by nate on Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 | News, Tech/Gadget

article from CNN Money.com

With all the presidential campaign talk about American exceptionalism, it might be easy to forget that we do a pretty unexceptional job at some things — like shopping for computers.

No question, we Americans buy a lot of them – the latest estimates say more than 75% of U.S. households have at least one PC, among the highest ownership rates in the world. The problem is, we are hooked on the underpowered, bargain-bin variety, the sort that putter around on the Internet, choke on high-definition video, and struggle to render 3D games. Our habits make PC buyers in places like Germany laugh at us. (The mainstream German PC buyer has a nose for good engineering – no big surprise there.)

“I think this is the beginning of the era of visual computing,” Drew Henry, general manager of Nvidia’s media communications processor business unit, said. “I believe that Oct. 14, 2008 will be remembered as the moment when an inflection point happened.” He said other computer makers have already expressed more interest in the chipss. “You’ll see other designs over the next few weeks and months,” in time for the holiday season, he said, though Apple won the opportunity to release it first.

read more

Tags: apple, computer, gadget, macintosh, PC, tech