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Comment by _almosnow | Hacker News Reader

As w/ everything. Great software makes great hardware. Only 8 apps at launch (not that it is actually bad per se) and I find it hard to believe that it will gain traction among current developers. I can't think of any reason to start developing for sprout, a platform with zero users right now. Users won't buy because no apps, developers won't code because no users; it will be interesting to see how HP will manage to solve this.

Still, it's good to see a big consumer-oriented company like HP trying (at least) to innovate in some new way.

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At the same time, at $1800, it still makes a solid all-in-one PC with decent specs. I tried to configure an iMac with similar specs but there weren't any 1:1 comparisons.

An iMac with an i7 of roughly equal speed, same 8GB RAM, a screen 2" smaller diagonal, similar nVidia graphics, same native resolution display (without touch capability), similar 1TB hybrid SSD/HDD, and none of the fancy projector/camera stuff would cost $1899.

Obviously these are going for different users and the iMac comes with Apple's trademark thin, industrial design whereas the Sprout adds the touch screen, pad, camera, and projector. Still, if you wanted an all-in-one and had $1900 to spend, I can see how you might pick up one with equivalent "guts" which came with the unique input options.

Worst case you don't get much use out of the projector stuff and still have a solid all-in-one on par with an iMac of similar price.

FWIW, the iMac's Fusion Drive includes a 128Gb SSD and a discrete spinning HDD, whereas the sprout appears to have a 'hybrid drive' which is a spinning disk with a small SSD used for cache. Much less expensive, flexible, and speedy.

A more Apples to Apples (sorry) comparison would be the non-fusion drive iMac for $1699

That said, the added hardware on this still seems to make it a relative bargain.

Yeah, good call. I was trying to find a configuration that was fairly close to see if it was roughly in the same range. Seems like it is so if you were comparing the two, you could spend about the same amount of money and either get a nicer storage option and Apple materials or a larger screen with touch, touch pad, and all of the projector/camera stuff.

My main interest was whether this was drastically more or less expensive than the most popular all-in-one PCs out there even if you don't care about using the unique Sprout stuff all the time.

the only problem is that it is either too expensive for mass market or that the camera/projector device is not available separately yet

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