Gadgetory

so I'd like to talk now a little bit some the key products from 20 years of Alienware history I think the first one that stands out to me is not the first one or two sort of off the self chassis boxes that you probably made yourself instead of magazines but really the first one that was called like the area 51 sort of the first wheel you know and we're branded the product a sees the one that had the biomorphic shaped to it that was near and dear to my heart it had to represent speed performance and the brand itself so we really thought about an industrial design that was out there and that people that appreciated performance would would love and sure enough that was that the first what we call a predator chassis and that chassis has really set like the iconic nature of every product since it it took a good full two and a half years to come out that design I mean even today a lot of gaming boutique makers don't make their own cases they just to square off the shelf cases so you know 15 years later it's still it's still difficult to imagine with that something like somebody sculpted of clay for you guys okay yeah we we had you I mean you dealt with the industrial design firm well the first things we did is we had to find the right industrial design firm to partners we didn't have our own industrial design team this is our first venture in building our own thing from the ground what do you guys like sketch it out on paper and go I wanted to look roughly like the essence an artist yeah so I sketched it on then we had a 3d designer that worked on staff and he he he made some sketches and then we turned that into the industrial design team that we hired I always thought that it should be biomorphic in nature and and have a real alien-esque feel to it that speaks to performance I mean one of the big moves I think was the first area 51 and which as far as I closed the first like real gaming laptop other people who tried you know kind of high-performance laptops we're not really built for gaming even though it's something you'd think people would be crying out for how difficult was that to make something like that work considering the hardware available in like 2002 well as its dealing with the the various OEMs and before we get to that I remember I remember Nelson and one product planner basically saying we're gonna go build a notebook and the companies are saying you're crazy no one's ever gonna buy a gaming notebook and barely anybody supported that call yet when you made that first notebook what's the number one thing that you said in the next version we're gonna fix this or change this thermal thermal issues I mean just there's so much power consumption and you need to dissipate the heat is just it's it was a big concern it wasn't easy I forgot that desktops used to get this big in the front it's not the little lock on it so nobody can get to your little floppy drive in here and your DVD writer with this about is gigantor's the first one with water cooling right well the first ever produced with liquid cooling and that has become such a mainstay now did you think that every company on the pint of that made gaming pcs were to doubt that with some form never I remember the first time a liquid cooling system failed on the factory floor and our production manager calls me he's like Frank I'm gonna need you to come out here one of your systems failed and he goes I don't need you to bring a mop I knew exactly what he's talking about but you look at the technology and how much it's of caulk and we used to use literally fish tank pumps to pump the water through the system you know and these very primitive heat exchangers and the the the hoses we would use and the pressure we would use all these things you know we because we've been doing it so long today you look at the liquid cooling systems that we use today and we co.design them with a partner and I mean they're self-contained they require zero maintenance used to have to refill that thing every six months tutorials on how to do that and you open it up and you're super careful the m11 X I remember seeing this I think at at CES 2010 if I'm not mistaken and we were blown away and we were blown away that you could actually get gaming level graphics in something you know this small and it's an 11 inch gaming laptop and I don't think anyone had ever done that before Arthur introduced it at CES 2010 and this was a lot of different things coming together and making it possible to be able to create the m11 x 1.is we had the netbook kind of revolution going on and that made the way for some pretty decent 11 inch screens to finally come on to the scene in the market mobile gaming graphics were actually pretty viable as a gaming solution in TDP packages or thermal packages that could fit in type on a form factor inside a form factor like this and Intel was making the processor that we could also fit inside of a form factor like this when we looked at all of those components and we kind of started testing them in the labs we started realizing this thing is actually a pretty powerful gaming system we've got something here back then we had 12 pound notebooks and nine pound notebooks and we wanted to create something that you could actually comfortably carry all day long and not get a backache largely thanks to extreme steam greenlight effort and the emergence of a massive library of indie game developers out there we've seen some incredible games come to the PC that are better suited to play and in front of the TV with a crowd of you're fit you know your friends in the room on game pads and in order to extend that experience to the living room prior to us building this product you had to pretty much put a big bulky desktop like the one behind in in your living room or in your bedroom attached to your TV and it just wasn't a comfortable experience it was it didn't seem natural right we partnered with valve we created the steam machine initiative and it's done fairly well we also created the Alpha the Windows version of this and that's done very well and customers are absolutely loving this product has an 85 percent customer recommendation rate right now and over four and a half stars people absolutely love the product it's not going to matter so much what platform you're playing on it's gonna matter what game you want to play and you'll have the choice of playing on any platform that you'd like and now the office turned into this incredible opportunity and this really iconic kind of PC console product in the industry that's just you know tearing things up yeah exactly successful because well people have tried this in the past and it hasn't really worked out