image reads: "Hewlett Packard executive chairman and Kleiner Perkins managing partner Ray Lane works on his computer at his home in Atherton, California November 11, 2011."
The strange implications are that Lane, on the one hand, silently approved Leo Apotheker's announcement to spin off HP's PC division (which has been reverted under Meg Whitman), and, on the other, HP could have had products such as the MacBook Air, had the company been more serious about nurturing its Voodoo enthusiast PC unit. It isn't such a big deal which PC Lane uses in private, but in a high-profile interview as well as in customer contact situations, lane should probably be seen with the HP brand.
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ROFL WHO CARES! He probably found it in the dumpster..
This is extremely interesting news that may as well change the face of PCs as we know it.
/sarcasm
^ ROFL
Who cares, we all have different tastes, I know if I owned a car company lets say Hyundai I probably won't be driving one 24/7 as I know I probably have something like a Shelby Cobra and old Dodge Charger thrown in my car collection.
/end car analogy
He's an idiot who doesn't practice what he preaches oer and over and over again.
another Apple iFanboy
He looks just like I do when I'm checking out Girl's Gone Wild...
That photo could have the caption 'Harrison Ford loves Nyan Cat!'
Gotcha Ray, YOU'RE FIRED!
Absolutely INEXCUSABLE !
Meg, this clown needs to be FIRED ASAP!!
Maybe this was Ray's way of getting the axe, with that Golden Parachute of course.
Just despicable conduct by more incompetent and arrogant useless eaters at HP.
So if the Mac Air is so dispicable why are all the other PC manufacturers copying the form factor. I don't own any Apple products myself, never have. So I don't dog a product I have never even tried myself. May some of the other folks in this forum should try an item before they determine it is a POS.
smooth move
He is clearly laughing at it. Just look at him. Maybe he is just checking out one of his friends crappy MacBooks.
So if the Mac Air is so dispicable why are all the other PC manufacturers copying the form factor. I don't own any Apple products myself, never have. So I don't dog a product I have never even tried myself. May some of the other folks in this forum should try an item before they determine it is a POS.
The thing is that the Mac Air is a poor value, you can buy a competing HP laptop that does everything and more that the Apple for a LOT less, and contrary to the myth the quality of the hardware is not any better.
he's testing the potential and trying to copy it so Apple can SUE Hp lolol
The thing is that the Mac Air is a poor value, you can buy a competing HP laptop that does everything and more that the Apple for a LOT less, and contrary to the myth the quality of the hardware is not any better.
My HP laptop is a perfect case scenario for that: It has very similar specs to a mid-range 17" Macbook Pro: It's a dv7 (17"), has an Intel Core i7-2630QM 2.0 GHz quad, 8 GB DDR3-1333, 2 x 500 GB hard drives, and an AMD Radeon HD 6770M 1 GB GDDR5. Where it gets better is that it has 6 things that Macbook Pro's don't: Blu-Ray, USB 3.0, a fingerprint reader, Beats audio, a numberpad on the keyboard, and Windows 7! Not to mention great battery life too (5+ hours on the Internet). All the specs of a $2,200+ MBP in an equivalent HP laptop for $1,100 total!
The way I see it, all laptops now use the same hardware: Intel processors, chipsets etc etc.... It's now a question of do you want Reeboks, or Nike? Basically.....
So if the Mac Air is so dispicable why are all the other PC manufacturers copying the form factor. I don't own any Apple products myself, never have. So I don't dog a product I have never even tried myself. May some of the other folks in this forum should try an item before they determine it is a POS.
My wife has an 13" MBP, it is POS, the thing it can do is surf the net, thats it, and it is slow at doing that. one day in a fit of rage i chunk-noris kicked it across the room, and dented its display shell - whatever. but anyways, I swapped out pretty much everything inside SSD, Ram, HDD, optical drive, minus the CPU/GPU, even removed the OS X completely and turned it into windows-only machine etc. because it is a POS, and swapping everything was the only way to salvage it from turning into a completely useless piece of brick.
i think ray lane realized that he was posing with a macbook air mid photo shoot and tried to cover his face. or may be he realized that he was using it wrong.
but this makes a good starting campaign for hp's ultrabooks!!
@legacy7955: you do realize he's Meg's boss, right?
The thing is that the Mac Air is a poor value, you can buy a competing HP laptop that does everything and more that the Apple for a LOT less, and contrary to the myth the quality of the hardware is not any better.
A less-than-3pounds, 13.3" ultra portable with a 128GB SDD, 6-7hours of battery life, a chassis milled from aluminium and a huge multitouch touchpad?
Nope, HP doesn't do that.
HP does some decent cheap laptops, but they certainly don't make anything that could compete with the MacBook Air.
If you want something comparable, you have to look at Sony or Asus "ultrabooks".
Double agent for Apple?
So if the Mac Air is so dispicable why are all the other PC manufacturers copying the form factor
The Toshiba Portege was an Ultrabook before the Macbook Air was an itch in Jobs nutsack, so who is copying who?
The Toshiba Portege was an Ultrabook before the Macbook Air was an itch in Jobs nutsack, so who is copying who?
That might be true, but to be honest, in terms of overall build quality, etc. for the ultra-thin laptop market, nothing still competes with the MacBook Air. Some of them are close, but miss features such as a backlit keyboard, overall quality of the keyboard, screen quality, etc. I'm sure one will come out sometime soon that will fully compete with the MacBook Air, but until then, I'll just use Windows 7 on my Air.
The thing is that the Mac Air is a poor value, you can buy a competing HP laptop that does everything and more that the Apple for a LOT less, and contrary to the myth the quality of the hardware is not any better.
I have been a PC guy for forever, and have done my fair share of Apple bashing (when it's warranted), but I'm sorry to say, I completely disagree with you that the MacBook Air is a poor value (when it comes to the ultrathin form factor that is). What competing HP laptop are you talking about by the way? Because ALL of HP's laptops, except for the Folio 13, ARE NOT competing laptops. Sure you can get a much bigger, bulkier laptop for less that does more, but the whole thing about the Air is the form factor, and HP only has the Folio 13 that would be considered competition. And even with that the Folio 13 is still much bigger and heavier than the Air, has a lower screen res, worse keyboard, etc., so the Air can still justify the higher price. And again, sorry to say, but while the internal hardware quality may not be better, the external hardware and design definitely is -- as hard as that may be to admit it's true, so you really need to take off your blinders.
Who cares, we all have different tastes, I know if I owned a car company lets say Hyundai I probably won't be driving one 24/7 as I know I probably have something like a Shelby Cobra and old Dodge Charger thrown in my car collection./end car analogy
I agree, but when you're doing a photo op, that's ridiculously stupid. This isn't some candid photo of him at a coffee shop or something using his MacBook Air, this was all staged, and as such, this guy is a complete moron. To me this is pretty big deal to be this stupid, and to be honest, if this guy isn't aware of something like this, I wouldn't want him to be an "agent of change" for my company. Seems to me he's a "bottom line" guy, worried just about numbers, and not about brand identity, etc. What he did is like if a college football coach is hired by a new school, and he does a photo op in a magazine wearing clothing with a rival school's logo. It's just effing stupid.
I really can't understand why anyone would think this is OK...
An executive chairman is a representative of the board, and the board are responsible for the interests of HP's shareholders.
Appearing in the media specifically using a well-known competitors products is absolutely moronic, and a big embarassment to HP.
After all, this is why Meg Whitman has stopped HP from losing it's PC division - because although it may be a small part of the company profits it is the brand recognition of the PC hardware which the majority of the world associates with HP.
If a company executive (the executive chairman, no less) does not want to use HP's products primarily himself then how can he represent HP at all? It completely undermines the interests of HP's shareholders and alienates every single member of staff at HP who champions the brand and drives to deliver their products to consumers, business and enterprise customers.
It's clear that this blatant disregard for HP's brand perception is rife within HP, and I hope that Meg Whitman stamps this out across the organisation. I hope the board remove him.
Doesn't mean he likes MacOSX any less ..
That might be true, but to be honest, in terms of overall build quality, etc. for the ultra-thin laptop market, nothing still competes with the MacBook Air. Some of them are close, but miss features such as a backlit keyboard, overall quality of the keyboard, screen quality, etc. I'm sure one will come out sometime soon that will fully compete with the MacBook Air, but until then, I'll just use Windows 7 on my Air.
Now you are just arguing semantics, I never mentioned build quality just the form factor, in my formative years I had dozens of these shoddily constructed POS's returned with various faults so I agree that the Macbook Air is better constructed.
So in the same grain, if another manufacturer comes along and does better build quality than Apple what will they fall back on, because the "we got their first" line isn't true.
So if the Mac Air is so dispicable why are all the other PC manufacturers copying the form factor.
Right! As far as I know, no manufacturer ever thought of making a laptop as thin as possible, fold like a clam shell, have a display on the top half and a keyboard on the bottom half. How was Apple ever able to come up with this?? I think, maybe, laptop, and computers in general were invented by Apple?
Now you are just arguing semantics, I never mentioned build quality just the form factor, in my formative years I had dozens of these shoddily constructed POS's returned with various faults so I agree that the Macbook Air is better constructed.So in the same grain, if another manufacturer comes along and does better build quality than Apple what will they fall back on, because the "we got their first" line isn't true.
I know you didn't mention build quality; I was just adding that into my comment. I'm not saying that Apple doesn't take or steal ideas from others...hell, Jobs admitted it himself. Nowadays people can claim that almost everything is stolen or borrowed from something else in one way or another. To be honest, in the end I personally don't care who comes up with something first, it's who comes up with the best overall iteration of a product.